Chapter
2 - The US government goes Remote Viewing
During the Iran-Contra fiasco that hit the American political
landscape of the Reagan era, resulting in the trial of Oliver
North, the American Secretary of Defense initiated a search for
“likeminded” projects that had disobeyed the proper chain of
command. “Premature” disclosure of these in the media might cause
even more embarrassment for President Ronald Reagan.
The search stumbled upon the remote
viewing project, which was run within the Army. An inspector general
was dispatched to investigate and the resulting quagmire meant that
the project’s sponsors in Washington officially “lost interest”.
“Officially”, the sponsors lost interest as the project had never
delivered serious results and hence it was time to close the books.
The infamous “no more money” was scribbled in the side-margin. This
official version, however, seems to have been little more than a
face-saving operation, where politicians deny any links with
potentially embarrassing projects.
The exact scope of the remote viewing project was just one of a
number of altered truths. Testimonies from those involved in the
Remote Viewing project showed a
glaring contradiction with the official scope. Everyone leaving the
project stated that anyone could remote view. That no special skills
were required. But the project managers did not just hire anyone.
They had hired people who showed psychic abilities, either overt or
latent. And if latent, an interesting but never asked question was
how the government knew what to ask for to find out whether a person
was or was not psychic, without showing signs of it. After all, it
does not seem to feature on the standard questionnaire recruits into
the military fill out.
Remote Viewers underlined that no-one in the project really
seemed to know how it worked, but it just did, and they went with
the flow. It seemed that somehow, all people were like radios. On
leaving the factory, however, the tuners on all radios were not all
identical. This would mean that when switched on, all of us would
pick up the “normal transmission” zone which we use to move about in
everyday reality.
However, some would pick up signals at
other frequencies. Though the majority of the radios could not pick
it up, there seemed to be no reason why our radios (brains) could
not be adjusted to pick those other frequencies up too. That would,
of course, involve some sort of “retuning” our brain, which is what
Puharich had done, either through a mechanical aid (his
“psychic machine”) or a psychic drug.
Even though no-one apparently figured out how it all worked, it was
apparently not for want of trying. Captain Edgar Mitchell,
the Apollo astronaut who walked on the moon and who knew
Puharich very well, was the overseer of the project.
Mitchell stated:
“in the early 1970s, I turned my
attention to the larger related questions about the basic nature
of this ‘consciousness’ we humans enjoy. The most neglected
fields of consciousness studies lay in the realms of the
mysterious states of mind that allow for epiphany [intuitive
insights] and the psychic events.”
Mitchell founded the
Institute of Noetic Sciences, but
according to Puharich, remained closely involved with the SRI
project also. One liaison with SRI was through Brendan O’Regan,
a biochemist, who directed Mitchell into the medical field and
health issues. O’Regan became vice-president of research of
Mitchell’s Institute in 1975, until his death in 1992.
Dr. Willis Harman, also working
for SRI, became the President of the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
Mitchell started in 1972, when at SRI, Russell Targ and
Hal Puthoff were conducting the remote viewing experiments,
including those on Uri Geller. In The Way of the Explorer,
Mitchell writes that he and Puharich were both “looking for answers
to puzzling human phenomena.” Puharich used Mitchell to make sure
that SRI was interested in running such experiments.
Again, it all seemed very
“coincidental”. Mitchell stated how it had been a “sychronicity”
that Puharich and Geller entered into his exploration, and Mitchell
suggests that the Geller testing was not part of a bigger project…
even though SRI was running a remote viewing project at the time,
and Targ and Puthoff were the project leaders.
Coincidence? Or design?
Mitchell maintains that,
“the remote-viewing experiments were
conducted independently”, even though in the same paragraph
Mitchell confirms that Geller “in a room all by himself where he
was isolated from receiving any possible information, would
describe the setting [of the target of the remote viewing
project]. We found he could do just that.”
In short, Mitchell stated Geller had
nothing to do with the remote viewing, and this seems to have all
the appearances of making sure Geller’s shattered credibility did
not shatter that of the Remote Viewing project as well.
Whereas Mitchell would maintain his claims of independence, Puharich
later had less trepidation, and Geller and Einhorn would later
conclude that the entire “Geller testing” was part of a CIA project
– the remote viewing project. This was, in essence, what Mitchell
was saying: he merely stated it did not start like that, but that
Geller in the end was working as part of the remote viewing project.
Mitchell stated that,
“after the Geller work, I was asked
to brief the then-director of the CIA, Ambassador George Bush,
on our activities and results.”
George Bush, who became vice-president in 1980 and
was therefore vice-president when the Iran-Contra scandal broke, the
George Bush who would become president if Reagan had to resign or
was forced to resign, the Bush who did become president in 1988 and
whose son would be elected president in 2000. That George Bush was
the man who knew all about Geller and his law of physics-defying
demonstrations, for Mitchell had personally briefed him. This was
not just a bizarre coincidence, for Mitchell and Bush had been
long-time friends.
It is clear that Mitchell is therefore fearful of making sweeping
statements and underlining the point that in its conception, he was
not working for the CIA, merely that his private initiative was
later used – if not handed over – to the CIA. A man with no
trepidations in linking the CIA with the remote viewing project is
Jack Sarfatti, a physicist with a degree from Cornell
University. Sarfatti was a friend of Ira Einhorn and moved in the
circles that tried to bring about “world change” in the 1970s.
Sarfatti identified Harold Chipman,
a former CIA station chief, as the middle-man who funded the SRI’s
remote viewing project and even the Geller tests. Some other
participants on the SRI team were John Hasted of Birbeck
College in England; David Bohm, the theoretician of quantum
physics, and Nobel Laureate Brian Josephson, “noble” names
and innovators indeed.
In 1973, Sarfatti was invited to study Geller and together with a
friend, Fred Wolf, he travelled to Europe, to study and
lecture. At the same time, Sarfatti became introduced to the French
film La Jetée, which formed the inspiration for famous Bruce Willis
movie, The Twelve Monkeys, a movie that talks about physical
time-travel. Sarfatti had worked for Bohm at Birbeck College –a
small world – and he was asked to get the co-operation of the
Birbeck College scientists.
This request came from Brendan
O’Regan, though of the CIA, then working for SRI. It was
this that resulted in the Geller tests at Birbeck, in London, in
early 1974.
In all, some forty scientists were involved in these “world changing
experiments”. Did this team of esteemed scientists find anything?
Officially, the answer is no. Except… well, there always is
something, isn’t there?
Puharich had this to say:
“When you’re inside [a Faraday
cage], a psychic, for example, has their performance increased
by a thousand fold. A Faraday cage shields you from the
electromagnetic radio waves, allowing only extremely low
frequency (ELF) magnetic waves to get through. I don’t think
there’s a psychic warfare research lab that doesn’t make use of
them today.”
This observation of the Faraday was
supported by Mitchell.
Mitchell also stated that,
“the brain waves of two individuals
separated and isolated by a Faraday cage could be synchronized
[…] Somehow there seemed to be some sort of communication
occurring between the two that we didn’t know was possible.”
In short, this is proof positive of some
new phenomenon, which in short proves the case that telepathy – to
the extent that our thoughts can in some conditions be picked up by
others – exists. Which really means the project did prove
“something”… I think. Not?
In fact, what is stated was this: once a
brain is no longer bathed in electromagnetic radio waves, but
isolate it from that “dirt”, the brain becomes “psychic”. That’s
quite something, not? That was not the only trick. Another was an “ideascope”.
Once again Puharich offers an
explanation:
“It’s an ordinary strobe light, but
very high-powered. You look into this strobe light, a single
point source, and you adjust the frequency of the strobe to your
own alpha-waves. When that happens, instead of seeing one point,
you suddenly see two. It splits. What it does is separate the
two halves of the brain functionally. And, what you then see
is two circles, one on each point.
When you see two circles move
together, they form a vesica-pisces. In other words, a
fish-like figure with a dark and light space. We’ve tried this
out on successful businessmen who never heard of E.S.P., tested
them, and they scored greatly! After five or ten experiences,
you’re ready for the next stage which involves a video tape with
instructions that help you develop concentration levels that
lead to out of body experiences at will.”
Right. Techniques which can separate the
mind from the body… in conditioned environments… which is officially
“nothing important”?
Then, there is the occasional world premiere.
Puharich:
“It took me about 10 years until I
was able to measure the energy coming out of Uri’s hands – which
is 7 Hz instead of the usual eight. Now we know more about the
nature of electron flow which, in matter, causes metal to bend.
This is what I am most interested in right now. [..] All the
magnetic energy, the magnetism inside any matter can be
expelled, which is probably the way UFOs work. It requires no
energy once you get it going.”
So we have a free source of energy – oh,
and a scientific explanation of how the spoon-bending phenomenon may
work.
“I have a company called ELF
(Extremely Low Frequency) Cocoon Corp. I designed
this very sensitive piece of equipment. It gives off an 8 Hz
frequency. The watch was a ten-year project. I began to
understand that there is a frequency vibration emitted by all
these healers. So I developed some unique equipment that could
measure this. When healers lay their hands, or energy, on
someone, they put out exactly 8 Hz magnetic frequency – the same
vibration emitted by crystals. This is universal.”
He continues:
“I was concerned about the E.L.F.
warfare that the Russians had started using in 1976. They’re
bombarding everything and everybody. E.L.F. can be real bad for
you as it can affect DNA at the right vibration.”
Magnetism, involving genetic effects.
Interesting.
“I spent three years trying to
convince the American, British, and Canadian Intelligence
communities that the Soviet E.L.F. signal does, indeed, affect
the DNA. At first they thought I was smoking some weird stuff
but eventually they understood and acknowledged my ideas. So I
developed something that would protect the individual from the
E.L.F. –
The Teslar.
I named it after
Nicola Tesla, whom I
consider one of my most important teachers. The watch also
dramatically lowers high blood pressure and prevents jet lag if
you fly with it on. I have been battling with the C.I.A. for the
past two years [1986-1988] because they have tried everything to
suppress this invention. They don’t want anyone to believe that
E.L.F. exists and has adverse affects. Of course, now they’re
using it in covert warfare with the U.S.S.R.”
The amazing thing was that this guy was
not a lone nutcase. He was the father of such technology – the man
who had given the first such inventions to the CIA. And despite the
fact that he was officially retired and working on his own, he
somehow could not stop but continue to go to the CIA, and try to
convince them of his latest discoveries. And it seems that they
continued to listen to him… as he kept coming up with the goods.
On the downside, it was obvious that Puharich still suffer from the
same problem: he wanted to take some things out into the field, make
some money from it, give something to Mankind, not just to a group
of possibly not very interested generals in the government who would
read the reports, then archive them. Or use them in some manner that
no longer suited Puharich.
Puharich in the 1970s was relatively
young, but by the late 1980s, he knew everything he did was about
leaving a legacy.
So when Puharich tried that make yet another step into the open
world, the government came down on him, as we already mentioned.
There was the CIA incident with the watch. And some more, as
Puharich stated that when his house burnt down, it was no accident,
but orchestrated to halt his new enterprises – orchestrated by the
US government, that is. Or as Puharich had identified the culprits:
the CIA.
To anyone on the outside, Puharich would
indeed look like a nutcase… but for anyone who knew where he was
coming from… it was not at all the case.
Puharich, however, was not the only person to bring such knowledge
outside the confines of the intelligence industry.
The patriarch of American investigative
journalism Jack Anderson, in his column for July 31, 1978,
wrote:
“For years, ELF research suffered
under the cloud of ‘parapsychology’, into which it was lumped
with such cockamanie concepts as time-warp machines and
intercontinental mind-reading. Unfortunately for the human race,
there’s nothing silly about the potential effects of very
low-level electromagnetic radiation on the nervous system.”
Anderson obviously knew about the
Remote Viewing project, but felt it was nonsense, unlike the
potential of E.L.F. for electronic warfare on unsuspecting humans.
What Anderson did not seem to realise was that E.L.F. and Remote
Viewing shared the same origins. And went hand in hand. But the mind
machines at SRI were not run by Puthoff and his team.
Those projects were assigned to Dr.
Karl Pribram, directory of the Neuropsychology Research
Laboratory.
SRI was thus involved with both: ESP and mind control. In both
cases, the US government was sponsoring this research. When the
scientific assistant to the Secretary of the Navy, Dr. Sam Koslov,
received a routine briefing on various research projects, including
those from SRI, one slide stated “ELF and mind control”, to which
Koslov interrupted, asking what was going on.
Koslov made sure that such research was
stopped: SRI’s co-operation with the Navy was stopped and he
withdrew $35,000 of funding that had been reserved for more remote
viewing work. In the end, the Navy assigned $100,000 to the project
from another budget. It merely underlines that to the Navy, remote
viewing was not a waste of money… and when it was officially
stopped, they unofficially diverted funds to make sure it would
continue.
Some have argued that the ESP project was merely a cover for the
mind control projects. But that simply does not hold. For one, the
mind control experiments were uncovered earlier and were trashed out
in government enquiries decades before the CIA-backing of the
Puthoff projects saw the light of day. If it was a cover, as some
claim, well, it was the worst cover ever – one that only seems to
make sense in the head of some conspiracy-minded authors who believe
everything the government does is inspired by fascist ideas.
If anything (though I do not personally
ascribe to this possibility), the mind control was a cover for the
fact that the US government was dabbling into and with a psychic
realm. Because of its early exposure, the mind control experiments
definitely did work as a cover for the paranormal research, a cover
that was furthermore enhanced by the conspiracy so hell-bent on
exposing “the truth”.
In short, what was going on, was research into the mind, and how it
could access other dimensions. During this research, some methods
and tools were used that could “control the mind” as well, which
seem to have been produced and used by both sides of the Iron
Curtain during the Cold War. But the central focus was uncovering –
and mapping – the psychic abilities of the mind. All the goodies
that the military cherished and which are classified as “non-lethal
warfare” were, in my opinion, added benefits. After all, in order to
make mind-altering devices, you need to know how the mind works.
Really works… For it is clear that
altering one’s mind is not so easy. Try altering that of your
partner, your child or your own if you think I am wrong…
Part of the project involved the development of a mind-reading
computer in 1975, by SRI – of course. This computer could understand
the brain waves via EEG associated with specific spoken words, so
that it could respond to them even if the words were not verbalized.
Today, such technology is commonly available and as part of Frontier
Sciences Foundation, we have given a public demonstration of such
technology during the Frontier Symposium 2005.
Back in 1979, the machine could move a TV camera in specific
directions in response to a person’s thoughts. It was developed by
Lawrence Pinneo (psychologist), Daniel Wolf and
David Hall (computer scientists). It underlines how far advanced
some applications were more than thirty years ago. At the same time,
Pribram’s work was also in line with a theory he had been
developing: that the brain operated on the principle of a hologram.
It tried to explain the fact that when a
large portion of the brain is removed, somehow there is no
impairment of memory. Memory therefore seemed to be completely
present in each part of the brain.
Pribram could, however, not take full credit. He had to share the
honor with David Bohm.
And that
David Bohm was exactly one of
the people directly involved in the Remote Viewing projects at
SRI.
So even though they did not officially
know how remote viewing worked, they did know that memory in our
brain was stored in a holographic manner, in which each part
of the whole has the total knowledge of the whole in it.
Another important question: who lay at the origins of the Remote
Viewing project?
The official answer is:
“the Russians did it, so the
Americans could not lag behind.”
In 1970, Shiela Ostrander and
Lynn Schroeder wrote
Psychic Discoveries behind the Iron Curtain.
The authors had toured the Soviet Union and the East Block countries
and alleged that the United States was lagging behind the Soviets in
psychic research. The book was a great success and excerpts were
broadcast on Voice of America.
One of the book’s readers was Hal
Puthoff.
In 1972, Puthoff would later claim, he was approached by two CIA men
who enquired whether he would be willing to take on such research.
Time-Life and author Ronald McRae have stated that the CIA
had about six case-officers, belonging to the Office of Strategic
Intelligence (OSI), whose job it was to follow research
efforts within parapsychology. It’s an awful lot of people for
something that is officially classified as “hocus pocus”. They met
with Russell Targ, in April 1972, after viewing films of
Soviet telekinesis in which objects were moved. That report was
passed to the Office of Research and Development (ORD)
and their project officer met with Puthoff and Targ.
He made a recommendation to the Office
of Technical Services, who gave a contract to SRI, in August 1972.
The report also mentions the involvement of
Ingo Swann, who had impressed
the officers during their visit at SRI. As such, SCANATE was
initiated on May 29,1973, with Swann becoming the first remote
viewer. As late as 1993, Puthoff, when asked, stated he “could not
comment on that”, saying he had signed secrecy oaths with the CIA.
Geller was also aware of Puthoff’s
silence, as in interviews as late as 1999, he was unaware that
Puthoff had finally admitted his role in the CIA project – this
following the CIA’s admission of the project’s existence in 1995.
But what if the entire enterprise was home-grown and the Russians
were merely used as a good excuse to guarantee that the government
would spend money on it – the Cold War was after all on. What if
people within the intelligence agencies, in particular the “clique”
around Puharich, finally wanted to answer whether the ideas of Allen
Dulles’ good friend and world-renowned psychologist Jung were
possible or not?
In short, many have seen the origins of the Remote Viewing
project in 1972, which is the official line. But in truth, the
project had a much older history. Puharich’s career suggests a
“prehistory”, however “informal” it may have been. But hard evidence
comes from a CIA document, released in 1981 under the Freedom of
Information Act.
The document is dated January 7, 1952,
i.e. shortly before Puharich’s work began – and the CIA embarked on
its mind control experiments.
The document states that the agency was
considering projects involving ESP.
“If, as now appears to us as
established beyond question, there is in some persons a certain
amount of capacity for extrasensory perception (ESP), this fact,
and consequent developments leading from it, should have
significance for professional intelligence service.”
Read that quote again, and then read how
it continues:
“It now appears that we are ready to
consider practical application as a research problem in itself
[…] The two special projects of investigation that ought to be
pushed in the interest of the project under discussion are,
first, the search for and development of exceptionally gifted
individuals who can approximate perfect success in ESP test
performances, and, second, in the statistical concentration of
scattered ESP performance, so as to enable an ultimately perfect
reliability and application.”
The first part of the project was
definitely the bailiwick of Puharich, whom in the 1950s worked with
renowned psychics. In 1972, he found Geller, who definitely fits the
profile of an “exceptionally gifted individual”. Later, Puharich
would create a school in his house for children that were
specifically gifted in the psychic domain; they were nicknamed “the
Geller kids”.
Part two of the project, coming up with a practical application, was
where SRI in the 1970s came into the picture again – though before,
Puharich had, on his own, come up with many practical applications
as well. As mentioned, officially, the success-rate of the Remote
Viewing project was never better than twenty percent, though the SRI
researchers, like Geller and Pat Price, scored close to a hundred
percent.
If true, that only twenty percent was
successful, the Remote Viewing project is almost unique
whereby at the start of the project, success was higher than at the
end of the research; knowledge was lost, rather than learned, the
more it went along! Though this is indeed a good reason to end the
project, it merely shows that the project after some stage was
either badly run, or badly managed… it does not detract anything
from the reality of telepathy and the initial success.
If, however, the twenty percent hit rate is indeed correct, than it
is clear that psychics were no longer what they used to be, or that
there was an “X-Factor” involved in the early SRI experiments that
augmented their performance, and which subsequently had been lost.
Was that X-factor a “psychic drug”?
Not according to Mel Riley.
The American remote viewers were aware
that their Soviet counterparts had been using techniques such as
drugs and electric shocks to enhance their performance.
According to Riley, these made them less
effective than the American viewers – a statement for which we can
only take his word.
“This was their downfall. We heard
they killed several young people trying this, and it also
reduced their remote viewing capability because remote viewing
requires alert concentration. When a person is on drugs, their
remote viewing capability is diminished.”
Though definitely true for some drugs,
it is clear that, as early as the Puharich research, this is simply
not true for all drugs, and that the government was aware of what
drugs were not, and what drugs were, effective. Furthermore, that
people were killed as result of this experimentation seems to me to
be a major claim… and I would like to see declassified government
documents that show how, so many decades ago, the CIA was able to
learn that Soviet psychics were dying because “bad drugs” were being
administered to them.
However, if it is true that the Soviets
were using drugs, why were they, seeing that according to the US
official line, Remote Viewing worked better without drugs? Good
question, no?
Was Riley therefore lying? Another explanation seems more likely.
There is evidence to suggest that drugs
were involved in the early stage of the research, i.e. 1952. At its
reincarnation, in 1972, the effect of drugs on the viewers was
known, if only because Puharich was there and the doctor overseeing
the remote viewers was an expert on psychedelic drugs. It was during
these SRI days that the project had close to 100 percent results.
Could it be that when the project moved from SRI to Army
Intelligence, the “X-Factor” was never transferred with it?
This could explain the dramatic decline
in accuracy, which officially was as low as twenty percent, even
though it was most likely more than fifty percent, but seems not to
have been close to 100 percent, as in the “good old days” of SRI.
The scores suggest that somehow the secret ingredient was not used
in Army Intelligence research. Why not? There are a number of
possibilities, but Ingo Swann, the very first remote viewer
at SRI, may have come up with the answer. He states that there was a
“second group” of remote viewers that he trained, a group that did
not belong to the known Remote Viewing Army Intelligence
project, and which Swann says were much better, more intelligent,
and much more covert. Interesting, not?
Puharich stated:
“There are smokescreens deliberately
set up to discredit parapsychology research or keep what they
know concealed.”
That about sums it up…
Let us now go back in time, before Puharich and 1952. In the middle
of the Second World War, in September 1942, OSS director and Army
Maj. Gen. William “Wild Bill” Donovan thus begins his search
for an effective “truth serum” to be used on POWs and captured
spies. Beginning with a budget of $5,000 and the blessing of
President Franklin Roosevelt, he enlists the aid of a few prominent
physicians and psychiatrists like George Estabrooks and
Harry Murray, as well as former Prohibition agent and notorious
Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) director Harry
Anslinger.
America at the time is not alone in this search for the serum; the
enemy, in Germany, is experimenting with various hallucinogenic
drugs. These are mainly performed at the Dachau concentration camp,
directed by Dr. Hubertus Strughold, who would later be
honored as “the father of aviation medicine”. His research is
followed with great interest in the USA, especially after an October
1945 Navy technical mission to Dachau reports in detail on
Strughold’s work.
So great is their interest, in fact,
that when the OSS and its successor, the CIA, import 800 German
scientists of various specialties under the auspices of the infamous
“Project
Paperclip” during 1945-55, it makes sure to include Dr.
Strughold.
Dr. Strughold’s “medical experiments”, for which his subordinates
were tried and convicted as war criminals at Nuremburg, were nothing
more than a series of bizarre and unspeakably brutal tortures. Even
so, he learned a lot about human behavior and a natural alkaloid in
the peyote cactus called mescaline. Intriguingly, the Navy
tested mescaline as part of its 1947-53 Project CHATTER… and
we are back to Puharich and the search for a psychic drug.
The remote viewing projects seem to have been largely ethical and
clean. But the same cannot be said of other projects, such as
MK-ULTRA… which seemed to be more
in line with the “ideology” of Strughold’s Nazi Germany. MK-ULTRA
was set up in 1949 by Richard Helms under the direction of
Allen Dulles as Project ARTICHOKE, named after one of
Dulles’s favorite foods.
It was renamed BLUEBIRD two years
later and was termed MK-ULTRA in 1953, to finally become
MK-SEARCH in 1965 until its “official termination” eight years
later. MK-ULTRA was directly responsible for the availability of
LSD, phencyclidine (PCP or “angel dust”),
dimethyltryptamine (DMT), dimethoxyphenylethylamine
(STP) and other powerful synthetic psychoactive drugs… on the
streets of America.
Whereas the remote viewing projects seemed to be about mapping the
other-dimensional aspects of the mind, MK-ULTRA was more about
robotizing the mind.
On April 10, 1953, in a speech at
Princeton University, CIA director Allen Dulles thus warned
that the human mind was a “malleable tool”, and that the “brain
perversion techniques” of the [Communist] Reds were,
“so subtle and so abhorrent” that
“the brain becomes a phonograph playing a disc put on its
spindle by an outside genius over which it has no control.”
This meant, in short, that the CIA was
working on both sides of the spectrum of the mind:
-
on the one hand, they were able
to offer total liberation, a paradigm shift
-
on the other hand, they could
all turn us into robots
And most likely, it was as simple as
switching one button on a “mind machine” from one side to the other.
To quote one commentator:
“Propaganda, in its simplest form,
is condemning one’s opponent publicly for doing what one is
already doing privately.”
Thus, three days after warning assembled
Princetonians of the disturbing ramifications of these techniques,
Dulles directed MK-ULTRA researchers to perfect them.
Dr. Sidney Gottlieb headed up the
operation as director of the Chemical Division of the Technical
Services Staff and, via a front organization called “The Society
For Human Ecology”, distributed $25 million in drug research grants
to Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley and other institutions. In short,
the slight whiff of marihuana that some still perceive to hang
around Berkeley campus was his doing…
By the end of the 1950s, the CIA was funding just about every
qualified LSD researcher and psychologist it could find, through
such contractors as the Society for the Study of Human Ecology,
the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, and the Geschichter Fund
for Medical Research.
At first, Dulles would have scanned who out there could run the
project. Better to start with a promising person than from scratch.
At first, perhaps Dulles would like to run it outside of the
government. He must have known that there was at first a grey area.
Was it promising or not? And how to deal with the fact that
scientists who should be facing charges of crimes against humanity
were involved? Was there going to be any distinction possible
between the crimes of the Nazi enemy… and the future crimes of the
US government?
Exploration and innovation always seems easier outside the confines
of strict government budgets – if only because they create a false
sense of reassurance, often resulting in not delivering on the scope
of the project. So start outside, see whether it has promise and if
the promise is there, reel it in. Perhaps by first reeling in
the project manager, and later the entire project. Like Andrija
Puharich and later like the Remote Viewing project.
If Dulles had acted like this, it would
have been nothing more brilliant than basic project management
skills. Companies like Sony have done so in the past with many of
their innovative technologies. Employ some brilliant geeks, lock
them up in a laboratory and let them experiment and play.
Occasionally, they will come up with some new developments, which
can be incorporated in already existing technology. If you are very
lucky, you come up with an entirely new piece of technology.
There was more than a decade between Puharich’s Round Table’s
experiments and the start of the Remote Viewing project at SRI in
1972. We have already shown some parallels, some continuations, but
there is one golden nugget we have withheld until now: Dr. Sidney
Gottlieb. He was, as mentioned, the supervisor of the MK-ULTRA
programs. In 1953, he did this in co-operation with the Army
Chemical Center, when and where Puharich was stationed there too. It
was there that Gottlieb oversaw the LSD program – the creation of a
“psychic drug”.
In 1972, Gottlieb was still holding that
position and as such gave Hal Puthoff the funding for the Remote
Viewing Project. And as soon as Puthoff had started his experiments
at SRI, who turned up at SRI – officially coincidentally? Puharich,
with a new psychic: Uri Geller. But that’s not the good part:
Gottlieb was also the assigned doctor who had to monitor these
psychics.
Now why would an expert in drugs worry
himself with looking after the health of remote viewers, whose
health monitoring was officially nothing more than just an health &
safety issue: as it was officially research and development, medical
oversight had to occur. But this would normally and logically – if
there was no nothing else going on than remote viewers
“concentrating” – be assigned to a non-descript, low-level doctor.
Not the godfather of LSD… that famous psychic drug.
So what happened between 1972 and its final demise?
The Remote Viewing program was sponsored
by the CIA between 1972 and 1976. In 1976, George Bush entered the
office of DCI and his friendship with Mitchell secured the survival
of the project. But Ford lost the 1976 election to Jimmy Carter and
Admiral Stansfield Turner moved into the position of DCI.
Turner was uninterested in psychic
events. In 1977, he remarked that they had tried to develop
Pat Price as a remote viewer
“but he died in 1975 and we haven’t heard from him since”.
Expectedly, oversight was given to another branch, and Army
Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) were the no
doubt unlucky recipients.
The unit was the idea of Major General
Ed Thompson and he decided that personnel would be trained at
SRI and would work in Detachment G, based at Fort Meade, in
Maryland. Project names went from GRILL FLAME, CENTER LANE, SUN
STREAK (randomly assigned) to
STAR GATE, not randomly assigned by
a computer, unless order suddenly reigned over randomness, which
should not de facto be seen as an impossibility.
The Army employed an operational unit of soldiers, officially
classifying the project as research. Though it would officially
remain a research project, the project was in practice operational.
This meant that at the time of the Iran-Contra scandal, when
archives and offices were searched for documents that did not fit
within what had been approved and what not, massive amounts of
operational documents resulting from RV sessions to aid intelligence
gathering were destroyed.
In 1988, the project was placed under
civilian control. In the end, two women seemed to run the
department, Angela and Robin, nicknamed “the witches”. It was Swann
who had said that the DIA unit was only masking a more secret unit
working elsewhere in the government. These two women were obviously
assigned to make sure that “officially”, the project could be
stopped, whenever it was required.
Robin had been a clerk in the DIA, whose
mother had claimed to be a “channeler”. Interested in tarot, they
officially claimed to be able to remote view, though their ability
was doubted by all involved. Their main aptitude seemed to be to
rapidly concoct stories of their exploits, never committing any of
them on paper, though maintaining the profile that they were
legitimately doing research. In the end, the end of the project was
signed off by the CIA’s review panel, but it was clear that Angela
and Robin had nailed the coffin on the project. I doubt this was
their mission; those who had assigned these two women to the
project, knew the outcome… and so did everyone else.
By 1995, several former participants were in the private sector
offering their services. According to Jim Marrs, even before
Angela and Robin’s arrival on the scene, there were rumors that a
unit had been taken into an even higher level of secrecy and
continued to perform their sessions. This coincides with the
statements from Ingo Swann, who claims that he had personally
trained those people. Swann said that he had trained 28 remote
viewers by the end of 1986.
They were in two groups, each unaware of
the other’s existence.
“I can’t really talk about this
second group”, said Swann. “They were kept completely separate
from [the psi spies]. I don’t even know where they went. They
were much more ‘black’ and much more covert. I don’t think I
ever had their right names. But they were smart as hell.”
Morehouse would speculate this
team were part of the Navy SEALS or Delta Force.
Thus, when the project was “officially” cancelled, it was merely one
visible arm that had been cut, ending one episode of a saga that for
more than forty years had been an official secret… but anyone who
believes it is the total truth, is unfortunately all too naïve.
The truth of how the “remote viewing” project would be leaked and
ridiculed, was also clear: by linking it to little grey aliens
– extra-terrestrials. At one point, I typed in remoteviewing.com on
my web browser, and arrived at a site operated by “Psi
Tech”. The company was apparently operated by two
individuals, Jonina Dourif, President and Dane Spotts,
CEO.
Their goal was,
“to evolve human consciousness
through the development and training of mind technologies. We
assert that all people are born with natural psychic or sixth
sense abilities, however, in most, it lies dormant.”
This is almost word perfect what
Puharich had said several decades before.
The website added:
“By training our cutting edge
Technical Remote Viewing® skills, this innate PSI ability or
“PSI muscle” as we like to call it, becomes activated. Awakening
this dormant capability in the human race is PSI TECH’s goal.
Once human beings have installed this learned skill, not only
will it expand an individual’s potential but when enough people
become activated, it will shift consciousness on a global
scale.”
They had a newsletter, which
coincidentally was named “The Matrix”. Oh, and of course, the
company’s goal was the creation of a paradigm shift, identical in
scope to the one Puharich had been planning to execute two decades
earlier.
Just like Puharich had wanted to take parts of the project to
the private sector, so had Psi Tech, it seemed.
“PSI TECH had its beginnings in the
covert world of military intelligence. The company was created
in 1989 by a few renegade officers in a top secret military
intelligence unit who risked their careers to transfer this
classified technology into the private sector. Those individuals
knew that when the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Remote Viewing
Operational Unit lost its funding that this ground breaking
technology would be lost forever.”
At the same time, they stated that they
were there to prepare the ground for others having to leave this
project, making sure they had a career outside of the military.
Nothing essentially wrong with that.
Any service provider needs to market its capabilities, thus we can
read:
“In late 1991, during the Gulf War,
PSI TECH provided intelligence on Saddam Hussein to the National
Security Council, and located Iraq’s hidden biological warfare
stockpiles for the United Nations. These endeavors earned PSI
TECH the attention of the world press. Currently, PSI TECH’s
clients range from the leaders of Fortune 500 corporations, to
academics in science, medicine and law, as well as select
individuals from the private sector who undergo the firm’s
specialized training.
Since 1993, when Jonina Dourif began
teaching and employing these incredible skills in the private
sector, PSI TECH has perfected remote viewing methods and
training techniques, and developed the TRV® Video Training
Course, a method by which anyone can successfully learn this
skill in the privacy of their own home.”
It seemed that with the government
project finished, the government had asked the same Remote
Viewers, now in their private sector role, for help. And some of
the former classified technology was finally freely available.
So far, nothing wrong. But in 1995, I chanced upon a lecture by
Major
Ed Dames, who stated he was at
the birth of PSI TECH. Jonina Dourif was, in fact, his wife, and the
ex-wife of actor Brad Dourif. Dames was thus amongst the first to
commercialize the remote viewing initiative. He was also the first
to move the remote viewing promotion into the extra-terrestrial
realm. The same realm where Puharich had moved it into two decades
ago.
So, here we had it: both Puharich and
Psi Tech stated they wanted to create a paradigm shift, by showing
to the world the powers of the mind. But from the word go, there was
talk of little extra-terrestrial beings. What – if any –
relationship they had with the fact that we could all remote view
and access another dimension… was never made clear.
Instead, what we got was this: Dames claimed that human abductees
were ferried to Mars for use as slave labour, by evil
extra-terrestrial creatures. He made various claims about UFOs,
extra-terrestrials, etc., and got invited to international
conferences, including Germany, where I saw him lecture in 1995.
Dames’ mission, or interest, depending on which side of the mirror
you were looking at him, was to promote Remote Viewing as a tool
that had unraveled the mysteries of the world.
Like Puharich, he was overshooting at
best.
Dames’ allies included General
Albert Stubblebine, the retired
director of Army Intelligence (INSCOM), a co-founder of
Psi-Tech. Another co-founder was
David Morehouse.
Dames and Morehouse were both at the
beginning of the waterfall of books that would soon engulf the
remote viewing project. In short, here were three people, two freely
using their military title, to talk about the remote viewing
project, but equally arguing for an extra-terrestrial presence on
Earth. Was this true… or disinformation?
For even though they spoke freely about
remote viewing and thus preparing the public for the revelation that
such a project had existed, they were also confirming something
else: that the general public, once they heard that people like
Dames had been channeling ET, would agree with the government’s
official statement that the project had been a waste of time. Only
some hardened core of believers, who believed ET was real and the
government was hiding the truth, would think otherwise. In 1995,
that was a minority opinion…
Texas-based author Jim Marrs’s primary interest was the Kennedy
assassination. For years, if not decades, he reported on new
developments as to whether a lone assassin had killed the President
of the United States, or whether it was a larger conspiracy. Then,
he wrote a book, Crossfire, and the film rights were sold to
Oliver Stone, who used the book for his 1993 movie JFK.
I was familiar with Jim Marrs
since 1989 and therefore followed his career quite closely. Shifting
his focus away from Kennedy, he found a new interest; this was
remote viewing, at the time hardly heard of. When Marrs took it up,
the story of the government’s involvement with RV was unknown and
only a handful of people had stated they were former remote viewers.
Two of these were Dames and Morehouse, both of whom were approached
as witnesses for a book Marrs was planning to write. Marrs received
an advance of $100,000, which implied the book was going to receive
a major, nationwide launch.
To start quoting Marrs:
“The inclusion of Morehouse’s
experiences upset Dames, who apparently had come to view the
book as his own personal biography, despite the fact that all
concerned had initially agreed that it would be about remote
viewing and the military unit rather than about any individual.”
Marrs states it was Dames and Dames only
who set about a series of actions that resulted in the book not
being published.
“Dames, who by this time was
claiming to be in contact with alien ‘grays’, sent a letter via
an attorney to Harmony [the publisher] disavowing the book, even
though he had previously signed an unprecedented release
statement based on my completed manuscript.”
Just a man who was upset about
Morehouse’s involvement?
“Some observers saw a darker purpose
behind Dames’ actions.”
Marrs agrees with those unspecified
observers, as he states that,
“this darker purpose seemed to have
been confirmed by subsequent events. First, the book’s editor
was suddenly offered a job outside New York City and left the
project. Interestingly, some months after the book was
cancelled, he returned to his old job. The senior legal counsel,
who had approved publication of the book following a lengthy and
thorough legal review, was suddenly no longer there.”
True, these things happen… The matter
was then given to an independent law company, who decided against
publication, because of Dames’ threats.
Marrs:
“I was assured that the only reason
for the cancellation was the possibility of legal actions by
Dames […] Everyone involved with the book came to believe that
the cancellation had been ordered by someone with great
authority, perhaps within the government.”
Publishing companies are familiar with
threats of lawsuits and unless a serious error has occurred
somewhere – often an oversight – publication is never halted, unless
some pressure is applied somewhere to stop it. At the time, Marrs
was a well-known and respected author, who was able and willing to
delete all references to Dames, without changing any of the impact
or message of the book.
Marrs writes how in mid-1995,
“following the abrupt and unusual
cancellation of a major book on the subject [his own], the CIA
first admitted its role in psychic research.”
Strange coincidence, or planned? Was
Marrs’ book the final straw that broke the CIA’s back and made them
decide to finally go public?
Let us note that the book was cancelled in late July 1995 and that
on August 27, the story of the Remote Viewing project appeared in a
London newspaper. The article was written by a young American
journalist, Jim Schnabel, who, according to Marrs had
“earlier that year had received a copy of my manuscript from Dames.”
I had personally failed to speak to
Schnabel in July 1995, as he was scheduled to appear at a conference
in Fribourg, Switzerland. But within the hour of his arrival, he had
to return to the United States, because of a family crisis (and yes,
I believe it was indeed a family crisis, not a CIA handler forcing
him to report in person to Washington!)
In the end, Marrs decided to rewrite the book and published it under
the title Psi Spies, in 2000.
This was how it was advertised by its
publisher:
“Originally titled The Enigma
Files, Marrs’ new book detailed the activities of the U.S
Army and CIA in training soldiers and spies in the use of
psychic abilities. The publisher received advance orders for The
Enigma Files from around the world. Meanwhile, the U.S.
government agencies publicly issued denials that such programs
ever existed. As the release date neared, Marrs’ editor
mysteriously disappeared, apparently relocated to somewhere
outside of the United States.
What followed was an attempt by his
new editor to coerce Jim to rewrite the book in a FICTIONAL
setting, a request that Marrs flatly refused to honor. This
ended the publishing deal, thus delaying the book’s publishing
indefinitely. […] Interestingly, the CIA ultimately admitted to
funding psychic research later in Congressional hearings,
although they downplayed the importance of the program. Uhh,
right.”
Indeed, following the newspaper article,
in early September 1995, the CIA was reviewing the project. The
CIA’s choice fell on the American Institutes of Research (AIR)
in Washington, DC, an organization that in the 1970s had been
identified as having been involved in a series of behavior
modification experiments conducted in prisons, mental hospitals and
campuses from 1950 to 1971.
Hardly an untainted or objective
reviewer there, but instead an organization firmly in the pocket of
the CIA and thus fully steerable by the CIA into any
direction it wanted it to go. The reviewers were Ray Hyman
and Jessica Utts. These themselves were not “neutral”. Hyman
was a well-known member of CSICOP, the Committee for the
Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, and thus a
well-known skeptic of such material. The result was stunningly what
everyone expected: on September 29, 1995, the reviewers proposed
that the project had to be stopped and that it had been a waste of
time and money.
This despite the fact that the project, throughout its existence,
was overseen both by scientific and governmental control, and that
based on their results, funding had to be approved each year. It was
not a run-away project that was not overseen, as popular perception
– created by Hyman and Utts’ conclusions – would have it.
Swann:
“Any suggestion that the program
operated loosely, or with a lack of control, is pure bunk.”
I can only agree….
With the project now officially closed, the story of the “remote
viewers” broke in America in early October 1995, in a supermarket
tabloid.
Marrs states that,
“this tabloid treatment, obviously
leaked by government sources, was a ‘kiss of death’ to anyone in
the mainstream media taking the subject seriously.”
Thus, the mission was complete: the
project was officially over, damage control had been exercised, had
been successful, with the American public at large not reacting to
the revelation. Though the cat was out of the bag as to the fact the
government had been researching “remote viewing”, it was felt that
the cat was homeless; Remote Viewing was not working, not
interesting, and hence should be stopped. A waste of money.
Let’s talk about something else, shall
we?
Not just yet… ABC covered the CIA admission on Nightline, Washington
and New York newspapers wrote about it, dismissively, following the
line the government had proclaimed, but the information did not
cascade down – or reach newspapers on the West coast. The
Washington Post wrote that the project was “a trio of citizens
with suspected paranormal powers who were located at a Maryland
military base”.
At a news conference on November 28,
1995, the project’s existence was finally officially confirmed. Or
how the official confirmation of a project’s existence is made
several decades after the project started. In short, it was a
whitewash:
“We did not tell you about this
project for several decades, but now we finally told you.
Nothing happened. Just some money wasted. Oops. Sorry.”
One observer stated that Ingo Swann
had stated how he,
“was told by a government official
as early as 1973, that even if it could be proved that remote
viewing worked, the program would be officially discredited in
the long run”.
Why? The reason seems to be in part the
American social climate itself, where there is a divide between in
general arch-conservative religious people, people who performed
book-burnings of Harry Potter and Stephen King as late as December
2001, believing they are the work of the devil.
It is clear that Remote Viewing and the
phenomena linked to it are clear and occurred within a scientific
framework, with not only objects apparently moving by themselves,
but also people. In a religious setting, such phenomena are labeled
as “possessed by the devil”. Even if the CIA would seriously want to
uphold the highest standard of truth, could we truly expect it to
tell a majority of the American people that psychic abilities are
real? That there are other dimensions?
Worse of all, no doubt, that much of the
content of various religions is just nonsense?
Rather than have the news break in what would have been a
best-selling book, by the author of Crossfire, a major national
bestseller and, as mentioned, the basis for the movie JFK just two
years before, “the forces that are” decided to stop that
publication. Once successful, it went public, leaking it via
tabloids, then have it deemed “worthless” by a review panel, before
stating officially the project existed. All of this in less than six
months.
Now who was responsible for this? Marrs fingered Dames. Dames, the
man who had gone public about his involvement with Remote Viewing
before, but had always suggested that what he had been doing was
looking for ET. Dames who in 1995 stepped up the pace and stated
he had been contacted by aliens. By October 1995, when I heard
Dames lecture in Germany, he was talking about extraterrestrial
civilizations on Mars, as well as Martians on Earth.
In 1995, his claims had become far more
outlandish than what anyone else had said. It was the year when he
saw a draft of Marrs’ book. A draft he then gave to Schnabel, a
young journalist making a reputation for himself after he had
published his first book, Round in Circles, which was an
expose of the going-ons of crop circle researchers. Schnabel had
looked at their community and their research and found it severely
lacking in many things. Schnabel was known for his tabloid treatment
of people – and was it any coincidence that Dames gave him Marrs’
manuscript? Was Dames hoping that Schnabel would publicly ridicule
Remote Viewing?
Though Schnabel was in the end rational
in his exposé, for all intents and purposes, having the story break
by Schnabel was enough to paint the picture… a darker shade of grey.
Marrs also states that Morehouse “suffered greatly for his part in
exposing the RV story. Charged with taking a typewriter without
permission and adultery with another soldier’s wife”, Morehouse was
court-marshalled and admitted to a psychiatric ward within Walter
Reed Medical Center.
“On the occasions when I visited him
there”, Marrs wrote, “he was so heavily drugged that he could
barely lift his head.”
Why Morehouse required drug treatment is
completely a mystery – except perhaps to discredit him – and his
later accuracy in recollecting events. Charges were dropped against
Morehouse when he agreed to resign and take a less than honorable
discharge, losing all benefits and his credibility. In fact, it was
this loss of credibility that was obvious in the manner Schnabel
wrote about the entire “Marrs book incident”, where Schnabel
suggested Morehouse was less than trustworthy.
Nevertheless, Marrs felt
Morehouse was trustworthy, and so did another person:
Uri Geller. Geller believed
that Morehouse was a key individual in unraveling the story of the
Remote Viewing project. Geller perhaps also saw a close
personal parallel between his own treatment some decades before and
Morehouse’s ordeals.
What about Dames?
Marrs observed that Dames had initiated
the exposure of the psi spies, but suffered no retaliation “and, in
fact, maintained control over the private company that he and
Morehouse had created.” So the only one better off from all of this
was Dames, who in October 1995 was parading around German UFO
conferences with his partner, lecturing and teaching courses on
Remote Viewing, giving off that typical Hollywood-Beverly Hills
demeanor.
In 1997, Dames and
Courtney Brown, that other
professor who would make a ridicule of the Remote Viewing technique,
were claiming that
Hale-Bopp was accompanied by a
spaceship – a claim one UFO-cult in the United States apparently
believed, committing mass suicide.
No-one ever raised a finger to the two…
As mentioned, the official CIA report was issued on September 29,
1995. The report suggested that funding had to be withdrawn as it
was no longer justified. Though I previously hinted that the CIA
denied the existence of a “psychic phenomenon”, that is not actually
the case. The actual position was different.
In fact, the report admits psychic
phenomena exist.
“A statistically significant effect
has been observed in the recent laboratory experiences of remote
viewing”.
That’s good, but it gets worse from here
on:
“to say a phenomenon has been
demonstrated, we must know the reasons for its existence.”
So even though it was agreed Remote
Viewing worked, funding could not be continued as no-one seemed to
know “how” it worked. This is a very ambiguous situation. They did
not deny the phenomenon, merely saying they did not know how the
phenomenon worked. Is this truly a reason to stop something that had
obvious benefits and practical applications? This was a military
operation, not a scientific research study.
Thompson stated that the reason why he started the project, and the
Army continued it for 19 years, was that,
“We didn’t know how to explain it,
but we weren’t so much interested in explaining it as in
determining whether there was any practical use to it.”
For 19 years the government had
officially not been interested to know how it worked, just that it
worked. But when they wanted to stop the project, their own lack of
commitment to understand the dynamics was suddenly held against
them? These contradictions always suddenly appear when the project
has to be axed for reasons other than the truth.
As always, there is then suddenly the CIA spokesperson putting out
the official company position suggesting the project was nefarious
from its inception – twenty years earlier. He stated how it was
“always considered speculative and controversial – [it] was
determined to be unpromising.” And everyone seemed to swallow it –
and Remote Viewing had its bad reputation.
To add insult to injury, all
ex-employees then started to scream how the project had been doing
nothing but try and remote view ET and the Face on Mars – even
though the review by AIR or the CIA had not mentioned anything about
such sessions. Whitewash? Oversight? Or, perhaps most logically, had
the US government not bothered with such matters?
Most remarkable is how at odds the conclusion of this review was
when we compare it to the report of the 1981 Congressional
Research Service.
They concluded that,
“recent experiments in remote
viewing and other studies in parapsychology suggest that there
exists an ‘interconnectiveness’ of the human mind with other
minds and with matter. This interconnectiveness would appear to
be functional in nature and amplified by intent and emotion.”
The report concluded with suggestions of
possible applications for health care, investigative work, and,
“the ability of the human mind to
obtain information as an important factor in successful decision
making by executives.”
Did no-one ever act upon this? And if
not, why? If so, how? Where?
Perhaps the answer to a lot of questions lies in the figure of
Hyman, the man who was given the dagger and asked to perform the
execution. As early as 1972, he was on a mission to stop Remote
Viewing experiments being carried out at SRI with government
funding. It was because of his actions that the CIA got involved and
secretly provided the funds. In a reversal of fortune, the CIA used
him in 1995 to again discredit the project – this time they wanted
him to succeed.
One can only wonder, however, whether
the CIA or other factions of the government did not perform the same
disappearance act as two decades earlier.
Since 1995, Remote Viewing has slowly disappeared from the radar…
When no weapons of mass destruction were found in 2003, or 2004, or
2005, there was not a hint of using “remote viewers” to try and find
them. Even George Bush, it seems, was not that desperate to
find them… Then again, if there weren’t any, then even psychics
could not find them. But neither were they used, or even rumored to
be used, to search for Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein… if
anyone of course was truly interested in capturing these
individuals.
Still, this silence was not the result of “forgetfulness”. It was
the result of one book that would shatter the public credibility of
Remote Viewing forever. The “honour” goes to Dr Courtney Brown,
of the FarSight Institute. His profile did not fit in with
the rest of the authors reporting on Remote Viewer, as he was not a
former Remote Viewer, though he did claim to be involved.
His book outshone the popularity of all
others, and in essence ended all hopes for the genuine “defectors”
to write mass market books. For Brown’s allegations centered on
extra-terrestrial civilizations visiting Earth. Sounds familiar?
What follows probably isn’t. Brown claimed that the aliens were
responsible for a man-made structure on Mars, the so-called “Face
on Mars”.
This was just the top layer of a cake
with several more “imaginative” claims. All of this “knowledge” was
received via remote viewing. There were only two options: either
Brown was seriously “New Age” or someone who had to put the cork
back into the bottle. Could Brown be a disinformation agent?
Apparently by sheer coincidence, while exploring this avenue of
research, UFO-researcher Tom Rouse wrote about his interest
in the history and theory of American Psychological Warfare
since 1940.
He wrote:
“Classical PW derived from the
academic disciplines of mass communications, social psychology
and survey research and crystallized as its own discipline
during WWII.”
In the UFO-field, several authors had
run into the subject area, wrote the book, then had run away. It was
like walking into a room, throwing a hand-grenade, leaving before
the explosion and leaving everyone in the room stunned as to what
was happening.
One of these was one
Philip Corso, allegedly a
high-profile member of the US Military, who, at the very end of his
life, decided to share his knowledge on the true events surrounding
the crash of an extraterrestrial spacecraft near Roswell, New
Mexico, in 1947. Rouse had discovered that Corso had ties to the
Psychological Warfare department, specifically to its chief, C.D.
Jackson.
The source of this link was Burton
Hersch, in his book The Old Boys: The American Elite and the
Origins of the CIA:
“On C.D. Jackson’s staff at the
Operations Coordinating Board, responsibility for salvaging
the guard battalions fell now to the hotspur Colonel Philip
Corso – who until 1955 had liaised closely with
Nelson Rockefeller, for some
months Eisenhower’s Special Assistant for Cold War Strategy.
Rockefeller’s Open Skies Policy had functioned in large
part as an eleventh-hour smoke screen to suffocate the promising
disarmament talks of the period.”
In short, Corso had been partially
responsible for stalling world peace.
Other points that Tom Rouse picked up was that,
“Corso was personally acquainted
with Frank Wisner, legendary CIA organizer and operator”, as
well as being “personally acquainted with Nelson Rockefeller,
who served as director of the Psychological Strategy Board under
Eisenhower, replacing C.D. Jackson.”
C.D. Jackson was best known for
his top executive position at the Time-Life-Fortune magazines,
but during World War II, he was deputy chief of the Psychological
Warfare Division at S.H.A.E.F. for Eisenhower.
Before that, he was deputy chief for the
Office of War Information.
Rouse added:
“C.D. Jackson was among the most
powerful psychological warriors of his time. He knew how to
organize, on a large scale, mass communications and employ
social psychology and survey research to promote ideas and
propaganda to influence public opinion and behavior.”
In short, C.D. Jackson was also an
expert on paradigm shifts… how to fabricate them, and how to defuse
them…
This was Corso’s boss, friend and apparently mentor.
Rouse concluded:
“If […] Corso was acquainted with
the practitioners of PW at the highest levels, then we might
conclude that he had knowledge of basic PW methods and
operations. And this is where I speculate: If Corso had
sophisticated knowledge of PW methods, how might he have
employed them in the publication of his book:
The Day After Roswell? Is it
possible that the book could have been some kind of
eleventh-hour smokescreen?”
Corso’s book on Roswell may seem far
from the Remote Viewing subject, were it not for the likes of
Ed Dames – who equally soon disappeared from the public forums after
1995 as he had arrived on them.
On Corso, Rouse concluded:
“I suspect that perhaps Corso’s
integrity was sacrificed for a larger purpose, and that he
complied, for whatever personal reason he may have had. I ask
myself: why would a person of position and accomplishment be
willing to sacrifice his personal integrity by indulging in
seemingly fantastic, bizarre and incredible accounts of a topic
as difficult as ufology?”
For your information, since the
publication of Corso’s book, all of his claims have since been
discredited…
Rouse and I shared the same brainwave when the subject turned to
Courtney Brown:
“I had this same question a few
years back when Courtney Brown, Ph.D. Associate Professor of
Political Science at Emory University published
Cosmic Voyage: A Scientific Discovery of
Extraterrestrial Visiting Earth. Why would Dr. Brown
risk an academic career, in a field like political science, to
publish what is, in my opinion, one of the more outlandish and
wild hypotheses in a field that is replete with them? What could
he possibly hope to gain in a few royalties that could offset
damage to his career?
Fortunately, Dr. Brown provides the
answer on page 257 of his book: ‘I should remind the readers at
the outset that I am a professor of political science. One of
the specialties within the discipline is public opinion and mass
behavior, which directly relates to governmental concerns
regarding the subject of ETs and UFOs.’”
We are well warned about this when he
writes about how there are Martians living, surviving, on Earth, in
a secret location – though he of course knows where.
“There are Martians on Earth, but
one must think clearly about the implications of this before
ringing the alarm bell. These Martians are desperate. Apparently
they have very crude living quarters on Mars. They cannot live
on the surface. Their children have no future on their
home-world. Their home is destroyed; it is a planet of dust.”
We can only wonder when the next TV
marathon whereby the public will donate money for the poor
conditions is going to occur. But, wait…
The subtitle of the book was “A scientific discovery of
extraterrestrials visiting Earth.” The science used was “scientific
remote viewing”.
The opening words of the book were:
“This is a book about two
extraterrestrial civilizations that either already have or soon
will have an important evolutionary impact on human life on
Earth. This is not a book about scientific remote viewing.
Nonetheless, since scientific remote viewing has been used to
obtain the data […] it is necessary to briefly outline the
history.”
Even if it is totally coincidental, it
is a standard debunking technique: link the subject to be
discredited with outlandish claims, and the subject itself will
become discredited.
Mud sticks. Remember Geller and The
Nine?
Rouse concluded:
“He published a book, (mass
communications) with an interest in ‘mass behavior’ (social
psychology) and measures the effect ‘public opinion’ (survey
research). When Dr. Brown published his book, he was employing
the classical methods of Psychological Warfare. He didn’t write
his book to persuade anyone of his outlandish assertions, he
just wanted to gauge the reaction, possibly as a front for
someone else, or some agency.”
Remember: Rouse wrote that, not I…
Another researcher who investigated the Remote Viewing “revelation”
was Michael Miley. He learned that
Joe McMoneagle, who was
definitely a remote viewer, had stated that Dames had never
commanded an RV unit. He had furthermore only ever been a monitor,
never an official remote viewer himself. Miley also concluded that
the stories of ET and Mars that Dames and Brown aired were
not resulting from the remote viewers themselves, but originated
with the monitor, i.e. people like Dames.
Miley also underlined that Brown never
had any formal training, and that Brown never practiced on “real
targets” but immediately went for the outlandish targets, such as
Mars and Martians.
Miley concluded:
“What I found was a couple of space
cowboys, drunk in the heart of the temple, destroying the
covenant.”
Miley agreed they were tarnishing the
image of something that had been “carefully developed over 24 years
by a group of dedicated people”. Someone had been peeing in the RV
soup – it is to each our own to conclude for what reason they did
so.
How could I possibly comment?
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