It's way beyond a reasonable doubt that the knives were out when it came to a fair and open-minded evaluation of remote viewing—it just didn't happen. To state that there was absolutely no evidence that it provided materials of value flies in the face of more credible oversight committees on the research side of the house, and enthusiastic end users of the methodology who walked into Senate and congressional hearings held secretly year after year, presenting highly classified and sealed results of the effectiveness of remote viewing, arguing for its continued existence, use, and funding.
In reality, having been there for the entire period of its operation, I know it would be fair to say that in its final twelve months of existence there might have been some question as to the feasibility of continuing under the same plan of management. There might have even been a sufficient justification for tightening the controls and protocols under which the operational arm was performing. But these are material to how the project is being conducted from a managerial standpoint, not from a "does it work" standpoint.
It took decades to overcome resistance to the use of snipers. Every time war was declared, they had to reinvent the wheel and open a new sniper school to train them. This didn't happen because snipers couldn't shoot straight, or didn't always hit their targets. It happened because there was no effective historically established ethic for the training, use, and maintenance of a sniper-equipped and -qualified unit. It wasn't something "gentlemen" did to one another.
Regardless of how one might feel about the efficacy of using the paranormal for intelligence gathering, I can emphatically state that it works, it's here, and it will continue to be reinvented from time to time, until it becomes part of the established, historically accepted background. Wishing it can't, or won't, doesn't make it go away, and doesn't make it any less effective in the new understanding of modern warfare techniques.
I'll break the ugly silence with the unspoken question that no one ever wants to ask.
Is there a defense against remote viewing? Is that the real problem here?
Whether there is or isn't, isn't material here. I can appropriately state that not paying any attention to it is the same as burying one's head in the sand. Everyone should believe whatever s/he wants. Who really cares? What does it really matter?
Chapter Eighteen
Going Public
Scooter and I were enjoying a small cottage on the beach just south of Kitty Hawk when very early one morning I received a call from someone purporting to represent the program Nightline. I was asked a lot of questions about my participation in a black project called Star Gate. Up until that point in time, public knowledge of my existence or participation in the project was classified and protected. I have no idea who released my name to the program producer. I initially said that I had no comment regarding the existence of such a program and hung up the phone.
The situation was further complicated by the fact that the ABC special appeared within a week of the release of the report. It provided clear evidence that remote viewing worked and worked well, a point not missed by most of the media now wanting to talk to me.
I immediately called Ed May at home in California and asked him what was going on. He explained that someone had passed the AIR report, along with some very negative comments to a number of the news media, and it was growing into a very large story within just a few hours. We talked about whether or not we should admit to having been a part of the project that was reviewed, and having no guidance decided initially that we should seek advice from those in charge.
No one would return my calls.
In effect, official statements had been issued to the press by various agencies or offices of the government stating that while there had been some use of remote viewing, it was experimental and didn't work. These were flying in the face of the demonstration that was shown by ABC.
In fact, most of what we had been doing in the research side of the house was unclassified and open to public access. Much of our writing was published in numerous journals. In the case of events I've talked about in this book, for instance, I have prior authority and authorization for discussing them in unclassified company, or I wouldn't be talking about them at all. The intelligence simulations were specifically declassified for use in unclassified briefings and presentations. But, when seeking information about what could or should not be talked about with the media, the only word that was being given—and indirectly at that—was don't talk with anyone.
Meanwhile, we were being castigated within the media by some of our former users as somewhat over the edge, and guilty of having wasted millions of dollars in tax money, a comment repetitively levied over the phone to me by media representatives, which was not true.
Eventually, I received a call from the senior science adviser for Nightline, who asked me if I would agree to appear on the show. I was advised that there would be representation for the CIA, one of the end users who worked for the CIA, and others who supported the findings in the AIR report.
The room was beginning to smell bad. I agreed to appear, but only with the understanding that I would not speak to operations, only to the efficacy of using remote viewing for intelligence purposes. This was the beginning of a long involvement with the media that has sometimes been gentle, but for the most part has been testy under the best conditions.
Initially, the vast majority of the media was hostile and aimed toward one result—to ridicule. It was clear to me, if no one else, that there was a full-court press to paint the entire history of remote viewing in a negative and somewhat less than ideal light. The emphasis was on the number of dollars spent on the project over the eighteen and a half years of its existence—a figure of about eighteen to twenty million. I remember asking myself, "Now where in the hell did they get that figure?" It's actually a fairly accurate figure (general total) based on a compilation of figures taken from a multitude of financial support sources over a very long period of time and from a multitude of origins within the intelligence agencies of the U.S. government. The only way they could have gotten it was to have had it tactically slipped to them by someone on the inside. The fact that it was being used derisively also says all that has to be said about someone's possible ulterior motive.
The synchronicity of events leading up to and including my interview with Nightline, was also very telling. They flew Scooter and me in from the beach to Durham, North Carolina, by private plane for the interview. Initially, they took us to three separate locations to do the interview, but were unable to find an area quiet enough. In one case the interview was disturbed by a train, doing multiple-car decouplings and couplings, behind the bench we were sitting on. When we moved to a log house in the country the wind picked up to the point that the soundman had trouble standing up in the face of it. Eventually, we moved to the J. B. Rhine Center—which was crowded and had no room. A suggestion was made that we might be allowed to do the shoot at Ms. Sally Feathers' house. Sally is Dr. J. B. Rhine's daughter and was then the director of the J. B. Rhine Research Center. She agreed.
Her newly constructed house sits almost on top of her father's old house foundations, a place that one might even consider to be "the foundation" of paranormal research in America. I smile even now, when I consider the incredible synchronicity required to put me in a chair at that place for the first interview on the Army's Star Gate remote viewing project. Incredible.
Following the interview, which was shown in November of 1995, Star Gate was out of the bag. In spite of continued ill treatment from the majority of people representing magazines, newspapers, radio, and television, I persisted in giving as clear and accurate a response as allowable under the conditions of my security agreements. To this day, I have never violated them in any way. But the ridicule, tongue-in-cheek remarks, or comments clearly designed to criticize or embarrass me and others continued unabated. For those who have not had this experience, I will outline it for you.
No matter what you do, they have a story. If you agree to ta
lk, you give them more to use any way they feel like using it. If you decide not to talk with them, then they have the grounds to backlight you as an unreasonable or nonresponsive person. Regardless as to how you respond or what you respond with, something will be written, and it will be edited in any fashion necessary to sell papers, airtime, or the magazine involved. They won't lie outright, as that would make them liable, but they will and sometimes do lie by omission. In other words, sometimes they will tactfully leave something important or pertinent out of the conversation to highlight your personal integrity in a bad way or dilute whatever point you are trying to make. It really doesn't matter what the truth is in most cases; it's what will people believe and how can it impact the most emotionally so it will sell.
In reality, the $20 million spent on Star Gate isn't even chicken-feed. It hardly deserves a line in a column of print. During either the Gulf War or the antiterrorist actions in Afghanistan, we spent more than that much after launching the first twenty cruise missiles."xvii To compare blowing up twenty mud-and-rock huts to an intelligence collection process that supported all the major intelligence agencies of the federal government for eighteen and a half years (inclusive of all of the research support involved) is completely ludicrous. If one were to actually go back and honestly look at the decisions that were affected by the intelligence provided, and how it might have saved lives, it's even more incredible that it would be viewed derisively.
It certainly wouldn't even reach the level one would have to ascend to to be considered "pork" attached to a real budget line item. Another fact that is always lost in the fine print is how much of that money was spent or distributed throughout the nation to colleges and universities doing subsidiary or supportive work to the RV research, or that which was shared with other national labs, renting their equipment. Easily half of the budget disappeared into those areas. It certainly wasn't spent helping intelligence officers down on their knees cleaning and scrubbing the floor of their own work environment.
Before my transfer to the special project, I spent ten times the entire eighteen-and-a-half-year remote viewing budget on a single stage of development for a prototype SIGINT device, which we weren't sure would work until it was finished.
But then I suppose it is big dollars to a guy on the street who is taxed to the limit and believes that remote viewing is an affront to God—many of whom called me as a result of the articles that were appearing.
My business, which had actually been doing very well for a number of years, began to rapidly taper off. It wasn't the negative reporting alone that was doing the damage. I quickly discovered that it was the fact that I was talking to someone (the media) in the first place. Many companies that had been using my services were now concerned about appearing suddenly in the public eye. What had been operating quite well beneath the mushrooms on the forest floor for many years might suddenly be exposed to direct sunlight. Fear set in quickly. They might actually get caught standing next to the person who was giving them a 15 percent edge on their competitors, or pointing out the inside track for a specific stock or currency, when the spotlight suddenly came on. Customers began to drop away like flies trying to squeeze through a heating coil. In spite of the fact that I have never violated a business confidence, decade-long relationships with some of my customers suddenly vaporized, as everyone suddenly seemed to be taking off on vacations. I started giving talks at The Monroe Institute just for something to do, and went back to contract building, and started a second book.
It might have been the stress, but my back, which I'd damaged severely in the helicopter crash in Vietnam in the late 1960s, finally gave out. I had surgery within a few weeks of my appearance on Nightline. The recovery took a lot longer than I anticipated, and while the pain in my lower back abated to some degree, it increased along the rest of my spine.
During the period between the end of 1995 and 2000, I added two chapters to my original book, Mind Trek, where I openly talked about the Star Gate project following its exposure. I wrote The Ultimate Time Machine (1998), which was intended to provide my own understanding for how I believe time works, and our place within it. I believe that we as humans are the "ultimate time machine." It contains dozens of predictions for the next 75 years, some of which have already come true and some of which have not. It wasn't meant to prove precognition, but to deliver a message about how time might work and why our place within it is important to the outcome. I also wrote Remote Viewing Secrets in 2000, attempting to establish a baseline for understanding how and why remote viewing might work, and how the average person might learn something about it and/or employ it—all published by Hampton Roads.
I continued to do live remote viewings on television as a way of demonstrating the fact that remote viewing works. I felt that if I couldn't control how things would be edited, then the most powerful thing I could do would be to demonstrate it.
During 1996 I traveled to London, where I appeared on a show called The Paranormal World of Paul McKenna—"Telepathy." Paul was a man known for his ability to use hypnosis in live demonstrations on Channel 4 in England. He asked me if I would do some demonstrations of live RV on camera for him and I agreed. We did two series of two.
The first two were very successful. He and his staff contacted Ed out in California and received instructions on how to set up a target pool and target me using an outbounder methodology. These two out-bounder sessions were filmed live and worked, but with an interesting twist.
One of the things that people do not understand about RV is that how it is applied is almost as important as doing the actual remote viewing or collection of the data. As an example, in the first out-bounder target they selected, one of their locally famous actors randomly chose a target from a pile of envelopes, then traveled there, arriving at a specified time, choosing as a target the very large coal-fired power plant located just outside the heart of London on the Thames River. When I entered the room of the hotel where we were going to do the RV, we sat and waited for nearly an hour, while the target selection process was done at the studio across town, and the actor fellow traveled to the target location. When it was time to begin, they sat me down at a table and handed me an envelope, which I opened, that contained a photograph of the actor.
"Have you ever seen this man before?" they asked.
"No."
"He should now be located at the target site. We would like you to draw a picture of where he is standing."
Which is what I did. I drew a lovely picture of a bridge spanning both a river as well as a roadway. I explained that he was standing just off the side of the bridge in the right-hand corner.
We all loaded into a London cab and headed out to meet the out-bounder. When we arrived, I was elated. There he was, standing just to the side of the bridge that I had drawn in detail. However, when asked what the target was, he pointed across the river with a grin.
"It's over there. That large power plant."
The target was nearly a mile away. Everyone was disappointed, until I pointed out the fact that they asked me to describe where he was standing, not what he was interested in.
They learned a valuable lesson in that first RV. When you ask the viewer for something, that's exactly what you get. He hadn't been properly instructed to actually be standing on or in the target location. They asked me if I would do another one and I agreed. This time they did something even more foolish.
The following day, after guaranteeing that the outbounder was standing either next to or inside of the actual target, I was asked to describe it. The response went something like this:
"It's a place of dread. It's a dark place. It's a place of incarceration. It's a place no one is comfortable in." And that's pretty much how it continued. I was being overwhelmed with a foreboding sense about the target and a lot of warning bells were going off in the back of my head. I minimized my results and kept them as general as possible. I felt as though I were describing a secretive and dark area with heavily regulated access.
We all piled into another London taxi, which drove us again to the river's edge. We met with the actor standing on a small walkway along the edge of the river immediately behind a blockhouse kind of building—much like the rough sketch I did in the hotel room. As we approached with the camera crew, I noticed the dozens of cameras, which began to swing our way.
Well, it didn't take long for the group of "suits" to arrive, asking us what our business was. To which Paul McKenna announced very loudly that we were filming a live remote viewing with the ex-psychic spy from the United States. The building we were standing beside was the new British MI5 building—their equivalent of our FBI Headquarters.
When I returned a month later to the studio for the "chat show" portion of filming in the studio, I was told that we wouldn't be using any of the materials from the second target site location, which was no surprise to me. I was also hassled for nearly three hours entering customs. They kept badgering me for a Queen's permit because I was appearing on the television show and they wouldn't believe that I was making the appearance "unpaid." Or, at least that was their position. My sense was they were collecting their photographs and simply doing what good intelligence people do.
I've since done two more live RVs, both of which worked. I was filmed doing the remote viewing while sitting in a gazebo in Annapolis, Maryland, targeting where I would be in a couple of month's time on a future visit to England. In both cases, no one but me saw the films until I had actually visited the randomly chosen sites in England a couple months later. When I finished the RV in Annapolis, I personally removed the film clips and placed them along with the drawings and tapes inside a courier pouch, which was then sealed with a lead seal. I nailed both targets—although a Dr. Richard Wiseman argues over the judging of the second target. He is a researcher from Oxford who doesn't believe in the paranormal. He was the person who was asked to independently judge my materials and match them to one of four possible sites.
The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy Page 31
