3.- US psi-spies
News of this massive Russian paranormal-warfare research projects
eventually filtered out to the West. It was thought by CIA analysts
that the Soviets might be capable of telepathically controlling the
thoughts of leading US military and political leaders, as well as
being able to remotely kill US citizens. Telekinesis could be used
to disable US hardware such as computers, nuclear weapon systems and
space vehicles. The report stated:
‘The major impetus behind the
Soviet drive to harness the possible capabilities of telepathic
communication, telekinetics, and bionics are said to come from the
Soviet military and the KGB.’
No wonder they were worried!
The term ‘eight-martini effect’ was coined by Norman Jackson, a
CIA
spokesman and former Technical Adviser to John McMahon, Deputy
Director of the CIA. On the US TV show ‘Night Line’ (28 November
1995) which was about the use of remote-viewing programmes in the
mid 1980s, he said,
‘Well, if it’s the eight-martini results you
want to talk about, I won’t talk about them. “Eight-martini results”
is an in-house term for remote-viewing data so good it cracks
everyone’s sense of reality.’
After one particularly spectacular
demonstration apparently, the CIA handlers had to have eight
martinis to calm their nerves. The following is the story of how
eight-martini effects were sometimes achieved by the US
remote-viewing programme.
AMERICA GEARS UP FOR PSYCHIC WAR
As early as 1972, it was feared that the Russians were developing a
form of group-augmented telepathic telekinesis whereby a large
number of telepaths could create thought-forms out of the collective
unconscious and cause materialization. That would mean the Soviets
could materialize their energy bodies in distant locations to steal
top-secret documents or damage equipment (see
Appendix 1, page 27,
the apport technique).
The US effort was stimulated by
information that they received in 1973 about the top-secret
psychical research base to the north east of Leningrad, code-named ’Black Box’.
Dr Igor Vladsky sent a letter to Harvard psychologist
Gene Kearney, giving
information about the Leningrad psychical research facility and its
telekinesis experiments. The Russians’ advances in ESP and
telekinesis seemed to be leading them towards the ability to cause
physical effects. This frightened the US missile command - if
psychics could disable US ballistic missiles in their silos, or in
flight, American deterrent capability would be destroyed. In 1975,
Thomas Bearden, a nuclear engineer, was asked by the US Army to
investigate this area of Russian psychical research. By then, the DIA were discussing Soviet
psychokinesis at length:
All the Soviet and Czech research on PK is significant, especially
that associated with the spectacular Soviet psychics Kulagina,
Vinogradova and Ermolayev.
-
Kulagina’s highly publicized ability to
affect living tissues might be applied against human targets
-
in
like manner, Vinogradova’s power to move objects
-
Ermolayev’s
levitational ability could possibly be used to activate or
deactivate power supplies or to steal military documents or
hardware
Robert Pavlita’s
generators and Julius Krmessky’s
PK
indicators could be (and possibly are now) used to train large
numbers of lesser known Soviet and Czech citizens to develop,
enhance, and control their latent psychic abilities.
Such a cadre of
trained but anonymous individuals could be used for any number of
covert activities. Less spectacular, but more significant, is the
fact that Soviet and Czech scientists are pursuing an interrelated,
unified approach to determining the energy sources and interactions
underlying PK and appear to be far ahead of their Western
counterparts in reaching this goal. It will be but a short step from
understanding to application and there is little doubt that many
applications can be directed toward man for whatever purpose, be it
good or bad.
[Appendix 2, page 51.]
Both superpowers became interested in telekinesis. Telekinetic
effects may be small, but it does not take much force to ruin a
circuit board in a missile-guidance system, or tear open a capillary
in the brain.
In the early seventies, Soviet, Czech and Chinese paranormal-warfare
projects forced the CIA reluctantly to start their own psi-spy
programme but the number of scientists willing to help the CIA was
very limited.
However, two physicists,
Russell Targ and
Dr Hal Puthoff, agreed to
help the CIA. They began remote-viewing research at the
Stanford
Research Institute in California. On 6 June 1972, the first psychic
experiments were begun with
Ingo Swann, a leading clairvoyant. He
had served in Korea, but by the 1970s was an artist who supplemented
his income by becoming a subject in parapsychology experiments. His
remote-viewing abilities were eventually demonstrated to be of a
high order and he was later to invent the six stages of protocols
now used by all US remote viewers. On this first test, Swann
succeeded in psychically influencing a magnetometer. There followed
a series of remote-viewing experiments which proved hit and miss.
In the autumn of 1972, Yuri Geller visited the Stanford Research
Institute and was tested by Targ and Puthoff. His talent was alleged
to be quixotic, hard to pin down.*
*
Mind Reach Hal Puthoff and
Russell Targ (Delacorte, New York,
1977)
On one occasion in 1973, Swann demanded that geographical
co-ordinates of the sites to be remotely viewed were given to him,
rather than blind locations such as X. Targ and Puthoff were not
pleased, but were forced into accepting co-ordinate remote viewing (CRV).**
**
Remote Viewers: The Secret History of
America’s Psychic Spies, Jim Schnabel (Dell, New
York, 1977)
Remote viewing, a term coined by
Targ and Puthoff, was a synergy
created between telepathy and clairvoyance. It is like a psychic
version of I spy with my little eye something beginning with the map
co-ordinates... The monitor in this psychic-spying game travels
mentally to that specific location, and the guesser attempts to
obtain a mental image of that location and then sketches what he
sees.
With this new form of remote viewing, Ingo Swann’s efficiency
increased to meaningful levels, and the CIA became interested enough
to increase their initial funding of the project. When Puthoff gave
Swann the co-ordinates of a place just east of California’s Mount
Shasta, the psychic’s response was, ‘Definitely see mountain to
south west, not far, also east.’ The co-ordinates of a point 20
miles east of Mount Hekla volcano in southern Iceland produced:
‘Volcano to south west, I think I’m over ocean.’ When Puthoff gave
the co-ordinates of the middle of Lake Victoria in Africa, Swann
described: ‘Sense of speeding over water, landing on land. Lake to
west, high elevation.’
Puthoff thought Swann had described the
target inaccurately until he consulted the Times Atlas of the World
and found his co-ordinates were those of the Tanzanian village of Ushashi, some 30 miles inland from Lake Victoria’s south-eastern
shore. Results such as this enabled Puthoff to get funding from the
CIA Technical Services Division in the Directorate of Operations,
which was transferred to the Directorate of Science and Technology,
later to be called the Office of Technical Services. There was also
funding from the CIA Office of Research and Development.
Ingo Swann talks of an incident that occurred between 1975 and 1976
when he was asked to remotely view Soviet submarines:*
‘This was one of those “big test” things that went on, with
witnesses, and the room was filled with top brass. Oh my God! Hal, I
don’t know what to do. I think that this submarine has shot down a
UFO or the UFO fired on her. What shall I do? And Puthoff was as
pale as anything you know, and he looked at me and whispered, “Oh
Christ! It’s your show. You do what you think you should do.”
So I
sketched out this picture of this UFO and this brass (two or three star general) sitting on my right grabbed it and said, “What’s
that, Mr Swann?” I said, “Sir, I think it’s rather obvious what that
is.” And he took the paper and stood up, and when he stood up,
everybody else stood up except me and Puthoff, and he walked out of
the room, and so did the others. So Puthoff and I went back to the
hotel and I said, “Oh Christ, we’ve blown the program.” So we went
out and got drunk on margaritas and things like that. Three days
later Puthoff got a call. The call said, “OK,
how much money do you
want?”’
* Ingo Swann interview on ‘Dreamland’ transcribed organization,
University of Wisconsin, 12 December 1996. Quoted from ‘Remote
Viewing and the US Intelligence Community’ Armen Victorian
(Lobster
magazine June 1996 No. 31)
While these early experiments with Swann were going on, Puthoff got
a call from Pat Price, a retired police officer, offering his
services. Price was tested by CIA liaison officer Richard Kennett,
who gave him the approximate co-ordinates of his summer cabin in
West Virginia. When Price responded with a detailed description of a
secret US military underground base, Kennett thought he had failed;
but when Kennett drove to his cabin sometime later, he found the
location that Price had described was situated nearby. The ’Sugar
Grove’ - a National Security Agency (NSA) underground spy satellite,
communication and telephone interception centre - had been described
perfectly. Price had even named three of the senior officers who
worked there.
This generated a very serious DIA probe into
Puthoff,
Targ and Price. Suspected of being communist spies, the entire
project was examined with a fine toothcomb, as the Pentagon did not
believe Price could have got such detailed information about the NSA
base by psychic means. When no evidence could be found, the heat
died down. Price offered to remotely view the Russian counterpart to
the NSA base, to soothe the CIA’s discomfiture. He pinpointed the
Russian base at Mount Narodnyna in a remote part of the northern
Ural Mountains. He described the underground base, its high
proportion of female personnel, radar dishes... The CIA were
delighted.
Rivalry developed between Price and Swann, which was made worse by
the fact that Price was acknowledged as the better psychic. Such was
the power of Price’s remote viewing that he could read numbers and
words at the site he was studying. Price was asked by the CIA to
remotely view the Semipalatinsk military research facility. He
successfully described 60 foot diameter steel spheres and extremely
large cranes, constructed with the use of sophisticated welding
techniques to seal these nuclear-bomb containers together. Satellite
photos showed that Price’s remote viewing was correct. It was
assumed the Semipalatinsk complex was developing an exotic
high-energy, beam weapon using nuclear explosions to power the
proton or neutron beam.
Pat Price’s death in 1975 under mysterious circumstances was highly
controversial. It was alleged at the time that the Soviets poisoned
Price, most likely with a mycotoxin. It would have been a top
priority for the KGB to eliminate Price as his phenomenal
remote-viewing abilities would have posed a significant danger to
the USSR’s paranormal-warfare build-up. He may also have been the
victim of an elite group of Russian psi-agents trained to remotely
kill enemies of the Soviet Union. Whatever the true reason, Price,
the leading US psi-spy, was probably the first casualty of the
inner-space arms race.
Not to be outdone, Swann convinced Puthoff and Targ that he could
train anyone to remotely view. The aim was to train military
personnel with security clearance, rather than psychics who had
none. Swann persuaded military top brass who came to inspect the
remote-viewing research to take part by pointing out that the
training would enable them to remotely view top-secret files.
Intelligence operatives from the
CIA
(Central Intelligence Agency),
DIA
(Defense Intelligence Agency),
NSA
(National Security Agency) and other shadowy
organizations also came calling. Such was the enthusiasm of the
military and intelligence communities that they decided to fund a 20
year top-secret programme to train military remote viewers. This
programme was called Stargate.
Ingo Swann used his co-ordinate remote-viewing system to help train
the new breed of military remote viewers. These are the basis for
the commercially available courses sold in the USA today, which cost
$1000-7000 per week.
In 1976, the team started experimenting with precognitive remote
viewing, which is a specialized version of clairvoyance,
specifically to check on the future of the US embassy which was
being built in Moscow but the remote viewers found it difficult to
see that building in the future. When asked to describe the building
as it would be in the mid-eighties, they could not agree on the same
thing. What actually occurred was that the Russian construction
teams had planted so many bugs in the structure (discovered by a
giant X-ray machine brought in by the Americans), even using the
steel supports as antennae, that eventually the construction had to
be partly demolished.
The US government decided to take away the top
two floors and build four secure floors atop the bug-ridden
structure. This possibly explained why the US remote viewers could
not home in on the building in the future - it had no future, as it
was almost completely demolished.
PROJECT GRILL FLAME
In the late seventies, the US Army set up its own small
remote-viewing programme. Taking orders from the Army’s Assistant
Chief of Intelligence in the Pentagon, only a few dozen officials in
the intelligence community knew about this project, code-named Grill
Flame. Documents obtained from US intelligence, published in part in
Lobster magazine, show that Grill Flame was the operational wing of
the overall Stargate programme, which was originally set up
in 1977 to assess what intelligence information an enemy could tap
into by psychic means. In 1978, with the establishment of
Detachment @G@ (later listed in the Intelligence and Security
Command -INSCOM-
books as Grill Flame), the US Army was given a new mission - to
utilize remote viewing as an intelligence-gathering tool.
Eventually, the entire Defense Department’s remote-viewing programme
was moved under the administrative umbrella of Grill Flame.
Six people -
Mel Riley,
Joe McMoneagle, Ken Bell, Fern Gauvin,
Hartleigh Trent and Nancy Stern - most of them army personnel, were
tested by the Stanford Research Institute for the Grill Flame
project and all were found to be suitable. Based at Fort Meade in
Maryland, the home of the NSA, the largest US intelligence branch,
this unit carried out remote viewing against Soviet and Chinese
bases. In late 1978, its services were made available to anyone in
the US intelligence community who had high enough access. General
Ed
Thompson, in overall command of the unit, increased funding so that
Mel Riley, Joe McMoneagle and Ken Bell, nicknamed the ‘Special
Action Branch’, could work full time on the project. In the summer
of 1979, Mel Riley was assigned one of his first important
remote-viewing targets - a Chinese nuclear-weapon test near Lop Nor.
He remotely viewed an airborne nuclear-weapon drop by the Chinese in
which the weapon exploded but failed to go into a nuclear chain
reaction. He also reported that it was much more sophisticated in
its construction than anticipated and made use of enrichment
processes the intelligence people had not expected from China.*
*
‘Operational project summary: an unofficial list of nineteen
apparent RV successes, 1974-93’ Dale Graff (CIA sponsored report,
1995).
Joe McMoneagle was asked by the NSA to remotely view a US consulate
in the Mediterranean theatre from which the Russians were extracting
information. McMoneagle correctly described a Russian listening post
opposite the consulate, and the location of the electronic bug
inside the consulate - he even psychically spied upon an NSA
counterespionage team in a room beneath the Russians.**
**
Remote Viewers: The Secret History of
America’s Psychic Spies, Jim
Schnabel (Dell, New York, 1977)
McMoneagle sensed radioactivity as a green glow when he was remotely
viewing a Russian nuclear facility and saw a greenish glow emanating
from the nuclear reactor. In 1979, he remotely viewed a greenish
glow around a nuclear weapon on the seabed off the coast of Spain.
The weapon was rumored to have fallen from an American nuclear
bomber.
Like Joe McMoneagle at Fort Meade, Ingo Swann at the
Stanford
Research Institute was asked to detect nuclear reaction. Using
remote viewing, he was able to determine the moment a rocket motor
was fired, and in another case, the event and time of a
nuclear-weapon detonation in Nevada.
The Fort Meade group were set to predict the impact site of Sky Lab.
When the space station finally fell to Earth, it struck Western
Australia; McMoneagle had predicted this general area in his remote
viewing. Ken Bell successfully found a downed US helicopter in a
remote part of Peru. He was distraught to remotely view the burnt
and broken corpses of the pilot and co-pilot.
The Russians have spent billions of roubles developing ESP. Have the
Americans developed the same telepathic scanning technology? One
story has it that the Grill Flame group successfully psychically
interrogated an agent in an Eastern European country. The CIA were
suspicious of him but needed to know the right questions to ask to
uncover his misdeeds. McMoneagle remotely viewed the agent and
discovered that he had received a large amount of money. During his
next annual lie-detector test, the agent, when questioned about the
money, blurted out, ‘How could you have known that!’
*
*
Remote Viewers: The Secret History of
America’s Psychic Spies, Jim
Schnabel (Dell, New York, 1977)
The main aim of the CIA and DIA research teams at this time,
however, was to develop a reliable psychic-spying method. To test
out the powers of the US remote viewers, they were asked to spy
psychically on US top-secret projects. McMoneagle remotely viewed a
new experimental XM-1 tank in a hangar, correctly describing its
special armour, main gun and targeting system and producing a
detailed diagram of the tank, which was later to be the M1 main
battle tank used by the US Army in the Gulf War. Riley psychically
spied on the bat-like B1 stealth bomber, years before it was made
public. Results like this proved to the military that remote viewing
was a very powerful intelligence asset.
Unfortunately, the remote-viewing group’s warnings that psi-poisoned
gifts from the Russians to US diplomats should be removed, or at the
very least be put in isolated rooms, fell on deaf ears and at worst
generated ridicule. Mainstream US society was not ready to
understand that the Soviet Union had developed paranormal weapons
and thus instigated a whole new branch of warfare.
In their psychic spying, the US remote-viewing group (the team of
six were by now nicknamed the Naturals) studied the new main Soviet
battle tank, the T-72. They also remotely viewed how one of these
T-72s was stolen by the CIA from Eastern Europe and brought to the
USA by freighter.
McMoneagle’s greatest display of remote viewing was in 1979 when he
investigated a naval facility at Severodvinsk on the White Sea near
the Arctic Circle. Within a huge building in the facility,
McMoneagle discovered a giant submarine, the size of a First World
War battleship. McMoneagle, with the aid of Hartleigh Trent,
sketched the submarine which had 20 canted tubes for ballistic
missiles, a double hull and a new type of drive mechanism. During
one remote-viewing session, McMoneagle saw the Russians dynamiting a
channel from the building, which was 100 yards from the water’s
edge. Satellite photos confirmed the Typhoon class submarine at the
dockside some four months after McMoneagle’s last remote viewing.
His spectacular remote-viewing ability enabled him, in his own
words, ‘to gain access to the insides of filing cabinets, desk
drawers, rooms, buildings in restricted areas of other countries for
espionage purposes’.*
*
Mind Trek, Joe McMoneagle (Hampton Roads Press, 1993)
The incident with the Typhoon submarine and
his picture-perfect remote viewing of other sites demonstrated that
Joe McMoneagle was now the finest remote viewer in the team. In
fact, he was one of the US government’s premier psi-spies. When this
army intelligence officer left Stargate in 1984, he was awarded a
Legion of Merit for providing information on 150 targets that was
unavailable from other sources.
US REMOTE VIEWING EXPANDS IN SCOPE
While the Naturals were working on improving their technique, so
other methods were constantly being developed, as CIA reports for
their Research and Development Office, declassified in 1995, reveal.
Targ and Puthoff at the
Stanford Research Institute had refined many
different training techniques. In outbound remote viewing, for
instance, an experimenter mentally visited the target site, while
the remote viewer tried to visualize the experimenter’s
surroundings. Then the remote viewer was taken to the target site to
get an actual look at what he had been seeing in his mind’s eye.
This was extended to long-distance outbound remote viewing (without
the final visit) which was used to look for kidnap victims,
terrorist bombs, etc., with much work being carried out on high-tech
targets including nuclear facilities and Mikoyan and Sukhoi the
Soviet aircraft design bureaux. The remote-viewing unit was being
trained in the technical mind-set needed to psychically spy on the
Soviets and Chinese.
However, these all involved remote viewing being carried out from a
normal state of consciousness, i.e. the beta state. The technique
favoured by the Fort Meade military remote viewers was called
extended remote viewing (ERV) whereby the remote viewer
practiced
psychic spying from a deeper level of consciousness, the
theta
state, normally found in dreaming. Biofeedback and EEG machines were
used to train the remote viewer to put him- or herself into the
theta state. A special room to cut out external stimuli was used to
facilitate ERV. This advanced form of remote viewing was the
technique the Russian remote viewers used.
Ingo Swann continued to use the co-ordinate remote-viewing method.
In one notorious session he spoke about on a 1996 Equinox Programme,
The Real X-Files, on Channel 4, he psychically spied on a location
in the Soviet Union which was being used for biological-weapons
research on unwilling human victims. This could have been the
biological-warfare complex at Obolensk, in a forest to the south of
Moscow. Swann catalogued a number of such biological-weapons sites,
including one at Stepnogorsk, an island in the Aral Sea called
Vozrozhdeniye, Berdsk and the city of Sverdlovsk, which in 1979 had
suffered a deadly accident with anthrax spores that killed hundreds
of Russians.
Gary Langford, another talented remote viewer from Stanford, and
Swann also tested CRV techniques on underwater Atlantic ridges,
looking for Russian ballistic-missile submarines. In fact, the
Stanford and Fort Meade military remote viewers worked together on
many projects. According to the ‘Operational project summary: an
unofficial list of nineteen apparent RV successes, 1974-93’ compiled
by
Dale Graff and selectively released by the CIA to sponsored
investigators in 1995, the strategic use of remote viewing was made
plain by the Stanford remote viewers being used by the Air Force to
look for the new MX ballistic-missile sites.
Soviet missiles were
becoming so accurate that there was a possibility that they could
destroy nearly all US land-based nuclear ballistic missiles in a
first strike. In 1979, the Air Force had come up with the MX missile
plan in which 200 mobile nuclear missiles were to be distributed, on
a special railroad 30 miles long, between 23 specially hardened
silos. The Soviets would have to fire two missiles per silo,
necessitating a total of 9,200 Russian warheads, which was thought
to be too many nuclear weapons for the Soviets to be able to deploy.
The Stanford Research Institute was asked by the Air Force to see if
remote viewing could be used to pinpoint the missiles in their
specific silos. Two thousand students were tested for remote-viewing
abilities. Groups of those who passed were set to find the silos, in
a shell-game simulation. They had 10 per cent accuracy. Mary Long,
the remote-viewing prodigy of the group, reached 80 per cent
accuracy. The Air Force were not pleased at this result, as it cast
doubt on the efficacy of their plan. Since the Soviets were far more
advanced than the USA in paranormal warfare, they probably had
groups of remote viewers with Mary Long-like abilities. In the end,
only 50 MX missiles were built and these were housed in old
Minuteman silos at Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming and in Colorado.
CIA sponsored research enabled Puthoff to make a study of the brains
of remote viewers, to see if any neurophysiological changes could be
found. Los Alamos National Laboratory gave the Stanford remote
viewers brain scans, using super-conducting magnetoencephalographs.
Puthoff and the CIA were keen to find the part of the brain involved
with psi activity, and they pinpointed the temporal lobes, which are
situated to the front and side of the cortex, i.e. the top spongy
grey matter of the brain (see Figure 1, page 00).
In 1980, the CIA asked Ken Bell to help them with a suspected
KGB
agent who had been detained by BOSS (the South African intelligence
organization) in South Africa. The KGB agent was proving difficult
to break. Bell remotely viewed the KGB suspect and telepathically
interrogated the man. During this psychic interrogation, Bell asked
the man questions which were telepathically transmitted to the
Russian and appeared in the man’s thoughts as if he was asking them
of himself. Bell discovered that the suspect was using a pocket
calculator specially modified to decode messages from the KGB. One
of the BOSS agents had taken the calculator home. When it was
recovered and examined, it enabled them to prove the man was a KGB
agent.
The Fort Meade group were called upon to spy on the ultra-secret
nuclear testing base at Semipalatinsk, as well as looking for the
crash site of a wrecked Soviet TU-95 bomber, but their real test was
to come with the task of finding the whereabouts of US hostages in
Iran, who were captured in 1979. In April 1980, Hartleigh Trent
remotely viewed US special forces rappelling out of helicopters in
Iran, and day after day, the group used remote viewing to keep tabs
on the hostages. However, on 25 April 1980 President Carter
announced that the rescue mission had been a debacle; Nancy Stern
left the Grill Flame project, followed shortly by Fern Gauvin. By
early 1981, most of the Grill Flame team had dispersed, Bell and
Riley to the regular army and normal military work, and McMoneagle
was nearing retirement. Hartleigh Trent died of cancer. The need for
new blood from the Stanford Research Institute to bolster the US
remote-viewing programme was growing.
AMPLIFYING REMOTE VIEWING
By the early eighties, Ingo Swann was working for Jack Vorona of the
DIA and General Ed Thompson, who was still in overall charge of the
Fort Meade project. Puthoff had found that two-thirds of the data
gained by remote viewing was correct, but the aim, as always, was to
improve accuracy.
Techniques used by US remote viewers in these early days included
locking up their thoughts in a ’mental suitcase’; ultra-quiet
remote-viewing rooms; sensory deprivation tanks; alpha- and
theta - inducing mind machines - now sold to the public; biofeedback
using EEG machines to enable the remote viewer to get in the mood
for remote viewing by entering a theta state.
Ingo Swann became interested in teaching pupils how to distinguish
signal (or first impressions) from noise (or attempts to analyze).
If the remote viewer’s first impressions were recorded without any
attempt to analyze them, the information was of high accuracy. When
the remote viewer tried to analyze what he or she was seeing,
accuracy plummeted. This phenomenon was called analytical overlay.
Within the first two seconds of studying an event, or part of the
target, accuracy was high; once the remote viewer tried to analyze
the image or information, the remote viewing became garbled or
wrong. Puthoff postulated that the left hemisphere of the brain was
not involved in psi activity.
Since the left part of our brains is
involved in analytical, mathematical and alphanumeric data, he
theorized that this part of our brain gets in the way of the deeper,
non-language based parts involved in remote viewing. It is rather
like a person with a damaged left hemisphere who can see and draw
pictures but cannot label them accurately. Swann developed
remote-viewing methods of working that concentrated on raw data, and
then in later parts of the session, on bringing in analytical
information, when it was more likely to be right. In this way, Swann
assumed that the brain could be trained to evaluate psi data. In
effect, he was attempting to rewire the neural network of the brain,
to build in a sixth sense. This was his method:
-
Stage One - doodle the first thing that comes into your mind after
being given the co-ordinates of the remote-viewing target. The
essence of the target could be seen in this ideogram. As the session
developed, visual imagery could be brought in and finally analytical
information, which was strictly avoided until then.
-
Stage Two - allow visual and sensory data into your consciousness
but discard any analytical mental processes. The raw data of
remote-viewing perceptions was to the fore, with no conscious
thought about what it may or may not be.
-
Stage Three - put an overview of your remote-viewing perceptions
into a bigger picture, possibly drawing numerous pictures.
-
Stage Four - make lists of the emotional and aesthetic impact what
you have seen in the remote-viewing session has had on you. List the
tangibles and intangibles of which you were aware. Finally make a
sketch including all the information acquired in the remote-viewing
session.
These four protocols, as he called them, were used in the early
days. Swann later added a Stage Five, in which ways of improving
remote-viewing resolution were implemented; and a Stage Six, in
which a three-dimensional representation of the target was arrived
at, by making models of the target. Later still, other teachers
introduced a stage seven which involves reading documents at the
remote-viewing location. These CRV protocols still form the basis
for all remote viewing taught in the USA.
Puthoff theorized that remote viewing was a form of subliminal
perception, rather like the image flashed on the screen too fast to
be consciously seen but nevertheless perceived by the subconscious.
It seemed as if the remote viewer was travelling to the target for
the briefest of moments, picking up a subliminal perception of it,
then alighting back in his body. As the remote-viewing process was
repeated, the remote viewer went back to the target and slowly built
up a picture of what he was seeing as a set of subliminal images and
perceptions that slowly, tenuously, slipped into conscious
awareness. In later chapters, we will discuss how this US research
fits into an overall theory of how remote viewing works - the
physics of the paranormal.
REMOTE VIEWING MOVES TO WIDER CIRCLES
Psychic Noreen Renier, during a 1981 lecture at the FBI’s training
centre at Quantico in Virginia, predicted President Reagan would be
the subject of an assassination attempt that spring, which turned
out to be correct. The White House was very pro-paranormal. Ronald
and Nancy Reagan regularly consulted astrologer Joan Quigley.
Freelance psi-spies such as Alex Tannous were kept busy by the
CIA.
When the CIA’s station chief in Beirut, William Buckley, was
kidnapped by Moslem terrorists, the Agency’s Directorate of
Operations asked Tannous to remotely view the captive. When Tannous
reported the route of the kidnapping and that Buckley had been
tortured to death by the terrorists, the CIA were not happy to hear
his news - especially since it turned out to be true. Tannous’s
group of private psi-spies were also used by the secret service to
find an assassin code-named the ’Cat’, who was targeting Ronald
Reagan.
A massive boost to official remote-viewing deployment in the US Army
came with the appointment in 1981 of
Major General Albert Stubblebine to head
Intelligence Security Command (INSCOM). A true
believer in remote viewing
- ’I will tell you for the record that
there are structures underneath the surface of the Mars’ I will also
tell you that there are machines under the surface of Mars that you
can look at. You can find out in detail, you can see what they are,
who they are and a lot of detail about them...you can do that
through remote viewing’
* -
...and the merits of paranormal warfare, Stubblebine had pushed through neuro-linguistic programming in the
management training of staff officers and the teaching of
out-of-body consciousness at
the Monroe Institute. The military,
under Major General Stubblebine, with the help of Jack Vorona of the
DIA and the technical expertise of Hal Puthoff, pushed forward the
remote-viewing project at Fort Meade.
*
Nexus magazine, Remote Viewing,
Vol 2 No 21, Aug-Sep 1994
Colonel John Alexander oversaw many of these INSCOM projects for
Stubblebine. Alexander, a true visionary, had published a seminal
article in Military Review called ’The New Mental Battlefield’, in
which he described remote viewing and extolled its usefulness, and
suggested that effective mind-influencing devices were already a
lethal reality referring to Warsaw Pact psychotronic weapons and how
they might be used against the USA.
Another innovation, according to Sally Squires of the Washington
Post (‘The Pentagon’s twilight zone’ 17 April 1988), was an Army war
college called Task Force Delta, which looked at the development of
paranormal warrior-monks. The project was to investigate strange
philosophical practices for anything that might be of use to the
military. Lieutenant Colonel Jim Chandler and like-minded officers
from the Task Force came up with the name ’First Earth Battalion’ -
an ecologically minded, politically correct, warrior-monk vision for
the future soldier. A 1982 report of a Task Force Delta meeting was
reported by Colonel Mike Malone:
’I am one of the tribal elders... my
name is "The Mullet Man." I am known as the one who casts nets.
And I try to tell people that of all those who cast nets, most
should focus more on the casting than the catching. I live with,
fish for, and push the cause of the mullet, because he is a
"low-class" fish. He is simple. He is honest. He moves around in
great formations and columns. He does damn near all the work...’
According to documents in my possession,
Jack Houck, a defense
consultant and the US expert on psychokinesis, introduced
Stubblebine and Alexander to spoon bending, which Stubblebine
subsequently showed to INSCOM officers, as well as to General
Thompson, Directorate Chief at the DIA, and John McMahon, Deputy
Director of the CIA.
For some time, character clashes had been evident amongst the
Stanford researchers and Fort Meade remote viewers and now they
became acrimonious. Russell Targ’s finance was stopped by the DIA
for alleged sloppiness, and in 1983 he and remote viewer Keith Harary left to go into business on their own. Initially they proved
spectacularly successful in analyzing the silver-futures options for
clients,* but again bitter acrimony was the end result. It seemed
opening Pandora’s box of remote viewing led to bitter emotional and
personality clashes.
* The goose that laid the silver eggs: a
criticism of psi and silver
futures forecasting, The Journal of the American Society for
Psychical Research, October year October 1992, volume 86
In 1983, the military remote-viewing programme came under the
auspices of INSCOM and the direct control of Stubblebine, in the
process receiving the new code-name of Center Lane. The unit was
used to look for terrorists, among other things. When Brigadier
General James Dozier was kidnapped by the Italian Red Brigade, the
team at Fort Meade was asked to find him. Langford had predicted the
blue van that was involved in the kidnapping; McMoneagle gave an
exact description of the second-floor room in Padua in which Dozier
was being held; another remote viewer, Ted Wheatley, found the exact
town. Dozier was eventually found and freed, thanks in part to
signals intelligence by US special-operations teams. He was found in
a second-floor room with a radiator on the wall at the store with a
distinctive facade on the ground floor, just as McMoneagle
described.
New blood was introduced by Stubblebine into the Fort Meade group,
including
Lyn Buchanan and
Ed Dames.
Ingo Swann’s training enabled the new US military remote viewers not
only to learn CRV and simple ERV, but to experience bilocation. This
was seen as the first major step towards Russian techniques of
remote viewing. It enabled the remote viewer to perceive the target
as if he or she was actually there. In the US, bilocation was seen
as the pinnacle of remote viewing, a peak experience to be enjoyed
when it occurred. Of all Swann’s trainees, Tom Nance was the finest;
he could make models of what he was remotely viewing, Stage Six of
Swann’s training.
Stubblebine’s replacement by Major General Harry Soyster put the
Fort Meade group into a strong decline; it was transferred to the
DIA, renamed Sun Streak. While the Army’s remote-viewing group fell
on hard times, the Stanford group blossomed, working for all
branches of the US government. During 1984 and 1985, Jack Vorona of
the CIA and Hal Puthoff lobbied congress, the military and
intelligence agencies for funds. Remote-viewing demonstrations were
held for the White House, the Navy, the Air Force, the CIA, Joint
Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Council, NSA, FBI, DEA, the
Customs Service, the Coast Guard, and the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency. As a result, they won the support of a
Pentagon-affiliated agency and a five-year, $10 million research and
development contract to work on the neurophysiology of remote
viewing, and psi abilities such as psychokinesis.
Most of the old experienced remote viewers died from cancer or
heart
attacks, even McMoneagle had a massive heart attack that nearly
killed him in June 1985. The American remote viewers were oblivious
of the enormous remote-influencing and killing potential of the
Soviet Union’s thousands of KGB trained paranormal-warfare experts.
US remote viewers were seen as a danger to the Soviet’s
paranormal-warfare capability. A paranormal first strike to take out
US remote viewers would have been seen as a legitimate military
operation by the KGB. Since the US did not possess any remote
killers, it would be relatively safe, with no chance of a psi-counterstrike.
Though no hard evidence shows this to be true, the massive Soviet
capability in psi warfare lends credence to the first-strike
scenario.
Sun Streak was given the job of remotely viewing high-tech Soviet
weapons. In 1987, they psychically spied upon the Dushanbe satellite
tracking, communication and strategic laser complex in the USSR. Mel
Riley and Paul Smith were among the unit’s remote viewers. They
located Chinese Silkworm missile emplacements in Iran, towards the
end of the Iran-Iraq war. In 1988 and 1989, the unit helped the Drug
Enforcement Agency (DEA) look for drug routes, vessels and barons.
They also psychically searched for US POWs abandoned to their fate
in Vietnam after the war.
With a new DIA operations officer, Fern Gauvin (a former
Natural
with Grill Flame), more exotic and occult techniques were
practiced
at Fort Meade. Up until then, CRV and ERV were the only techniques
regularly used. Now channelling, allowing your body to be taken over
by a spirit, was added to the portfolio of techniques. Written
remote viewing, where the spirit wrote down the answer to whatever
you were remotely viewing, enabled Angela Dellafiora to find a rogue
US Customs Service officer, Charles Jordan, in Lovell, Wyoming. She
predicted how Quaddafi would transport chemical weapons from the
facility at Rabta by ship to another location, to avoid US
surveillance and a presumed bombing raid. She even predicted a
hijacking in Rome, or Athens, of US airline passengers by Moslem
terrorists.
The channelling of information by discarnate spirits to enable
remote viewing has a long history. Helen Duncan was a psychic who
publicly stated at a séance during the height of the Second World
War that a British battleship had been sunk. She was promptly jailed
by the British authorities. It is known that Churchill was aware of
psychic warfare during the Second World War. The lighting of candles
and meditation on the powers of light was used to ward of the
evil
forces of Hitler.*
*
The Spear of Destiny, Trevor Ravenscroft, Neville Spearman, 1973.
Churchill was concerned that vital
defense
information may have been leaked by Helen Duncan if she was allowed
to continue. A front-page article in The Times in January 1998,
revealed that pressure was being put on the government to pardon
Helen Duncan, Britain’s first convicted psychic viewer. Until this
very day, psychic viewing is looked on by the British establishment
with horror. A country such as the UK, obsessed with secrecy, cannot
allow remote viewing to become public knowledge - as I have found to
my cost.
THE TWILIGHT YEARS OF US MILITARY REMOTE VIEWING
In 1988, the new Secretary of Defense, Frank Carlucci, announced a
$33 billion defense cut. A Pentagon Inspector General’s team arrived
at Fort Meade to examine the work the US military remote viewers had
been undertaking. Numerous files were shredded before the Inspector
General’s team could examine them, remote viewers were told to avoid
the inspectors. Not surprisingly, the Inspector General recommended
that the remote-viewing unit be shut down. Many of the personnel
left. Ingo Swann left Stanford in 1988; Ed Dames left the unit that
summer, and Mel Riley retired in 1990.
In fact, the unit survived, but only four remote viewers were left
at Fort Meade when the Gulf War started in 1991. They were asked to
find mobile scud-missile launchers in the western desert of Iraq.
Ken Bell and Joe McMoneagle, acting as private contractors, aided in
this psychic hunt for the scuds. Towards the end of the Gulf War,
David Morehouse and two other independent remote viewers, were asked
by the DIA to examine the Iraqi army units which were torching the
oil wells in Kuwait. Morehouse claims he saw the Iraqis releasing
toxic agents into the conflagration.
According to Morehouse’s remote
viewing, these nerve agents, mycotoxins and bacteriological
substances, were spread at low concentrations to give US and UK
troops chronic poisoning that would not show up at the time, but
would disable or kill these soldiers years later. Acute poisoning
which would have killed US and allied troops on the battlefield may
have forced the USA to respond with nuclear weapons. The Iraqi
command may therefore have considered they only had the option of a
low-level chemical and biological weapon response. If Saddam Hussein
actually ordered this attack, as Morehouse states, he is responsible
for over 10,000 US deaths from Gulf War Syndrome. To add to this
horror, nearly 250,000 ex-servicemen and women are now severely ill,
many having children with birth defects.*
*
Gulf War Syndrome: Biological Black Magic,
David G. Guyatt, Nexus
Aug-Sep 1997, Vol 4 No 5.
Sun Streak was now renamed Stargate (as the overall programme was
called in 1977). In 1994, the American Institute for Research (AIR)
was asked by the CIA to evaluate the remote-viewing programme.
Ray
Hyman, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon in Eugene,
and Jessica Utts, a professor of statistics at the University of
California, helped prepare the study. Hyman was skeptical.
‘My
conclusion was that there’s no evidence these people have done
anything helpful for the government,’ he said. Utts, however,
thought some of the results were promising; ‘I think they would be
effective if they were used in conjunction with other intelligence,’
she said, but that the statistical results were promising enough for
research to continue. ‘I would like to see funding in the open
science world - I think we’re at the point that something needs to
be explained,’ she said.
However, David Goslin, who headed the AIR
team, concluded that evidence for the 1993-94 period showed that
remote viewing was not useful. This seems to have been a politically
motivated decision, according to Dr Edwin C. May, Director of
Research for Remote Viewing Programs for both the CIA and DIA:
’Dr May believes that the reasons
for the cancellation of the RV programs were mainly due to the
geopolitical shifts, and a review of priorities by the
intelligence community.’
*
*
Remote
Viewing and the US Intelligence Community, Armen Victorian,
Lobster vol 31 June 1996.
Dr Marcello Truzzi a research scientist in this area adds:
‘the recent strange CIA/AIR report on the one hand indicates about
fifteen per cent above chance guessing rate while somehow managing
to conclude that RV is not operationally useful (bad enough but also
dismissing the many hits in the operational, non-experimental
efforts with RV). Given the low reliability of so many espionage
methods and sources, one would have expected them to be delighted
with fifteen per cent over chance. Obviously, the conclusions were
dictated in advance of the evaluation study and were mostly
politically motivated.
The decision to halt remote viewing was extraordinary. According to
conventional science, remote viewing could not possibly work.
Fifteen per cent accuracy (McMoneagle states it was 50 per cent and
Morehouse gives 80 per cent) shows that our conventional science
must be wrong. Russian science had expanded to encompass psi and in
doing so allowed them to develop operational psi warfare. US remote
viewing, lacking a comparable theoretical basis, was easily
dismissed by the skeptics as illusory.
In 1995, the CIA released information on the remote-viewing
programme it had decided to discontinue. A 29 November Associated
Press wire story stated:
CIA confirms US used ’psychic’ spies. Project
’Star Gate’ employed
psychics to hunt down Libyan leader Muammar Quaddafi, find plutonium
in North Korea and help drug enforcement agencies. CIA spokesman
Mark Mansfield confirmed the existence of the Star Gate study. ‘The
CIA is reviewing available programs regarding parapsychological
phenomena, mostly remote viewing, to determine their usefulness to
the intelligence community,’ he said.
But he noted that when the
CIA first sponsored research on the
program in the 1970s, the program was found to be ‘unpromising’ and
was later turned over to the Defense Department.
PRESENT-DAY PSI RESEARCH
The US remote-viewing programme was being run down by 1988. This
might be comfortable for the scientific community, but in fact
remote viewing is still being developed by the military, in absolute
secrecy. DIA personnel and other secret groups in the US military
are developing paranormal warfare along similar lines to the Russian
research. The aim is to protect democracy against Chinese
paranormal-warfare projects, including remote influencing. A May
1992 DIA report, classified Secret/NOFORN (no foreigner), as well as
open-source literature on the scope and thrust of the Chinese
parapsychological effort, shows a five to ten year intelligence gap
in this area.
The US military’s official position on remote viewing was stated by
CIA spokesperson David Christian, who accepted that no further
governmental US research into remote viewing was warranted:
‘We
think the intelligence community shouldn’t pursue research on this
and that it is best left to the private sector.’
However, a carefully planned campaign of disinformation to mask the
continued and accelerated study of psi warfare became necessary
following a chance remark made by former president Jimmy Carter at a
conference in South Africa in 1995. CNN reported on 20 September
1995:
Carter: CIA used psychics to help find missing plane. Atlanta,
Georgia (CNN)
- Former President Jimmy Carter said the
CIA, without
his knowledge, once consulted a psychic to help locate a missing
government plane in Africa. Carter told students at Emory University
that the ‘special US plane crashed somewhere in Zaire’ while he was
president.
According to Carter, US spy satellites could find no trace of the
aircraft, so the CIA consulted a psychic from California. Carter
said the woman ‘went into a trance and gave some latitude and
longitude figures. We focused our satellite cameras on that point
and the plane was there.’
The Carter statement was circulated by Reuters in September 1995
(‘Carter says psychic found lost plane for CIA’).
Milton Friedman, a speech writer for President Ford with inside
information, writing in Venture Inward magazine, Jan-Feb 1996, in an
article called, Intuition is Alive in Washington, has said that:
‘Remote-viewing accuracy was actually sixty per cent to eighty-five
per cent (not fifteen per cent as claimed). The programs have not
closed down but been moved under a deeper cloak of secrecy. (Other
agencies like the FBI are now training their agents to use intuition
in investigations like the Oklahoma City bombing incident.) The
budgets are enormous - much more than the alleged twenty million
dollars over twenty years. The intelligence data picked up by psi-spies
is called, ’critical, crucial, vital and unavailable from any other
source’. It was used by the highest echelons of the military and the
government.’
The highest ranks of the military are involved in the new research.
An official CIA paper written by Gerald K. Haines of the National
Reconnaissance Office, states:
’There is a DIA Psychic
Center and the NSA studies parapsychology, that
branch of psychology that deals with the investigation of
such psychic phenomena as clairvoyance, extrasensory
perception, and telepathy.’
Robert Gates, former Director
of the CIA, estimated ‘that the intelligence community had
invested about twenty million dollars over the sixteen-year
period during which the threat was under examination.’
(‘Night Line’ TV show, 28 November 1995).
Ingo Swann responded on 1 December 1995:
A great deal was learned for those twenty million dollars, and our
nation received a lot back for the bucks spent. And this knowledge,
although somewhat on the shelf now, will soon come in handy again.
Several quite respectable sources have informed me that two major
nations are making advances in
psychoenergetics applications, one of
which is remote viewing. It is also alleged that a third, smaller
nation with well-known and advertised hatred of the American way of
life, is also making progress. I believe these sources, because I
know that liberated Russia sold for big bucks the Soviet psychic
secrets three times over in order to acquire needed foreign exchange
monies.
The fifteen per cent accuracy cited in recent public statements on
behalf of the CIA is the baseline which ordinary non-gifted and
untrained persons often do achieve. This figure was identified very
early in the Stanford research phase. The minimum accuracy needed by
the clients was sixty-five per cent. In the later stages of the
development [training] part of the effort, this accuracy level was
achieved and often consistently exceeded.
...remote viewers did help find scud missiles, did help find
biological and chemical warfare projects, did locate tunnels and
extensive underground facilities and identify their purposes...
From the top of our system down, there are many who could stand up
and be counted regarding the efficiency of developed remote viewing,
and even regarding superior natural psychics. It has been circulated
in the intelligence community that successful remote-viewing
sessions probably saved the nation a billion-plus dollars in what
otherwise would have been wasted, or misdirected, activities. Not a
bad payback for the twenty million dollars.
US research into remote manipulating and influencing, which
concentrates on the telepathic knockout at which the Russians are
expert, and the use of sleep-wake hypnosis to control people at a
distance or plant suggestions in their brains, has obvious military
value. According in Armen Victorian,* it is headed by
Colonel John
Alexander, the former Director of Non-Lethal Weapons at the Los
Alamos National Laboratory, who remains advisory head of Nato’s
Non-Lethal Defense initiative.
*
‘The
Pentagon’s Penguin’ Armen Victorian (Lobster magazine 28, Dec
1994)
He was assistant to General Stubblebine on
Grill Flame. One of America’s leading experts on
paranormal warfare, Alexander foresaw the danger psi warfare posed
when most others ridiculed the very idea. He has been the prime
mover in shaping DIA psi warfare for the twenty-first century.
The Japanese, having also bought the technology from the Russians,
have brought psi warfare into the corporate arena. Any US firm that
is not aware of it will be at risk. Russian researchers found they
could remotely influence the decision-makers in foreign governments.
New Scientist (23 December 1995) revealed a major Japanese
Corporation’s attempts to use psychotronic technology in the
business world to further Japanese interests. They are apparently
developing mind-reading machines. US firms that are ignorant of psychotronics will be at a major disadvantage to foreign competitors
who master this new field of study developed by the Soviet Union.
There is a danger that the Chinese are developing military remote
influencers, who may be used against the USA and the West. Faced
with these scenarios, there are secret psi-warfare projects
spearheading US countermeasures.
Few people understand the power of psi, in effect consigning the
paranormal to mental aberration or hallucination. There is a private
programme which would not be subject to the US Freedom of
Information Act. One of these new top-secret institutes is
multi-millionaire
Robert Bigelow’s Nevada-based National Institute
for Discovery Science. Robert Bigelow is recruiting leading
researchers in UFOs, remote viewing and other fringe sciences, with
the aim of developing a biophysical research programme that can
match the Russians, who still lead the world in this area. Colonel
Alexander is a leading proponent of this type of this research and
advises NATO on non lethal weapons and there uses.*
* ‘The
Pentagon’s Penguin’ Armen Victorian (Lobster magazine 28, Dec
1994)
At the end of the millennium, it seems that the USA has indeed
entered a new age, one in which American psi-spies stand between
democracy and foreign powers, which by the use of remote viewing,
remote sensing and remote influencing, can modify the decisions and
behaviour of the politicians upon whom democracy depends. With the
end of the Cold War, the inner-space arms race has not died down,
but instead spread further afield.
Unraveling the nature of reality
I believe that the universe is more structured than modern theorists
would imagine. Physics used to be an experimentally based science in
which theories were developed to explain experimental data. In
recent times, more and more complex theories have been developed,
but little experimental work has been carried out because the high
energies involved require particle accelerators that western
governments do not fund because of the enormous cost. The next 20
years will therefore be full of more and more complex mathematical
physical theories, which to all intents and purposes are improvable
by experiment.
Physicists have, in effect, become highly educated
science-fiction writers. In my research into remote viewing it
forced me to reappraise the nature of reality in order to begin to
come to terms with how it could possibly work. Science has
overlooked the implications that remote viewing has for the nature
of physical reality. According to physics and biology, remote
viewing is not possible. In chapter 4, we look at the science
underlying remote viewing.
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