touching the void

Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so too does human nature whenever a perceptual void frustrates the need to discover the whereabouts and condition of something valuable. And into that dark chasm can rush all sorts of wild speculation and conjecture in the absence of anything concrete. The absolute unwillingness to settle for the unknown and the pressure to discover what is hidden can sometimes tempt the desperate into the realms of extrasensory perception. And this is where remote viewing comes in.

Remote viewing or RV, as it is sometimes referred to, has been practiced in some form or other since ancient times: the Delphic Oracle of Greece, it was claimed, in a test set by a king regarding what he was doing on a particular day, correctly told the king’s emissary that on that day the monarch was dining on tortoise and lamb stew!

Since those times the phenomenon has gone by various classifications, including travelling clairvoyance and telesthesia, but they all more or less refer to the alleged capacity to visualise something that exists beyond the natural range of the senses, no matter how distant or obscured.      

The Church, along with other authorities, made efforts throughout history to discourage the practice by enacting laws against what was then viewed as sorcery and later regarded as nothing but fraudulent activity.

In England the law specifically penalised the use of sorcery to divine the whereabouts of lost or stolen chattels (goods and personal items). And King James I, in 1597, fearful of the implications of folk learning news and events from any part of the world other than by official channels, went on the attack in a notorious book he wrote called Daemonologie which vigorously denounced this and all ‘sorcery’.

ad astra

Despite opposition from the authorities of the past and the growing scepticism of the scientific age, the practice never died out. On the contrary, recently declassified documents have revealed the so-called Stargate project (nothing to do with the movie): a military program set up by the CIA in the seventies during the Cold War to explore the potential for spying on Soviet facilities and acquiring the whereabouts of targets by means of RV.

And it was when decorated Vietnam veteran Brigadier General James Dozier was snatched in Italy by the brutally militant left-wing Red Brigades in 1981, and after conventional detective work had failed to produce him, that the US government turned in desperation to the psychic agents of Stargate.

The Red Brigades had a reputation for not f*cking around, so time was very much of the essence. For example, in 1978 in an attempt to disrupt the political status quo in favour of revolutionary objectives, they kidnapped a former prime minister, Aldo Moro. When the groups demands were not met after 54 days, Moro was driven to a location, ordered to cover himself with a blanket and executed by multiple gunshots to the chest.

So the psychic spotters of Stargate had to really concentrate their minds. One of them, another Vietnam veteran called Joe McMoneagle, had worked on locating captive American hostages in Iran as part of an operation entitled Grill Flame a couple of years previously and claimed to have ‘seen’ his current mission objective, General Dozier, “chained to a wall heater” in Padua, Northern Italy. But alas, no street or house number.

It would be nice to imagine that somehow the American Intelligence Support Agency (the ISA), who were working the case codenamed Operation Winter Harvest in conjunction with the Italian authorities, had received a tip off from their Stargate colleagues. However, the RV report didn’t reach the agency desk until eight days after Dozier was successfully found and extracted by Italian special forces. He survived having spent 42 days in captivity “chained to a steal cot” positioned under a small tent that was continually lit.

ad absurdum

Stargate was once described as a ‘missing person’s bureau’; one that operated on a shoestring: 20 million dollars over its lifetime. So insignificant a portion of the US military budget, it probably didn’t raise the eyebrows of the auditors overseeing the tax dollars spent on agents to gaze into the ether. And there was always the defence that the Soviets were at it, so this was just another necessary facet of the arms race, or the ‘inner space race’. The symmetry between NATO and the Eastern Bloc military capabilities was often maintained reductio ad absurdum.

But were the Soviets really using remote viewing to peek behind the Iron Curtain?

A book released in 1971, Psychic discoveries behind the Iron Curtain, seem to suggest that in Eastern communist bloc countries this was the least of it, merely the tip of the iceberg. If the chapter titles are anything to go by there was a surprisingly colourful pseudoscientific scene: ‘Seeking the Cosmic Messiah,’ ‘The Tele-pathic Knockout,’ ‘Artificial Reincarnation,’ ‘Astrological Birth Control,’ ‘Pyramid Power and the Riddle of the Razor Blades’, all replete with copious citations and an extensive bibliography of sources. Giving the impression that these countries weren’t quite as staid as the West would have us believe.

In fact these revelations and the FOMO may have convinced the United States to fund their own explorations into ‘inner space’, where grown men of military rank made earnest attempts to stare goats to death and even run through solid walls. If you’ve heard of Monty Python and the Ministry of Silly Walks, well this was the Ministry of Silly Ideas, the Department of Batshit Crazy.

Funding was allocated for experimentation and RV missions for a couple of decades, but the Stargate program didn’t survive closer scrutiny once the Cold War thawed. And when signals intelligence grew exponentially in the digital age where communication intercepts and upgraded satellites offered the promise of rock-solid intel, the curtain went down on the twilight zone of information gathering.

Remote viewing continued to be practiced and evaluated in a civilian capacity within the Monroe Institute, an educational establishment that studied deeper aspects of human consciousness. Stricter protocols were implemented and the practice was treated methodically, rather than metaphysically, with a disciplined and less haphazard approach.

does it work?

There is plenty of testimony that appears to validate the Stargate program,  many extraordinary reports claiming to support the accuracy of some of the high-profile remote viewers. One of the most intriguing examples of ESPionage involved the case of a Russian super-sub in a kind of ‘that’s way too big to be a space station’ moment.   

(c) A Spectacular Example of Precognitive Remote Viewing

(Carried out by Joe McMoneagle in September 1979)

Mission: Spy satellite photographs had shown suspicious heavy construction activity around a building located 100 meters from a large body of water, somewhere in northern Russia. The National Security Council (NSC) wanted to know what was going on there.

Assignment: Joe was given only the geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude) and asked to describe the site.

When Joe said it was a “cold location, near a body of water with large buildings and smoke stacks etc”, NSC was satisfied that he was probably at the right site. They then showed him the satellite photograph in their possession and asked him to find out what was going on inside the building. Joe said, “The interior is very large and noisy; active working area, full of scaffolding, girders and blue flashes probably arc welding.” He took a break and continued in another session, ”Probably a huge submarine under construction (Draws a sketch with dimensions, etc). A long flat deck; strangely angled missile tubes, about 18 to 20 in number. A new type of mechanism to drive the submarine (nuclear powered?); a double hull.”

At this point the NSC representatives figured that Joe must be wrong because if what he said was true, it would be the world’s biggest submarine! No US intelligence agency had ever heard of it. The US did not possess a submarine this large. Besides, who would build a submarine in a building so far from water? How would they launch it? But since Joe had acquired the reputation of being very accurate, NSC asked him to ‘view the future’ and find out when it would be launched!

Joe ‘scanned the future month by month’ and said the Russians would blast a channel to connect the building with the body of water and launch the submarine in four months.

Confirmation : In January 1980, exactly as predicted by Joe, spy satellite pictures confirmed the launching of the world’s biggest submarine after construction of an artificial channel connecting the building to the water. It had 20 missile tubes, a large flat deck etc exactly as described by Joe!

(This example brings out spectacularly the ‘non local nature of consciousness’ not only in space but also in time, even into the future!)  “Clairvoyant Remote Viewing: The US Sponsored Psychic Spying”.

 

Were there more hits than misses? Can a serious intelligence operation be guided by (and resources devoted to) the intuitive manifestations of remote viewers? A lot could be at stake if something went wrong, and the exposure to public ridicule is forever stalking such programs. But that’s not to say RV doesn’t work or that the CIA haven’t now contracted out the program to civilian agencies when they ran into a bureaucratic brick wall ...