“If you ever need any help,” Price said, “I can handle anything.”
“It was a strange thing to say,” Puthoff recalls. It would get even stranger. That Price met Puthoff and Swann at a Christmas tree lot sounds like something out of a folktale. But Pat Price would soon become a towering figure in the CIA’s psychic research program, the central figure in a fascinating story about extraordinary anomalous abilities that has never been matched.
CHAPTER TEN
Remote Viewing
In an effort to meet the CIA’s objective and locate “opportunities for operational use,” Puthoff and Targ worked to demonstrate a form of long-distance mental telepathy previously known as traveling clairvoyance. Ingo Swann had already demonstrated success in this area, the scientists believed, during the ceiling-tray tests with Karlis Osis at the American Society for Psychical Research in New York. Swann called his process remote viewing. Puthoff and Targ liked the term: it had a scientific feel that they hoped would help distance it from occult associations. In an attempt to establish an official procedure, they developed a protocol called the outbounder-beacon experiment.
The way it worked was that two scientists or researchers, called the outbounder team, would begin their day at SRI. They’d randomly choose an envelope from a group of sealed envelopes kept in a safe. The team would leave the office and, once inside their vehicle, open the sealed envelope, which contained a photograph of a nearby landmark with an address written below. Targets included the courtyard of the Stanford Museum, the exterior of Palo Alto City Hall, and the local public tennis courts. The outbounder team would then drive to the target site and wait there until a predetermined time, at which point one of them would survey the site with intent, mentally recording the target. At this same time Swann, who was back at SRI sitting inside a Faraday cage, would sketch what he perceived the outbounder was seeing and sending to him telepathically. The theory was that the outbounder would act like a beacon for the psychic in the Faraday cage. In addition to Swann, SRI hired several other “gifted” people to participate in these tests—local individuals identified as being psychic who were read onto the classified program.
Puthoff and Targ were excited by the results, so much so that they made plans to publish their work in a national science journal (scrubbed of any CIA affiliation) and to perhaps even write a book about remote viewing. Swann was underwhelmed. “These ESP experiments are a trivialization of my abilities,” he said, complaining that the experiments felt like grown-ups playing childish spy games. He was not supposed to know SRI’s client was the CIA, but he later said he knew intuitively that this was most likely the case. And because of this, Swann accurately surmised that in the real world of espionage, the outbounder-beacon approach was implausible. If an intelligence agency could get a spy to a physical location, what would it need a remote viewer for? Real CIA targets, Swann figured, would involve classified military facilities deep inside the Soviet Union. The inaccessibility of these targets was the problem, he told Puthoff and Targ, and their team should be working on a way to address this real-world challenge.
One day in late April 1973, Swann was eating lunch in the SRI cafeteria with a colleague of Puthoff’s, a computer scientist and astronomer named Jacques Vallée. French by birth, Vallée’s first job in America was as a computer programmer at the University of Texas, where he had codeveloped the first computerized mapping system of Mars for NASA, using a combination of nineteenth-century telescopic observations and high-technology software. For his work at SRI, Vallée carried a top-secret security clearance, and he was assigned to the SRI psychic research program. “I was the de facto unpaid consultant,” he remembers.
In early 1973, Vallée was working on a classified Defense Department contract for the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). The project involved a multiuser military computer network called ARPANET, later made public and renamed the Internet. Vallée was considered one of the most significant figures in the study of unidentified flying objects, along with J. Allen Hynek, with whom he worked on the Project Blue Book files for the U.S. Air Force. (Vallée would serve as the real-life model for the character played by François Truffaut in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.) With his expertise in information technology and computer programming, and his dedication to the study of UFOs, Vallée was someone Ingo Swann could relate to. “Ingo was frustrated” with the outbounder-beacon experiments, says Vallée. He wanted to be viewing locations more challenging than a hospital courtyard or a tennis court across town.
“I suggested he look at the problem from the perspective of information technology,” recalls Vallée. “During lunch I asked him, What do you do [when remote viewing]? Do you move your consciousness around? Ingo said ‘Yes, I can position it anywhere.’” As the two men discussed geolocation, recalls Vallée, he was struck with a thought about long-distance telepathy being analogous to some of the work he was doing for the Defense Department on the ARPANET. “You really need an addressing scheme,” he said.
For centuries the word “address” generally meant a house or a building on a street, in a town, in a country. With the advent of computers, this concept had fundamentally changed. In multiuser computer systems there was direct addressing and indirect addressing, Vallée said, and virtual addressing: “searching out a piece of information that isn’t there locally,” he told Swann. Why not apply this kind of thinking to remote viewing? Vallée suggested. Accessing a virtual address on the ARPANET was “a means of accessing data which is clearly beyond the sensory grasp.” This got Swann thinking. A few days later, he was sitting beside the pool at his apartment complex in Mountain View when he had an epiphany. “I was drinking a glass of scotch when a voice in my head said ‘Try coordinates,’” he later recalled.
Geographic coordinates allow for every location on Earth to be precisely pinpointed by a set of numbers, letters, and symbols. The concept is more than two thousand years old. Credit for the invention of geolocation goes to the Greek mathematician and astronomer Eratosthenes, also credited as being the first person to estimate the circumference of Earth. He is said to have calculated this distance using a shadow-catching sundial called a gnomon, similar to the one Ed Mitchell carried on the Moon. Eratosthenes created the first map of the world that used latitudes and longitudes, or parallels and meridians, and he coined the term “geography,” which translates as “writing about the Earth.” Sitting poolside in Silicon Valley in the spring of 1973, Swann started thinking about how geographical addressing had evolved over history. He decided to create a new concept and a new term for long-distance telepathy, called coordinate remote viewing. He took the idea to Puthoff and Targ.
“Outrageous,” Puthoff remembers himself saying. There were a number of reasons the concept was flawed, he said, starting with the idea that it could be relatively easy for a person to memorize the coordinates of the globe. “A person with an eidetic memory could read an atlas and reproduce the pictures from memory,” Puthoff said. Swann insisted that he didn’t have an eidetic memory. Well, the colleagues on the East Coast would never go for it, Puthoff predicted.
“But the idea stuck,” says Puthoff, and he wondered whether coordinate remote viewing was worth a try. He called Kit Green at CIA.
Kit Green remembers sitting in his office at Langley when the call came. When Puthoff described Swann’s idea for a new coordinate system for remote viewing, he thought the idea sounded absurd. Puthoff asked Green to at least give Swann’s idea a chance. Perhaps Green could provide SRI with a set of coordinates known only to him; this would give Swann the opportunity to succeed or fail. Green agreed to give the idea a try.
Green hung up the phone. “I got an even better idea,” he recalls. “Here was an opportunity to design an experiment that was essentially fraud proof.” He would get map coordinates from a colleague so the location would be entirely unfamiliar to him. Green walked down the corridor and the first person he saw was a colleague he knew only as “Russ.” Because Rus
s was with the clandestine service, “that wasn’t even his real name,” says Green.
“I told him I was testing a new geolocation imaging system,” Green recalls. “I said, ‘I want you to give me some coordinates.’ I treated what was going on as if we were talking about photography or imagery, not human intelligence.”
Green asked Russ to choose a place that meant something to him personally, so that if Green were later to show Russ a sketch of the place, Russ would immediately be able to discern whether the sketch resembled the physical location. A few hours later Russ handed Green a piece of paper with the following address written on it: 38˚ 23′ 45-48″ N, 79˚ 25′ 00″ W.
On May 29, 1973, Swann entered the Faraday cage at SRI at 4:03 p.m. He sat down in the orange imitation leather lounge chair used for remote viewing sessions, took a few puffs on a cigar, and relaxed. Hal Puthoff began recording the session, then showed Swann the geographic coordinates provided by Kit Green at CIA. Swann examined the coordinates and described what he saw: “There seems to be some sort of mounds and rolling hills,” Swann said. “There is a city to the north. This seems to be a strange place, somewhere like the lawns one would find around a military base, but I get the impression that there are either some old bunkers around, or maybe this is a covered reservoir. There must be a flagpole, some highways to the west, possibly a river over to the far east, to the south more city.” Swann sketched a map of the target from an overhead point of view. He drew a circular area he labeled “Target,” with one road leading to the south and another to the north. To the east, he drew a river. The session lasted six minutes. Puthoff collected the data and prepared a report. Blind to the target, he made no judgment about what Swann had said and drawn.
Swann went home to his apartment in Mountain View. The next morning he felt compelled to visit the target site again, so he sat down at his kitchen table, noted the time as 7:30 a.m., focused on the coordinates, and began sketching and writing. Working at home, unsupervised, was a clear departure from scientific method and would create problems and tensions down the road. Detractors and skeptics had good reason to argue that the SRI scientists included in their reports data that was not obtained in a laboratory setting under laboratory controls.
Swann’s second narrative contained more details: “Cliffs to the east, fence to the north. There’s a circular building (a tower?), buildings to the south. Is this a former Nike base or something like that?” he wrote. His impressions were vague, and he felt limited. “There is something strange about this area, but since I don’t know particularly what to look for within the scope of this cloudy ability, it is extremely difficult to make decisions on what is there and what is not. Imagination seems to get in the way. For example I seem to get the impression of something underground but I’m not sure.”
Ingo Swann’s second map was more detailed than the first. It showed a facility inside a fenced-in area surrounded by forest on three sides. At the center of the map Swann sketched a circular driveway with a flagpole. He drew two rectangular buildings and a smaller square one. When he was finished, he packed up his notes and papers and headed over to SRI. He gave the papers to Puthoff, who marked the sketch “Map Number Two.” Puthoff noted that Swann had done this second viewing at his own apartment, on his own initiative. Certainly Swann could have looked up the coordinates on a map and, using general region and geography as clues, guessed broadly what might be there. Puthoff indicated to the CIA that he knew Swann well and that he was not someone who would cheat. Puthoff typed up a report on Swann’s second set of impressions and sent it to Kit Green at CIA.
The following day, Puthoff was sitting in his SRI office when the telephone rang. It was Pat Price, the Christmas tree salesman he and Swann had met six months before, in Mountain View. Price said he was calling from Lake Tahoe, where he lived, and that he could help.
“It was so odd and out of the blue that he called on that day that I decided to give him the coordinates,” Puthoff recalls. “I asked him to describe what was located at those coordinates.” This phone call was the second coincidence involving Price and the psychic research program. And the remote viewing session Price was about to perform would occur without any oversight or laboratory controls.
Three days later, on June 4, Puthoff received an envelope in the mail from Pat Price, postmarked June 2, from Lake Tahoe. Price had written a lengthy description of the impressions the geographic coordinates provided, which he said he had observed through extrasensory perception. “Looked at general area from altitude of about 1500′ above highest terrain,” he had written, as indicated in declassified CIA documents. “On my left forward quadrant is a peak in a chain of mountains, elevation approximately 4996′ above sea level. Slopes are greyish slate covered with a variety of broad leaf trees, vines, shrubbery and undergrowth. I am facing about 3˚–5˚ west of north.” Details pertaining to terrain and geography went on for two paragraphs. Puthoff knew this was information a person could find in any good atlas. But Price also provided very specific details regarding the weather at 25,000 to 30,000 feet above the target site, including a colorful description of the “high cumulo-nimbus clouds” and “a cirrostratus air mass.” While in 2017 this kind of weather information can be accessed on a smartphone in a matter of seconds, in 1973 it would have been challenging but not impossible to obtain, particularly if Price knew someone who worked at a weather station. Either way, thought Puthoff, it was a bold statement. Puthoff continued reading.
“Perceived that the peak area has large underground storage area,” Price had written. “Road comes up back side of mountains (west slopes), fairly well concealed, deliberately so… Would be very hard to detect [this facility if] flying over area. Looks like a former missile site—bases for launchers still there.” It was this missile site detail that caused Puthoff to pause. Swann, too, had described the base as a former missile site. Puthoff read on. “Area now houses record storage areas, microfilm, file cabinets; as you go into underground area through aluminum rolled up doors, first areas filled with records, etc. Rooms about 100’ long, 4’ wide, 20’ ceilings with concrete supporting pilasters, flare-shaped.”
Next, Price described the location as if he’d been able to get inside the underground facility. “Temperature cool—fluorescent lighted. Personnel, Army 5th Corps engineers. M/Sgt Long on desk placard on grey steel desk—file cabinets security locked—combination locks, steel rods though eye bolts,” he wrote. “Beyond these rooms, heading east, are several bays with computers, communications equipment, large maps, display type overlays. Personnel, Army Signal Corps. Elevators.”
Puthoff picked up the telephone and called Pat Price in Lake Tahoe. This information was more specific than what Ingo Swann had described. “I asked him if he could revisit the coordinates and pick up any additional information,” remembers Puthoff, the more specific the better. Price said he’d work on it. Puthoff was uncertain how to interpret this scenario. Could the CIA be conducting some kind of psychological operation against SRI? Was this a test to see whether Puthoff could be deceived? Two days later, Pat Price called back. Puthoff wondered about the time frame. Why had it taken two days?
Price said he’d traveled back to the site in an out-of-body experience and gathered more words. Two code names seemed important, he said. They were “Flytrap” and “Minerva.” Price also told Puthoff that he’d been able to view a set of documents that were sitting on top of a file cabinet against the north wall. The file was labeled “Operation Pool [something],” Price said; the second word was unreadable. Inside the file cabinet there were several folders, he added, and he could read the labels on four of them: “Cueball,” “14 Ball,” “8 Ball,” “Rackup.” Words resembling “Hayfork” or “Haystack” were also written down, Price said, and he’d been able to determine the names of three individuals: “Colonel R. J. Hamilton, Major General George R. Nash and Major John C. Calhoun.” Finally, Price told Puthoff the classified code name of the site. It was “Sugar Grove,” he said.
Puthoff had no idea what to make of any of this except that Price’s description of the target site exterior was strikingly similar to the one provided by Ingo Swann. He thought about sending Price’s narrative to Kit Green but decided to wait and see what the Agency said about Swann’s information. Pat Price was not part of the SRI program.
At CIA, Green received the information provided by Swann and shared it with his colleague whose cover name was Russ. “He said something along the lines of, ‘What a stupid imagery system you’re working on,’” remembers Green. “He said none of it was accurate, [not] the flagpole, the circular driveway, the multiple buildings. This was all nonsense, he said.” Green asked Russ what was actually at the location. Russ kind of chuckled and said it was his summer cabin in Pendleton County, West Virginia, a simple cabin located in the forest at the end of a long dirt road. Green recalls taking a deep breath and resigning himself to the fact that this idea of remote viewing by geographical coordinates was a fool’s errand. “Back to submarines and Biafra, I thought,” recalls Green.
He called SRI and reached Targ. “We were about to get off the phone when Targ said, ‘That’s too bad. The other guy saw the same thing.’”
Green paused. “What other guy?” he asked. Targ told him about Pat Price.
Green was confused and frustrated. “Something about the situation bothered me,” he explains. “I had to see for myself.”
That weekend, Green piled his family into the car and set out with them on a drive. “I drove to the coordinates,” Green recalled in 2015. “I found the cabin. I found the dirt road. Then I drove down the road a little further and I found a secure military facility. I saw the flagpole [described]. I saw the circular drive. I saw the building with the accordion door.” Green was looking at a highly classified military facility called the Naval Radio Station, Sugar Grove, an ultrasecret facility run in part by NSA, designed to intercept international electronic intelligence from around the world. The site contained classified radar systems and deep-space telescopes. And it was right down the road from Russ’s summer cabin. Apparently he had no idea it was there. On Monday morning Kit Green wrote up a report for his superior at CIA.
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