Clairvoyance is the apparent ability to gain information about an object, location or physical event through means other than the known human senses, a form of extra sensory perception. A person said to have the ability of clairvoyance is referred to as a clairvoyant. Claims for the existence of paranormal psychic abilities such as clairvoyance are highly controversial. Parapsychology explores this possibility, but the existence of such paranormal phenomena is not accepted by the scientific community outside of parapsychology.

Within parapsychology, clairvoyance is used exclusively to refer to the transfer of information that is both contemporary to, and hidden from, the clairvoyant. It is differentiated from telepathy in that the information is said to be gained directly from an external physical source, rather than being transferred from the mind of one individual to another. Outside of parapsychology, clairvoyance is often used to refer to other forms of Anomalous cognition, most commonly the perception of events that have occurred in the past, or which will occur in the future, or to refer to communications with the dead. Clairvoyance is related to remote viewing, although the term remote viewing itself is not as widely applicable to clairvoyance because it refers to a specific controlled process.

The concept of clairvoyance gained some support from the US and Russian governments both during and after the Cold War, and both governments made several attempts to harness it as an intelligence gathering tool. According to skeptics, clairvoyance is the result of fraud, self delusion, Barnum effects, confirmatory biases, or failures to appreciate the base rate of chance occurrences. For example, in a scientific experiment of clairvoyance, a purported clairvoyant participant will inevitably make correct guesses some of the time, simply because of chance. Furthermore, because of the nature of the statistical tests used by experimenters, a very small proportion of all experiments conducted will yield an overall statistically significant result, again simply because of chance. A proper summary of the experimental evidence on clairvoyance should include a summary of all experiments that were conducted, taking into account their probabilities of turning out false positive and false negative results, and making sure that studies are not included in the review selectively. Some researchers on clairvoyance have tended to purposefully exclude negative findings from their reviews, thus biasing their own conclusions.

Clairvoyance was a reported ability of some mediums during the spiritualist period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and was one of the phenomena studied by members of the Society for Psychical Research. Psychics of many descriptions have claimed clairvoyant ability up to the present day. While experimental research into clairvoyance began with SPR researchers, experimental studies became more systematic with the efforts of J. B. Rhine and his associates at Duke University, and such research efforts continue to the present day. Perhaps the best-known study of clairvoyance in recent times was the US government funded remote viewing project at SRI/SAIC during the 1970's through the mid 1990's.

The search for a valid and reliable test of clairvoyance has resulted in thousands of experiments. One controlled procedure has invited senders to telepathically transmit one of four visual images to receivers deprived of sensation in a nearby chamber. The result was a reported 32 percent accurate response rate, surpassing the chance rate of 25 percent. But follow up studies have failed to replicate the phenomenon or produced mixed results. One skeptic, magician James Randi, has a longstanding offer to anyone who proves a genuine psychic power under proper observing conditions they will recieve 1 million dollars. To refute those who say there is no ESP, one need only produce a single person who can demonstrate a single, reproducible ESP phenomenon. So far, no such person has emerged. Randi’s offer has been publicised for three decades and dozens of people have been tested, sometimes under the scrutiny of an independent panel of judges. Still, nothing. People's desire to believe in the paranormal is stronger than all the evidence that it does not exist.



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