I made the mistake of discussing this with him. It was apparent from the outset that the monitor would have to know the answers or what the target was in order for this to take place in the manner he described. If that were the case, then wasn't this just an extension of the old colored-pins game that Scotty had whipped on me? By deduction, anyone could eventually be guided by the monitor, by omission, to the target. He said it wasn't like that. So, we began to get into philosophic discussions about what was going on. This wasn't something new; it was something we had all done together since inception of the project. We believed that by arguing about things you would always eventually reach truth. This had the added benefit of preventing any one of us from drifting off in some way or deluding ourselves into believing something that wasn't real. But, in this case, it hit a major nerve.
After a short time I was called into Franks's office and asked to refrain from discussing their training methods with them. I argued with him. If they really wanted to learn what's going on inside their minds, they needed to discuss it openly with others of like mind and within the safety of the office.
But, this wasn't the way it was being looked at now The method of instruction they were receiving was in effect indoctrinating them to believe there was only one way to evaluate what their minds were telling them and that was the severely structured format they were currently learning at SRI.
I pulled away from both Robert and Tom for a bit, thinking that I would wait and see how well this new training system worked. In the meantime, I continued being the only person in the office doing the RV. After a bit, the project secretary showed me some of the practice sessions that Robert and Tom were doing when they were at Fort Meade. I did not seek them out. She brought them to me because she said she was having a difficult time interpreting what they were actually doing. What I saw astounded me. After nearly ten months of training, all either of them was doing was drawing simple lines or scribbles down the side of a page and writing in a few accompanying words of description. Some of the words were pertinent to the targets they were working, but many of them were pertinent to almost anything else in the target files. I knew I was missing something.
I carried one of the folders to the boss and asked him what exactly was going on. I told him that I was concerned that maybe this wasn't the appropriate approach to teaching someone remote viewing. A person with talent should have been able to draw at least fragments and segments of a targeted site by now He explained to me that they were being taught by rote, incrementally, how to build the picture of a target step by step. I complained that I wasn't sure that was the case at all. In my observation, they were being incrementally led to the appropriate answer by the monitor who was training them. A simple comparison between teaching targets and actual targets displayed that. The examples from their instructional classes were tenfold better than the ones they were attempting blind for practice.
Franks ordered me to go back to my cubical and to not speak with either Robert or Tom again. I was ordered to not leave my cubicle unless I was remote viewing, and to otherwise mind my own business. He would not have me screw up the only training system they had for teaching new viewers. I did as I was told. But it sure got lonely in the huge room within which my desk sat. I was hidden behind a large section of wall dividers from those around me—now wrapped in an imposed cone of silence.
I stopped communicating with either of them. I stopped communicating with anyone but the unit secretary. It was her encouragement that kept me from quitting the unit altogether. In the meantime, I continued to do the viewing, averaging two or three operational targets a day.
Chapter Ten
The Army and Bob Monroe
In 1983, Fred suggested I accompany him to a place called The Monroe Institute (TMI). He said the man who owned and ran the place could do out-of-body travel—astral projection—at will. He wanted me to meet him and thought there might be something there that could help me be even better with my viewing. I knew they wanted me preoccupied with something else. Or maybe I was becoming paranoid and just thought that. In any event, I went down to visit with Mr. Monroe around the middle of 1983.
When I first met with Robert Monroe, he and his wife and stepson lived in an apartment directly over the office of the Institute. His wife struck me as a wonderful sort of old-fashioned Southern lady, the kind of person who always makes sure the company feels at ease and at rest in her home. The fact that they lived over the store seemed to bother her terribly, but in my mind, her home was just that, a beautiful home and something to be happy about. Monroe had just returned from the hospital, after having had work done on his cardiovascular system—specifically repair to the major leg arteries just below the bifurcation valve in the lower groin area. He was still in considerable pain and was not a happy man. (He struck me as someone who didn't deal with pain very well.) But he was very courteous and friendly with me. It was obvious that he already knew Fred.
While talking with Bob, his large cat, "Blackie," climbed up into my lap and began to purr. So I started stroking her. Bob warned me not to do that because he said that Blackie got unusually excited by that and would probably bite me. I smiled and ignored him. When Bob looked away to pick up his cigarette and coffee cup, Blackie bit all the way through my left thumbnail, burying her fang in bone. I pried her tooth out of my nail and dumped her to the floor while crossing my left index finger over my thumb to stop the bleeding. Bob looked around lighting his cigarette and smiled. I smiled back, while shoving my left hand in my pocket as though nothing had happened. He didn't notice.
After our meeting, Fred took me up to the main building to give me a tour. On the way, I had to wring the blood from my pocket liner. Good thing I was wearing dark blue slacks.
What I didn't know was that Fred had suggested to Bob that he work with me to help me develop control of the spontaneous out-of-body experiences I'd been having since my near-death experience in Austria in 1970.
While touring the Center building, I bumped into Ms. Nancy Honeycutt, Bob's stepdaughter, who had just returned from the West Coast, where she had been working for a major textbook publisher. She was now working for one in the Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee area, selling textbooks to colleges in the region. We sat and talked on the rear deck for about 45 minutes. She tried various questions in an attempt to learn who I was and where I was from, which I avoided answering in any specific sense. While the conversation was pleasant we eventually shook hands and I left to look for Fred and Bob. Many years later, Nancy said that it was the longest "non-information meeting" with someone she had ever experienced. She knew exactly the same amount of information about me when I left as when we met—zero. She also says that it made me even more mysterious than I otherwise would have appeared to be. She had a sense that I was military, but beyond that, nothing.
On returning to Fort Meade, Fred asked me to write up a justification for attending the Gateway Seminar at TMI, and we'd see how that would affect me, or my viewing. This I did, and received orders to attend within the month.
The Gateway Seminar was and still is the backbone of The Monroe Institute. Back when I attended, there were only a handful of trainers, and my group's trainers were Melissa Jager and Fowler Jones, a psychologist. The seminar began at noon on Saturday and ended the following Friday morning. We spent all day listening to the Institute's Hemi-Sync" patterned tapes, which are designed to encourage the brain to develop a frequency following response. These specific frequency mixes are designed to assist someone in a course of self-discovery. In my case it was meant to improve my remote viewing, or at least that was the thought.
My wife didn't like the idea of my attending the seminar. For her, it was a far-out kind of woo-woo thing. (As if remote viewing wasn't!) More and more of my paranormal beliefs were coming up in conversation and I think this was frightening and unsettling for her. I think many of the things I was doing were beginning to put a lot of pressure on her religious convictions as well. While I could tell
that she was upset with me, she wouldn't sit down and discuss what was bothering her. When I would bring it up, she didn't want to talk about it.
When I returned from the Institute, I felt somewhat different, obviously a direct effect of the tapes and sounds I'd been exposed to. In hindsight, I would say that all of these effects by their nature felt positive. At least, I could determine no negative effect. I was able to sleep better than I had been, was able to deal a lot better with the day-to-day stress, and I was able to focus my mind more clearly, which had an immediate payoff in the viewing room. So, I would have to say that my viewing did improve a bit, at least in the sense that I could relax and better focus on the targets, which increased the amount of accurate information I was able to produce in any given session.
Right after I returned from the Gateway Seminar, I received word that my mother had passed. Peggy and I drove down to Miami to help Dad make arrangements for her funeral. I and my sisters—all but my twin, Margaret, who was having difficulties of her own trying to remain mentally stabilized—agreed to split all of the expenses. Besides, Margaret actually hated Mom with a passion that cannot be expressed with words—ever since my parents forcibly took her child from her. Margaret and Mom never spoke to one another when together around other people or when forced to be in the same room together.
It was a surprise that Mother, who was only in her late fifties when she went, had died from a previous heart condition. This was something she had never shared with any of us. Sitting with my father after the funeral, he told me that she knew she had a severe problem but had made him swear on his own grave not to tell any of us. I'd always suspected that she had liver problems from drinking and the terrible way she'd massacre a dinner, but to suddenly lose her was a terrific surprise.
It turned out that she had had a major heart attack almost a year earlier and, because she couldn't afford to pay for an ambulance, she had caught a bus and ridden it for more than an hour, making two connections, to reach the hospital emergency room. He said when she arrived they asked what her specific problem was and asked how she had gotten there. On hearing that she had ridden the bus they assumed that she was having a problem with gastritis or something of that nature and had her wait for nearly five hours before treating her. I asked my dad what kind of treatment she had gotten and he said they had kept her overnight and then, when her pain was gone, had given her a bottle of pills and had told her that she would have to take it easy once she got back home.
Of course I was enraged with a system that could have done more but chose not to, because she couldn't pay. I almost couldn't believe my ears, sitting there listening to him tell the story. But it was difficult to know if it actually happened exactly that way, or maybe my dad was telling it to me this way, so that I wouldn't know that he and she, or she alone, had made a decision to not pursue a more aggressive medical solution. In any event, I let it go, trying more to console my dad in his grief.
Throughout their lives they had fought like cats and dogs, but they were so wedded to each other, it was as if a huge wound had been opened in his side and he was slowly leaking out of it. Almost nothing I could do would console him. My sisters, Peggy, and I buried Mom in a grave in a small out-of-the-way burial ground located in the northern area of the city. It was a plot my grandmother (Dad's mom) had reserved and bought for herself.
While we were spending the short time with my dad, I noticed he had a constant need to clear his throat, and a somewhat dry cough.
I don't think my sisters noticed, or if they did, they said nothing about it. When my dad and I were alone, I asked him what was wrong. He just stared at me for a long time and finally said that he had esophageal cancer. He said it matter-of-factly, as though if he treated it with normality it would disappear.
I asked him to come back to Fort Meade and live with us. Because he was indigent and elderly, we could claim him as a dependent and he could move in with us. As a dependent, he would receive the best medical support money could buy, through the Army hospital system. I knew that a lot could be done for him at Walter Reed Medical Center. He said no. He also made me swear that I would not say one word about our conversation to anyone else, even my sisters. When I asked him why he wanted it that way, he said it was because he was tired of living anyway, and didn't want to be here any longer since Mom was gone. He said he'd rather be where she was. I have to say, that if I had not been all those years in the Grill Flame project, and had not attended the Gateway Seminar, and had not grown in personal enlightenment during that time, I probably would have forced him to move to Fort Meade. But it was as if I could look deeply into his heart and soul. I knew that he was right. He had every right to decide the issue for himself, and I told him that I would honor his decision. When I left Miami, I knew I probably would not be seeing him again, at least physically. (Since then, I sometimes get a whiff of his aftershave lotion. So I know that he visits now and then, at least in spirit, or in my mind.)
By the time Peggy and I returned to Fort Meade, I was close to burnout. For long periods of time, all I could do was sit in the easy chair by the sliding door and stare off into nothingness. I was now traveling to Walter Reed Medical Center every Friday evening for acupuncture at the chronic pain clinic. They also started giving me pain medication to take when I couldn't lie flat or sleep. In the middle of all this, I was continuing to do all of the remote viewing at the office.
During this same time period we were beginning to have funding difficulties with the unit. General Stubblebine was straying further and further afield in his quest to learn as much as he could about altered states of mind and how he might be able to apply them within his command to meet the mission goals. I had some talks at the time with a new colonel on the block named John Alexander. The general was using John to chase down a lot of his information for him. I liked John a lot for a number of reasons. He was a solid kind of guy who had spent time in Southeast Asia and was not shy about putting his own butt in the wringer if he felt it could be for the good of the service. In shorter, more military terms, he had balls. But, the general had put us between a rock and a hard place. By virtue of who we were supporting and the sensitivity of what we were doing, we were given direct orders not to exchange information about the project with anyone who was not cleared by name first either by the chief of staff, the ACSI, or by the general himself. Hence I was not allowed to speak about Grill Flame with John, and he couldn't speak with me about whatever he was into. We were compartmented off from each other. In many cases, this resulted in both of us working at cross purposes to one another or even getting in each other's way.
As an example, we had gone out of the system to order a flotation chamber, to use as a decompression module following hours of remote viewing. It took approximately two years from when we ordered it till it was delivered. Since it was a somewhat peculiar purchase for the United States Army at the time, John's department was asked to handle it by the general. When John tried to deliver it, I told him he had the wrong address and he'd have to go deliver it to whoever had ordered it, which of course was not us. It ended up in a field storage depot at Meade for another year before we hired some furniture movers to retrieve it and bring to our building.
Sometimes the general or the chief of staff would forget who did and did not have authorization to enter our facility. In more than one case a person who arrived at the door under orders from the chief of staff or the general was made to sit in his or her car for an hour while we tracked down the appropriate clearance. In one case, a ranking officer decided he didn't have to do that and tried to force his way inside. To this day, he has no idea how near he came to a close-up view of the working end of the .45 automatic I was pulling from the back of my belt. Things were beginning to get a little bit out of hand.
Home life was deteriorating fast. I sort of broke the camel's back when I announced that I was going to be buying a piece of land in the valley adjacent to The Monroe Institute. It was a nice lot of about five acres, buried in
the woods in the same valley in which the Institute was located. Bob Monroe had actually purchased about 800 acres, or nearly a complete valley surrounded by hills, and decided to share it with friends. He had broken it up into 79 lots of varying sizes, which he was now offering for sale. I decided to buy one. Peggy really didn't say much, but did ask me what I intended to do with it. I told her that I was going to build a small cabin on it, a place that I could go on weekends to relax. I closed the deal with Bob, and Peggy and I traveled down to the property a couple of weekends later to begin construction on the cabin.
The cabin was a small thing, comprising only about 400 square feet, and all one level. I put in 12x12 pressure-treated footers and began building a support deck. About the time the support deck was completed, we had our first fight over the property. It actually followed a meeting we attended that was called a "New Land Property Owners Meeting."
(A lot of people thought the term "New Land" had some special meaning to Bob, but the name happened merely because when Bob and his wife, Nancy, were looking for property to buy, and looking at a number of areas simultaneously, one day he was going out to visit the location on which the Institute now stands, and Nancy asked him where he was going. He simply replied, "I'm going over to the new land," and the name stuck.)
Attending the meeting, Peggy was able to meet quite a few of the other people who had bought land and were either building or living nearby. In those days, the meetings were more for social than business reasons. Among some of the participants were younger women, who were clearly unattached and obviously came across in some way challenging to Peggy. It could have been the way we were being greeted by the others, or it could have been their interest more in me than her, because I had attended one of the seminars. Certainly, one of my trainers, Melissa, was attractive, and she owned a house there and was acting as if we were old friends. In any event, for one reason or another, Peggy got angry. She didn't say anything while we were at the meeting, but she certainly did on the long three-and-a-half-hour drive back to Fort Meade. By the time we returned, she made it very clear that she did not want anything to do with the Institute, Bob Monroe, the cabin, or anything else that might create a connection there. I was deaf in one ear from the ride, so I went to bed in the guest room.
The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy Page 19
