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Chapter 1
Dr. Harold E. Puthoff describes the CIA-Initiated Remote Viewing Program at Stanford Research Institute
With RV timeline compiled by IRVA vice-president Paul H. Smith, and comments by quantum physicist Dr. Jack Sarfatti, whose fascinating book Destiny Matrix contains much more about this subject in detail.
NOTE: Combat Diaries received a few complaints about mispellings and confusions in this article as pasted from the original into the current Combat Diary 24. We have therefore extensively copy-edited the original text, made points more clear, and glossed some references and acronyms. But (of course) we have not changed meaning in any respect. We have included also graphics which were not in the original Chapter 1, and could not be obtained from the source reference to this article, www.biomindsuperpowers.com/Pages/CIA-InitiatedRV.html which is now not available. We have also added new material of direct interest, including two Appendices:
Appendix 1: Jack Sarfatti makes his characteristic pungent comments regarding the work of Eric Davis, who is an associate of Harold Puthoff, with whom Sarfatti is in perpetual conflict. Regarding the reputation of Sarfatti himself, here is a telling commendation: On Feb 16, 2005, at 3:18 PM, George Chapline, Jr, designer of the X-Ray Atomic Bomb Laser at Lawrence Livermore Lab in Ed Teller's elite group, wrote:
> Jack, > > Your solid He4 superfluid paper is wonderful! You actually once did something of > very great importance - and apparently you didn't realize this. This paper is > aprecursor to quantum gravity, and much more important in that regard than string > theory ( you can quote me). > > george
Appendix 2: Introduction, Preface, and Foreword to Mind-Reach The Introduction is by Margaret Mead (1901-1978). Her books, such as An Anthropology of Human Freedom and Human Nature and the Power of Culture brought her great fame as an anthropologist. She studied life among peoples in Samoa, Papua New Guinea, Bali, and Native North America. She taught generations of Americans about the value of looking carefully and openly at other cultures to better understand the complexities of world-views which were not based on Western consumer-industrial and scientific paradigms.
Mind-Reach, authored by Targ and Puthoff was published in by Jonathan Cape in 1977. As the original master work on the phenomenon known as “remote viewing,” it became rapidly a legendary book that influenced generations of speculative thinkers in this area, including many leading scientists. Harold Puthoff is a patent holder in the areas of lasers and optical devices and is the author of a widely used text-book in quantum physics. Before joining Russell Targ at the Stanford Research Institute, his professional experience included service as a Naval Officer on a research assignment in a Defence Department laboratory. Russell Targ worked on the development of the laser and is the inventor of the tunable plasma oscillator at microwave frequencies.
To commence, here is a brief description of Earttech International, the organization within which Harold Puthoff continues his research in 2005.
Earthtech International
This organization supports academic pursuits via the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, its theoretical and publication division. ETI is a privately funded research organization dedicated to the exploration of new frontiers in physics. Our activities center primarily around investigations into various aspects of the Zero-Point Field. We routinely perform evaluations of reported “over-unity” energy devices. We specialize also in performing accurate power-balance measurements using calorimetry. In the historic retrospective which follows, quantum physicist Harold E. Puthoff explains the program he co-founded with Dr. Russell Targ whilst at Stanford Research Institute. This program resulted in the highly influential book, Mindreach.
The Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin was established in 1985 to explore advanced concepts in forefront scientific areas. Its activities range from theoretical studies to publication in professional journals of such fundamental topics as gravitation, inertia, energy and cosmology.
The Institute has established a track record of excellence both with regard to publication in leading scientific journals, and in the development of new technical concepts and technologies, including the successful pursuit of patents. Its expertise is sought after by both corporate and government entities, and its personnel regularly brief various senior scientists, corporations, foundations, government agencies, the Executive Branch and Congress as consultants on leading-edge technologies and future technology trends. An example is participation by the Institute personnel in NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program, and briefing of senior scientist Edward Teller.
The Institute’s Director, Dr. Harold Puthoff, is a member and officer of several professional organizations (NY Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Physical Society, Society for Scientific Exploration); is listed in American Men and Women of Science, Who’s Who in Science and Engineering, Who’s Who in the South and Southwest, Who’s Who in the World; and has been distinguished as a Fetzer Fellow (1991).
ABSTRACT
In July 1995, the CIA declassified, and approved for release, documents revealing its sponsorship in the 1970s of a program at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, to determine whether such phenomena as remote viewing “might have any utility for intelligence collection” [1]
Thus began disclosure to the public of a two-decade-plus involvement of the intelligence community in the investigation of so-called parapsychological or psi phenomena. Presented here by the program’s Founder and first Director (1972 - 1985) is the early history of the program, including discussion of some of the first, now declassified, results that drove early interest.
INTRODUCTION
On April 17, 1995, President Clinton issued Executive Order Nr. 1995-4-17, entitled Classified National Security Information. Although in one sense the order simply reaffirmed much of what has been long-standing policy, in another sense there was a clear shift toward more openness.
In the opening paragraph, for example, we read: “In recent years, however, dramatic changes have altered, although not eliminated, the national security threats that we confront. These changes provide a greater opportunity to emphasize our commitment to open Government.”
In the Classification Standards section of the Order this commitment is operationalized by phrases such as, “If there is significant doubt about the need to classify information, it shall not be classified.” Later in the document, in reference to information that requires continued protection, there even appears the remarkable phrase, “In some exceptional cases, however, the need to protect such information may be outweighed by the public interest in disclosure of the information, and in these cases the information should be declassified.”
A major fallout of this reframing of attitude toward classification is that there is enormous pressure on those charged with maintaining security to work hard at being responsive to reasonable requests for disclosure. One of the results is that FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests that have languished for months to years are suddenly being acted upon.1
One outcome of this change in policy is the government’s recent admission of its two-decade-plus involvement in funding highly-classified, special access programs in remote viewing (RV) and related psi phenomena, first at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and then at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), both in Menlo Park, CA, supplemented by various in-house government programs.
Although almost all of the documentation remains yet classified, in July 1995, 270 pages of SRI reports were declassified and released by the CIA, the program’s first sponsor [2] Thus, although through the years columns by Jack Anderson and others had claimed leaks of “psychic spy” programs with such exotic names as Grill Flame, Center Lane, Sunstreak and Star Gate, CIA’s release of the SRI reports constitutes the first documented public admission of significant intelligence community involvement in the psi area.
As a consequence of the above, although I had founded the program in early 1972, and had acted as its Director until I left in 1985 to head up the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin (at which point my colleague Ed May assumed responsibility as Director), it was not until 1995 that I found myself for the first time able to utter in a single sentence the connected acronyms CIA/SRI/RV.
In this report I discuss the genesis of the program, report on some of the early, now declassified, results that drove early interest, and outline the general direction the program took as it expanded into a multi-year, multi-site, multi-million-dollar effort to determine whether such phenomena as remote viewing “might have any utility for intelligence collection” [2]
BEGINNINGS
In early 1972 I was involved in laser research at Stanford Research Institute (now called SRI International) in Menlo Park, CA. At that time I was also circulating a proposal to obtain a small grant for some research in quantum biology. In that proposal I had raised the issue whether physical theory as we knew it was capable of describing life processes, and had suggested some measurements involving plants and lower organisms [3]
This proposal was widely circulated, and a copy was sent to Cleve Backster in New York City who was involved in measuring the electrical activity of plants with standard polygraph equipment (see Cleve Backsters book Primary Perception: Biocommunication With Plants, Living Foods and Human Cells). New York artist Ingo Swann chanced to see my proposal during a visit to Backsters lab, and wrote me suggesting that if I were interested in investigating the boundary between the physics of the animate and inanimate, I should consider experiments of the parapsychological type.
Swann then went on to describe some apparently successful experiments in psychokinesis in which he had participated at Prof. Gertrude Schmeidler’s laboratory at the City College of New York. As a result of this correspondence I invited him to visit SRI for a week in June 1972 to demonstrate such effects, frankly, as much out of personal scientific curiosity as anything else.
Prior to Swann’s visit I arranged for access to a well-shielded magnetometer used in a quark-detection experiment in the Physics Department at Stanford University. During our visit to this laboratory, sprung as a surprise to Swann, he appeared to perturb the operation of the magnetometer, located in a vault below the floor of the building and shielded by mu-metal shielding, an aluminum container, copper shielding and a superconducting shield.
As if to add insult to injury, he then went on to “remote view” the interior of the apparatus, rendering by drawing a reasonable facsimile of its rather complex (and heretofore unpublished) construction. It was this latter feat that impressed me perhaps even more than the former, as it also eventually impressed representatives of the intelligence community. I wrote up these observations and circulated it among my scientific colleagues in draft form of what was eventually published as part of a conference proceedings [4].
In a few short weeks a pair of visitors showed up at SRI with the above report in hand. Their credentials showed them to be from the CIA. They knew of my previous background as a Naval Intelligence Officer and then civilian employee at the National Security Agency (NSA) several years earlier, and felt they could discuss their concerns with me openly.
There was, they told me, increasing concern in the intelligence community about the level of effort in Soviet parapsychology being funded by the Soviet security services [5]; by Western scientific standards the field was considered nonsense by most working scientists.
As a result they had been on the lookout for a research laboratory outside of academia that could handle a quiet, low-profile classified investigation, and SRI appeared to fit the bill. They asked if I could arrange an opportunity for them to carry out some simple experiments with Swann, and, if the tests proved satisfactory, would I consider a pilot program along these lines? I agreed to consider this, and arranged for the requested tests. 2
The tests were simple, the visitors simply hiding objects in a box and asking Swann to attempt to describe the contents. The results generated in these experiments are perhaps captured most eloquently by the following example. In one test Swann said “I see something small, brown and irregular, sort of like a leaf or something that resembles it, except that it seems very much alive, like it’s even moving!”
The target chosen by one of the visitors turned out to be a small live moth, which indeed did look like a leaf. Although not all responses were quite so precise, nonetheless the integrated results were sufficiently impressive that in short order an eight-month, $49,909 Biofield Measurements Program was negotiated as a pilot study, a laser colleague Russell Targ who had had a long-time interest and involvement in parapsychology joined the program, and the experimental effort was begun in earnest.
EARLY REMOTE VIEWING RESULTS
During the eight-month pilot study of remote viewing the effort gradually evolved from the remote viewing of symbols and objects in envelopes and boxes, to the remote viewing of local target sites in the San Francisco Bay area, demarked by outbound experimenters sent to the site under strict protocols devised to prevent artificial results.
Later judging of the results were similarly handled by double-blind protocols designed to foil artificial matching. Since these results have been presented in detail elsewhere, both in the scientific literature [6-8] and in popular book format [9] I direct the interested reader to these sources. To summarize, over the years the back-and-forth criticism of protocols, refinement of methods, and successful replication of this type of remote viewing in independent laboratories [10-14]. has yielded considerable scientific evidence for the reality of the phenomenon.
Adding to the strength of these results was the discovery that a growing number of individuals could be found to demonstrate high-quality remote viewing, often to their own surprise, such as the talented Hella Hammid. As a separate issue, however, most convincing to our early program monitors were the results now to be described, generated under their own control.
First, during the collection of data for a formal remote viewing series targeting indoor laboratory apparatus and outdoor locations, the CIA contract monitors, ever watchful for possible chicanery, participated as remote viewers themselves in order to critique the protocols. This data was eventually published in toto in the Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) [7].
In this role three separate viewers, designated visitors V1 - V3 in the IEEE paper, contributed seven of the 55 viewings, several of striking quality. Reference to the IEEE paper for a comparison of descriptions/drawings to pictures of the associated targets, generated by the contract monitors in their own viewings, leaves little doubt as to why the contract monitors came to the conclusion that there was something to remote viewing (see, for example, Figure 1 herein).
As summarized in the Executive Summary of the now-released Final Report [2] of the second year of the program, “The development of this capability at SRI has evolved to the point where visiting CIA personnel with no previous exposure to such concepts have performed well under controlled laboratory conditions (that is, generated target descriptions of sufficiently high quality to permit blind matching of descriptions to targets by independent judges).” What happened next, however, made even these results pale in comparison.
Figure 1 - Sketch of target by V1
Figure 2 - Target (merry-go-round)
COORDINATE REMOTE VIEWING To determine whether it was necessary to have a “beacon” individual at the target site, Swann suggested carrying out an experiment to remote view the planet Jupiter before the upcoming NASA Pioneer 10 flyby. In that case, much to his chagrin (and ours) he found a ring around Jupiter, and wondered if perhaps he had remote viewed Saturn by mistake. Our colleagues in astronomy were quite unimpressed as well, until the flyby revealed that an unanticipated ring did in fact exist. 3
Expanding the protocols yet further, Swann proposed a series of experiments in which the target was designated not by sending a “beacon” person to the target site, but rather by the use of geographical coordinates, latitude and longitude in degrees, minutes and seconds. Needless to say, this proposal seemed even more outrageous than “ordinary” remote viewing.
The difficulties in taking this proposal seriously, designing protocols to eliminate the possibility of a combination of globe memorization and eidetic or photographic memory, and so forth, are discussed in considerable detail in Reference [9]. Suffice it to say that investigation of this approach, which we designated Scanate (scanning by coordinate), eventually provided us with sufficient evidence to bring it up to the contract monitors and suggest a test under their control.
A description of that test and its results, carried out in mid-1973 during the initial pilot study, are best presented by quoting directly from the Executive Summary of the Final Report of the second year’s follow-up program [2]. The remote viewers were Ingo Swann and Pat Price, and the entire transcripts are available in the released documents [2].
In order to subject the remote viewing phenomena to a rigorous long-distance test under external control, a request for geographical coordinates of a site unknown to subject and experimenters was forwarded to the OSI group responsible for threat analysis in this area.
In response, SRI personnel received a set of geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude in degrees, minutes, and seconds) of a facility, hereafter referred to as the West Virginia Site. The experimenters then carried out a remote viewing experiment on a double-blind basis, that is, blind to experimenters as well as subject. The experiment had as its goal the determination of the utility of remote viewing under conditions approximating an operational scenario.
Two subjects targeted on the site, a sensitive installation. One subject drew a detailed map of the building and grounds layout, the other provided information about the interior including codewords, data subsequently verified by sponsor sources. This report is available from Contracting Officer’s Technical Representatives 4. Since details concerning the site’s mission in general, 5 and evaluation of the remote viewing test in particular, remain highly classified to this day, all that can be said is that interest in the client community was heightened considerably following this exercise.
Because Price found the above exercise so interesting, as a personal challenge he went on to scan the other side of the globe for a Communist Bloc equivalent and found one located in the Urals, the detailed description of which is also included in Ref. [2]. As with the West Virginia Site, the report for the Urals Site was also verified by personnel in the sponsor organization as being substantially correct.
What makes the West Virginia/Urals Sites viewings so remarkable is that these are not best-ever examples culled out of a longer list; these are literally the first two site-viewings carried out in a simulated operational-type scenario. In fact, for Price these were the very first two remote viewings in our program altogether, and he was invited to participate in yet further experimentation.
OPERATIONAL REMOTE VIEWING
Midway through the second year of the program (July 1974) our CIA sponsor decided to challenge us regarding the operational tactical of remote viewing under operational conditions. A long-distance remote viewing experiment was designed and carried out on a sponsor-designated target of current interest, an unidentified research center at Semipalatinsk, USSR.
Pat Price was the remote viewer. A description of the remote viewing, taken from our declassified final report [2]. reads as given below. I cite this level of detail to indicate the thought that goes into such an “experiment” to minimize cueing while at the same time being responsive to the requirements of an operational situation. Again, this is not a “best-ever” example from a series of such viewings, but rather the very first operational Soviet target concerning which we were officially tasked.
This experiment, carried out in three phases, was under direct control of the COTR. To begin the experiment, the COTR furnished map coordinates in degrees, minutes and seconds. The only additional information provided was the designation of the target as an R&D test facility. The experimenters then closeted themselves with Subject S1, gave him the map coordinates and indicated the designation of the target as an R&D test facility. A remote-viewing experiment was then carried out. This activity constituted Phase I of the experiment.
Figure 3 - Subject effort at building layout
Figure 4 - Subject effort at crane construction
Figure 3 shows the subjects graphic effort for building layout; Figure 4 shows the subject’s particular attention to a multi-story gantry crane he observed at the site.
Both results were obtained by the experimenters on a double-blind basis before exposure to any additional COTR-held information, thus eliminating the possibility of cueing. These results were turned over to the client representatives for evaluation. For comparison an artists rendering of the site as known to the COTR (but not to the experimenters until later) is shown in Figure 5 .
Figure 5 - Actual COTR rendering of Semipalatinsk, USSR target site
Were the results not promising, the experiment would have stopped at this point. Description of the multi-story crane, however, a relatively unusual target item, was taken as indicative of possible target acquisition. Therefore, Phase II was begun, defined by the subject being made “witting” (of the client) by client representatives who introduced themselves to the subject at that point; Phase II also included a second round of experimentation on the Semipalatinsk site with direct participation of client representatives in which further data were obtained and evaluated.
As preparation for this phase, client representatives purposely kept themselves blind to all but general knowledge of the target site to minimize the possibility of cueing. The Phase II effort was focused on the generation of physical data that could be independently verified by other client sources, thus providing a calibration of the process.
The end of Phase II gradually evolved into the first part of Phase III, the generation of unverifiable data concerning the Semipalatinsk site not available to the client, but of operational interest nonetheless. Several hours of tape transcript and a notebook of drawings were generated over a two-week period.
The data describing the Semipalatinsk site were evaluated by the sponsor, and are contained in a separate report. In general, several details concerning the salient technology of the Semipalatinsk site appeared to dovetail with data from other sources, and a number of specific large structural elements were correctly described. The results contained noise along with the signal, but were nonetheless clearly differentiated from the chance results that were generated by control subjects in comparison experiments carried out by the COTR.
For discussion of the ambiance and personal factors involved in carrying out this experiment, along with further detail generated as Price (see Figure 6) “roamed” the facility, including detailed comparison of Price’s RV-generated information with later-determined “ground-truth reality,” see the accompanying article by Russell Targ in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 10, No. 1.
Additional experiments having implications for intelligence concerns were carried out, such as the remote viewing of cipher-machine type apparatus, and the RV-sorting of sealed envelopes to differentiate those that contained letters with secret writing from those that did not. To discuss these here in detail would take us too far afield, but the interested reader can follow up by referring to the now-declassified project documents [2]
FOLLOW-UP PROGRAMS
The above discussion brings us up to the end of 1975. As a result of the material being generated by both SRI and CIA remote viewers, interest in the program in government circles, especially within the intelligence community, intensified considerably and led to an ever-increasing briefing schedule.
This in turn led to an ever-increasing number of clients, contracts and tasking, and therefore expansion of the program to a multi-client base, and eventually to an integrated joint-services program under single-agency (DIA) 6 leadership. To meet the demand for the increased level of effort we first increased our professional staff by inviting Ed May to join the program in 1976, then screened and added to the program a cadre of remote viewers as consultants, and let subcontracts to increase our scope of activity.
As the program expanded, in only a very few cases could the clients identities and program tasking be revealed. Examples include a NASA-funded study negotiated early in the program by Russ Targ to determine whether the internal state of an electronic random-number generator could be detected by RV processes [16] and a study funded by the Naval Electronics Systems Command to determine whether attempted remote viewing of distant light flashes would induce correlated changes in the viewer’s brainwave (EEG) production [17]
For essentially all other projects during my 14-yr. tenure at SRI, however, the identity of the clients and MUCH OF THE TASKING WAS CLASSIFIED AND REMAINS SO TODAY. (The exception was the occasional privately-funded study.) We are told, however, that further declassification and release of much of this material is almost certain to occur.
Further development of the SRI effort in the two decades following 1975-7 were concerned with developing an operational U.S. capability, and also assessing the threat potential of its use against the U.S. by others.
The words threat assessment were often used to describe the programs purpose during its development, especially during the early years. As a result much of the remote-viewing activity was carried out under conditions where ground-truth reality was a priori known or could be determined, such as the description of U.S. facilities and technological developments, the timing of rocket test firings and underground nuclear tests, and the location of individuals and mobile units.
And, of course, we were responsive to requests to provide assistance during such events as the loss of an airplane or the taking of hostages, relying on the talents of an increasing cadre of remote-viewer/consultants, some well-known in the field such as Keith Harary, and many who have not surfaced publicly until recently, such as Joe McMoneagle.
One might ask whether in this program RV-generated information was ever of sufficient significance as to influence decisions at a policy level. This is of course impossible to determine unless policymakers were to come forward with a statement in the affirmative.
One example of a possible candidate is a study we performed at SRI during the Carter-administration debates concerning proposed deployment of the mobile MX missile system. In that scenario missiles were to be randomly shuffled from silo to silo in a silo field, in a form of a high-tech shell game. In a computer simulation of a twenty-silo field with randomly-assigned (hidden) missile locations, we were able, using RV-generated data, to show rather forcefully that the application of a sophisticated statistical averaging technique (sequential sampling) could in principle permit an adversary to defeat the system.
I briefed these results to the appropriate offices at their request, and a written report with the technical details was widely circulated among groups responsible for threat analysis [18] and with some impact. What role, if any, our small contribution played in the mix of factors behind the enormously complex decision to cancel the program will probably never be known, and must of course a priori be considered in all likelihood negligible. Nonetheless, this is a prototypical example of the kind of tasking that by its nature potentially had policy implications.
Even though the details of the broad range of experiments, some brilliant successes, many total failures, have not yet been released, we have nonetheless been able to publish summaries of what was learned in these studies about the overall characteristics of remote viewing, as in Table 5 of Reference [8].
Furthermore, over the years we were able to address certain questions of scientific interest in a rigorous way and to publish the results in the open literature. Examples include the apparent lack of attenuation of remote viewing due to seawater shielding (submersible experiments) [8], the amplification of RV performance by use of error-correcting coding techniques [19,20] and the utility of a technique we call associational remote viewing (ARV) to generate useful predictive information [21].8
As a sociological aside, we note that the overall efficacy of remote viewing in a program like this was not just a scientific issue. For example, when the Semipalatinsk data described earlier was forwarded for analysis, one group declined to get involved because the whole concept was unscientific nonsense, while a second group declined because, even though it might be real, it was possibly demonic; a third group had to be found.
And, as in the case of public debate about such phenomena, the program’s image was on occasion as likely to be damaged by an overenthusiastic supporter as by a detractor. Personalities, politics and personal biases were always factors to be dealt with.
OFFICIAL STATEMENTS/ PERSPECTIVES
With regard to admission by the government of its use of remote viewers under operational conditions, officials have on occasion been relatively forthcoming.
President Carter, in a speech to college students in Atlanta in September 1995, is quoted by Reuters as saying that during his administration a plane went down in Zaire, and a meticulous sweep of the African terrain by American spy satellites failed to locate any sign of the wreckage. It was then “without my knowledge” that the head of the CIA (Admiral Stansfield Turner) turned to a woman reputed to have psychic powers. As told by Carter, “she gave some latitude and longitude figures. We focused our satellite cameras on that point and the plane was there.”
Independently, Turner himself also has admitted the Agencys use of a remote viewer (in this case, Pat Price) 9. Recently, in a segment taped for the British television series Equinox [22], Maj. Gen. Ed Thompson, Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, U.S. Army (1977-1981), volunteered “I had one or more briefings by SRI and was impressed.... The decision I made was to set up a small, in-house, low-cost effort in remote viewing....”
Finally, a recent unclassified report [23] prepared for the CIA by the American Institutes for Research (AIR), concerning a remote viewing effort carried out under a DIA program called Star Gate (discussed in detail elsewhere in this volume), cites the roles of the CIA and DIA in the history of the program, including acknowledgment that a cadre of full-time government employees used remote viewing techniques to respond to tasking from operational military organizations 10.
As information concerning the various programs spawned by intelligence-community interest is released, and the dialog concerning their scientific and social significance is joined, the results are certain to be hotly debated. Bearing witness to this fact are the companion articles in this volume by Ed May, Director of the SRI and SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation) programs since 1985, and by Jessica Utts and Ray Hyman, consultants on the AIR evaluation cited above. These articles address in part the AIR study. That study, limited in scope to a small fragment of the overall program effort, resulted in a conclusion that although laboratory research showed statistically significant results, use of remote viewing in intelligence gathering was not warranted.
Regardless of one’s a priori position, however, an unimpassioned observer cannot help but attest to the following fact. Despite the ambiguities inherent in the type of exploration covered in these programs, the integrated results appear to provide unequivocal evidence of a human capacity to access events remote in space and time, however falteringly, by some cognitive process not yet understood.
My years of involvement as a research manager in these programs have left me with the conviction that this fact must be taken into account in any attempt to develop an unbiased picture of the structure of reality.
FOOTNOTES
1 – One example being the release of documents that are the subject of this report - see the memoir by Russell Targ elsewhere in this volume.
2 – Since the reputation of the intelligence services is mixed among members of the general populace, I have on occasion been challenged as to why I would agree to cooperate with the CIA or other elements of the intelligence community in this work. My answer is simply that as a result of my own previous exposure to this community I became persuaded that war can almost always be traced to a failure in intelligence, and that therefore the strongest weapon for peace is good intelligence.
3 – This result was published by us in advance of the ring’s discovery [9].
4 – Editor’s footnote added here: COTR - Contracting Officer’s Technical Representative
5 – An NSA listening post at the Navy’s Sugar Grove facility, according to intelligence-community chronicler Bamford [15]
6 – DIA - Defense Intelligence Agency. The CIA dropped out as a major player in the mid-seventies due to pressure on the Agency (unrelated to the RV Program) from the Church-Pike Congressional Committee.
7 – See also the contribution by Ed May elsewhere in this volume concerning his experiences from 1985 on during his tenure as Director.
8 – For example, one application of this technique yielded not only a published, statistically significant result, but also a return of $26,000 in 30 days in the silver futures market [21].
9 – The direct quote is given in Targ’s contribution elsewhere in this volume.
10 – “From 1986 to the first quarter of FY 1995, the DoD paranormal psychology program received more than 200 tasks from operational military organizations requesting that the program staff apply a paranormal psychological technique know (sic) as “remote viewing” (RV) to attain information unavailable from other sources.” [23]
REFERENCES
[1] “CIA Statement on ‘Remote Viewing’,” CIA Public Affairs Office, 6 September 1995.
[2] Harold E. Puthoff and Russell Targ, “Perceptual Augmentation Techniques,” SRI Progress Report No. 3 (31 Oct. 1974) and Final Report (1 Dec. 1975) to the CIA, covering the period January 1974 through February 1975, the second year of the program. This effort was funded at the level of $149,555.
[3] H. E. Puthoff, “Toward a Quantum Theory of Life Process,” unpublished proposal, Stanford Research Institute (1972).
[4] H. E. Puthoff and R. Targ, “Physics, Entropy and Psychokinesis,” in Proc. Conf. Quantum Physics and Parapsychology (Geneva, Switzerland); (New York: Parapsychology Foundation, 1975).
[5] Documented in “Paraphysics R&D - Warsaw Pact (U),” DST-1810S-202-78, Defense Intelligence Agency (30 March 1978).
[6] R. Targ and H. E. Puthoff, “Information Transfer under Conditions of Sensory Shielding,” Nature 252, 602 (1974).
[7] H. E. Puthoff and R. Targ, “A Perceptual Channel for Information Transfer over Kilometer Distances: Historical Perspective and Recent Research,” Proc. IEEE 64, 329 (1976).
[8] H. E. Puthoff, R. Targ and E. C. May, “Experimental Psi Research: Implications for Physics,” in The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World, edited by R. G. Jahn (AAAS Selected Symposium 57, Westview Press, Boulder, 1981).
[9] R. Targ and H. E. Puthoff, Mind Reach (Delacorte Press, New York, 1977).
[10] J. P. Bisaha and B. J. Dunne, “Multiple Subject and Long-Distance Precognitive Remote Viewing of Geographical Locations,” in Mind at Large, edited by C. T. Tart, H. E. Puthoff and R. Targ (Praeger, New York, 1979), p. 107.
[11] B. J. Dunne and J. P. Bisaha, “Precognitive Remote Viewing in the Chicago Area: a Replication of the Stanford Experiment,” J. Parapsychology 43, 17 (1979).
[12] R. G. Jahn, “The Persistent Paradox of Psychic Phenomena: An Engineering Perspective,” Proc. IEEE 70, 136 (1982).
[13] R. G. Jahn and B. J. Dunne, “On the Quantum Mechanics of Consciousness with Application to Anomalous Phenomena,” Found. Phys. 16, 721 (1986).
[14] R. G. Jahn and B. J. Dunne, Margins of Reality (Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, New York, 1987).
[15] J. Bamford, The Puzzle Palace (Penguin Books, New York, 1983) pp. 218-222.
[16] R. Targ, P. Cole and H. E. Puthoff, “Techniques to Enhance Man/Machine Communication,” Stanford Research Institute Final Report on NASA Project NAS7-100 (August 1974).
[17] R. Targ, E. C. May, H. E. Puthoff, D. Galin and R. Ornstein, “Sensing of Remote EM Sources (Physiological Correlates),” SRI Intern’l Final Report on Naval Electronics Systems Command Project N00039-76-C-0077, covering the period November 1975 - to October 1976 (April 1978).
[18] H. E. Puthoff, “Feasibility Study on the Vulnerability of the MPS System to RV Detection Techniques,” SRI Internal Report, 15 April 1979; revised 2 May 1979.
[19] H. E. Puthoff, “Calculator-Assisted Psi Amplification,” Research in Parapsychology 1984, edited by Rhea White and J. Solfvin (Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, NJ, 1985), p. 48.
[20] H. E. Puthoff, “Calculator-Assisted Psi Amplification II: Use of the Sequential-Sampling Technique as a Variable-Length Majority-Vote Code,” Research in Parapsychology 1985, edited by D. Weiner and D. Radin (Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, NJ, 1986), p. 73.
[21] H. E. Puthoff, “ARV (Associational Remote Viewing) Applications,” Research in Parapsychology 1984, edited by Rhea White and J. Solfvin (Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, NJ, 1985), p. 121.
[22] “The Real X-Files,” Independent Channel 4, England (shown 27 August 1995); to be shown in the U.S. on the Discovery Channel.
[23] M. D. Mumford, A. M. Rose and D. Goslin, “An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications,” American Institutes for Research (September 29, 1995).
© Copyright 1996 by H.E. Puthoff.
Permission to redistribute granted, but only in complete and unaltered form.
REMOTE VIEWING AT STANFORD RESEARCH INSTITUTE IN THE 1970s: A MEMOIR – By Dr Russell Targ Bay Research Institute, 1010 Harriet Street, Palo Alto, CA 94301 Volume 10 Number 1: Page 77
Hundreds of remote viewing experiments were carried out at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) from 1972 to 1986. The purpose of some of these trials was to elucidate the physical and psychological properties of psi abilities, while others were conducted to provide information for our CIA sponsor about current events in far off places.
We learned that the accuracy and reliability of remote viewing was not in any way affected by distance, size, or electromagnetic shielding, and we discovered that the more exciting or demanding the task, the more likely we were to be successful. Above all, we became utterly convinced of the reality of psi abilities.
This article focuses on two outstanding examples: One is an exceptional, map-like drawing of a Palo Alto swimming pool complex, and the other is an architecturally accurate drawing of a gantry crane located at a Soviet weapons laboratory, and verified by satellite photography. The percipient for both of these experiments was Pat Price, a retired police commissioner who was one of the most outstanding remote viewers to walk through the doors of SRI.
The American Institute for Research
Remote Viewing Time-Line
The following chronology was compiled by IRVA vice-president Paul H. Smith and is partly based on research for his book, Reading the Enemy’s Mind.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/product-description/0312875150/ ref=dp_proddesc_0/002-0512790-0267250?%5Fencoding=UTF8&n=283155
This is only a brief chronology of events in remote viewing history. Many more details could be added, and many more names included. But this will serve as a starting place to record the major events and some of the important personalities in relation to one another. Certainly, important events and personalities remain to be added. This chronology will become more complete over time. If you wish to nominate an event to be considered for addition to the timeline please forward it to Timeline.
Readers should be aware that there are two parallel remote viewing timelines: the operational, military-run program at Ft. Meade, Maryland, and the civilian-led, military-funded research program in California. External civilian research and applications were also taking place. In the chronology below, the operational and military lines are intermingled with a few references to the RV-related activities in the civilian sector.
Sept 1971 Ingo Swann begins PK research with Cleve Backster
Editor Paul H. Smith to Jack Sarfatti: can you ‘lock-down’ your CONTACT timeframe re: future physics, etc.?]
Sarfatti comments:
“I met Backster in 1974. He will be at Santa Fe Conference April 2005 where I am also speaking. http://www.bizspirit.com CIA Chief of Station the late Harold Chipman also conducted REAL successful RV operations on Soviet Union targets - or so he told me in mid-80’s.”
Nov 1971
Swann participates in PK experiments in Gertrude Schmeidler’s lab; also participates in OBE experiments.
8 Dec 1971
First remote viewing experiment (describing weather in Tucson, AZ from ASPR offices in NYC). Term “Remote Viewing” is adopted. Sarfatti comments: “Was Stewart Hammeroff involved in that one?”
22 Feb 1972 First beacon experiments (also conducted at ASPR)
March 1972 Cleve Backster shows Swann a letter from Dr. Hal Puthoff at Stanford Research Institute. Swann and Puthoff communicate.
6 June 1972 Swann/Puthoff magnetometer / quark-detector equipment experiment in physics building at Stanford University.
27 June 1972 Puthoff communicates with Kit Green, Central Intelligence Agency, concerning the magnetometer experiment results.
Sarfatti comments: “Kit Green and I in active contact up until very recently.”
Aug 1972 Under Puthoff’s supervision, CIA representatives conduct first evaluation trials with Swann. Russell Targ visits Puthoff at SRI.
1 Oct 1972 CIA awards SRI $50K exploratory contract.
Sept 1972 Russell Targ joins the RV program at SRI.
Summer 1973 Pat Price and Ingo Swann remote view NSA’s Sugar Grove facility in West Virginia.
Sarfatti comments: “Pat Price was a very close friend of Hal Chipman’s. Indeed they had some private security business. Chip also allegedly part of early MK ULTRA in San Francisco. Some episodes TV Series The Enforcer written by Chip. I also have his film treatment “The Union” on anti-Soviet CIA RV Cold War Ops (fictionalized). Hal Puthoff still refuses to acknowledge Chip’s role in all this. Chip told me Hal was out of the loop on that for security reasons. Chip and Neocon Pundit Stephen Schwartz had a great falling out. Reason is classified for this forum.”
July 1974 Pat Price’s operational remote viewing of a facility near Semipalatinsk in USSR conducted.
Sarfatti comments: “This was really controlled by Harold Chipman at a layer Hal Puthoff was not privy to. Chip met Russell Targ at Henry Dakin’s 3220 Sacramento St in 1985. I don’t know if Russ recalls but there were witnesses (Creon Levit, myself, Bob Jones, Kim Burrafato). The key physics issue here is “signal nonlocality” that is strictly forbidden in micro-quantum theory. Indeed this is why “Quantum Mind” is not a good term. David Deutsch says no consciousness in micro-quantum theory. I agree. Antony Valentini showed what changes to micro-quantum theory are needed to get “signal nonlocality”. Macro-quantum theory is to micro-quantum theory as general relativity is to special relativity. You need signal nonlocality to have RV as well as ordinary interior consciousness, i.e. naturally conscious nano-tech AI androids for example. Wait till MAC’s Steve Jobs announces “conscious computers”! Our minds are large things not micro-things. Large “hologram” quantum coherent phase modulated systems are immune to environmental decoherence because of “phase rigidity” (PW Anderson’s “More is different” indeed “more” allows PRESPONSE ((Dick Bierman et-al)) “signal nonlocality”). Therefore, Max Tegmark’s objection against Penrose-Hammeroff does not apply. Signal nonlocality compromises quantum computer cryptography-teleportation-density coding et-al schemes - a backdoor loophole.”
18 Oct 1974 Russell Targ and Hall Puthoff publish article on remote viewing research in Nature.
July 1975 CIA terminates (overt) involvement in and funding of remote viewing.
Later in 1975 Air Force Foreign Technology Division becomes the primary funding source of SRI research program, with Dale Graff supervising. Same group allegedly involved in flying saucer Black Ops.
March 1976 Puthoff & Targ publish a major article about remote viewing in Proceedings of IEEE.
1976 Dr. Edwin May joins RV program at SRI International.
1977 The book Mind Reach (Targ & Puthoff) is published.
June 1977 Founding of Mobius Group; Project Deepquest - a submarine RV experiment is jointly conducted by SRI International / Stephan Schwartz. Sarfatti comments: “Not the same Stephen Schwartz who wrote “The Two Faces of Islam” same name two different people.”
Sept 1977 US Army’s remote viewing program GONDOLA WISH is established by Lt. F. Holmes “Skip” Atwater at the direction of the Army Assistant Chief of Staff Intelligence, Maj. Gen. Edmund Thompson.
13 July 1978 GONDOLA WISH name is changed to GRILL FLAME.
Oct 1978 US Army’s INSCOM is tasked by the ACSI with developing a parapsychology program.
Dec 78 - Jan 79 Selection of remote viewers for GRILL FLAME. Mel Riley, Joe McMoneagle, Ken Bell, and three others are included.
4 Sept 1979 First Army-conducted operational remote viewing session performed.
March 1979 Remote viewers working with Dale Graff at Wright-Patterson AFB and at SRI correctly locate downed Soviet TU-22 recce aircraft.
1979-81 Stephan Schwartz conducts Alexandria Project, a remote viewing archaeology project in Egypt. His book Alexandria Project is subsequently published. Sarfatti comments: “I suspect that real Egyptologists consider this and also similar stuff by Jim Hurtak to be bogus. See “The Star Gate Conspiracy”.”
ca. 1980 Air Force Chief of Staff cancels AF RV program; Dale Graff joins Defense Intelligence Agency as principal staff officer for remote viewing effort.
1981-82 Puthoff and Swann develop coordinate remote viewing (CRV) architecture.
1982 Russell Targ leaves SRI International’s RV program. Mel Riley departs Ft. Meade’s operational RV unit.
1982 With Swann as instructor, two individuals (Tom McNear and Rob Cowart) begin first CRV training.
Dec 1982 US Army’s RV project’s name is changed to CENTER LANE.
1983 Charlene Cavanaugh joins military RV unit in August; Paul H. Smith joins in September.
Jan 1984 Bill Ray joins military RV unit; second group of CRV candidates begins training (group includes Smith, Ray, Charlene Chavanaugh; Ed Dames is last minute addition to training contract while remaining assigned to his sponsoring unit).
1984 The book Mind Race (Targ & Keith Harary) is published.
Apr 1984 Lyn Buchanan joins the Ft. Meade RV unit.
Sept 1984 Joe McMoneagle retires from the Ft. Meade RV unit.
July 1984 Brig. Gen Harry Soyster replaces Maj. Gen. Bert Stubblebine as Commander, INSCOM. Orders close of Army’s CENTER LANE RV program. Soyster eventually persuaded to allow transfer of program & personnel to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
1985 Dr. Hal Puthoff leaves SRI International to take directorship of Institute of Advanced Studies in Austin, TX. Sarfatti comments: “This is little more than a smallish office lab in a cheap industrial park in Austin suburb - not at all like IAS in Princeton, New Jersey. See Nick Cook’s description in “The Hunt for Zero Point”.”
Dr. Edwin May becomes director of SRI’s program.
1985-86 Caravel Project, an underwater archaeology project conducted by Stephan Schwartz.
31 Jan 1986 After a year of holding operational control, DIA takes formal control of the military operational RV program, and renames it SUN STREAK. Ed Dames joins RV unit.
1986 Mel Riley is once more assigned to the Ft. Meade RV unit.
1987 Brig Leander Project, an underwater archaeology project conducted by Stephan Schwartz.
Dec 1987 F. Holmes “Skip” Atwater departs the Ft. Meade RV unit on retirement leave.
June 1988 David Morehouse is assigned to the Ft. Meade RV unit.
Dec 1988 Ed Dames departs the Ft. Meade RV unit.
June 1990 David Morehouse departs, and Mel Riley retires from the Ft. Meade RV unit.
Aug 1990 Paul Smith is reassigned from the Ft. Meade RV unit to the 101st Airborne Division for Desert Shield / Desert Storm.
Late 1990 Dale Graff becomes chief of the Ft. Meade RV unit, and changes project name to STAR GATE.
1991 Edwin May moves RV research program from SRI International to Science Applications International Corporation.
Jan 1992 Lyn Buchanan retires from the Ft. Meade RV unit.
1993 The book Mind Trek (McMoneagle) is published.
June 1993 Dale Graff retires.
1994 Wording added to Federal Y95 budget transferring control of STAR GATE from DIA to CIA.
1995 CIA begins Congressionally directed evaluation of RV as an Intelligence tool. American Institute of Research is hired to do a “scientific” study. But in the official report published in September, AIR concluded that RV has no value as an intelligence tool. Significant questions are raised about the completeness and accuracy of the AIR study.
30 June 1995
CIA cancels STAR GATE program. The five remaining personnel are reassigned to other jobs in the government.
28 Nov 1995 Ted Koppel’s Nightline reveals existence of government remote viewing effort. Interviewed are former CIA director Robert Gates, Dale Graff, Edwin May, and Joe McMoneagle.
1996
Remote Viewing is featured in many media articles and broadcasts, and becomes a featured item on Art Bell’s and other talk shows.
Nov 1996
The book Psychic Warrior (Morehouse) is published.
Feb 1997 The book Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America’s Psychic Spies (Schnabel) is published. Sarfatti comments: “This is an important book, note Chapter “You can’t go home again” story of one-armed man and also story of cold metallic voices on tapes about Uri Geller.”
8 March 1999
The International Remote Viewing Association is formed.
19-20 March 1999 First remote viewing conference: CRV Conference hosted by Lyn Buchanan’s training company, P>S>I. Featured speakers: Russell Targ, John Alexander..
19-20 May 2000 Year 2000 Remote Viewing Conference in Mesquite, NV. Featured speakers: Charles T. Tart, Jessica Utts, Larry Dossey, Marcello Truzzi..
June 2001 First IRVA sponsored remote viewing conference. Held at Texas, Station Las Vegas, NV. Featured speakers: Edgar Mitchell, Dean Radin, Jeffrey Mishlove. Sarfatti comments: “See my article about this in FIRST EDITION of Mishlove’s “The Roots of Consciousness” removed in second edition for some strange reason I think having to do with Black Ops in-fighting. Very Orwellian since the content of my removed article is very relevant today.”
June 2002 IRVA remote viewing conference in Austin, TX, celebrating 30 years of remote viewing. Featured speakers: Ingo Swann, Hal Puthoff, Dale Graff, Cleve Backster.
October 2003
Joint sponsorship of remote viewing conference with the A.R.E. Held at Virginia Beach, Virginia. Featured speakers: Charles Cayce, James Spottiswoode, Hal Puthoff, and Dale Graff.
June 2004 IRVA remote viewing conference in Las Vegas, NV. Featured speakers: Ingo Swann, Melvin Morse, and Daryl Bem
Copyright © 2002 by Paul H. Smith. Permission granted to quote in full or part with proper attribution. Appendix
From: Jack Sarfatti Date: 02/14/05 18:21:54 To: Gary S. Bekkum Subject: Re: Eric’s Teleportation Study
Thanks. This is bad physics, some supported by taxpayer’s money, in my opinion as well as in the opinion of several top physicists at GR 17 who know about it who I spoke to in Dublin.
On Feb 13, 2005, at 7:56 PM, Gary S. Bekkum wrote:
> > http://americanantigravity.com/eric-davis.shtml > > Q&A With Dr. Eric Davis > By Tim Ventura & Eric Davis, PhD > February 4th, 2005 > > Dr. Eric Davis is a physicist specializing in Breakthrough Propulsion > & Power Physics and Astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Studies > at Austin/EarthTech International, Inc. He’s agreed to speak with us > about his past experiences in breakthrough physics research, as well > as his current leadership role at the STAIF Conference. > > > AAG: First things first: you just started a new job at Earthtech > International working with doctors Hal Puthoff & Michael Ibison. Tell > us a bit about how things are going, and some of the projects that > you’ve taken on with their team? > > ED: It’s actually the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, and > EarthTech International, Inc. is the corporate parent. Work is going > really very good. We are exploring fundamental questions concerning > the relationship of the quantum ZPE to gravity, inertia and particle > mass, and the development of schemes to effectively tap the ZPE for > power generation, etc. We are also advancing theoretical work on Hal’s > Polarizable-Vacuum Representation of General Relativity in order to > develop toy models for understanding general relativity-related FTL > propulsion schemes (such as warp drives and traversable wormholes), > and how we might find clues from the model to engineer these in the > lab, etc. > > In that connection, Hal Puthoff, Claudio Maccone (Italian physicist > who recently retired from Alenia Spazio) and myself published a new > paper on this effort, which will appear in the March 2005 issue (vol. > 37, no. 3) of the peer-reviewed scholarly physics journal "General > Relativity and Gravitation." In the paper we analyzed Levi-Civita’s > artificial gravity spacetime metric in terms of Hal’s PV-GR model and > developed the equations showing how either an electric field or a > magnetic field will alter the vacuum index of refraction and > subsequently modify the speed of light in the artifically-induced > gravitational field region.
Hogwash. > > Also, EarthTech/IASA serves as a clearing house for evaluating and > testing the numerous alternative power generation inventions (such as > fuel cells, ZPE, cold fusion, etc.) that are brought to us from all > over by maverick inventors. One can go to our website > www.earthtech.org and see the papers and experiments posted there.
This part of their work is mostly OK. Hal Puthoff has allowed his ego to get in the way of his objectivity about his own theory. Eric Davis was hardly making a living even at Bigelow’s (who paid him maybe 35K a year - a pittance) and is compromising for a paycheck. That’s the reality here.
> > AAG: From what I understand, the main research area for Earthtech > hasn’t been space-science -- hasn’t it been focused on Zero Point > Energy? Can you tell us a bit about how ZPE research is coming along, > and if we’ll see any real applications for this in the next few years? > > ED: I answered most of this in my response above. I cannot comment on > specific proprietary research, but I can say there are ideas we are > looking into for the theoretical development and experimental > implementation of tapping ZPE for power generation. All of this is in > the works, so there is nothing I can report on. > > AAG: You’ve done some remarkable speculative physics research, and I’m > wondering how your life experience & training led you into this type > of work. > > ED: Actually, I was led to this type of work by the pioneering > research and popular papers/books/articles published by Dr. Robert L. > Forward and his colleagues during the 1970s, which ignited an intense > spark within me that fostered my childhood dream of someday being able > to fly to the stars on a warp-drive starship, and being one of the > guys to invent the physics. > > I was also a huge fan of the TV shows Star Trek, Lost In Space and The > Outer Limits when I was a kid (and I still am a fan!!). In addition, > the Dept. of Defense and the MacArthur Foundation produced (via film > producers Robert Emenegger and Allan Sandler) a 1974 TV documentary > that strongly influencedme: UFOs: Past, Present & Future, which was a > Golden Globe nominee for best documentary production in 1975, and it > was later updated and re-released in1979 as UFOs: It Has Begun. I also > watched all the ground-breaking classic science fiction movies of the > 20th century, among my favorites are: The Time Machine, The War of the > Worlds, The Day The Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, the Star Wars > movies, the Star Trek movies, the Alien movies, 2001: A Space Odyssey, > Planet of the Apes, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET: The > Extraterrestrial, etc. > > Starting in middle school I read all the Science News and Scientific > American magazines; and I read lots of science fiction novels written > by Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Arthur C. Clark, H. G. Wells, Ray > Bradbury, Frank Herbert, and Larry Niven. I also read scientific and > investigative journalism books written by Carl Sagan, Jacques Vallee, > Carl Sagan and Thornton Page, Howard Blum, Paul Davies, Robert > Emenegger, John Fuller, Donald Keyhoe, Allen Hynek, Brad Steiger, etc. > Other books I read were a variety of physics and physics history > books; most pertaining to particle physics and unified field theories, > Einstein’s relativity theories, quantum theories, and space > exploration. > > All of this plus the real-world R&D work being done in the 70s-80s on > future flight propulsion physics by Hughes Research Lab (then in > Malibu, CA), the Air Force, NASA, Boeing, McDonnell-Douglas, etc. > ignited that huge spark within me. > > Another much later turning point for me (that turned on that inner > spark even higher) was when I read Robert Forward’s 1988 book "Future > Magic" while in grad school. In that book Bob wrote about his > conceptual physics explaining telepathy, dousing, consciousness, and > the spirits of deceased people. That was surprising considering that > the topic of the book had to do with FTL physics, space and time > warps, antimatter rockets, etc. What a blast! > > And, if you don’t already know this, Bob was Joseph Weber’s Ph.D. grad > student in the 1960s at the University of Maryland, where they did > pioneering research developing gravity wave detectors. Bob’s first > prototype detector is now in the Smithsonian Institute Museum in > Washington DC. Bob was a winner of the annual international general > relativity physics essay competition, was awarded a Hughes Corporation > graduate student fellowship to do gravity research with Weber, > published numerous technical papers and was awared patents, and saw > many of his gravity detection sensors launched on Air Force > satellites. His winning essay was about his discovery of antigravity > force solutions in Einstein’s general relativity theory. I pointed out > this work (in connection with my upcoming Advanced Propulsion Study > for the Air Force) in a January 2004 briefing to the Air Force > Research Lab. > > Anyway, I first met Robert Forward, Robert Bussard, Alan C. Holt, Dave > Froning and others at the annual AIAA Joint Propulsion Conference in > Las Vegas during the summer of 1979. I had just finished high school > then. UFOs and their hypothetical propulsion physics, warp drives, > fusion ramjets, antimatter rockets, photon and laser rockets, etc. > were all the rage among the large mainstream aerospace and military > defense corporations, U.S. military and NASA physicists and engineers > of the time. The AIAA’s annual joint propulsion conferences had > "Future Flight" sessions where research into these topics were > presented as serious technical papers. That tradition continues today, > more or less, in the guise of the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics > technical paper sessions and the STAIF’s Near and Far Term Propulsion > Concepts sessions. > > I established a correspondence relationship with Bob Forward and Alan > Holt that went on (off and on) for the first 5 years while I was in > college and going on to grad school. But my correspondences and > personal face-to-face interactions became more steady and continued > for 20 years thereafter. All told, I have known these individuals for > 26 years. Although, Bob Forward died from an inoperable brain tumor in > Fall 2001, and this was awful for everyone who knew him. > > Bob Forward began mentoring me in the area of breakthrough propulsion > and power physics (a.k.a. BPP) by first introducing me to all of his > Hughes/Air Force research studies on antimatter physics, antimatter > rocket propulsion, etc. His mentoring evolved to include his research > into exploiting the quantum vacuum zero-point energies/fluctuations, > Einstein general relativity FTL schemes leading to warp drives and > traversable wormholes, exploring and exploiting psychic phenomena, > exploring "new physics", exploring the known anomalies (or finding new > ones) in current theoretical and experimental physics to find > potential breakthrought propulsion and power. > > Bob sent me copies of all his reports and the reports of other > physicists/engineers he worked with, and he put me on his Mirror > Matter Newsletter membership, etc. He sent me everything he published > that was of relevance to breakthrough propulsion physics (BPP). When I > started grad school Bob told me the bad news that there were no > graduate Ph.D. degree programs in this field, so I would have to get a > Ph.D. in some discipline of physics I liked and get a job in industry > if I wanted to pursue this area professionally as a full-time career. > But he said even then that industry and government was not fully > funding this area of research for the long-term. > > In 1989 I met with Bob at an AIAA conference and told him I had turned > in my Ph.D. dissertation and was waiting for my doctoral oral defense > to be scheduled, and that I expected to soon be graduated and > available for employment. He gave me more bad news. There were no > industry jobs left where I could do BPP research because of corporate > retrenchment across the U.S. due to the beginning recession and the > fall of the Berlin Wall and communism in Russia created a move to cut > down the DoD budget. > > So my potential career got derailed. I couldn’t do postdoc work in my > astrophysics discipline because that too was being affected by > decisions in the first Bush Administration to cut down NASA spending > on space exploration, of which I was a part during my graduate work. > With space science research funding being cut, there were no > forseeable postdoc positions available in areas I was experienced to > work in. > > So I had to resort to teaching jobs at community colleges and > universities to get by. In the mid-1990s I ended up traveling around > Asia while working for the U.S. Air Force under contract through the > University of Maryland. > > After my stint in Asia with the AF, I was recruited for a new job in > Las Vegas working as a research physicist at the National Inst. for > Discovery Science. It is there where I was first introduced to Dr. Hal > Puthoff who served on the NIDS Science Advisory Board. However, it was > because of my association with Bob Forward that I first became aware > of Hal’s scholarly physics journal publications on ZPE research while > I was in grad school since Bob was following Hal’s work and reported > on it in one of his later Air Force studies. > > Before I finished grad school, I got on the bandwagon of the 1985-89 > research done and papers published by Kip Thorne and his students on > traversable wormholes and time machines. In the 1990s when I was in S. > Korea working for the Air Force and U.S. Forces Korea, I continued my > research into that subject and later linked up with a black hole > astrophysicist at Kunsan National University. Then things in the > physics community really began to heat up when Paul J. Nahin’s book > "Time Machines", Matt Visser’s book "Lorentzian Wormholes" and Kip > Thorne’s book "Black Holes & Time Warps" were published. These showed > that wormholes, space warps and time machines had become a mainstream > cottage industry of research in physics. I began to hope that the > breathrough propulsion physics field would then take off and get the > serious long-term funding it deserved. > > In 1997 the NASA-LeRC (now known as the John Glenn Research Center) > and NASA-JPL began the official BPP program following the publication > of these books, and Hal was invited by the program manager at > NASA-LeRC (Marc Millis) to join the effort. Hal liked my preliminary > work on traversable wormholes because I showed him that aspects of the > quantum vacuum zero-point energy can provide the special mass-energy > field needed to generate a space warp or traversable wormhole. So he > and Marc Millis brought me into the NASA BPP program. Bob Forward, Al > Holt, Frank Mead (Advanced Concepts Office at AFRL, Edwards AFB, CA), > and Dave Froning were also among those involved. So from 1997 to the > present Hal and I and our colleagues have been working together on > breakthrough propulsion physics in one form or another. > > It was during my early years at NIDS that Hal took over as my BPP > mentor because Bob Forward’s involvement in the BPP field was winding > down as he was shifting his interests into other directions like > writing science fiction novels, getting his space tethers business off > the ground, and getting ready for full retirement. > > Even though the NASA BPP program ended up losing funding, Hal and I > continue to work together on our favorite BPP topics, and we also > continue to collaborate with Frank Mead, Al Holt, Dave Froning, and > others who are in our circle. > > I was laid-off from my job at NIDS in Spring 2002 along with the other > principal staff and science advisory board members, so I went into > business for myself as a contractor/consultant to the Air Force > Research Lab’s Advanced Concepts Office (working for Dr. Frank Mead) > at Edwards AFB, CA. > > In the summer of 2001 Frank Mead approached me to do advanced concepts > contract work for him because Bob Forward was no longer available to > do BPP research studies for AFRL. So in the fall of 2001 I formed my > company Warp Drive Metrics (but did not register it as a business in > Las Vegas). My first AFRL contract (the Teleportation Physics Study) > began in February 2002, four months before I learned that Bigelow was > going to begin the massive lay-offs at NIDS. My second AFRL contract > (Ball Lightning Study) begin in April 2002 and ended January 2003, and > that report was published in May 2003. I still have two other > contracts that I completed, and publication of those contract reports > is pending. I’m wrapping up a fifth contract now, but it is an > editorial re-write of someone else’s final report. > > AFRL advanced concepts program funding was severely cut in FY04 > because of major reshuffling of Air Force research priorities, so I > was forced to find other employment. Last fall I was offered, and I > accepted, a job offer to work for Hal at EarthTech Int’l/IASA. I moved > to Austin, TX last November to start my new job. > > AAG: A few months ago, the Air Force commissioned you to write a > report on teleportation. I’ve read it cover to cover, and it looks > like a blueprint for a real-life StarGate technology. Can you tell us > anything about your findings? > > ED: The Teleportation Physics Study contract was officially > commissioned in February 2002. It ended in July 2003, and the report > was finally published by the Air Force in Aug. 2004. > > It is physically possible, in principle (based on Einstein’s general > relativity theory and also on a toy model for FTL flight based on > Hal’s Polarizable-Vacuum Representation of General Relativity), to > build a traversable wormhole (in the form of a stargate). But we have > a long way to go before we can get a handle on the technology for > creating the negative energy density required to hold open and > stabilize such a thing. We have good technical ideas on how to do > this, but more work needs to be done to shore up those ideas and get a > feel for the numbers that will be involved on an experimental level, > and we need to examine how to best demonstrate a wormhole in the lab > once we do get a handle on negative energy generation. > The latest published paper by Matt Visser and his colleagues proved > that one can significantly relax the demand for a large amount of > negative energy density, such that we can now consider arbitrarily > (near-zero) small amounts for the creation of a traversable wormhole. > That means the demand on any particular technology to produce a > negative energy density field can be dramatically reduced to workable > laboratory scale. There is now an opening for us to do a lab > demonstration once we develop a negative energy generation system that > can produce a quantifiable amount of negative energy in a confined > way. > > Quantum teleportation will continue to evolve. The negative effects of > decoherence upon the entanglement process is now becoming well > understood and brought under control, so that the fidelity of > teleporting the quantum states of large samples of atomic matter and > photons has improved and will continue to do so. The science will > evolve to demonstrate the teleportation of molecular states and later > on large samples of molecules will have their states successfully > teleported. Other quantum teleportation breakthroughs will continue to > be announced, and these will involve teleporting other features and > facets of matter and information that we have yet to fathom. > > It will become possible in the future to forsee dabbling in the > quantum teleportation of live beings and bulk inanimate matter (like > cargo). But this will involve the destruction of their physical > quantum states in order to teleport those states to another "glom" of > matter, thus destroying the originals. This will create difficult > ethical questions that will have to be considered. > > AAG: Next, I wanted to ask about the feedback you received from the > teleportation study. I’m sure that the Air Force gets tons of fan-mail > asking about when they’re going to build something like we’ve seen in > StarGate SG-1, and I’m wondering if it made them nervous to see a > speculative proposal for the same idea coming across their desk. Did > they take it well? > > ED: The Air Force doesn’t know what it does because it’s such a large > bureaucracy. The teleportation study only came to the attention of > commanders at WPAFB, the Pentagon, and members of Congress when the > media bruhaha broke out. The Air Force took it all very well in the > end, though. > > However, the AF was caught off-guard and surprised by the unexpected > outburst of media attention and the accompanying outcry that came from > the professional political, national security and scientific agitators > in society. But in the end, the AF supported the study because it had > to, because it is required to (see below for specifics on this). > > What these agitators and self-appointed pundits don’t understand about > the federal government is that there are major policy and statutory > requirements that all U.S. military research labs must explore, > investigate, and conduct out-of-the-box research in areas not usually > considered mainstream in order to uncover all possibilities for > expanding the envelope of presently known science and/or to discover > new science in support of future military needs and missions. This is > why the AFRL’s Advanced Concepts Office at Edwards AFB commissioned > the teleportation physics study. DARPA’s R&D mandate is another > example of these policy/statutory regulations. > > AAG: Speaking of TV, since you’ve done the study, if Hollywood called > you up to consult for the TV show, would you give it any thought? > > ED: Sure! Many qualified scientists already do this. NASA has > personnel who consult to the film/TV studios on productions related to > spaceflight, space science fiction, etc. > > AAG: You have a big event coming up in February -- it’s once again > time for the annual STAIF conference, and you’re on the panel of > scientific experts who review submitted papers. Can you give us a bit > of background about the STAIF conference, as well as your > participation in it? > > ED: I’m presenting an invited oral paper on the wormhole-stargate > aspect of teleportation, which is based on the AFRL study.
STAIFF is Paul Murad’s Forum. Murad is at DIA and has been wasting tax payer’s money IMHO. American Institute of Physics has supported STAIFF. Robert Park would be upset if he knew. ;-) > > STAIF is the Space Technologies & Applications International Forum > that is annually hosted/sponsored by the Univ. of New Mexico’s > Institute for Space and Nuclear Power Studies in Albuquerque. The > symposium is comprised of a number of different technical conferences > that have an emphasis on space technology development. The part I am > involved with is the space nuclear power and propulsion conference > which is the venue for the Future Frontiers sessions. These are where > the BPP related papers will be presented. The sessions include papers > on detecting and harnessing high frequency gravity waves for > propulsion, wormholes, warp drives, anomalies known in present > theories and experiments in physics from which we might derive some > kind of BPP technology, FTL communications, other FTL flight concepts, > antimatter rockets, advanced antimatter-augmented nuclear fusion > rockets, ZPE-based space drives, different proposals for > propellantless propulsion, antigravity, gravity/inertia modification > theories and experiments, etc. > The talks are all quite diverse and comprehensive. > > The papers that get presented as talks at the symposium and published > in the proceedings (published by the American Inst. of Physics Press) > are all peer-reviewed for quality and efficacy. Our Future Frontiers > paper review panels strive to include scientifically sound (credible!) > AND cutting-edge non-mainstream concepts, while making sure to weed > out the pathological crackpot elements that tend to infest the BPP and > alternative energies/alternative physics fields. > > AAG: The Gerstenstein Effect is one STAIF proposal that caught my eye > -- Gary Stephenson has been suggesting it as one possible explanation > for these gravitational force-beam experiments that we’ve been hearing > about. Any comments on this effect, and whether it’s worth building an > experiment to test? > > ED: Exactly! And it is for this reason that I support such > experimental work on this topic. It has only been possible to > implement this kind of experiment in recent years because technology > caught up with the theory, which was originally published in the > 1960s. > > AAG: We’ve talked a bit about Dr. Ning Li in the past -- she sent me > an email in 2003 indicating 11-kilowatts of output effect, and > apparently nobody’s heard from her since then. I haven’t been able to > make heads or tails of this, but from what I gather she’s completely > disappeared. Do you think this means she’s onto something big? > > ED: No, not really. It might mean she was unable to measure any effect > from the device she tested for the Army, and so has been forced to > find other financial support to stay in business. The terms of her > Army contract were clear, she was to produce a report stating in the > positive or negative on the experimental efficacy of her A/C gravity > theory. Hal and I saw her at the May 2003 MITRE Corp.’s Int’l HFGW > Conference, and she reported in her talk that the A/C gravity field at > a Cu nucleus arising from the magnetic dipole effect is ~ 10^-2 > milli-gees (which translates to ~ 10^-4 m/s^2 acceleration effect). > > AAG: What are some of the benefits associated with presenting an idea > at STAIF, and how can people learn more about it? > > ED: The purpose of STAIF is to communicate the results of recent > engineering and scientific research to all other aerospace, nuclear > power and propulsion workers, to communicate the results of work that > is of relevance to these fields. One can go to the STAIF website and > find out more about them. > > AAG: Time for the Final Question: What are your plans for future > research? > > ED: Wormholes, warp drives, ZPE power production, generating negative > energy, laboratory demonstration, alternative physics and cosmology, > etc. My plans, as are those of the staff at IASA, are quite ecclectic > and theoretically very rich and very deep. > > Special Thanks: We’d like to express special thanks to Dr. Eric Davis > for his time in putting together responses to these questions. He’s > been in last-minute preparations for STAIF 2005, and the time that he > spent answering our interview questions was precious indeed! --Tim > Ventura, American Antigravity.Com > > > > > Related Information > > EarthTech Int. - Learn more about Eric’s new stomping ground -- > working with Dr. Puthoff & Dr. Ibison at EarthTech: Click Here > > > USAF Teleportation - Check out this stunning USAF report on how to > build a real-life StarGate! Click Here > > > Contact Eric - Questions about research or his work at STAIF? Contact > Dr. Davis via email: Click Here > > > Disclaimer - Please note that Eric Davis responses are based on his > own opinions, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of EarthTech > International.
Appendix 2
Preface to Mind-Reach
“Discoveries of any great moment in mathematics and other disciplines, once they are discovered, are seen to be extremely simple and obvious, and make everybody, including their discoverer, appear foolish for not having discovered them before.” -G. Spencer Brown Laws of Form.
Scientists have long attempted to determine the truth or falsity of claims for the existence of so-called psychic, or paranormal functioning; that is, the ability of certain individuals to perceive and describe data not discerned by any known sense. During a lengthy series of experiments conducted in the Electronics and Bioengineering Laboratory of Stanford Research Institute for the past three years, we have been investigating those facets of human perception that appear to fall outside the range of well-understood perceptual or processing capabilities. The primary achievement of this research has been the demonstration of high-quality “remote viewing”: the ability of experienced and inexperienced volunteers to view, by means of mental processes, remote geographical or technical targets such as roads, buildings, and laboratory apparatus., Our accumulated data from over a hundred observations with more than twenty subjects indicate the following:’ The phenomenon is not limited to short distances; electrical shielding does not appear to degrade the quality or accuracy of perception; most of the correct information given by subjects is of a nonanalytical nature pertaining to shape, form, color, and material rather than to function or name, suggesting that information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding may depend primarily on functioning of the brain’s right hemisphere; and finally,-the-,principal difference between experienced and inexperienced volunteers= is not that the inexperienced never exhibit the faculty, but rather that their results are simply less reliable. This indicates to us that remote viewing is probably a latent and widely distributed perceptual ability. Although we do not yet understand the precise nature of the information channel that couples remote events with human perception, certain ideas in information theory, quantum theory, and neuropsychological research appear to bear directly on the issue. As a result, our assumption is that the phenomenon will be found consistent with modern scientific thought, and can therefore be expected to yield to the scientific method. We consider it important to continue data collection and to encourage others to do likewise; investigations such as those reported here need replication and extension under as wide a variety of rigorously controlled conditions as possible. We have two principal reasons for writing this book: The first is our desire to put our research into perspective with regard to the publicity it has received over the past three years. For example, early in our program we carried out a six-week series of experiments with Uri Geller. We eventually published the results of these experiments along with those of two much more extensive studies in the British scientific journal Nature.2 Since that time we have observed that although our work with Mr. Geller accounts for only 3 percent of our overall effort, it has received 97 percent of our publicity. Therefore, one of our purposes here is to present a more balanced view of our research. Our second objective is to attempt to prevent psychic functioning from again becoming undiscovered. There is great resistance to accepting data indicating the existence of the paranormal. Its acceptance by society is limited to the degree it violates the main tenets of our shared conditioning with regard to the sensory limits that we have come to accept as absolute. Its acceptance by science is limited to the degree that the underlying laws governing the phenomena remain unidentified. With the success of modern science in organizing and explaining most of the (normal) observable phenomena and available experience, we have become accustomed to dismissing the merely unexplained as nonexistent. Psychic functioning is simply a body of observational data whose scientific description is as yet very incomplete. Until the observations described in this book can be fit into niches that allow them to be perceived and experienced as the familiar, there will be a continuing desire to sweep them away, since they are annoying reminders of the incompleteness of our knowledge of the world around us. Our attempt here is to provide the beginning of a stable data base upon which an understanding of these phenomena can be constructed. After we have presented this data in lectures, inevitably we’ve received a telephone call or letter within a couple of weeks from someone who had followed the procedure we outlined, exclaiming, “It really works!” Thus we go beyond just describing our work, detailing a procedure which can be followed by the reader should he desire to experience paranormal functioning for himself. The authors have followed a procedure in their work of alternating the order of names on publication of mutual efforts, and therefore the order is not significant; they share equal responsibility for the material presented in this book.
Russell Targ Harold E. Puthoff Palo Alto, Califomia
Introduction to Mind-Reach by Margaret Mead
This book is a clear, straightforward account of a set of successful experiments that demonstrate the existence of “remote viewing,” a hitherto invalidated human capacity. The conventional and time honored canons of the laboratory have been observed, aided by our current repertoire of instrumentation, Faraday shielding, specifically generated sets of random numbers, and cathode rays. People-both inexperienced learners as well as those who have previously demonstrated psychic proficiency-have been used as subjects successfully. It is a perfectly regular and normal piece of scientific work, as is the study of communication among bees, the luminescence of fireflies, the way in which frogs discriminate between the sexes, or the scientific study of any new biological phenomena. Contemporary quantum physics, specific qualities of electromagnetic fields, and advances in brain research not only have determined the experimental methods, but have contributed to the tentative explanations advanced in this book as to how this newly observed ability might operate. As all work following the canons of science must be, the experiments are presented in a form that can be inspected and replicated under the same conditions, and further tested by altering various experimental parameters. The claimed results are narrow but clear. The particular set of human beings studied have been able to produce formal drawings on paper approximating some distant spatial target mediated only by the independent designation of the target and the concentration and attention of the subject. In terms of the ordinary type of painstaking procedures of the scientific method, We should now be well launched into a new era of exploring aspects of the human mind, with which scientists previously have had difficulty in dealing. There have been other thoroughly creditable, conventionally structured experiments before. But these have not received the kind of acceptance normally given within what scientists feel is a wholly rational, totally trustworthy scientific community. In fact, I think it may be fair to say that as the experimental methods to investigate so-called psychic powers have improved, so have the violence of controversy, the proclamations of disbelief, and the accusations of either conscious or unconscious fraud. These particular experiments do start with several advantages: they come out of physics, popularly believed to be the hardest of the hard sciences; they come out of a respected laboratory; and they do not appear to be the work of true believers who set out to use science to validate passionately held beliefs. Tremendous efforts have been used which far outstrip the normal procedures to guarantee scientific credibility. Perhaps this in itself may make them less easily accepted. For scientists on the whole take each others word for most of their experiments, and only present their data in completely accessible form when others have failed to replicate their experiments, seldom distrusting the carefulness and honesty of their colleagues. We may well ask why it is necessary, in studies of this kind, to have at least twice as many safeguards and artificial substitutes for integrity as those usually demanded. Why does the psychic research worker, following ordinary rules, have to anticipate more hurdles than research workers in other controversial fields-such as the study of the inheritance of acquired characters, the existence of eidetic imagery, mind/body relationships postulated for somatotypic studies, or the findings of psychoanalysis. In all of these fields, those who claimed new results have been subjected to enormous academic punishment. They have been tempted to distort or suppress their data. Many have become unscientifically dogmatic and stubborn advocates of their positions. And, occasionally, some have been driven into exile, or even into desperate situations involving suicide, misery, and death. The scientific world and the literate public have been fully exposed to the intricacies of disputes involving scientific theories so dogmatic as to resemble religious beliefs. Among other topics, they have been treated to diatribes on the impossibility of transmitting acquired characters and to the inextricable associations made between some scientific claim and the sociological platforms of communism, capitalism, fascism, or racism. We have read Double Helix, the accounts of Lysenko, Tempter by Norbert Wiener, and most recently the story of Bill Summerlin in June Goodfield’s The Siege off Cancer. We have even read of the early use of the microscope to find miniature horses in horse sperm. Psychic researchers do, I think, sometimes forget that they are not the only research workers who are subjected to harassment, misquotation, and unfair attack when they challenge old theories and propose new ones. Yet when we examine the history of the last hundred years, in which careful experimentation has been continuously misrepresented and denied, we find many recognized scientists insisting that psychic research should be endlessly repeated because it is not a “recognized area of scientific research.” As one person quoted in this manuscript said, “This is the kind of thing that I would not believe in even if it existed.” We can easily conclude that this is indeed an area of scientific research more fraught with irrational opposition than most, although hardly more subject to attack than, for example, psychoanalysis. There are, I think, a series of historical reasons for this. It would be valuable for the open-minded reader to explore some of the -historical and cross-cultural backgrounds of psi capacity. It seems to be a very unevenly distributed ability, overtly manifested by only a few individuals. In most societies, no connection is made between these very special unique “sensitives” and the rest of the population. Sometimes, in other societies, the capabilities exhibited by the few individuals are generalized, but if there are a large number of individuals believed to be capable of some exercise of psi-like predicting the future, diagnosing illness, or healing the sick, then the individuals who would normally stand out are simply absorbed into a group of practitioners and their special abilities go unremarked. Other societies outlaw all such behavior as coming from the devil or involving fraud, and here again, both the uniquely gifted and the somewhat gifted will be discouraged. Furthermore, there is good reason to believe that the practitioner of an uninstitutionalized art - such as a prophet or healer or diagnostician - may have limited understanding or control of his or her special capacities. There is therefore a tremendous temptation to include various kinds of tricks in the practitioner’s repertoire, in case the little understood and unreliable power fails. This may be why the tricks of the healer who palms a “pain” by extracting a small crystal from the body of a patient go hand in hand with the demonstration of special healing abilities. The charismatic leader may also substitute oratorial tricks for the spontaneity which won him his original place. The medium who once could easily attain an altered state of consciousness may take along a glove filled with wet sand, in case the spirits fail to arrive. There seems to be a fluctuating, unpredictable quality about these special powers, which may be due to nothing more than the lack of a stable cultural understanding. In any event, such abilities should probably be classified with all other statistically unusual abilities, such as the amazing aptitudes of some individuals to arouse awe or wonder. As scientific exploration tells us more about how these capabilities can be disciplined and developed-as mathematical and musical ability have been fostered in the past-many conditions of uncertainty surrounding psi capacity can be removed. For example, the sophistication possessed by one of the subjects mentioned in this book in his describing the necessary conditions for “remote viewing” is particularly striking. Psychic powers have historically been closely associated with powers of healing, an area where faith and hope and response to placebos means that many diagnoses and many cures remain problematical. Faith in the healer is essential to the ability of the healer to heal, so that both healer and patient are held in a tight circular system which is beneficial to both, and dangerous to break. The vested claims of other kinds of healers inevitably come in conflict with the claims for and by the psychic healer, further obscuring rational discussion. The reception accorded psychoanalysis and all attempts to trace symptoms or their relief to communicative activities is analogous to the reception given to reports of psychic healing -sometimes with amusing overtones such as when the psychoanalyst who holds to a carefully structured theory of what is happening is obliquely credited with “just having generalized therapeutic powers” as a way of explaining the theory away! Through the ages, deliberate magical procedures have also taken on independent life, and guilds of conjurers and magicians naturally hold vested interests in their bags of tricks. It has become customary to include expert magicians among the groups testing the powers of sensitives, and to give critical comment on the conditions under which experimental proof for some psychic ability is sought. From this has arisen the curious type of criticism which will undoubtedly plague psychic research for a long time to come, that if a particular act could have been performed by a magician, then it could not have been genuinely psychic. But is this any more meaningful than the kinds of doubt which plague the study of the psychosomatic disorders of a single patient who displays a mixed set of symptoms which could be “caused” by several different sets of antecedent circumstances? I think one of the worst complications arises when both sensitives themselves and their followers advocate psychic energies as being “extrasensory,” as proof of life after death, or of the existence of supernatural or transcendent powers of some sort. When they attach such a belief system to something as little-known and undependable as psychic energy, fanaticism is often substituted for open-mindedness. The very tenuousness of the connection, the insistence upon a physical manifestation of a power claimed to be outside the physical universe, means that they must cling to their beliefs more strongly in the face of all evidence to the contrary. When scientific methods were applied to the study of psychic powers, the confrontations became increasingly dogmatic, the arguments became more farfetched, and paranoia on both sides arose.
It is often hard to tell the fanaticism of the true believer from the paranoia of the serious experimenter, as each side feeds upon the other’s obstinate insistence. No researcher on psychic abilities can expect to be free of this situation, and certainly the authors of the present book were not immune to misrepresentations by both the credulous and the stubbornly unconvinced. The SRI research not only displays the elegance characteristic of physical experimentation and theory, but the experimenters have also used an imaginative approach to the-Human aspects of their problem. Where too many experimenters have~ it their “subjects” through long, dull, repetitive performances - during which whatever psychic capacities they had first displayed eventually deteriorated - Targ and Puthoff have realized that boring experiments are unproductive for learners, and resented by sensitives with developed psychic powers. Furthermore, where much of existing research has treated the human participants as either “subjects” (usually thought of as human substitutes for rats persuaded to run a maze) or impostors or self-deluded oddities, Targ and Puthoff have treated both their apprentice learners and experienced sensitives as collaborators and persons whose views were to be respected. It is unique here that the subjects were considered as partners in research. And Puthoff and Targ have been richly rewarded and have gained new insights into the complicated and delicate processes involved in “remote viewing.” In addition to the “remote viewing,” in which the participants were most successful in picturing by drawing rather than by verbally describing and interpreting the nature of the “target” areas, the authors present a few cases of precognition-correct viewing of the target area before it is known to the observer who is later to be directed there by randomly chosen instructions. These are the cases which raise the most interesting questions both for the contemporary state of theory in physics, and for the way in which precognition may be expected to function in everyday life. If there is precognition of a future event, such as a train wreck, can death in the wreck be avoided by not taking the train, even though the wreck still occurs? Stated succinctly, does precognition add up to greater freedom of the will, or to a new prescription for despair? There seems little reason to believe that human beings could live with the certain knowledge of disasters which they would have no power to prevent. This issue is not yet faced by the experimenters, but will, I understand, be on their future agenda. A second issue, which will undoubtedly be picked up by the sensationalist press,_ and which flows from the accounts of Soviet interest in mind influencing from a distance, is the prevalence of fantasies surrounding spying and being spied upon, “Could the enemy read the President’s mind?” as one newspaper account put it. But such fantasies of omnipotence or total vulnerability to inimical forces have been continuously fed and exaggerated for over a quarter century by the science fiction in which many dilemmas are solved not by science, but by ESP. These fictions represent easy solutions, most likely unreal and certainly regressive and unchallenging in nature. Thirdly, these experiments are concerned with the ability of participants to penetrate shielding when both participants are willing to do so. But it may prove quite possible that this channel could be as successfully blocked as it can be successfully opened. Experiments which demonstrate that there is a counterpart to the cooperation between the observer at the target and the observer in the shielded laboratory, in which a trained observer at the target blocks the channel, would go a long way to avert all the suggestions that one’s mind can be “read,” creating the strange paranoia that, in this postwar world of nuclear threat, is inevitably exacerbated in the minds of the public, in the press, and even by fellow scientists. Finally, I think it is important to realize that if a certain psi phenomenon can be studied by scientific methods and one or more of its mechanisms involved can be related to existing scientific theory, this does not necessarily lead to a reductionist demolition of the essence of the phenomenon. Explaining the behavior of great artists in terms of childhood trauma, order of birth, or congenital excess of a hormone may advance our knowledge of biological functions far more than it explains a great work of art. Those who wish to relate the human condition to some transcendent power in the universe should be better, not worse, off by an increased knowledge of electromagnetic mechanisms. Science is not simply a device for explaining away events and capacities hitherto thought to be God given. Because science expands one type of knowledge, it need not denigrate another. All great scientists have understood this. But those who hold a slavish belief in “scientific facts" and who do not understand the glorious uncertainties of modern science are likely to come to small conclusions that are as trivializing as reducing “remote viewing” to repetitious “readings” of a pack of cards. As I understand contemporary trends in physical science, there is increasing recognition of vast unknown areas which science may explore and assist in ordering, but to which it may never provide anything like complete answers. Such explorations, however, should greatly expand our present paradigms.
Foreword by Richard Bach, author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull
It was comfortable, human . . . warm, soft-leather chairs in a quiet room away from the lasers and bevatrons and whatever else was going on at SRI’s center in Menlo Park. Somehow I hadn’t expected it to be human. I had expected to be plugged into a big steel machine with blinking lights, with white-smocked doctors watching dials and frowning over germ-masks at me, because that’s what advanced paranormal research is in the movies. I didn’t even change from my civilian clothes. I sat there on the couch and Russell Targ said, “We don’t care what you do outside this room, but while you’re here, you have permission to be psychic.” He looked at the clock and reached for a miniature tape recorder. “Hal should be there in three minutes,” he said, and switched the machine on. “It is eleven o’clock on Tuesday, July 18, 1975. This is a remote viewing experiment with Richard Bach as the subject, Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff as experimenters.” He clicked it off and handed the machine to me. “You can start anytime. Press the button there on the microphone and tell me where Hal is.” My throat went dry. “You know, Russell, I’ve never been in Menlo Park before.” “Thats okay,” he said cheerfully. He did not tell me to close my eyes or open them or to breathe or meditate or anything of the sort. He just asked me to describe where a man was who had been in this room half an hour before, who was now somewhere 300 square miles in some direction, across, roundabout. Describe where he is, please, in detail. I forced myself quiet. I did not remind him that what he asked was impossible, that psychic things are fun to talk about but to sit in this chair no matter how comfortable, and somehow leave my body - are you asking me to leave my body, Russell? Hal’s last words as he left to drive to his secret destination were not much help. “See you in the aether,” he had said cheerily, and I had laughed. Now he was waiting for me in the aether and I somehow had to find him, no excuses accepted. I closed my eyes and pressed the switch on the microphone. As soon as the dark fell behind my eyes, I saw city streets, gray watercolors of asphalt and concrete, as though I hovered on some noiseless gliding carpet a thousand feet over the ground. My imagination, of course. There’s no place Hal could be that wasn’t on some city block, somewhere. I was just imagining the logical. But my carpet stopped, and looking over the side I saw Hal’s car pull to the curb just past an intersection. “Got him in sight,” I said in total fake confidence. It was a surreal television picture that I watched in my mind, and all I had to do was to tell the machine what this other me was sending-no incense required, no dim lights, no magic words. My other me sometimes sent me wrong pictures. What he showed as a tiny steep-roofed building was in fact a gigantic steep-roofed building, and what he showed as parks were tree-lined residential streets. But everything else he sent turned out to be a clear description of a place I had never been. Mystics for years have smiled mysteriously and told us that we are limited by the world only because we believe that we are limited by it. That it is all illusion for our eyes to accept. Today, the teachers who once chalked diagrams of matter in solid unsmashable protons and billiard-ball electrons tell us that matter is energy, that space is time, that an electron is not so much a particle or a wave as it is a field of probabilities, not a thing as much as an energy event. That behind solid matter is nothing touchable at all. Modern physics, in short, is no longer physical, and the new scientific method shows up surrounded in adventure. It is OK to be right, it is okay to be wrong. Let’s pretend it is possible and see what happens. Out of this method we begin to meet aspects of our being that have powers next to which nuclear violences are faint cat’s-puffs in the air. When I first realized the implications of the Targ/Puthoff research, I was afraid for their lives-these were established scientists who had found a principle that has made secrets impossible. But it is too late now to burn their files; what they’ve found is already being duplicated and expanded in laboratories and private organizations around the world. As I am coming to know more of the powers that I have, so are thousands of others, so will the readers of this book. This world-changing, I think, is going to be fun. |
