We did a number of these and I found the greater the depth of the feeling of reality I had in my LDS, the better I did on the target. But, there was an interesting sidebar, which was beginning to spook me after a few days in the sleep lab. I was beginning to have numerous back-to-back "false awakenings," thinking I had awakened when I hadn't. It's stepping from one LDS into another LDS, believing that you have actually come out of your sleep.
After signaling them that I was ready to be awakened at the end of an LDS adventure, Stephen came into the booth and shook my shoulder, waking me up. I spent a few moments becoming grounded in being awake, then turned on the tape recorder, recording my impressions of the target. I spent a bit of time drawing my impressions on the pad of paper, after which I announced that I needed to go to the bathroom.
Unplugging my wire umbilical from the booth wall, I walked out into the empty corridor and padded down to the men's room in my bare feet. Since we were running the experiments at night, there were no students in the basement lab area, so the light had been turned off in the men's room. I hit the switch and nothing happened.
Backing out of the men's room, I looked around for another switch on the exterior and, not finding one, just stood there for a moment. A janitor came around the corner and I stopped him.
"The lights don't work in the bathroom," I said.
He grunted and opened the door and hit the switch and the lights came on. I thanked him, and he grunted again, then continued on his way.
After finishing in the bathroom, on the way out I hit the switch to turn off the lights. They didn't go out. I hit the switch again and still they didn't go out. So, I carefully inspected the switch as I attempted to throw it a third time.
My finger was passing through it, as though it weren't there!
I just stood there for a few minutes confused. It was unbelievable. My finger was actually passing through the wall switch itself. I kept thinking, "Man! Wait till Stephen and Ed get a load of this."
Then I realized I must still be asleep. It shook me to the core. I was living a near perfect reality in every sense of the word that I had expected to live. If it was true, then there was one sure way of testing it. I stood totally still in the doorway to the bathroom and quickly looked over my left and right shoulders four times.
Stephen shook me awake in the sleeping chamber. It was true. I had done my entire debriefing in an LDS. I repeated the process, and detached my umbilical and padded down to the room where they were doing the monitoring. I wanted to tell them about my experience. When I entered the room, Stephen was working at the computer alone.
"Where's Ed?" I asked.
Stephen looked at me with puzzlement. "Ed who?"
I felt the blood run to my knees. Could I still be in an LDS? Quickly, I looked rapidly over my left and right shoulders again, and almost immediately Stephen shook me awake again.
I didn't move. For the longest time I just lay on the bed, staring back at Stephen. Finally I said, "Am I awake?"
"I don't know. Are you?" he humorously asked back.
"How do I know when I'm awake?" I asked back without humor.
"I don't think it's possible to ever know when you are really awake," Stephen quickly returned. "Maybe life itself is one long lucid dream state."
I continued to lay there not moving. After what seemed like an eternity I sat up and looked around, feeling the walls of the booth and touching the cold floor with my bare feet. It felt real enough.
Looking up, I saw Stephen pulling up a chair at the small desk in the sleep room. He was preparing a set of connector cables, while he hummed a happy tune to himself. I watched fascinated as he leaned over and began gluing them to the head of a bear sitting in the chair next to the desk. "There, there, little fellow. This won't hurt at all."
I lay back down on the bed and closed my eyes. Was this ever going to end? I lay there a long time trying to think of a way out of the experience, but kept coming back to not being able to tell when I was really awake. Eventually, on the fifth try, I was able to describe the target, draw it, disconnect from the booth wall and walk outside, where a couple of early-morning students looked at me strangely. Nothing changed from that point on, so I've either lived a very long LDS, or I reverted back to reality, if there is one, after the seven-hour nap I took that day.
To be perfectly honest, the experience scared the hell out of me. I now know what it must be like to be detached completely from reality and not know what is real or not real. It must be something similar to what a schizophrenic episode must be like. I can only imagine what such an episode must be like when it involves paranoia or something even more sinister as an accompaniment.
We finished the experiment and got some really fine results, but it was not something I'd recommend trying to develop for remote viewing capability. The other side effect is that you never really get any rest while this is going on. You are continually being awakened in the middle of your deepest sleep cycle, which begins to wear you down about the end of the second day. You think you're getting sleep and rest, but you really aren't. I believe this only adds to the false awakening effect, as well as follow-on paranoia. If someone weren't stable when experiencing these things, I can only imagine what kind of changes it would make to his or her psyche.
It also gave some hints as to the verifiability of some of the things people talk about experiencing while in a paranormal or LD state of consciousness. It is very real to them, but it is not very real to all the rest of us sharing another LDS called life. I saw this experience as one more very good reason to ensure the stability and sanity of someone who was going to be exposed to any mind type of experimentation or exploration.
Chapter Fourteen
Research
Between then and the end of 1994, I participated in an additional few dozen experiment series, some requiring as many as 75 remote viewings, as well as another few dozen operational types of targets.
One operational target involved U.S. Marine Lt. Col. William Higgins, who was kidnapped in Lebanon on February 17, 1988. It was one of the most debilitating operations I worked on, because I, and a number of other remote viewers, were about as reasonably certain about our information regarding his location(s) and how he was being treated as we had ever been about anything. Ken Bell and I went so far as to volunteer to lead someone to his location in a rescue attempt. But, because we were one of the few sources of information, it was considered way beyond the realm of possibility to plan or execute a raid based on PSI sources. Many months later, when one of the suspects in the colonel's kidnapping and murder was apprehended, he confirmed that our locations had been correct in the last two cases of his movement, and we had also been correct regarding his treatment as well as the methods used that resulted in his subsequent death.
I was reminded of a similar case, which happened just after I retired. Between the time I retired from the Fort Meade unit and my hiring by SRI, I was contacted directly by an old friend who asked me to see if I could provide him with any information relative to a U.S. intelligence agent named William Buckley. I provided him with a detailed description of almost ten days of torture and described his eventual murder in Beirut. This was also subsequently verified in newspaper articles, which were passed to me many months later.
While my description of his initial holding area was incorrect, the description and location I had provided for where he died was almost exact. I could only think of General Dozier and how lucky he had been. Had it not been for the professionalism of the Italian police and counterterrorist agents on the ground in Italy, he might have shared a similar fate.
Between 1988 and the middle of 1994, I worked an additional five major terrorist incidents, involving the loss of many Americans, as well as the attempt on the World Trade Center buildings that occurred in February 1993. The results of these remote viewings continue to be classified and/or protected information.
A lot of changes took place between 1986 and 1995 within the project, the greatest b
eing that it was transferred to the Defense Intelligence Agency. Toward the end of 1986, Tom McNear had decided to call it quits. I asked him why he left the project and he told me he had been there for three years and eight months and was getting bored with what was going on. He said he was receiving mediocre OERs and there was very little he could do about it. He felt the low quality of the OERs and the job descriptions they contained were not going to get him promoted. This was a surprise to me, because my OERs had been outstanding. It was apparent from his comments that some major changes had taken place within the unit. Something was wrong.
He said that he and the boss were not the best of friends, and since Rob had developed cancer and left the unit and Gemma had died from cancer it wasn't the same. He said he had spent so much time away from home during the long and exhausting training with Ingo in California and up in New York, that it was beginning to affect his marriage. This was not a surprise to me.
He said his wife felt he was also becoming more and more withdrawn and introverted, as a result of his duties with the project.
When he asked to be released from the project, at first they were reluctant to let him go. But he persisted and eventually they agreed.
He said he left the unit with no respectable job descriptions; no significant contributions to his OERs, which had mediocre ratings; and he got no end-of-tour award of any sort.
When I asked him if he had finished his training, he said I would have to ask Ingo that. His memory was that the last three to four stages had not yet been completed.
Since Ingo's training program was ended prior to its completion, the remaining extension to his system had to have been created, developed, and finished within the unit. Knowing how close to the vest Ingo always held his information and methods, especially his training methods, I wasn't convinced at the time that anyone could have done that. As time passed, I became even less convinced. At the least, they would have been unable to read Ingo's mind with regard to why he might have done things a specific way.
During this same period, a number of new people had been added to Ingo's training schedule, none of whom could possibly have completed it in its entirety, given the time it had taken Tom up until that point. They might have finished the project's version of Ingo's training, but certainly not Ingo's.
After the project transferred to DIA, we attempted on two occasions to include the remote viewers at Fort Meade in experiments that we were running at the lab. We thought it would be of value to include them, in that it would provide them an opportunity to practice on targets with ground-truth feedback, and would give us additional remote viewer input to the experiments, which were designed to try and identify an area within the brain in which the remote viewing was taking place. These were preliminary experiments to those that we would later run at great expense in the National Laboratory at Los Alamos. As we had always attempted to do in the past, we liked to try and identify consistent viewing talent prior to using it in our more expensive and complicated lab trials.
Unfortunately, neither the management nor the remote viewers back at my old project were willing to participate. Both of these test phases were around early 1987.
During these experiments, we used a slightly modified protocol, which involved the use of black-and-white (versus color) photographs for targets, and in another version, we used moving films or videos as feedback for targets, versus a static photograph.
Ken Bell, Gary, and I, plus three other viewers at SRI, participated in these two experimental efforts long distance. The target photographs (or, in the case of the second trial, sometimes videos) were selected and displayed on a "target table" in Pennsylvania. Ken did his remote viewing from his home in Florida, I did mine from my home in Virginia, Gary did his from California, and the other viewers did theirs from Maryland, New York, and one other state I can no longer recall. All the results were forwarded to California, where they were mixed with other targets, then independently judged.
We had some very interesting results that helped guide us in our designs for the non-remote viewing protocols we would be using at the national lab in Los Alamos.
The viewers at Fort Meade participated half-heartedly in the first few targets, then ceased to cooperate. I was never sure if it was the viewers who were the problem or the management, but it reduced the numbers of people we felt we might have available for future studies.
At the same time, whenever we felt we could add something of importance to the method of targeting, method of collection, or method of analysis, we generated a formal report and outline of those findings and forwarded them with recommendations to the project at Fort Meade. Many years later we were distressed to find most of those packages stored in a security safe, having never been opened.
So, whatever was going on at Fort Meade was either very destructive to the viewers, or management, or both. We continued to pass along our concerns to those in charge at the DIA administrative level.
Subsequent to that period, we did interact with one of the viewers at Fort Meade who voluntarily subjected herself to the rigors of remote viewing under scientific controls at our lab. She more than proved her remote viewing capabilities in a number of experimental series and is currently still working with the lab today. Her name is
Angela Ford and she has proven herself an exceptionally competent remote viewer in both research and applications areas. She dares to follow her convictions.
Following the cancellation of his training program, Ingo announced that he would be retiring from further work in the lab at SRI. (In spite of this, he also participated in data collection at Los Alamos.) He no longer visited the lab in California. I missed seeing him. He had spent a little more than a year doing an experiment that dealt with binary questions—those that can be answered with two possible responses—yes/no, up/down, zero/one, etc. In a run of double-blind challenges that ran into three digits, he maintained an accuracy that exceeded 90 percent, something I've never seen repeated. These kinds of targets are forced choice and some of the most difficult to answer accurately for any long period of time. His method in attacking the problem appeared to be extreme, at least to someone observing it from the outside, but his consistency in accuracy was astounding. I was very sorry to see him leave, because his originality and intelligence would be missed.
In the latter portion of 1987, we started our study at Los Alamos Laboratories. We used the facilities there because they had a specially shielded room that was able to cut out a specific frequency range of interference and equipment that operated inside the room that used what was state of the art back then—an MEG (magnetoencephalograph)xv which was brand new technology back then. The equipment we used in Los Alamos had a seven-channel SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device) for monitoring the inner workings of the brain.xvi
One of the conditions for using the equipment was that there could be no metal in the room, or as little as possible. The equipment is so sensitive to electromagnetic fields that it would pick up the very tiny wishbone in the center of a woman's bra and ruin an experiment.
Since everyone is born with a different size and shape skull, but approximately the same size brain, the brain is enfolded just slightly differently inside each head. So, you couldn't just point the SQUIDs in the same direction to read the specific areas of interest on different individuals. This required multiple attempts to first locate the area to be monitored. Once it was tuned to an individual, we would run specific feedback studies with the idea of finding out what we could about what was going on inside the person's working mind.
In our initial attempts, we captured many hours of data, which then had to be processed. There was so much data, processing it took months using what was back then some very sophisticated computer systems. The end result was finding out that the length of the session (data collection duration) was too short to give us what we were looking for, so we had to do it all over again. This is one of the interesting things about doing something completely new in science�
�you don't have a yardstick to measure what you are doing the first time—so it sometimes takes multiple efforts to find the baseball field before you can get into the game.
The way this testing was affecting me was quite different. I was having continuing heart problems at the time, because of the higher altitude at Los Alamos, which is up on a high plateau. So, when I was there and in the "box" (special room), I was dealing with continual breathing and pain difficulties. Being pinned face down, with my face pushed into a special holder that deforms to fit my contours, then having a huge machine pushed up against the back of my head, while having chest pain and breathing difficulties, then doing whatever I needed to do RV-wise for a few hours at a stretch was extremely difficult for me. After completing a full morning of these measurements, I would jump into my rental car and drive down to my hotel in Santa Fe, where I was at an altitude that was bearable. It would usually take four or five hours for me to begin to feel comfortable again. Everyone else was staying up at Los Alamos, so it was an extra hour drive for me in the mornings and evenings.
We were able to run a number of people through the system and it gave us a lot of data—or at least enough to formulate where we would go next. The following year, we returned to Los Alamos and collected data in a different experimental set that allowed us to begin to see the probable area within the brain where PSI might or might not be taking place. Unfortunately, the cost involved was extremely high. Even at a national laboratory, time scheduling was difficult and rental time for the equipment, support personnel, and post-hoc analysis equipment was very expensive—thousands of dollars per hour in some cases. The amount of data we collected required hundreds of hours in collecting, assimilating, and analyzing what we were looking for. These studies carried us up through the end of 1989, then were curtailed for lack of funding and the ability to find equipment that could carry us to the next step. There are now machines that go as high as 148 SQUIDs, and use computer support systems that are ten orders of magnitude higher than the equipment we were attempting to use in the late '80s. Hopefully, one day we will find enough funding to continue our search in this direction.
The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy Page 27
