Founder, president, and chief instructor Paul H. Smith had been retired from the Army just five months before launching Remote Viewing Instructional Services, Inc.’s first controlled remote viewing course on January 17, 1997 in Laurel, Maryland. This class introduced our original Thursday-through-Monday model, with Sunday as a break day, compressing more than 40 hours of instruction into just four days of class time. Effective but grueling, we eventually replaced this approach with a Monday-through-Saturday model that was easier on both students and instructors and allowed us to adopt additional enhanced training elements.
Numerous basic, intermediate, and advanced CRV courses in Maryland followed, as well as our first Las Vegas class–in June of that year. By August, RVIS, Inc. was established as a Nevada corporation, and its operations moved with Paul and his family to Austin, Texas.
In Texas, the business flourished, with hundreds of students passing through the company’s training programs. We also soon added an important new benefit for our students–engaging the services of Hal Puthoff, the founder of the original CIA remote viewing program who had his home and laboratory in Austin. Hal lectured to each new basic class on the origins of remote viewing and the science behind it. In 1999. Hal and Paul both helped organize the International Remote Viewing Association, a non-profit organization aimed at presenting and promoting remote viewing in a responsible and grounded way.
In 2005 RVIS, Inc. added a fully-featured, 3 ½-day associative remote viewing course to our program. The ARV course has been offered on a recurring basis ever since. Later, RVIS participated in filming a prototype dowsing course that was produced in DVD format and launched in 2007 by Remote Viewing Products as the highly-praised “LearnTechnicalDowsing” home study course.
Paul’s first book, Reading the Enemy’s Mind: Inside Star Gate–America’s Psychic Espionage Program was also published in 2005. During the years in Austin, he was also featured in scores of television and radio interviews, leading to a greater dissemination of remote viewing understanding and knowledge nationally and internationally.
In June of 2014, RVIS, Inc. once again moved, this time to Cedar City, Utah in the heart of Utah’s famed “Color Country.” Our new setting is stunning and resource rich. It is located just an hour from Zion National Park, less than 90 minutes from Bryce Canyon, 20 minutes from one of the richest ancestral Native American petroglyph sites, and within a few hours’ drive of three other spectacular national parks. The spectacular landscape has been integrated into the company’s remote viewing training profile in unexpectedly fruitful and enhancing ways.
In 2015, we released another home study course, called “Remote Perception: Basic Operational Training,” which is a condensation of Paul’s week-long basic CRV course onto four DVDs. Filming had been completed before the company moved from Austin, but the editing and post-production work was not completed until a year after arrival in Utah. Also in 2015, Paul’s second book, The Essential Guide to Remote Viewing was published.
Remote Viewing Instructional Services, Inc. continues to offer a vigorous rotation of workshops, seminars, and its various courses. We have now completed more than 20 years of teaching remote viewing to students from most of the 50 states and at least 10 countries. We hope to continue doing so for years to come.