Mind's Eye Part II

Yes I know the secrets of the iron and mind

They're trinity acts, a mineral fire

Yes I know the secrets of the circuitry mind

It's a flaming wonder telepath

-"Flaming Telepaths," Blue Oyster Cult

Remote viewing is one of those topics that's difficult for certain types of conspiracists because of its supernatural nature and the rather extensive evidence of its existence accumulated by reputable scientists in world renowned labs. Given the types of characters one encounters in the remote viewing field one can't help but feel as if they're being led down a path of disinformation that will inevitably make their research sound ridiculous. Yet the occult and its various aspects pop up time and time again when researching the Cryptocracy and with the occult comes the mystical. Things would be so much easier if the mystical aspects could simply be dismissed as a smokescreen, yet the massive sums of money the US intelligence community alone has invested in various fringe topics makes this explanation unlikely. Anyone that's read Jacques Vallee's accounts of various state-sanctioned UFO hoaxes will know that an effective hoax can be accomplished for far, far less money that was spent on remote viewing, or any number of other fringe topics programs such as Phoenix and MK-ULTRA tackled.

So, if we cannot dismiss remote viewing as a hoax, then we must consider its effectiveness as to understand why the Cryptocracy became so interested with it in the second half of the 20th century. Researcher Michael Talbot states of the SRI remote viewing program:

"In their remote viewing experiments at Stanford Research Institute, Puthoff and Targ found that, in addition to being able to psychically describe remote locations that experimenters were visiting in the present, test subjects could also describe locations experimenters would be visiting in the future, before the locations had even been decided upon...

"Puthoff and Targ's precognitive remote-viewing findings have been duplicated by numerous laboratories around the world, including Jahn and Dunne's research facility at Princeton. Indeed, in 334 formal trials Jahn and Dunne found that volunteers were able to come up with accurate precognitive information 62 percent of the time."
(The Holographic Universe, pgs. 205-206)

Personally I find the 62% more startling that the ability to see the future. This would imply that a majority of humanity would have some kind of psychic ability, which was exactly the conclusion that SRI researchers came to after a time. The ability was latent in all of us and in theory anyone could be taught it, but certain individuals possessed far greater psychic ability than the average person.

"The SRI researchers were somewhat evangelical on the subject of remote viewing; they believed that remote-viewing ability was like musical ability: everyone had it to some degree...

"...running medical, neurological, and psychological profiles of their remote viewers, looking for attributes that stood out. So far, about all they had found was that artistic talent, visual-spatial intelligence, and creativity all tended to be associated with high remote-viewing scores."
(Remote Viewing, Jim Schnabel, pgs. 14-15)

A person's susceptibility to hypnosis has also historically been a strong indication of strong psychic abilities:

"Dabblers in hypnosis quickly discovered that people who were very good at 'prenatural' skills like clairvoyants, psychokinesis, and even a kind of shamanic healing ability. Many of the talented 'somnambules' and 'clairvoyantes' were as celebrated as today's big-name psychics. By the 1840s hypnosis-related psi abilities were so common that they had become a sort of parlor trick."
(Remote Viewing, Jim Schnabel, pg. 143)

Many of the remote viewers recruited into Grill Flame were idea hypnotic subjects. As an interesting side note, the CIA heavily invested in hypnosis as part of their MK-ULTRA program in an attempt to create the perfect assassin, or 'Manchurian Candidate.':

"While hypnosis sounds tame by comparison, it actually had great potential as an intelligence weapon when wielded by the right hand and on the right subject. Much of what has been written on the applicability of hypnosis to a Manchurian Candidate scenario is fundamentally flawed: many investigators claim that since a hypnotized subject will not do anything to which he or she morally objects, hypnosis is therefore useless. They ignore the obvious implication that fully twenty percent of the human population is capable of 'going under' without too much difficulty, and that many of these potential subjects would not find murder, rape, theft, deceit, etc., morally objectionable, particularly if the command was given by a recognized authority figure.
(Sinister Forces, Peter Levenda, pg. 318)

Many people firmly believe that a hypnotized subject could in no way be persuaded to kill or harm another human being if they find it morally objective, yet the CIA conducted experiments on this belief under the direction of Morse Allen in the 1950s and found the opposite to be true. But I digress.

Anyway, the remote viewers had some truly remarkable success under Grill Flame. Much has already been written on this topic across the Internet, so I shall only give one example of the practical applications of remote viewing in the field. One of the most celebrated success of remote viewing, which managed to draw the praises of then-President Jimmy Carter, was the recovery of a highly classified Soviet plane in Zaire (now the Congo) in the late 1970s which the CIA was led to via coordinates given to them from an SRI remote-viewer:

"... eventually Graff's office was able to match Fran Bryan's sketch to a specific spot along a particular river. The coordinates of the spot were quickly cabled to the station chief in Zaire...

"Shortly thereafter, the CIA's team found the main intact section of the downed plane. It was in the river Graff's office had indicated, within three miles of the given coordinates.

"...Turner mentioned the role the psychics had played. Carter didn't seem to mind at all. He knew about the SRI program from National Security Council staffer Jack Stewart, and Congressman Charlie Rose. He seemed to approve of the idea."
(Remote Viewing, Jim Schnabel, pgs. 218-219)

An obvious question becomes, if remote viewing was as real and common as various researchers would have us believe, then why was it not more widely used? After all, it was much cheaper to have an individual lay in a darkened room and attempt to locate a crashed airplane via his mind's eye rather than, say, launching a satellite for the same purposes.

Well, remote viewing data was notoriously unreliable. At times it could appear remarkably accurate, and at other times be totally off. Researchers began to chalk this discrepancy up to the mental baggage of the remote viewers themselves than their actual ability. Apparently the biggest challenge to a remote viewer when spying an object, place, person, etc., is blocking out the 'noise' of their own minds so that the signal can come through. As such, SRI considered remote viewing as a kind of subliminal perception:

"Subliminal perception was so called because it described perception that took place below ('sub-') the 'limen,' the lower threshold of consciousness. All mental activities -the remembering of a face, the tasting of chocolate, the hearing of distant thunder, the fearing of tomorrow -had to have a certain strength and duration to rise above the liminal threshold and produce conscious perception...

"... SRI began to notice now that remote-viewing data resembled the kinds of data generated by test subjects who had been exposed to subliminal stimuli. They did freehand, autonomous sketches that they often were unable to label accurately. They reported very rough sense perceptions and emotions such as 'red' or 'makes me sa.' They gave out error-prone high-level descriptions... as their minds desperatley tried to amke analtical sense of the subliminally faint stimulus.

"... remote viewing was largely a form of subliminal perception. How psi information came into the brain in the first place wastill unknown, but it seemed to come in tenuously, in fragments, as if the remote viewer were continually being transported to his target, alighting there for the briefiest of moments, and then being hauled back again. It began to seem that the remote-viewing faculty was like any other sensory faculty -taste, smell, touch, sight, hearing -only much, much weaker, unable in ordinary circumstances to make it across the liminal threshold. This implied that, short of some revolution in our understanding of the mind and our ability to manipulate it, remote-viewing perception would always be extremely noise-prone for most people. There was really no way to get rid of the noise; one could only try to recognize it and seperate it from the signal."

(Remote Viewing, Jim Schnab, pg. 239-240)

The previous statement also provides a compelling explanation for how the bulk of humanity could have latent psychic ability, yet be totally unaware. Many of us probably experience some type of psychic phenomenon within our psyche regularly, yet cannot distinguish between it and our own unconsciousness. It's only when we experience a sensation such as deja vu, the feeling that an event has already happened before, that we're ever so briefly aware that something entered our consciousness from without. This is consistent with Jung's theory of the collective unconsciousness, which holds that our deeper unconsciousness is universal and something that all humans share. I've written on this topic before, which can be viewed here.

And now that I've given a brief overview of the remote viewing phenomenon, I'd like to delve into the truly bizarre incidents and synchronicities, some of which tie into themes that are already running through this blog.

The first aspect I would like to tackle is the location of the two main compartments of Grill Flame, one at SRI in California, the other at Fort Meade in Maryland.

We'll start with the later. Fort Meade is located near what I believe is a 'window area' that encompasses parts of Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, and virtually all of West Virginia. I've written of the odd happenings in this region before here, but to briefly recap: Strange happenings, rituals, and structures have found their way here since before the arrival of Europeans: The area around southern Ohio and northern West Virginia is littered with Indian mounds and bizarre religious structures. In the modern era numerous suspect government facilities such as Sugar Grove (an NSA communications facility in West Virginia which Pat Price remote viewed famously in the 1970s), Langley (the Virginia home of the CIA), Ohio's Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (home of the infamous Hangar 18 were legend has it the Roswell wreckage was brought), etc., have been built all around this region. Some of the nation's most notorious serial killers such as Charles Manson, Henry Lee Lucas, and Bobby Joe Long, were born in this area (SRI's home in California is also an appealing area for serial killers as well, a contrast I discussed in the second half of a Charles Manson article). For years this region has experienced countless instances of Fortean events from the Mothman, to UFOs sightings, and even phantom clippers.

Needless to say, this region of the country has a long history of attracting the bizarre. The Fort Meade remote viewers would be no different. In an isolated area of Virginia, within the Blue Ridge Parkway, is a place known as the Monroe Institute which would go on to serve a major role in the training of the Fort Meade remote viewers. The Monroe Institute is yet another one of these human potential centers, this one specializing in out-of-body experiences through a technique known as 'Hemi-Synch', which used extreme sound frequencies to alter human brainwaves. Monroe was discovered by 'Skip' Atwater, the longtime leader of the Fort Meade RV unit. He immediately became a big fan after experiencing a sensation of levitation after his first session at Monroe. Soon other military personnel were being sent there.

"Atwater became a regular visitor to the institute, as did Joe McMoneagle, and Colonel John Alexander, and even Major General Stubblebine. They began sharing Hemi-Synch tapes with others at INSCOM or in Grill Flame, to help them cool down before remote-viewing sessions, or to cure insomnia or jet lag."
(Remote Viewers, Jim Schnabel, pg. 296)

Eventually all Fort Meade remote viewers were required to attend the Monroe Institute as a part of their training. Several of them opted to stay, buying land in Blue Ridge near the Institute after retiring from the military.

Now we move onto SRI, which has attracted more than it's fair share of questionable characters over the years. The Stanford Research Institute of course has a cozy relationship with the military-industrial complex, having been a major recipient of DARPA largess for years. In the late in 1960s it employed the notorious intelligence asset and LSD guru Captain Al 'Trips' Hubbard as a 'security officer.'

"Hubbard accepted the offer of a $100 per day consultant's fee, and from then on he was officially employed as a security officer for SRI. 'His services to us,' explained Harmon, 'consisted in gathering various sorts of data regarding student unrest, drug abuse, drug use at school and universities, causes and nature of radical activities, and similar matters, some of a classified nature.'"
(Acid Dreams, Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, pgs. 198-199)

The Captain was of course perfect for this job as he had been instrumental in spreading LSD through the universities in the 1950s and early 1960s. More on this topic can be read here.

After the beginning of the SRI remote viewing program the institute attracted Nine disciple Andrija Puharich and his medium, Uri Geller, who would become one of the most famous test subjects of SRI. More on that below.

First, I want to address one of the oddest synchs I've come across while researching the SRI. This one occurred at the nearby Stanford University, which SRI was founded by, and affiliated with, until 1971.

"On October 12, 1974, the birthday of Aleister Crowley, student Arliss Perry was brutally murdered and left on display in the Stanford Memorial Church on the campus of Stanford University, nestled in the shadows of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Perry was left lying on her back, with her head toward the altar and her legs spread wide. She was nude from the waist down and an altar candle protruded from her vagina; another altar candle was wedged between her exposed breasts. Her jeans had been neatly arranged in an inverted V-shape and placed across her splayed legs, forming the Masonic symbol of the compass and the square. Five years earlier, the very same symbol had been left carved into the stomach of Manson victim Leno LaBianca, as the 'W' in the word 'War.' The prime suspect in the still-unsolved murder of Perry is a man named Bill Mentzer, who knew Charles Manson and at least one of his victims: Abigail Folger. In fact, Mentzer reportedly had lunch with Folger just a few days before her death. He later was connected to David 'Son of Sam' Berkowitz as well and still later was convicted of the Cotton Club murder of aspiring film producer Roy Radin."
(Programmed to Kill, David McGowan, pgs. 136-137)

Incidentally this horrendous murder took place around the same time Uri Geller was conducting his infamous experiments with the nearby Livermore National Laboratory, which more will be written of below. I'll just point out that shortly before and after the SRI remote viewer experiments were begun (a period stretching from 1967 to 1973) Northern California, especially the area around Santa Cruz, was experiencing a rash of serial murders.

"To briefly recap, no fewer than six serial killers/mass murderers -Charles Manson, Stanley Baker, Edmund Kemper, Herbert Mullin, John Lindley Frazier, and the Zodiak -were all spawned from the Santa Cruz/San Francisco metropolitan area in a span of just over four years, at a time when 'serial killers' were a rare enough phenomenon that they hadn't yet acquired a name."
(Programmed to Kill, David McGowan, pg. 136)

I'm not sure what to make of these synchs entirely. But if the theories of researchers such as McGowan are true and these 'serial murders' were a domestic extension of the CIA's Vietnam era Phoenix Program, then SRI as a major defense researcher would likely be involved in the program in some capacity. Perhaps brutally murdering a woman on the campus of SRI's original patron in the midst of some of its most bizarre remote viewing experiments was some kind of statement... Though I have no idea of what it may be.

Nevertheless, I find it interesting that there is an overlap between these two seemingly separate, and unrelated events, especially when one considers the Macrobes. One thing virtually all remote viewers seem to agree upon is that strange things are drawn to you when in that mental state.

"Dames and some of the others often talked about the phenomenology of the Matrix, the strange things that happen there. They liked to say, for instance, that remote viewing was like switching on a beacon within the Matrix. It attracted strange things, the way a porch light attracts bugs on a hot summer night. They all knew the story of what happened to Gene Kincaid, one afternoon back in 1987. Kincaid had been in one of the RV rooms, running Angela Dellafiora against a target... She was going through her routine, murmuring impressions from down in her zone, when suddenly Kincaid looked up and saw his dead father, standing there in the RV room, looking at him."
(Remote Viewers, Jim Schnabel, pg. 354)

'Aliens' were another target several remote viewers became obsessed with:

"Remote viewers themselves seemed just as captivated by the subject. And when they targeted UFOs in their remote viewing, strange things could happen. One of the strangest things was that they almost never failed to detect the UFO."
(ibid, PG. 356)

Indeed, their accuracy seemed to increase the stranger the target.

"This area of remote-viewing phenomenology would always remain confusing, but at least in some cases, the characteristics of a target that made it 'RV-friendly' were obvious: If a target had some religious or supernatural or paranormal significance, or was otherwise tinged with strangeness, remote viewers seemed to home in on it relatively rapidly."
(ibid, pg. 357)

Nothing, however, can top the Livermore incidents as far as paranormal events go in terms of remote viewing. The Livermore experiments concerned Andrija Puharich and Uri Geller, who at the time claimed to be channeling the Grand Ennead, nine gods from ancient Egypt who were in fact extraterrestrials. I have already chronicled the story of the Nine, which can be read in detail here.

In late 1974 Livermore National Laboratory became interested in testing Geller's famed psychic ability, as well as the whole remote viewing phenomenon in general. The results were nothing short of extraordinary. Not the actual experiments with Geller mind you, which were generally underwhelming, but what happened as a result of these experiments.

"One day in the lab, several embers of the Livermore group  were monitoring  Geller during a metal-bending session. They recorded him with audiotape, filmed him with videotape, and photographed him with a variety of still cameras, including one that was sensitive to thermal infrared radiation.

"After the  experiment they developed  all the film and saw something strange. The infrared camera had captured what seemed o be diffuse patches of radiation on the upper part of one of he laboratory walls. It was as if someone had briefly shone two large heat sources, either from inside the lab or outside pointing in. The patches grew in intensity for few frames, then over the  next few frames diminished to nothing.

"The Livermore Group were understandably puzzled over this, but it was only the beginning of the strangeness that would soon consume them. When they checked the audiotape they had made during the experiment, they found amid everything else a distinctive, metallic-sounding voice, unheard during the actual experiment but now clearly audible, if mostly unintelligible...

"In the days and weeks that followed, they began to feel that they were collectively possessed by some kind of tormenting, teasing, hallucination-inducing spirit. They all would be in a laboratory together, setting up some experiment, or one of the fellows and his wife and children would be at home, just sitting around, when suddenly there in the middle of the room would be a weird, hovering, almost comically stereotypical image of a flying saucer. It was always about eight inches across, in a gray, fuzzy monochrome, as if it were some kind of hologram...

"On the other hand, the flying saucer wasn't the only form the Livermore visions took. There were sometimes animals -fantastic animals from the ecstatic lore of shamans -such as the large raven-like birds that were seen traipsing through the yards of several members of the group...

"Then there was the very strange business of the metallic voice on the audiotape. Among the few intelligible words it pronounced were two or three Kennett recognized as the code name of a very closely held government project...

"The situation at Livermore eventually resolved itself, after Russo complained about a telephone call from the strange metallic voice. The voice demanded that the Livermore group cease its research activities with Geller. The group did, and within a month, the bizarre apparitions faded away.

"One of the last apparitions sprang itself upon a Livermore physicist named Don Curtis and his wife. They were sitting in their living room one evening, soberly, uneventfully, not talking about Geller or the paranormal when suddenly there was this...arm... hovering holographically in the middle of the room.

"The arm was clothed as if it belonged to a man wearing a plain grey suit. There was no bloody stump where it should have connected with a shoulder. It merely faded into clear space. But at the end of the arm where a hand should have been, there was no hand, only a hook. The hooked arm twisted around a few seconds in front of Curtis and his wife, and then disappeared."
(Remote Viewing, Jim Schnabel, pgs. 164-168)

Later several researchers working on the Livermore project related the arm story to Kennett, the CIA man, in a hotel room. Just as they were finishing up an account of the arm the men were startled by a loud knocking on the hotel door. Kennett got up to answer. On the other side he found an old man in a plain grey suit who apologized, stating he had the wrong room. As the old man walked away Kennett noted he was missing an arm.

There's one final synch I want to note. That's the unusually high fatality rate amongst remote viewers. In a prior article I wrote that addressed Rick Strassman's DMT research in part I noted that many test subjects, as well as others associated with experiments, seemed to experience an unusually high rate of health problems, or other tragedies, after being exposed to a higher state of consciousness. The same seems to be true of the remote viewers:

"...many of them had seemed to die before their time. Had they been living too far out on the shamanic edge of things? Did the act of remote viewing, or even being near a remote viewer, produce some kind of hazardous effect on the human nervous system, or immune system?.. There were Pat Price and Jackie Keith, who both died of heart attacks. (Alex Thomas would later die of a heart attack too.) Rob Cowart and Hartleigh Trent had developed serious cases of cancer; Cowart had been severely disabled and Trent had died. Cancer was currently gnawing at Jim Salyer and Hella Hammid, neither of whom would live through the decade. Even the lab secretary at SRI, young and attractive Martha Thompson, was about to die from melanoma."
(Remote Viewers, Jim Schnabel, pg. 325)

A more solid synch with the Strassman DMT experiments is cancer. Several of Strassman's test subjects developed cancer while experimenting with DMT, as did Strassman's then wife while he was conducting the experiments. At this point I will also remind the readers of the mysterious British WWII-era proto-remote viewer 'Anne' who we met in Part I of this series and who also suffered from disabling health problems.

It would seem that these altered states are not without their risks.