Many people will have heard about remote viewing (RV) in the context of American intelligence agencies spying on other nations' military installations around the world.

That military programme is supposed to have ended in the mid-1990s, and since then RV – the use of intuitive faculties to "see" with the mind's eye actual places and events at distant locations – has developed in other areas: murder and missing persons investigations, life skills development and even business dealings.

And in the forefront of all this has been Bristol-born Dr Angela Thompson Smith, who has just returned to live at Wimborne, Dorset, after teaching RV around the world for nearly 15 years.

Now she is arranging a five-day RV course at Wimborne at the end of November – possibly the first of its kind to be held in England.

"Although the RV programme had been ongoing for about 20 years in the military, they had suddenly found it was of no use, which was very surprising," Angela told me. "I think it's probably gone underground."

It was thought that every country had a government or military RV unit, and it was quite likely Britain had one – "but, of course, it would be kept very quiet".

A leading light in the Wessex RV Group (formerly the Nevada RVG), one of the first civilian bodies to provide paid consulting work to trained remote viewers, Angela has helped to train hundreds of people from all walks of life. "Our group did some work on the future of the economy about two years ago and actually predicted the current downswing," she said. "I had a business client who was very sceptical about this but as things progressed he was able to understand this was a reality and put in place some measures."

Everybody had RV potential, said Angela: "I think everybody has some intuition. It's a bit like music or maths ability; you have either a little or a lot or something in between."

Angela, who has had out-of- the-body experiences and significant intuitive incidents since she was a child, first qualified in nursing and social work, but went on to take degrees in psychology, followed by studies in parapsychology and lucid-dream research.

She has written two books on parapsychology, a memoir of her childhood in Shirehampton, and a novel based on the history of the Shirehampton area which she wrote using RV techniques.

In 1981, she emigrated to the USA to work first in medical research, then on research into precognitive remote perception at Princeton University, and began teaching, and training herself in, RV from 1994. She now carries out RV projects for clients worldwide.

For the future, Angela sees a key role for RV in tackling world problems, as more people become trained in the skill. It could be used to look into the past – at a crime scene, for example – and into present and future events.

"The proof of the pudding is in the eating, so to speak," she added.

Visit the Wessex RVG website at www.remoteviewingnv.com