Debra Lynne Katz is an American parapsychologist, author, educator, and intuitive practitioner. Her research has focused on remote viewing, associative remote viewing, ESP dreaming, precognition, and projects involving text-book analysis. She is the founder/director of the International School of Clairvoyance and president of the International Remote Viewing Association (IRVA).
Career
Debra Katz received a PhD in psychology, with an emphasis on society and consciousness, from the University of West Georgia’s department of sociology, psychology and anthropology in 2021. She holds a Master’s degree in social work from the University of Utah. At UWG she catalogued Ingo Swann’s Papers held at Ingram Library’s Special Collections. She was awarded a visiting scholar’s grant by the University of Illinois to study their Merten J. Mandeville Collection in Parapsychology and the Occult Sciences.
Katz and her identical twin sister began experiencing episodes of paranormal activity and telepathy during childhood. These experiences encouraged her to pursue a meditation discipline, studying clairvoyance and energy healing. At this time, she was working as a United States probation officer.
After a series of transpersonal experiences, she left this job to devote herself to her spiritual and intuitive work, travelling to the Philippines where she lived and studied with a variety of faith healers for a year. She returned to the US where she completed books on intuitive development.
In 2005 she founded The International School of Clairvoyance which was one of the first schools to offer intuitive development via tele-seminar and webinar. In 2019, she joined the board of directors of the International Remote Viewing Association (IRVA) and became its President in 2022.
Mainstream Research
Katz’s doctoral work was qualitative in nature and focused on the topic of Popular Psychology, examining whether derogatory attitudes about popular psychology books by academic psychologists were justified. Using formal case study methodology, she focused on books written about the psychological construct of attention, taking a social constructionist approach.
Remote Viewing
Microscopic Organisms
A bacteriophage is a virus that destroys a bacterium by growing and dividing inside it. The viruses’ ability to destroy multi-drug resistant bacteria offers possible benefits for medical technology, but they are difficult to observe without either being themselves destroyed or altered. In 2011 Katz, along with plant biologist Lance Beem, published a paper describing attempts to determine whether remote viewers could describe a bacteriophage in enough detail to provide useful information to scientists. In a double-blind test, forty remote viewers attempted to observe a phage in its natural environment within bacteria without being told the nature of the target Their transcripts were given to a virologist for rating: out of 153 items, 73 were rated as accurate.1
Variables
With James Lane, Katz investigated whether the background within which an object is positioned may impact the accuracy of remote viewing. Photographic images of physical objects are common targets in remote viewing projects today. Twelve experienced remote viewers each completed 30 remote viewing trials. Results indicated that targets with white backgrounds had a clear edge over other backgrounds (p = 0.005).2
Associative Remote Viewing
Associative Remote Viewing (ARV) is a psi-based methodology used to predict such things as sporting event outcomes and stock market moves. Katz and members of her remote viewing team paired up with Dale Graff to conduct a yearlong double-blind study which utilized dreaming within an associative remote viewing (ARV) protocol. Katz served as a dreamer along with five other members of the group. The overall hit rate of 17 out of 28 predictions was significant (p = 0.05). More impressively, the monetary gain was a little under 400 percent of the initial stake. Two of the dreamers had highly significant hit rates (13 hits, 4 misses and 16 hits, 9 misses), suggesting that remote viewing talent is narrowly distributed.3
Rater Reliability and Scoring
To investigate the contributing factors in ARV success, Katz completed 86 trials, comprising 220 remote viewing transcripts. Three teams of judges working under blinded conditions repeated the process of judging, scoring and predicting sporting events, while keeping all other variables stable. Judges were only in complete agreement on six (6.9%) of 86 trials, while experienced judges obtained statistically significantly higher hit rates than those that were less experienced. The results indicate the need to develop more consistent and reliable judging protocols, preferably using experienced individuals.4
Project Firefly
Project Firefly was an extensive project in which more than 60 remote viewers contributed 177 intuitive-based associative remote viewing (ARV) predictions over a 14-month period.
Using ARV predictions, project Firefly traded on the Foreign Exchange (FOREX) currency market. Investors pooled investment funds totaling $56,300 with the stated goal of ‘creating wealth aggressively’. However, most of the funds were lost over the course of the project. Katz was a remote viewer on this project. On its completion she and other project members formed a research team to examine the failures, providing lessons for future ARV research in both for-profit activities and basic research.5
Works
Books
Extraordinary Psychic: Proven Techniques to Master Your Natural Abilities. (2014). Living Dreams Press.
Freeing the Genie Within: Manifesting Creativity, Abundance and Success in Your Life. (2015). Living Dreams Press.
The Complete Clairvoyant: A Trilogy. (2020). Living Dreams Press.
You Are Psychic: The Art of Clairvoyant Reading & Healing. (2020). Living Dreams Press.
Unpacking the Popular Psychology Controversy: Dissertation. (2021). Living Dreams Press. Associative Remote Viewing: The Art & Science of Predicting Future Outcomes for Sports, Finances, Elections, and the Lottery. (2021). Living Dreams Press.
Articles
All articles can be downloaded here or here.
Creating Safe and Sacred Space via Teleseminar and Webinar Platforms: A pilot survey and case study of intuitive development courses taught via synchronous distant learning technologies. (2019) Medium.com.
Fridays with Ingo: Scientist & Psychic. (2021). Mindfield Bulletin 13/2.
Co-authored:
Remote Viewing the Outcome of the 2012 Presidential Election. (2013). Aperture Magazine, Spring/Summer, 46-56.
Explorations into Remote Viewing Microscopic Organisms (The Phage) and the Effects of Biological Scientists’ Exposure to Non-Local Perception within a Multidisciplinary Approach. (2015). Aperture Magazine 26, 42-49.
Predicting the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election using a double blind associative remote viewing protocol. (2017). The State of the Art of Remote Viewing Eight Martini’s Magazine 15, 4-15.
An Ethnographical Assessment of Project Firefly: A yearlong Endeavor to Create wealth by Predicting FOREX Currency moves with Associative Remote Viewing. (2018). Journal of Scientific Exploration 32/1, 21-54.
The Associative Remote Dreaming Experiment: A Novel Approach to Predicting Future Outcomes of Sporting Events. (2019). Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 83/2, 65-84.
The other half of Hella’s brain—An intimate conversation with Russell Targ. (2019). The State of the Art of Remote Viewing Eight Martini’s Magazine 19, 4-20.
Ingo Swann: A Many Side Man - Glimpses Into His Archival Collection. (2019). The State of the Art of Remote Viewing Eight Martini’s Magazine.
Book Review for the Premonition Code: The Science of Precognition: How sensing the future can change your life. (2019). Journal of Scientific Exploration 33/1, 136-45.
Project Associative Remote Viewing Projects: Assessing rater reliability and Factors affecting successful predictions. (2021). Journal for the Society for Psychical Research 85/2, 65-90.
Merten J. Mandeville Library of Parapsychology and Occultism: Explorations and Adventures in Library Research at the University of Illinois. (2020). Mindfield Bulletin 12/1.
Effects of Background Context for Objects in Photographic Targets on Remote Viewing Performance. (2021). Journal of Scientific Exploration 35/4, 756-90.
Remote Viewing Applications: A Survey of Present-Day RV Practitioners. (2022). Journal of Parapsychology 86,135-57.
Don't Judge a Book by Its Cover: A Case Study and Comparative Analysis of Popular vs. Academic Psychology. (2022). Journal of Scientific Exploration 36/2, 233-50.
Website
Michael Duggan
Literature
Katz, D. L., Beem, L.W. (2015). Explorations into Remote Viewing Microscopic Organisms (The Phage) and the Effects of Biological Scientists’ Exposure to Non-Local Perception within a Multidisciplinary Approach. Aperture Magazine 26, 42-49.
Katz, D.L., Graff, D. (2017). The Associative Remote Dreaming Experiment: A Novel Approach to Predicting Future Outcomes of Sporting Events. (2019). Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 83/2, 65-84.
Katz, D.L., Lane, J.D., Bulgatz, M. (2021). Effects of Background Context for Objects in Photographic Targets on Remote Viewing Performance. Journal of Scientific Exploration 35/4, 756-90.
Katz, D. L., Grgic, I., & Fendley, T.W. (2018a). An Ethnographical Assessment of Project Firefly: A yearlong endeavor to create wealth by predicting FOREX currency moves with associative remote viewing. Journal of Scientific Exploration 32/1, 21-54.
Katz, D.L., Lane, J.D., Bulgatz, M. (2021). Effects of Background Context for Objects in Photographic Targets on Remote Viewing Performance. Journal of Scientific Exploration 35/4, 756-90.