The Field

by Lynne McTaggart

  Hal gathered together nine remote viewers in total, mostly beginners with no track record as psychics, who performed in total over fifty trials. Again, an impartial panel of judges compared targets with transcripts of subject descriptions. The descriptions may have contained some inaccuracies, but they were detailed and accurate enough to enable the judges to directly match description with target roughly half the time – a highly significant result.

  As a backup method of judging the accuracy of the viewing, Hal then asked a panel of five SRI scientists not associated with the project to blind-match unedited, unlabeled typed transcripts and drawings made by the remote viewers with the nine target sites, which they visited in turn. Between them, the judges came up with twenty-four correct matches of transcript with target site, against an expected five.20

  By degrees, Puthoff and Targ were turning into believers. Human beings, talented or otherwise, appeared to have a latent ability to see anywhere across any distance. The most talented remote viewers clearly could enter some framework of consciousness, allowing them to observe scenes anywhere in the world. But the inescapable conclusion of their experiments was that anyone had the ability to do this, if they were just primed for it – even those highly skeptical of the entire notion. The most important ingredient appeared to be a relaxed, even playful, atmosphere which deliberately avoided causing anxiety or nervous anticipation in the viewer. And that was all, other than a little practice. Swann himself had learned over time how to separate signal from noise – somehow divining what was his imagination from what was clearly in the scene.

  Puthoff and Targ had tackled remote viewing as scientists, creating a scientific method for testing it. Brenda Dunne and Robert Jahn refined this science even further. This was a natural progression for them. One of the first to replicate the SRI work had been Brenda Dunne, while an undergraduate at Mundelein College and later as a graduate student of the University of Chicago, before her move to Princeton.21 Dunne’s forte, once again, had been ordinary volunteers, not gifted psychics. In eight studies using two students with no gift for psychic ability, she demonstrated that her participants could be successful in correctly describing target locations. Once she joined Princeton, remote viewing also became included in PEAR’s agenda.

  Jahn and Dunne were mainly worried about the great likelihood that these sorts of studies would be vulnerable to sloppy protocols and data-processing techniques or deliberate or inadvertent ‘sensory cueing’ by either participant. Determined to avoid any of these weaknesses, they were painstaking in study design. They came up with the latest subjective way of measuring success – a standardized checklist. Besides describing the scene and drawing a picture, the remote viewer would be asked to fill in a form of thirty multiple-choice questions about the details of the scene, which attempted to give flesh to the bones of his or her description. Meanwhile, the person at the remote site would also fill in the same form, in addition to taking photos and making drawings. On many occasions, the target site was selected by one of the REG machines and handed in a sealed envelope to the traveler, to be opened away from PEAR; on other occasions, the traveling participant might choose a target site only after he or she was at a remote site unknown to anybody back at Princeton.

  When the traveler returned, a member of the PEAR staff would enter the data into a computer, which would compare checklists for the traveler and remote viewer, and also compare these lists with all others in the database.

  In total, Jahn and Dunne performed 336 formal trials involving 48 recipients and distances between traveler and remote viewer of between 5 and 6000 miles, and worked out a highly detailed mathematical analytical assessment to judge the accuracy of the results. They even determined individual probability scores for arriving at the right answer by chance. Nearly two-thirds were more accurate than could be accounted for by chance. The overall odds against chance in the PEAR’s complete remote viewing database was one billion to one.22

  One possible criticism was that most of the remote viewing pairs knew each other. Although some sort of emotional or physiological bond between the participants seemed to improve the scores, good results were also achieved when the traveler and remote viewer were virtual strangers. Unlike the initial SRI studies, no one was chosen because of a gift for telepathy. Furthermore, better scores were obtained when the traveling participants were randomly assigned their sites from a large pool of possibilities, rather than spontaneously selecting it themselves. This made it unlikely that any common knowledge between the pairs of participants improved the scores.

  Jahn, as well as Puthoff, realized that nothing in the current theories of biology or physics could account for remote viewing. The Russians had maintained that clairvoyance operated through some sort of extremely-low-frequency (ELF) electromagnetic wave.23 The problem with this interpretation is that in many of the experiments, the viewers had been able to see a site as a moving video, as if they had been there on the scene. This meant that this phenomenon operated beyond a conventional ELF frequency. Furthermore, using the special double-walled, copper-screened room, which would block even low-frequency radio waves, didn’t tarnish anyone’s ability to pick up the scene or degrade any of the descriptions, even those of events thousands of miles away.

  Puthoff went on to test the ELF hypothesis by conducting two of their studies from a Taurus submarine, a tiny five-person vehicle made by the International Hydrodynamics Company Ltd (HYCO) of Canada. Several hundred feet of sea water is known to be an effective shield for all but the very lowest frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum. The remote viewer – usually Hammid or Price – traveled in the submarine 170 metres under the surface near Catalina Island, off the coast of Southern California, while Hal and a government contract monitor picked out a target from a pool of target locations near San Francisco. At the designated time, they went to the site and stayed for 15 minutes. At this point, Hammid or Price would try to describe and draw what her or his partner was looking at 500 miles away.

  In both cases, they’d correctly identified the target site – a tree on a hilltop in Portola Valley and a shopping mall in Mountain View. This made it highly unlikely that the channel of communication was electromagnetic waves, even of extremely low frequency. Even the very low 10 Hz brain waves would be blocked in 170 metres of water. The only waves that wouldn’t be blocked were quantum effects. As every object absorbs and re-radiates the Zero Point Field, the information would be re-emitted back through the other side of the water ‘shield’.

  Puthoff and Targ did have a few clues about the peculiar characteristics of remote viewing. For one thing, each of the SRI remote viewers appeared to have his or her own signature. Orientation appeared to match a person’s tendencies in other regards; a sensory remote viewer would also view with his or her senses in person. One might be particularly good at mapping out the site and describing the architectural and topographical features; another would concentrate on the sensory ‘feel’ of the target; yet another would focus on the behavior of the target experimenter, or describe what he was feeling and seeing, as though he was somehow transported and able to see out of the target person’s eyes.24 Many of the viewers operated in ‘real time’ as though they were somehow there, experiencing the scene from their target subject’s point of view. When Hal was swimming in Costa Rica, they saw the scene from his perspective; if he was distracted by a scene other than the central one he was visiting at the time, then so were they. It was as though they operated with the senses of two people – their own and the person on the scene.

  The signals were acting as though they’d been sent through some low-frequency bit channel. The information in their experiments was received in bits and often imperfectly. Although the basic information came through, sometimes the details were a little blurred. Usually, the scene was flipflopped, so that the subject would see the reverse, as though looking at the scene through a mirror. Targ and Puthoff had wondered whether this might have to do with the ordinary activity of the v
isual cortex, as they understood it. The conventional view was that the cortex takes in a scene in reverse, and the brain corrects this by switching the scene. In this instance, the sight isn’t being viewed by the eyes, but the brain still performs its reverse correction of the scene. That is where the similarity with ordinary brain activity ended. Many of the remote viewers had been able to change their perspective, particularly when gently urged to do so by their monitor, so they could move around heights and angles at will, or zoom in for a close up, like a video camera on a crane. With Pat’s first remote viewing of the secret Pentagon site, he’d begun his viewing from 1500 feet up to take the scene in as a whole and then zoomed in for closer detail.

  The worst thing a remote viewer could do was to interpret or analyze what he saw. This tended to color his impressions as the information was still filtering through, and invariably, he would guess wrong. Based on that guess, he would begin to interpret other items in the scene as being likely companions to the interpreted main image. If one viewer thought he saw a castle, he’d begin looking for a moat. His expectation or imagination would take the place of the receiving end of the channel.25 There was no doubt that information came through spatially and holistically in flashes of images. As with the phenomena studied by PEAR and Braud, this sensory channel appears to make use of the unconscious and nonanalytic part of the brain. As Dunne and Jahn had found with their REG machines, the left brain is the enemy of The Field.

  Remote viewers were exhausted when they finished and also overwhelmed by a kind of sensory overload when they returned to the here and now. It was as though they’d entered into some super consciousness, and once they’d come out of it, the world was more intense. The sky was bluer, sounds were louder, everything more deliciously real. It was as if, in tuning in to those barely perceptible signals, their senses had been turned to maximum. Once they rejoined the world, ordinary volume bombarded them with sight and sound.26

  Hal began to think about how remote viewing might be possible. He didn’t want to attempt a theory. Like most scientists, he hated woolly speculation. But there was no doubt that at some level of awareness, we had all information about everything in the world. Clearly, human beacons weren’t always necessary. Even a set of coordinates could take us there. If we could see remote places instantaneously, it argued strongly that it was a quantum, nonlocal effect. With practice, people could enlarge their brain’s receiving mechanisms to gain access to information stored in the Zero Point Field. This giant cryptogram, continually encoded with every atom in the universe, held all the information of the world – every sight and sound and smell. When remote viewers were ‘seeing’ a particular scene, their minds weren’t actually somehow transported to the scene. What they were seeing was the information that their traveler had encoded in quantum fluctuation. They were picking up information contained in The Field. In a sense, The Field allowed us to hold the whole of the universe inside us. Those good at remote viewing weren’t seeing anything invisible to all the rest of us. All they were doing was dampening down the other distractions.

  As every quantum particle is recording the world in waves, carrying images of the world at every moment, at some profoundly deep quantum level, something about the scene – a target individual or map coordinates – is probably acting like a beacon. A remote viewer picks up signals from the target individual and the signal carries an image that is picked up by us at a quantum level. To all but the experienced and the gifted, like Pat Price, this information is received imperfectly, in reverse or in incomplete images, as if something were wrong with the transmitter. Because the information is received by our unconscious mind, we often receive it as we would in a dream state, a memory or a sudden insight – a flash of an image, a portion of the whole. Price’s success with the Russian site and Swann’s success with Jupiter suggest that any sort of mnemonic, such as a map or cipher, can conjure up the actual place. As an idiot savant has access to impossible calculations in an instant, perhaps the Zero Point Field enables us to hold an image of the physical universe inside ourselves, and under certain circumstances we open our bandwidths wide enough to glimpse a portion of it.

  The SRI remote viewing program (later housed at the Science Applications International Corp, or SAIC) carried on for twenty-three years, behind a wall of secrecy that is still erected. It had been funded entirely by the government, first under Puthoff, then Targ and finally Edwin May, a burly nuclear physicist who’d carried out other intelligence work before. In 1978, the Army had its own psychic spying intelligence unit in place, code-named Grill Flame, possibly the most secret program in the Pentagon, manned by enlisted men who’d claimed some talent in psychic phenomena. By the time of Ed May’s tenure, a who’s who of scientists consisting of two Nobel laureates and two chairs of department at universities, all chosen for their skepticism, sat on a government Human Use and Procedural Oversight committee. Their task was to review all of the SRI remote viewing research, and to do so they were given unannounced drop-in privileges to SAIC, to guard against fraud. All concluded that the research was impeccable, and half actually felt the research demonstrated something important.27 Nevertheless, to this day, the American government has released only the Semipalatinsk study, one tiny portion of a mountain of SRI documents, and then only after a relentless campaign by Russell Targ.28

  At the close of the program in 1995, a government-sponsored review of all the SRI and SAIC data, carried out by Jessica Utts, a statistics professor at the University of California at Davis, and Dr Ray Hyman, a skeptic of psychic phenomena, agreed that the statistical results for remote viewing phenomena were far beyond what could have occurred by chance.29 As far as the US government was concerned, the SRI studies gave America a possible advantage over Russian intelligence. But to the scientists themselves, these results represented far more than a chess maneuver in the Cold War. It seemed to suggest that because of our constant dialogue with the Zero Point Field, like de Broglie’s electron, we are everywhere at once.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Endless Here and Now

  THE CIA MIGHT HAVE been struck by Pat Price’s success with Semi-palatinsk, but that wasn’t the experiment which most impressed Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ. That one had occurred the year before and concerned nothing more cloak and dagger than a local swimming pool.

  Targ had been with Pat Price in the copper-screened room on the second floor of the SRI Radio Physics building; Hal and a colleague had their electronic calculator randomly choose one of the locations, which in this instance turned out to be the swimming-pool complex in Rinconada Park in Palo Alto, approximately five miles away.

  After 30 minutes, when it was likely that Puthoff had arrived at his destination, Targ gave Price the go-ahead. Price closed his eyes and described in detail, and with near-correct dimensions the large pool, the smaller pool and a concrete building. In all respects his drawing was accurate, save one: he insisted that the site housed some sort of water purification plant. He even drew rotating devices into his drawings of the pools and added two water tanks on site.

  For several years, Hal and Russell had just assumed that Pat had got this one wrong. Too much noise to signal is how they usually phrased it. There was no water purification system there, and there certainly weren’t any water tanks.

  Then, in early 1975, Russell received an Annual Report of the City of Palo Alto, a celebration of its centennial, containing some of the city’s highlights over the last century. While flicking through it, Targ was flabbergasted to read: ‘In 1913 a new municipal waterworks was built on the site of the present Rinconada Park.’ It also included a photo of the site, which clearly showed two tanks. Russ remembered Pat’s drawing and pulled it out; the tanks were exactly in the place that Pat Price had drawn them. When Pat ‘saw’ the site, he saw it as it had been 50 years ago, even though all evidence of the water purification plant had long since disappeared.1

  One of the most astonishing aspects of the data amassed by Puthoff, Jahn and the ot
her scientists is that they hadn’t been at all sensitive to distance. A person doesn’t have to be in close proximity to affect a REG machine. In at least a quarter of Jahn’s studies, the participants were anywhere from next door to thousands of miles away. Nevertheless, the results were virtually identical to those obtained when the participants were at the PEAR lab, sitting right in front of a machine. Distance, even great distance, didn’t seem to lessen a person’s effect on the machine.2

  The same had occurred with PEAR’s and SRI’s remote viewing studies. Remote viewers were able to see across countries, over continents – even out into space.3

  But the Pat Price study was an example of something even more extra-ordinary. The research that was emerging from labs such as PEAR and SRI suggested that people could ‘see’ into the future or reach back into the past.

  One of the most inviolate notions in our sense of ourselves and our world is the notion of time and space. We view life as a progression that we can measure through clocks, calendars and the major milestones of our lives. We are born, we grow up, we get married and have children, and one by one collect houses, possessions, cats and dogs, all the while inevitably getting older and moving in a line toward death. Indeed, the most tangible evidence of the progression of time is the physical fact of our own ageing.