The Discoveries
The Political and Technical History
The Rise and the Fall
The Saga and the Soap Opera
The Strange Circumstances
An Autobiographical
Memoir
by Ingo Swann
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NOTICE
Remote Viewing -- The Real Story is a book being placed
in the Internet and WWW in serialized form, with continuing segments
appearing at unscheduled intervals because of the time necessary to
complete each segment.
The book is appearing in this fashion because the top five publishers
in these United States rejected it on the grounds that the public
interest in the real story of remote viewing is minimal and the
story is of no real mainstream interest.
The author has nonetheless determined that a record of the story
should be available for open-and-free-access historical purposes and
for those who might chance to have interest.
For purposes of accuracy, the book is very carefully based on
documents existing in the author's voluminous, chronological
archives as well as some in the possession of other sources and
resources. All documents substantively depended upon are noted in
the text. A complete bibliography of additional sources and other
supportive materials will be appended later on.
In those instances where guideline documentation is not available, or
never existed, I have confirmed my recall by consulting with one or
more direct witnesses of those instances. This follows accepted
journalistic procedures which are both traditional and proper.
However, the book, as it must be, is cast in the form of an
autobiographical memoir and therefore contains many memories,
opinions, deductions and estimations of the author -- and who
therefore leans on the freedoms of speech, belief and opinion
guaranteed by founding documents generally and equally applicable
throughout the United States.
DEDICATION
This book is especially dedicated to those of the next century soon to
be upon us, and who will at last open up and develop the superpowers
of the human bio-mind.
But it is also profoundly dedicated to those very many of the past
who, in small and big ways, helped consolidate and open that
particular doorway into the superpowers, that doorway called "remote
viewing."
But this book is also, and perhaps principally, dedicated to that
astonishing timeless phenomenon called human memory -- but which
perhaps might be called our species collective bio-mind memory, and
in which the superpowers perpetually dwell.
FORTHCOMING ADDITIONS
Dr. H. E. Puthoff, former director of the
Psychoenergetics Project at Stanford Research Institute, has
agreed to provide an Introduction for this book. Major General
Edmund R. Thompson, U.S.A. (Ret.), former Assistant Chief of
Staff for Intelligence, U.S. Army 1977-1981, has agreed to provide a
Foreword.
The Introduction and Foreword will be introduced into the book when
they are received. At some point ahead, as the serialization
extends, a Table of Contents will be inserted. The production of
this book is a rather momentous effort, and the effort to produce it
has to be time-shared with the author's other necessary activities.
And so it is anticipated that the Internet presentation of the
Real Story
will take over a year.
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
I had never planned to write this book. In the past there were
compelling reasons not to do so. In any event, I thought someone
else would eventually take a deep, serious interest and do THE book
on remote viewing.
Because the story of remote viewing is a substantial one from a number
of viewpoints, I had anticipated that such a book would be a
scholarly one, and would clarify all of the issues involved and
render them understandable for historical purposes.
Most of the issues involved are straightforward ones when seen in
their own contexts and times -- and which times began in 1971, after
which the issues remained more or less straight-forward until about
1988. This was the seventeen-year period during which the elements
of controlled remote viewing (CRV) were gradually
separated out from a somewhat ambiguous morass of parapsychological
phenomena, then refined until it was an entity of and within itself,
complete with a novel nomenclature appropriate to it.
In its refined and developed state, its chief characteristics were
twofold:
- its gradual increase in
scope, precision and accuracy; and
- its closeness more to general human potential rather than to special
things seen as psychic or parapsychological.
When remote viewing was
understood, even in its natural state in individuals, it was no
longer ambiguous, but seen as a precise set of existing faculties
against which the ambiguous term "psychic" was no longer useful.
After 1988, though, the year I retired from active research, what
might be called the decomposition of remote viewing began to set in.
Conceptual distortions began to occur, with the tendency to return
the formerly strategic characteristics back into the ambiguous
morass of parapsychological and psychic phenomena. After about 1990,
the decomposition proceeded at a rapid rate -- one reason being that
the term "remote viewing" went public and was seized upon by many as
a scientifically dignified replacement term for "psychic."
Thereafter, just about anything could be called "remote viewing,"
just about anyone could call themselves a "psychic remote viewer" --
and ambiguity had once again been achieved. Back to square one, as
it were.
Another reason for the decomposition was that the demand for precision
and accuracy in which the intelligence community had invested its
efforts was, in the public domain, not really necessary.
As we will see later in the text, it was to be the scope and increase
of accuracy which identified the original formats of remote
viewing, and especially controlled remote viewing, and which
accounted for the long duration of the intelligence community's
effort. The authenticating of such high-stage accuracy could only be
determined by adequate and long-term testing, record keeping, and
equally long-term oversight processes and committees.
There do exist extremely gifted natural remote viewers, of course. It
happened that I was one of them, and I know of four others. But in
general the raw (so to speak) forms of remote viewing do not produce
the high-stage accuracy absolutely mandatory for intelligence
purposes -- and this was the case even regarding my own natural
aptitudes at the start-up of the discovery and development phase.
In any event, there are a few things that cannot be ambiguous -- and
remote viewing proficiency and accuracy are two of them. And so
when, in the went-public stage, latter-day formats of "remote
viewing" began detaching from TESTED, DEMONSTRATED and CONFIRMED
proficiency and accuracy, the decomposition of remote viewing
proceeded apace.
But even so, those latter-day formats served to bring about two
essential and constructive effects. They served to bring the
concepts of remote viewing to larger public attention. As to
the second constructive effect, I, at least, am of the opinion that
any work regarding remote viewing is better than none
at all -- for all of it helps to shift the direction of human
awareness toward the real existence of the superpowers of the human
bio-mind. In the end, the absolute need for demonstrated and tested
accuracy of any format of remote viewing will win the day. Remote
viewing formats not up to this will disappear.
Nonetheless, the decomposition period entered many distortions into
the public situation. And so it is part of the factual history of
remote viewing to meet up with the details of this decomposition --
as we will do much later in the book under the general heading of
"The Fall of Remote Viewing."
I suppose that most of the distortions might have been avoided, at
least in an historical perspective, if someone as an insider had
earlier produced a substantial book regarding the how and why of
remote viewing. The public would then have had something by which to
judge things. I was the most logical person to do this -- for
although very many were strategically involved in remote viewing I
was intimately familiar with the entire history of remote viewing.
However, the real story of remote viewing has always been encumbered
with the secrecy which gradually surrounded it after 1972. The
secrecy initially involved attempts to protect the identities of
certain
government agencies which involved themselves with
remote viewing and with what was referred to as the Psi
Warfare Gap during the Cold War era. The secrecy was
never really very good.
Various major media waves of the 1970s and early 1980s rather
forthrightly exposed the players in such places as THE WASHINGTON
POST
and TIME magazine, etc. The arch-digger of secretive
information,
Jack Anderson, often appeared to be given deliberate and quite
accurate leaks which he joyfully exposed in his syndicated columns.
Many supposed that the leaks were engineered to frighten the Soviets
and the KGB of the Cold War era with the fact that the
United States was indeed developing competent "psychic spies."
In any event, if secrecy means totally black projects maintained
completely invisible, the research and development of remote viewing
and who sponsored it never enjoyed anything of the kind. Yet, the
pall of secrecy overhung the real story of remote viewing, at least
as far as its insiders were concerned, and so none of them wished to
step forward.
As any secrecy specialist knows, secrecy can have unpredictable
outcomes and clay feet. In the case of remote viewing, with the real
story of it unavailable, the media and the public had nothing to
judge against when latter-day distortions of its decomposition
blazoned forth with media attention. It would then be natural to
make the mistake of assuming that the distortions were factually
representative not only of remote viewing itself, but of what the
sponsors originally funded for research and development.
The concepts and story of remote viewing are now twenty-five years
old. But that story is not just the story of remote viewing. It is
also, and more importantly so, the real story which has involved
hundreds of people who worked to research and develop the concepts
in good faith and because they were told that it was important for
the security of the nation to do so. In their living memory, some of
those were reasonably familiar with the whole story, others with
important parts of it. It's surprising how many of those people are
dead by now. And, after a while more, all those who possess
the important living memory will also become absent.
And then the real insider story will be gone -- lost -- replaced by
versions of it emanating from those with their own mindsets,
agendas, and what is fashionably dignified as "their own realities."
And, indeed, this replacement has already commenced via many garbled
and truncated versions in which agenda-hype excels over the facts.
In pondering all of this, as I have done for the last three years,
it boils down to either of two choices for me. I can write the
living-memory book -- or I can let the living memory slide into
oblivion.
What would you do?
There are three sectors, or layers, to the real story of remote
viewing, as well as several quite subtle ones.
The three sectors need to be pointed up here at the start to help
expand the reader's overview of the real story and that phenomenon
named "remote viewing" -- but which, in hindsight, probably should
have been called something else. The first sector is the most
visible one. It concerns the long-term involvement of the American
intelligence community with remote viewing which was commenced in
1973 by the Central Intelligence Agency. This sector is visible for
two reasons. The mixing of the mainstream intelligence community
with the Fringe area of remote viewing and so-called psychic spying
IS one of the bigger tales of the twentieth century.
Because it is a big story, the media sporadically task themselves with
attempting to expose or speculate on its sexy and scandalous details
-- with the result that media frenzies occasionally occur, and the
first of which was in full bloom in 1975. Several media waves or
frenzies regarding the "government connection" have since come and
gone, the most recent being the extensive wave of late 1995 and
early 1996.
Of all the media waves, the one of 1995-1996 was the least
well-informed. And so it initiated a series of information
distortions which misled the public. This particular media wave
confused all of the important issues beyond recognition, and, in
general, held the intelligence community up to ridicule for
allegedly wasting tax payer money on the bewilderment of "psychic"
hoopla.
There is no doubt that the "government connection" is popularly seen
as THE sexy and big story, whose limelight is dramatically laden
with secrecy, super-espionage agencies and psychic foolishness. Here
is the exact stuff which can be hyped out of proportion and real
contexts -- to the utter delight and fascination of conspiracy buffs
and vulture-like skeptics awaiting opportunity. Many think that the
sexy story is the only real story. But it is only a part of the real
story.
The real story is found just beneath the sexy first sector of the
government connection. This second sector is of course comprised of
remote viewing ITSELF -- and WHY the intelligence community
took a long-term interest in it in the first place. This concerns
what remote viewing actually IS. And here we encounter an
exceedingly strange phenomenon which surrounds remote viewing, one
which few will even notice unless it is pointed up.
Hardly anyone really wants to know what remote viewing actually
consists of, especially if they see themselves in any way connected
to social mainstreams -- and which phenomenon, in my opinion,
constitutes the exact reason why the top five mainstream publishers
refused to publish this book.
As you will see, I encountered this phenomenon from the start as
early as 1972, and especially among scientists
and media types, but, surprisingly, among parapsychologists,
too. I have made a long-term, intimate study of this phenomenon and
its theme will occasionally appear in the text. But basically,
learning what remote viewing actually is might mean having to alter
one's academic and conventional wisdom. Even though most support the
concept of increasing our knowledge, very few really want to do
anything of the kind if it wrecks their existing "realities."
There is another reason that the fundamentals of remote viewing have
not been made visible. Aside from a few documents made public before
1976, and which identified remote viewing as a channel of
long-distance perception, the blame easily falls on those who
instituted its research and development and those who funded it. In
this instance, no one wanted the fundamentals made visible to the
broad public because remote viewing was considered a potential
intelligence tool -- an espionage vehicle whose methodologies needed
to be responsibly guarded. However, the CRV concepts
and methodologies themselves were never classified -- which is why I
can write this book giving their fundamentals and details. But there
was common agreement about this, additionally protected by the fact
that no one really wanted to know about the fundamentals anyway --
and in any event, the fundamentals of CRV will seem
like an alien language unless one is walked through them step by
step.
Beneath the fundamentals of remote viewing, however, is the third
sector I have referred to. The first two sectors involve
individuals, research projects, agencies, and all sorts of
situations which are introverted in smaller-picture kinds of ways.
As I have described, the centerpiece of the first sector is the
government connection. The centerpiece of the second sector is
remote viewing itself.
The centerpiece of the third sector is OUR SPECIES itself -- and
whether it DOES possess the superpowers of the human bio-mind fabled
throughout our history. Does our species possess the
superpowers even in societal opposition to them or in spite of
ignorance about them? It is in the light of this third sector that
we will encounter the ONLY rationale for the two sectors already
described. And it was this exact species issue, and nothing else,
which caused the intelligence community to undertake what it did,
and why remote viewing was extended the opportunity to attempt to
strut its stuff. And here is something which hardly anyone has
understood.
The superpowers of the human bio-mind, of which
remote viewing is but one, can be defined as those
SPECIES-INHERENT faculties which permit human awareness to
transcend the conventionally perceived limits of space and time,
and of matter and energy as well. If our species DOES NOT possess
such faculties, then remote viewing would have to be condemned as a
figment, and the participation of the intelligence community silly.
But, in this sense, it's worth mentioning that if the faculties for
the superpowers do not exist within our species, then we also have
to throw out a great deal -- such as intuition, telepathy, peak
experiencing, the creative processes, intelligence, altered states
of conscious. And on and on until we are left only with our most
mundane aptitudes which do correspond to the "laws" of matter,
energy, time and space -- which is to say, correspond to those laws
as presently understood, but which understanding does undergo
renovation and change within the sciences themselves.
On the other hand, if such species-superpowers DO exist, then the
participation of the intelligence community in researching them was
correct and justified -- while what was out of whack were the
modernist philosophies and sciences of the cultural West which
derided the superpowers under the stereotyped stigma of the term
"psychic." This particular situation deserves somewhat
extensive treatment, and will be adequately dealt with in the text.
But here it is worth noting that it was the COLLISION of Soviet
bio-mind research with the stereotyped stigma of psychic research in
the West which occasioned the circumstances within which remote
viewing was identified and developed. Had not this collision
occurred, then remote viewing would never have seen the light of
day.
It now has to be pointed out that neither psychic aptitudes nor the
superpowers of bio-mind have been viewed in the light of being a
SPECIES THING. Which is to say, as being ALWAYS present at the
species level as inherent faculties and potentials entirely capable
of manifesting in specimens of our species. And it is in this
context that we encounter the timeless and time-transcending aspect
not only of remote viewing but of all the other superpowers, too.
And it is this aspect which more or less has to arouse some radical
readjustments regarding conventional cosmologies and the actual
place of human consciousness within them. Since few really want to
alter their sense of cosmology, it is this exact thing which subtly
lies behind the widespread resistance to finding out what remote
viewing really consists of.
As you will see in the narrative ahead, this precise situation often
led to many amusing soap-opera incidents -- and many affected or
"threatened" in this way literally proceeded to the nearest bar to
"recover."
If the superpowers had been considered a species thing from the start
at some place back, say, around 1870, then the history of psychical
research and parapsychology would have been entirely different. What
has rather happened, though, is that we tend to think of the
superpowers as belonging to selected individuals who, for reasons
peculiar to their psychology, manifest them more vitally than others
do. And so our concepts regarding the superpowers is locked into
time and place at the individual level -- resulting in the
assumption that we can treat positively or negatively the
individuals (and what THEY are thought to represent) according to
our dispositions one way or another.
However, if the existence of the superpowers is lifted from the
individual to the species level, an entirely different and very much
larger panorama immediately opens up. For one thing, the existence
of the superpowers becomes a species situation or problem, and no
longer an individual situation or problem, while the elements to be
considered are completely different. If we consider the superpowers
an inherent species thing, then we can immediately see that various
forms of them have manifested throughout the whole of our recorded
history, and in all past and present societies. By logical
extrapolation here, we can be sure that they will continue to emerge
into the indeterminate future.
The fact that formats of the superpowers (under a plethora of terms)
have continuously emerged across generations and across all kinds of
social enclaves and strictures -- well, here is the strongest
evidence that the superpowers ARE a species thing first, and only
secondly an individual thing. If you can bear to consider what this
shift of perspective means, please begin doing so now, for this
aspect is the virtual backbone of the remote viewing story. This is
the same as saying that individuals, societies, intelligence
communities, research enclaves, philosophies, skeptics, sciences and
so forth come and go. But even so, each time a specimen of our
species is born, he or she will in some form be a carrier of our
species faculties for the superpowers -- more or less in the same
way that he or she is a carrier of our species genetic pool.
And here is the ultimate consideration behind my decision to write
this book. You see, if the superpowers are a species thing, then
they have dynamics which can be identified, understood, developed
and enhanced, and this possibly across the boards. Technically
speaking, there is only one thing necessary here -- a strategic
shift in vision regarding what the superpowers actually are, a
vision which sees the superpowers as a species thing first. It is
quite certain that the early Soviet researchers of the 1920s and
1930s were the first to make this shift. And, in making it, they
were obliged to approach the matter quite differently from how the
early psychical researchers and later parapsychologists of the West
viewed psychic things, and still do.
Radically different hypotheses are certainly needed if the superpowers
are to be viewed as a broad species affair as contrasted to an
individual one. For one thing, if the superpowers are a broad
species affair, then the constituents of the superpowers simply have
to have fundamental and close biological connections. It is this
which accounts for the peculiar, but necessary, nomenclature the
Soviets ultimately set up for their work -- for example,
"bio-communications," a term which had no Western equivalents.
By contrast, Western researchers have always viewed psychic attributes
as a particular arrangement of the individual's psychology,
independent of his or her biology -- as well as being non-material
in genesis. Indeed, on the down side of Western parapsychology, the
psychiatric definition of Psi held it to be the
illusory result of a deranged psychology. In any event, the Soviet
shift from the basis of a particular individual psychology to a
fundamental species basis made the early Soviet work unintelligible
to Western intelligence analysts -- and in which condition it
remained for nearly five decades. It was not until the very late
1960s that American intelligence analysts VERY SLOWLY began to
realize that the Soviets were attempting to identify
and HARNESS, as it was nervously put, certain powers of
bio-mind which transcended space and time, and probably also
energy and matter. It was also realized, much more quickly, that the
hypotheses of the Soviet work WERE completely different from the
conventional hypotheses American and other Western parapsychologists
labored within.
But it was the size and magnitude of the Soviet effort along those
lines which probably impressed American analysts more than anything
else. The utter SIZE of the Soviet effort clearly
indicated a good deal of smoke, so to speak, beneath which fires
were obviously brightly burning in order to justify the size. Where
there was such a vast amount of smoke which few really understood,
but anyway was shrouded in intense KGB secrecy, the
intelligence community and elements in Congress began worrying if
there was a "threat potential" in all of the Soviet strangeness
involved. And behind-the-scenes committees in Congress
mandated a full inquiry -- as it was their responsibility to do
regarding any possible "threat potential."
Thus, the American intelligence community, alarmed about a threat
potential, was forced to take an interest in matters it certainly
never would have otherwise -- and which resulted in the complex saga
and soap opera of that bittersweet story which is detailed in the
narrative ahead. By now, in 1996, that saga and soap opera has come
and gone, at least for the present. But there is still outstanding
the matter of bio-communications and the superpowers of the human
bio-mind being a species affair -- and evidence shows that many top
researchers -- for example, in Japan, China and elsewhere -- have
begun to think in those terms. (The evidence for this will be
presented much later in the narrative.)
In other words, the search for the superpowers has not ended just
because the Soviet Empire fell, or because the American effort got
screwed up and decomposed after 1988. I have no reticence at all in
predicting that the species superpowers of bio-mind will become a
topic of profound interest in the years and decades to come -- in
other nations and under other auspices, certainly to be secret. All
that it will take is the abandonment of the ideologies of the
twentieth century which were intolerant of and totally misguided
regarding such research -- ideologies already on their way out, and
which anyway were never very important in most non-Western nations.
I have determined that no one else will, or can, present the American
remote viewing epoch in the light of the species level of the
superpowers. That epoch will be interpreted in lesser ways,
according to particular agendas and particular ignorance and
stupidities regarding what was really involved. And, this is my
ultimate reason for writing this book. The narrative of the real and
detailed story of remote viewing begins ahead in chapter 4. I have
utilized the first three chapters to present certain background
materials which need to be isolated and dealt with, and which I'd
rather not spread throughout the narrative itself.
Remote viewing came about because of sets of CIRCUMSTANCES which
literally sucked people into participating in them. Most of those
circumstances, both big and small, ran across a spectrum of
unexpected and astonishing to dumbfounding. Most of them practically
came out of nowhere, and most of them left a trail of successes and
skeletons in closets. No one could have predicted hardly any of
those strange circumstances, least of all myself. But their
unfolding became apparent to me quite early, and gave me cause to
reflect on what circumstances actually consist of. As the years
passed, I got somewhat good at predicting the unfoldment of some
circumstances -- but only because I had undertaken a long-term
philosophical consideration of what circumstances actually consist
of.
By now, I will go so far as to say that the identification and
anticipation of circumstances BEFORE they unfold is one of the many
superpowers of the human bio-mind -- one which has never heretofore
been identified. Since the role, as it were, of circumstances is so
important throughout the story, I've decided to utilize chapter 1 to
present, as best I can, a philosophical discussion of their nature.
Thereafter, you will be better prepared to observe them and their
remarkable phenomena in action as regards the story of remote
viewing. The circumstances which ultimately led to remote viewing
unfolded in the Soviet Union two decades before I was born. Those
same circumstances doubtlessly will also serve as a basis for all
future work regarding isolating and enhancing certain superpowers of
the human bio-mind.
Technically speaking, those early Soviet circumstances established the
correct hypothesis that what was involved was, indeed, something at
the species level. The nature of the early Soviet work is hardly
accessible to Western readers, and where it is briefly referred to
it has been transliterated into Western nomenclature. The
transliterations permit Western readers to assume they know
something in familiar Western terms, but which terms are so much
gobbledygook in bio-communications research terms. Indeed, as we
shall see ahead, it was the transliteration of the Soviet work into
incorrect Western concepts which was the first mistake make made by
the American intelligence community -- and which delayed correct
analysis for at least two decades. Bio-communications research was
and is NOT psychic or parapsychology research, and I utilize
background chapter 2 to sort through various important distinctions
in this regard.
I utilize chapter 3 to present materials regarding my autobiographical
self. Of all the chapters in the book, this was the hardest for me
to undertake -- because I have to toot my own horn in ways which
might seem overly ego-laden. But, and I just as well say it as
plainly as possible, one of the amazing circumstances regarding the
whole story of remote viewing was that my prior accumulated
experiences and knowledge had prepared me to deal with a fair share
of the NOVEL circumstances which literally sucked me into them.
There IS something called the "prepared mind." And, everything
considered, I was more or less prepared to deal in the circumstances
which -- to my own astonishment! -- came about in 1971 and
thereafter. For example, I had already understood, in my own terms,
that the fundamentals of "psi" perceptions were a species thing, not
special manifestations of individual psychology. I had arrived
at this conclusion long before I ever heard of Dr. H. E. Puthoff,
Stanford Research Institute, or the concerns of the intelligence
community regarding the Soviet "threat analysis." As you will
see, this was to have certain advantages regarding what was to come.
Preliminary Comments On Ingo Swann's
REMOTE
VIEWING -- THE REAL STORY
Foreword to follow, focusing on later parts of the book which deal
with the period with which I am most familiar. Ingo Swann is the
only person who could write this book. That he has undertaken to do
so underscores his dedication to the understanding -- and to the
further perfection of remote viewing in the face of his frustration
with the distortions being injected into the story by the media and
people with more limited perspectives -- and sometimes with various
axes to grind.
The book also illustrates his dedication to furthering his optimistic
expectation -- expressed to me in conversation as well as in this
manuscript -- that the 21st Century will come to accept and
understand this and other phenomena (today, so-called "psychic"),
just as much as we do the results of crazy Ben Franklin's
kite-flying.
The value of Ingo Swann's "living memory" narrative of the
origins and refinement of remote viewing is that his memory, more
than anyone else I know, encompasses more facets of the story of
credible and verifiable, practical, usable parapsychology [Ingo
wouldn't like that term].
His categorization of remote viewing as a "superpower of the
human biomind" makes the most sense to me of any explanation
that I have yet seen. His thesis that these superpowers are a
species phenomenon, common to all humankind, also makes sense in
view of demonstrated results I've witnessed by a number of trained
remote viewers.
Ingo's dedication is further demonstrated by his placing this
manuscript in the World Wide Web -- to make it available to any and
all. Perhaps someone out there will pick up on his work and carry
research forward to the optimistic expectation that he envisions.
Edmund R. Thompson
Maj Gen, USA (Ret)
Asst Chief of Staff for Intelligence, USA (1977-81)
September 1996
To read the complete
book, go
HERE
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