Clairvoyance

Clairvoyance is the purported ability to obtain information about distant or hidden objects, people, or events through means beyond ordinary senses. The term comes from the French clair (clear) and voyant (seeing). In common usage, it is often distinguished from clairaudience (perceiving sounds) and from precognition (knowledge of future events. Some descriptions conceive clairvoyants as seeing impressions or images in the mind’s eye rather than through ordinary perception.

Historically, claims of clairvoyance appeared within esoteric, occult, and spiritualist movements, especially in the 19th century. In the 20th century, some researchers within parapsychology studied clairvoyant-like abilities and related phenomena, sometimes under the umbrella of remote viewing, and there have been public programs such as the U.S. government’s Stargate Project exploring related claims. These inquiries remain controversial and contested.

The scientific consensus is that there is no robust, reproducible evidence for clairvoyance. Rigorous studies have generally failed to demonstrate reliable effects beyond chance, and results are susceptible to biases, methodological weaknesses, and non-independent analyses. Proponents argue that the absence of evidence in mainstream science does not definitively prove nonexistence, while skeptics emphasize the need for extraordinary evidence given the extraordinary nature of the claim.

In practice, accounts of clairvoyance are often interpreted through cognitive biases, selective recall, and the tendency to perceive meaningful patterns in random information. As a topic, clairvoyance persists in parapsychology and folklore, but it remains outside mainstream scientific acceptance.