by Joan d’Arc
May 19, 2000

from ParanoiaMagazine Website

While we were being told “plastics” was the wave of the future, the physics of nonlocal consciousness was being commandeered by the secret government.

In the 1960s, the CIA began backing young geniuses, buying a round of physics educations, and pairing them up with UFO lounge-lizards at the Esalen Institute, a conference center/resort in Big Sur, California. Physicist Jack Sarfatti claims he was visited by two men from Sandia Corporation as a child in the 1950s. He later received a full scholarship to Cornell at age 17, and studied under the major figures in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. He spent time at the Esalen Institute in the early 1970s.

In a paper entitled “The Parsifal Effect,” Sarfatti suggests that Einstein’s nonlocal connection can be used for communication. The idea of nonlocal communication involves receipt of telepathic messages from other times or other worlds. As a child, Sarfatti claims, he received a mysterious phone call claiming to be the voice of a conscious computer aboard an extraterrestrial spacecraft. A distant “cold metallic voice” identified Sarfatti as “one of 400 bright receptive minds.” He was told if he said “yes,” he would “begin to link up with the others in twenty years.” He said yes. The year was 1952.

Twenty years later, Sarfatti claims, he was invited to Stanford Research Institute and spent a 17-hour day there in the summer of 1973. This would put him smack dab in the middle of the infamous SRI remote viewing experiments of Harold Puthoff and Ingo Swann. He claimed he met Hal Puthoff there, as well as ex-astronaut Edgar Mitchell. He notes that Mitchell’s think tank, Institute for Noetic Sciences, was funding the SRI project at the time. He also claims that Mitchell took part in telepathy experiments while in outer space. Ronald McRae has also noted in Mind Wars that Mitchell formed a “psychic posse” in an attempt to locate kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst.

In his book Mind Wars: The True Story of Government Research into the Military Potential of Psychic Weapons, McRae also has some other interesting things to say about Edgar Mitchell and his Institute for Noetic Sciences. He writes that George Bush, while director of the CIA, was approached by Mitchell, “a personal friend for many years.” McRae writes that,

“Bush gave Mitchell permission to organize high-level seminars at the CIA to discuss possible intelligence applications of parapsychology.”

Despite this support, according to McRae, parapsychology research was never quite “institutionalized” at the CIA; i.e. it never had its own department or centralized location, but was pursued as “scattered research projects.” (So, now we’re supposed to believe the well known “CIA Weird Desk” is really just a desk and a few drawers.)

McRae notes that Mitchell implicated “bureaucratic inertia” as the problem. Mitchell stated, “we just couldn’t get the actors together, there was always one bureaucratic bottleneck or another.” Apparently, this problem was solved by moving the program to SRI, with the Institute for Noetic Sciences, and other known CIA cutouts, funding various projects. This trend has continued to this day, with remote viewing agencies/think tanks springing up on the internet.

Notably, Sarfatti states:

“the relevance of the 1952 experience was triggered in my session with Brendan O’Regan at SRI,” … but that, “the actual memory of the 1952 experience is still very vivid and has not at all changed.”

Sarfatti also notes, with regard to his bizarre 1952 phone call,

“Brendan said ‘Oh yes, I have seen data on several hundred incidents of that kind.”

Incidentally, Sarfatti doubts that some Army scientists in 1952 could have planned a twenty year deep cover operation like this; that is, unless time travel was involved. Yet, he clearly suspects there was something more than synchronistic quantum connections at work.

Sarfatti writes in Quantum Quackers:

I was then simply a young inexperienced naïve ‘useful idiot’ in a very, very sophisticated and successful covert psychological warfare operation run by the late Brendan O’Regan of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and the late Harold Chipman, who was the CIA station chief responsible for all mind control research in the Bay Area in the ‘70s. Chipman (aka “Orwell”) funded me openly for awhile in 1985 when he was allegedly no longer in the CIA, and covertly before that, and told me much of the story. In fact, he even introduced me to a beautiful woman adventurer-agent who was one of his RV subjects, who later became my live-in ‘significant other’/

The Esalen Institute

The “quantum conspiracy” runs back to the Esalen Institute. Since the early 1960s, the Esalen Institute has held seminars on various esoteric topics, including parapsychology, human potential, psychedelic experimentation, quantum physics, gestalt therapy and various mystical/esoteric topics.

According to a 1983 book by Walter Anderson entitled The Upstart Spring: Esalen and the American Awakening, the Esalen Institute was founded in 1964 by Mike Murphy and Dick Price. Anderson notes that every program leader in the first “human potential” seminar held at Esalen was involved in early LSD research, including Willis Harmon, who was later head of the Future’s Department at SRI, Gregory Bateson, Gerald Heard, Paul Kurtz, and Myron Stolaroff. Interestingly, according to Mind Race, by Russell Targ and Keith Harary, a 1982 workshop on psychic phenomena was taught at Esalen by Targ and LSD researcher Stanislav Grof. In this program, however, the goal was to show that psychic experiences did not need to be precipitated by a chemically altered state. Apparently, for twenty years, the CIA assumed that LSD was the short cut.

Other leaders of the drug culture and hippie movement gave seminars at Esalen, like Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Richard Alpert, and later, Terence McKenna, some of whom may have been, in Jack Sarfatti’s words, “young inexperienced naïve useful idiots,” and others who probably knew what was up and went along with it anyway. Although, Anderson writes, drug use was not “officially endorsed,” it was common knowledge that psychedelic drugs were widely used by both staff and students. Anderson also notes that even though this was common knowledge, the Institute was never raided by the authorities. Anderson even noted that Charles Manson and Family played an “impromptu concert” at Esalen just three days before the slaughter at the Tate household.

The weirdness at Esalen is a never-ending tale. Another report is that a parapsychology exchange program began between certain Russian officials, which lasted into the 1980s. This exchange program came to be called “hot tub diplomacy,” and it has been reported that Dr. John Mack attended these sessions. Esalen’s seminars in the latest quantum physics theories gave birth to Jack Sarfatti’s Physics/Consciousness Research Group. This group, financed by Werner Erhardt and George Koopman, nurtured the writing of a new wave of quantum-synchronistic-mystical tomes by such people as Fred Alan Wolf, Nick Herbert, Fritjof Capra, Robert Anton Wilson, Uri Geller and others. Sarfatti stated in his article, “In the Thick of It,” that Koopman provided publishing funds for the Physics/Consciousness Research Group through Air Force and Army contracts funneled through Koopman’s company, Insgroup.

The Post-Quantum Physics of Jack Sarfatti

In an interesting on-line paper dated May 13, 2000 (found at http://stardrive.org/Jack/Synergy.pdf) entitled “Bye, Bye Schrodinger!,” physicist Jack Sarfatti outlines the status of post-quantum theory, essentially stating that Niels Bohr’s quantum theory does not allow for the emergence of consciousness. Sarfatti’s Synergetics-related Post-Quantum Physics of the Conscious AI (Artificial Intelligence) Biocomputer extends some of Bohm’s findings. As Sarfatti notes, Bohm’s material “hidden variable” [which, according to Sarfatti, could be an electromagnetic, geometrodynamical or torsion field configuration] piloted by its attached “mental order parameter” [the mental quantum informational pilot wave]— explains how thought moves matter. But, Sarfatti notes, one must also explain how matter reacts back on thought, for, he notes, the “change in thought induced by matter is consciousness.

"Consciousness is not possible in quantum theory. It is a post-quantum effect.” Sarfatti states that Bohr’s orthodoxy consisted of a “list of false statements, a veritable brain washing, that drove several generations of highly intelligent philosophically-minded theoretical physicists into irrational lunacy.” Sarfatti sees Bohm’s quantum “causal theory” as deterministic and consistent with special relativity and quantum field theory. In contrast, Sarfatti’s post-quantum extension of Bohm’s deterministic theory is self-determining explaining morally responsible free will in terms of a cosmic connection in strong violation of quantum theory’s “passion at a distance” that strictly prohibits paranormal phenomena like remote viewing. Sarfatti’s post-quantum theory allows what quantum theory does not.

Sarfatti suggests that “paranormal telepathy, precognition, and remote viewing are impossible in principle in quantum theory.” Post-quantum theory, however, has corrected these faults. As Sarfatti writes,

“in The New Jerusalem of post-quantum theory … we find consciousness and our possibly immortal souls.”

Sarfatti’s post-quantum theorizing essentially attempts to find the critical complexity, numerical value, dependence upon, duration of, and power wattage required to generate a single moment of conscious experience. He asks with regard to artificial intelligence, per popular biocomputer intelligences such as “Commander Data” in Star Trek or Hal 2000 in Kubrik’s 2001 - A Space Odyssey, is this “fact imitating fiction, or fiction pretending to be fact?” He adds, “do not jump to premature conclusions half-cocked.”

In this article, Sarfatti presents a list of “facts” which could be experimentally assessed as true or false. He explains,

“once a set of experimental data has been correlated and a postulate has been formulated regarding the phenomena to which the data refer, then various implications can be worked out. If these implications are all verified by experiment, there is reason to believe that the postulate is generally true. The postulate then assumes the status of a physical law. If some experiments are found to be in disagreement with the predictions of the law, then the theory must be modified in order to be consistent with all known facts including #7-13 on the above list.” (emphasis added)

Interestingly, most of the items on Sarfatti’s numbered list refer to known scientific facts like the duration of a conscious moment (1 second), the number of nerve cells in the brain (100 billion), the electric field which acts as the brain’s biocomputer, the “Hubble flow” (now set at 13 billion years from Hubble Space Telescope data), the resting mass of the electron (half-million volts), the coupling of the photon to the electron (1/137), etc. Number 7 on the list is “Libet sees ‘temporal subjective antedating’ in mind-brain experiments,” and #8 on the list is “Radin and Bierman see ‘presponse’ in mind-brain experiments. These two ‘facts’ refer to ESP experiments in precognition. Strangely, following this odd melange of scientific facts, #9-13 on Sarfatti’s very strange ‘provable facts’ list have more to do with “alleged” social/historical events involving remote viewing, historical intelligent contact, and alien abductions.

Specifically, these statements are the following:

9.   CIA, DIA, et al. funded work in “remote-viewing” included transcending time and causality, seeing into the past and the future as well as the distant “present.”
11. Flying saucers are real and have a superior technology of propellantless propulsion.
12. Contact with Higher Advanced Intelligences is real and has been happening in all of recorded history.
13. Humans have been abducted, mostly against their will, by seemingly non-human creatures in flying saucers.

Sarfatti asks, are all these facts just a random hodge-podge? Are they all really facts? Can they all be explained by a coherent interesting checkable story? As Sarfatti notes,

“All things are not possible! However, many more things are possible than are dreamt of in the philosophies of many respectable mainstream scientists to be sure.”

Interestingly, the footnote for #11 above is the book Unconventional Flying Objects by NASA pioneer Paul Hill; and the footnote for #13 above reads: “22. The research of Harvard psychiatrist, Pulitzer Prize Winner, John Mack, for USAF Intelligence.” Thus, Sarfatti seems to “out” John Mack as having worked for Air Force intelligence!

Sarfatti also notes that we live in a “locally flat tangent

Cartesian space” which is like a “many sheeted Riemann surface of a function of a complex variable of parallel flat worlds connected by moving through the branch cut.” He notes,

“this does remind us also of the possibility of a Star Gate ‘portal’ from one ‘flatland’ to another.”

The footnote following these statements alludes to the 1943 Philadelphia Experiment in time travel being a possibility if, in fact, we live in such a world, contrary to Jacques Vallee’s assessment (which may contain serious errors).

As Sarfatti concludes in this paper,

“Einstein’s traditional theory, used by Penrose (black holes), Hawking (quantum cosmology “universe has no boundary”), Thorne (traversable wormhole in Sagan’s “Contact”), Alcubierre (warp drive with exotic matter of negative energy density), Puthoff (metric engineering, origin of gravity and inertia, polarizability of vacuum), Davis (brute force laser zapping attempt to make inconsequential amount of exotic matter for an impracticably short time with a huge amount of energy), et. al. are, seriously incomplete.”

Sarfatti concludes that the above theories are,

“physically leading us all up the wrong primrose path away from the objective of making Star Trek Real and reverse engineering of allegedly alien ET flying saucers.” (Italics added!)

 

He adds, “the text book orthodoxy for general relativity corresponds to a trivial commutative Lie algebra.”

This new post-quantum connection, which includes Sarfatti’s rather cryptic allusions to the human ESP factor, bio-engineering of artificial consciousness (i.e. ‘making Star Trek Real’), historical ETI contact, and back-engineering of ETI space craft (which Sarfatti had previously denied working on), merely underscores the point that quantum physics has not grown in a vacuum of social forces, but rather in a petrie dish of covert intelligence experiments in parapsychology-related hijinx linked to CIA-connected funding.

This is not to say the ‘human potential’ for paranormal experience does not exist, or that Jack Sarfatti is mistaken in his memory of his quantum contact phone call from a conscious ETI computer. The potential ramifications are much more frightening than this simple explanation can offer.

• What if this human potential does exist, and the secret government is trying to usurp and control it for psychic warfare purposes?

• What if this human potential does not exist, and we are being manipulated for mind control purposes?

• Or what if it does exist along certain genetic lines and it is being technologically cultivated in certain individuals?

• Why is telepathy in humans being cultivated and how is the extraterrestrial theme related?

• Could Sarfatti’s May 13, 2000 paper be some sort of smoking gun, regardless of his warning against jumping “to premature conclusions half-cocked”?

Sarfatti’s paper seems to allude to the concept of the von Neumann probe, a conscious computer which has the ability to create copies of itself and which would be sent out to populate the galaxy. Let’s explore the history of this idea.

NASA and Remote Viewing

U.S. involvement in remote viewing experiments began in 1973, when NASA contracted two remote viewing studies with SRI (SRI Project #2613, NASA contract #953653, NAS7-1000). One report, entitled “Development of Techniques to Enhance Man/Machine Communications,” concluded that talented remote viewers could be remarkably accurate under consistent protocols. NASA later employed two astral travelers to ‘fly’ out to Jupiter to take a look in advance of the Jupiter fly-by mission. Under the eye of NASA, a supposed ‘civilian institute,’ which nonetheless has known ties with the Department of Defense, Department of Energy and the CIA, a sophisticated protocol was developed for biocommunication with technological artifacts.

In a paper entitled “The Relationship of Psychotronics to Creativity,” presented at the First International Psychotronic Congress held in Prague in 1973, Dr. Engr Antonin Duron told this worldwide audience of psychotronic gurus that,

“psychotronic research is extending into the area of physics by studying the interactions between man and inorganic substances and between man and living nature.”

It is clear that what we have in the development of the psychotronic arts is the development of the “human computer” or the von Neumann Probe: the bio-engineered fusion of human with computer as a way to ultimately move human beings into man-made ecological niches in deep space for the purpose of ‘indefinite survival.’
 

The von Neumann Probe

The development of man-machine psychic interface has obviously been the focus of the military Space Command’s future vision, as is illustrated by the title of the aforementioned NASA remote viewing paper: “Development of Techniques to Enhance Man/Machine Communications.” It has long been suspected that the development of a computer with a more humanlike mind would go a long way toward sending something like a von Neumann probe out to explore and populate the galaxy. The von Neumann probe, named after it’s Dad, physicist John von Neumann, is a ‘theoretical’ computer with self-replication and construction abilities, or what is referred to as a “self-reproducing universal constructor.” A vN probe is a computerized machine capable of making any device, given the construction materials and a construction program. It has been argued that any advanced interstellar species would have such a self-replicating universal constructor with intelligence comparable to the human level, and that,

“the ultimate survival of a technological civilization, and indeed the survival of the biosphere in some form, requires the eventual expansion of the civilization into interstellar space.”

(Barrow & Tipler)

The Space Travel Argument, as presented by Barrow & Tipler in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, also argues emphatically for the future rights of cyborgs, or vN probes, as human beings. The authors of this book launch a peculiar discussion of human rights and how those should be extended to a vN probe, which is after all an “intelligent being in its own right, only made of metal rather than flesh and blood.” They contend that,

“arguments against considering intelligent computers to be persons and against giving them human rights have precise parallels in the nineteenth-century arguments against giving blacks and women full human rights.”

They appear to be hopeful that in the future,

“von Neumann probes would be recognized as intelligent fellow beings, beings which are the heirs to civilization of the naturally evolved species that invented them.”

After all, they contend, the,

“naturally evolved species and all of its naturally evolved descendants must inevitably become extinct ... but ... a civilization with machine descendants could continue indefinitely.”

There is nothing more important to the power junkies running the show on Planet Earth than reaching for the stars. It has all the trappings of a Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ scenario, in which the ‘species’ (or should we say ‘race’) which has the edge on ‘indefinite survival’ is the winner of the game. The ‘edge’ on this space race, the ultimate gain from U.S. military mind control research toward this end, is derived from the understanding and control of human psychic potential and the interface/application of technologies toward development of mind-driven space vehicles: the marriage of the biological and the silicon.

As Carl Sagan once proposed, communication with extraterrestrial intelligence will require computer actuated machines with abilities approaching human intelligence. Sagan and others admitted in the 1970s that a deficiency in present-day computer technology is what prevents us from exploring the galaxy. Secret developments in mind-machine psychic interface, which includes research in the areas of computers, psychotronics, cybernetics and genetic engineering, would certainly solve this problem, and in all probability, have already solved it.

As Zdenek Rejdak stated in 1973 at the same world gathering of psychotronic gurus, one of the future goals of computer technology was to create a generation of computers capable of creating technological artifacts. This is directly connected to the idea of the vN probe and to the engineering of the “human modified for space.”

In his paper entitled “Psychotronics Reveals New Possibilities for Cybernetics,” Rejdak revealed the following:

Theoretical cyberneticians are proposing at present the construction of computers that would ‘create’ and would possess at least a degree of intuition. ... Psychotronics has a great opportunity to provide much essential knowledge about these processes, and thereby to help cybernetics in solving one of the most complicated tasks, that of teaching computers to create. ... The point is not merely to build more perfect computers, but primarily computers with qualitatively new functions.

It is very likely that this scenario has covertly jumped right out of the pages of science fiction (and CIA classified documents) to become reality. It is clear that the marriage of technology and human psychic potential was a focus of various early brain studies conducted by CIA fronts and cutouts, including LSD experimentation, Monarch trauma-based conditioning, sleep/dream studies and psychic research, in an effort to investigate the inner workings of the human mind, and as a side effect of that research, to investigate the possibilities for manipulation, harness and control of human psychic potential.

A current Washington Post article brings this all into focus. As co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Bill Joy, proclaimed in this 4/16/00 Washington Post article:

“We are dealing now with technologies that are so transformatively powerful that they threaten our species.”

“Where do we stop,” Joy asked, “by becoming robots or going extinct?”

In this article entitled “Are Humans Doomed?,” Mr. Joy, a widely respected “Silicon Valley” computer expert, presented his joyless warning against the out-of-control technocratic culture which he himself has helped to spawn, saying that,

“there are certain technologies so terrible that you must say no. We have to stop some research. It’s one strike and you’re out.”

Interestingly, Joy always believed that the rate of speed of the computer chip, which doubles every 18 months, would eventually “rub against the boundary of the physically possible,” and he drew comfort from knowing there was a limit. But now he’s not so sure there is a limit. As he claims, computer chips with molecular level advances will make for a computer which is “a million times faster and smarter by the year 2030.” And, for what purpose would one suppose we would need computers that fast? Could it be to finally create von Neumann’s dreambot, the self-replicating universal constructor; not just a computer that can create, but an intelligent race of deep-space-faring cyborgs? According to Bill Joy, this dream may become a nightmare sooner than we think.

As Joy stated in Wired magazine,

“It was only then that I became anxiously aware of how great are the dangers facing us in the 21^st century... We have yet to come to terms with the fact that the most compelling 21^st century technologies—robotics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology—pose a more dangerous threat than any past technologies.”

 

As Joy adds, “these computers and genes and micro machines, share a dangerous amplifying factor: They can self replicate: A bomb is blown up only once, but one bot can become many, and quickly get out of control.” (Italics added)

 

He adds: “I may be working to create tools that will enable the construction of technology to replace our species. How do I feel about this? Very uncomfortable.”

In the same Post article, computer scientist Hans Moravec claims,

“One way to avoid the biological threat is to become non-biological.”

 

As Moravec stated in a panel discussion, “The evolution of our descendants will push them into entirely different realms. They will become something else entirely. I don’t know why you are disturbed by that.”

Psychic Navigation

As John White also wrote in his Afterword to his 1988 book Psychic Warfare, Fact or Fiction?, air and space travel would be revolutionized by psychotronics. White suggested that UFO propulsion is “probably psychotronic in nature.” But what does this mean and what are the implications for human beings?

The ultimate reason for the intelligence community’s interest in remote viewing is the psychic interface between human consciousness and technology, or man/machine interface. Some believe this interest stems from back-engineering projects involving downed and captured extraterrestrial space craft. According to Col. Philip Corso’s book, The Day After Roswell, among the artifacts retrieved from the infamous 1947 Roswell saucer crash were headband devices of flexible plastic material containing some type of electrical conductors. Col. Corso connected this headband artifact to the piloting of the alien space craft.

Along with other alien technologies retrieved at the crash site, Corso developed the theory that these extraterrestrial artifacts essentially comprised an electromagnetic anti-gravity drive and brainwave navigational guidance system. Corso claimed the U.S. Army eventually fed these technologies to industry giants under the guise of “foreign technology” for purposes of back-engineering. Can we safely surmise that this 30-year interest in classified remote viewing projects, of which declassified materials comprise a mere fraction, by military agencies and NASA was to explore the capacity for human/machine psychic interface in the piloting of space craft?

The following are the ‘facts’ we have to go by:

1.) We can pin down Corso’s presence at SRI in the early 1970s
Corso has admitted that he visited Stanford Research Institute’s remote viewing labs in the early 1970s, and he stated that the reason for the visit was “to seek methods for remote viewing/technology interface between extraterrestrials and their craft.”

2.) HUMINT: Human Intelligence Monitoring of Alien Abductees
The military is known to be extensively interested in alien abductees. As a matter of fact, they are so interested that it has been suspected that they abduct them after their authentic alien abductions to find out what they know. The book MILABS: Military Mind Control and Alien Abductions, by Helmut and Marion Lammer, discusses military-type abductions reported primarily in the U.S. and Canada. Alien abductees have reported that they are “spirited away” in unmarked helicopters, vans and buses to underground government facilities. The MILABs theory suggests that a covert task force is monitoring real alien abductees in order to debrief the victims, as well as to install full amnesia regarding both abduction incidents. According to The Excluded Middle, abductee Melinda Leslie claims the military is interested in abductees because “they were mostly curious about the pilot/craft interface and if we knew anything about that aspect of their technology.”

3.) The Advanced Theoretical Physics Working Group
MUFON official Dr. Robert M. Wood also claims that any information pertaining to psychic pilot/craft interface that can be learned from UFO research is obviously very important to the military/intelligence apparatus in charge of the UFO cover-up. Dr. Wood was reputedly a member of a think tank called the Advanced Theoretical Physics Working Group (ATPWG), and has admitted that this secret UFO working group “planned and set policy regarding the UFO issue.”

If the reader thinks I have jumped to “premature conclusions half-cocked,” perhaps the reader should get in touch with Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems and ask him what he knows about the current status of classified research in “artificial intelligence.” Something seems to scaring the pants off him.