Читать книгу The Bushman’s Lair - Paul McKendrick - Страница 11

“Fifty years of laboratory parapsychology experiments have demonstrated that many people can perceive information inaccessible to the ‘conventional five senses’ . . . a few individuals have so developed this process that they can provide detailed descriptions of hidden or concealed events, places, people, objects, feelings, and color with considerable consistency.”

From a 1986 report entitled “A Suggested Remote Viewing Training Procedure” released with numerous other previously declassified documents by the US government in 2017

The first confluence of Bjornstrom’s career path and his psychic interests had occurred back in 1982, when he was hauling munitions from the Canadian Professional Munitions factory in Raymond, Alberta, to various military bases. At the Fairchild Air Force Base southwest of Spokane, Washington, he spotted a recruitment ad for individuals with psychic abilities. As a kid, Bjornstrom had become convinced he had a sixth sense that allowed him to foresee future events and acquire knowledge he had no natural means of acquiring. Eager to explore his psychic potential and intrigued by the ad’s suggestion that a career awaited successful applicants, he applied and was invited to attend a screening event in Washington, DC.

His bus ticket paid for, he made his way to the US capital. Upon arriving there he was evaluated with other respondents at an office in a twelve-storey building near the White House. He made it through the initial screening and spent six weeks living in a government house with other participants before being transferred to the Philadelphia area for more testing at a building with a hospital-like atmosphere. The tests were designed to evaluate his remote viewing ability and typically entailed looking at a picture of something—a missing person, boat, submarine, plane—and then identifying its location on a map. “They’d have you plugged into all kinds of wires, probes or wires taped to your head and chest, and they’d watch you continuously,” he later testified at his trial.

The program, eventually known as Stargate, was originated in the 1970s by the CIA in response to suspicions the Soviets were ramping up their spending on the use of extrasensory perception for espionage purposes. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which provides intelligence for combat-related missions, took over responsibility for the program in the 1980s. At the time of Bjornstrom’s involvement, he said, the program was led by Colonel Harold E. Phillips. According to Out There: The Government’s Secret Quest for Extraterrestrials, a book by former New York Times reporter Howard Blum, Phillips was a DIA intelligence analyst who had worked with remote viewers in the 1980s before going on to head up a UFO working group.

In 1995, for a special program called Put to the Test, ABC News interviewed Joseph McMoneagle, a retired army warrant officer who carried out remote viewing operations from within a leaky old wooden barracks at Fort Meade, Maryland, with roughly fifteen other remote viewers. A typical daily task was describing or drawing details about a person, place or thing of which they had no prior knowledge. According to McMoneagle, it was shown to work about 15 per cent of the time, which in his opinion was better than many other intelligence collection services.

The American Institutes for Research, a non-profit research organization tasked with evaluating the utility of remote viewing for the intelligence community, also found a statistically significant effect in their laboratory tests. Their findings were tempered by the lack of evidence supporting the “origins or nature of the phenomenon,” but even more problematic was that the information collected was often found to be vague and ambiguous and lacked the requisite ingredients for actionable intelligence. That marked the end of the program.

I reviewed some of the declassified files from the Stargate program, which was itself an ethereal experience. Several documents contain information on the civilian recruitment efforts that had been ramped up in the 1980s. One of them lays out some of the characteristics attributable to successful remote viewers: “open-minded, adventurous, above average intelligence, mature and stable, ‘artistic’ in character and personality, successful, well thought of by self and co-workers, articulate, sensitive, and have an ability to ‘in-flow’ data.” Consideration was also given to those with previous “psychoenergetic experience.” Not to be considered, however, were occult fanatics, mystical zealots or those who displayed an unreasonable enthusiasm for psychoenergetics.

Most of the screening sessions were contracted out to a research company named SRI International. Participants were recruited through advertisements for a remote viewing seminar; attendees were invited to recruitment trials in Washington, DC, and San Francisco. The Washington location was just across the Potomac River from the White House, which is consistent with Bjornstrom’s description of his first posting. (The declassified files refer to psychoenergetics research at other facilities, including St. Joseph’s University, which is located in suburban Philadelphia and presumably the other location where Bjornstrom spent time remote viewing.)

Screening was a two-stage process to whittle participants down from several hundred to five to ten individuals who demonstrated “robust RV [remote viewing] performance.” The sessions began with a lecture presentation, and then participants were instructed to relax, take a few deep breaths and try to focus on the task to be presented. Meanwhile, in another room, an assistant was waiting to begin communicating telepathically. Upon receiving the signal to start—a single ring of the telephone—the assistant opened an envelope and began viewing the corresponding material on a television monitor. The material, selected from sixteen random target videos, varied widely: James Bond skiing off a cliff in The Spy Who Loved Me; ostriches performing a synchronized dance; a clip from Superman IV in which a jolly cosmonaut does repair work outside a space station while singing “My Way” in Russian, only to be knocked into space by an errant satellite and rescued by Superman, who puts him back in the space station and tells him in Russian, “You’ll be safer singing in here.”

While the telepathic sender continually viewed the target video, participants drew or wrote down their perceptions on forms. Those who identified more elements than could be attributable to chance alone were asked to continue. In the second-stage screening the same targets were used but there was no sender—participants were now expected to identify target material that nobody was looking at, as if receiving telepathic signals wasn’t enough. Those who succeeded were deemed to have demonstrated robust RV.

When I asked Rob Nicholson—the former private investigator who sold me the Bushman documents—what he made of all this, he said he had previously worked with an intelligence operative in the US and had asked her about Bjornstrom. Her response was that he had made it through the screening process and was a good “farmer,” a euphemism for “trainee” that had originated at the main intelligence training grounds in Williamsburg, Virginia, which was also known as the Farm. However, despite Bjornstrom having some alleged success in the program, the experience left him unsettled and battling nightmares, so he left. He walked away from the Philadelphia facility and caught a bus back to Canada.

Nonetheless, if this experience gave Bjornstrom some validation of his sixth sense, it would help to explain what happened in the early 1990s, after he returned to Alberta—starting with his decision to establish a private investigation business. Up to that point, most of his work experience had consisted of driving trucks, managing cattle and farriering, so launching a new business as a private investigator was a curious career move. But perhaps the Stargate program had given him the confidence to believe he had a valuable service to offer. After taking some investigative and police science courses by correspondence, he rented an office in a building in an industrial park in southeast Calgary, where he headquartered his new venture, which he named Sir Pegasus. The company was listed with the Better Business Bureau from 1995 to 1998.

His investigative work included completing background checks on potential employees for companies, spying on cheating spouses and looking for missing children. He took on other, more routine jobs as well, such as monitoring traffic flows for potential restaurant locations and helping people find work. Things were soon going well for his new company, and he was talking regularly to Julie and Lucette. Lucette had married another man, with whom she had two more children, but her husband had recently passed away. That led to her reconnecting with Bjornstrom, who had quickly developed a relationship with her new children, and she began talking about joining him in Calgary.

It was around that time that Bjornstrom took on a local client named David Walsh, the president of a soon-to-be infamous company named Bre-X, which held a majority stake in a potential Indonesian gold mine. Bjornstrom had been having a drink in a downtown Calgary lounge with a friend when Walsh entered the lounge, also with a friend. The two friends knew each other, and the four men ended up having a beer together. A few days later, Bjornstrom received a call from Walsh asking if he could help him out with some investigative work. Bjornstrom agreed and was given some money up front.

Bre-X was no ordinary company and had more need for investigators than most, but Bjornstrom likely wouldn’t have appreciated just how much of an imbroglio Walsh found himself in. Undoubtedly there are many people who wish they had never become embroiled in the cautionary tale. Most entanglements were limited to financial losses. According to Bjornstrom, his own involvement landed him on a hit list.