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ОглавлениеWHAT WE KNOW ABOUT REMOTE VIEWING
Remote viewing is not a spiritual path, but such psychic functioning is a step in the direction of conscious awareness — nonlocal mind revealing itself for us to see.
Over time, I have sat in a darkened interview room with hundreds of remote viewers as they shared their mental pictures with me. It is a fact that people can experience a mind-to-mind connection with each other. They can also expand their awareness to describe and experience what is happening in distant locations. Fifty years of published data from all over the world testify to this.
In the fall of 1972, Dr. Hal Puthoff and I started a psychic research program at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). We were both laser physicists who had carried out research for a variety of U.S. government agencies for many years.1 Our great partner and teacher in the SRI program was the New York artist and highly respected psychic Ingo Swann. Ingo introduced Hal and me — and the world — to remote viewing. Actually, the chain of events went like this: Ingo taught us about remote viewing, we taught the army, and the army taught the world.2 The history of our program is described in several books, including Miracles of Mind.3
At the time when we began our psi research program, Hal had already carried out a remarkable experiment with Ingo. In this trial, Ingo was able to psychically describe and affect the operation of a highly shielded superconducting magnetometer buried in the basement of the Stanford University physics building. (This gave rise to the first of many government inquiries into our activities.)
As a result of this trial, Hal and I began to further investigate remote viewing, as any physicist would. We put a laser in a box and we asked Ingo to tell us whether it was on or off. We asked him to describe pictures that were sealed in opaque envelopes or hidden in a distant room. He did all these tasks excellently, but he found them boring. He eventually told us that if we didn’t give him something more interesting to do, he was going back to New York to resume his life as a painter. He said that if he wanted to see what was in an envelope, he would open it; to see into the next room, he would simply open the door. Since he could focus his attention anywhere in the world (as he told us more than once), these experiments were a trivialization of his ability! By the end of the decade, we’d given Ingo many opportunities to psychically view the world and beyond.
By the beginning of 1974, Hal and I had carried out more than fifty formal remote viewing trials at SRI, most of which were low-key experiments with little publicity. However, in 1973 we carried out a series of experiments with the now-famous Israeli psychic Uri Geller that brought us a fair amount of notice. During the year when we worked with Uri, who demonstrated remarkable telepathic ability, our tiny program was responsible for more than half the publicity received by the $100-million SRI. We published our findings from the work with Uri in the distinguished British science journal Nature,4 and as a result the SRI psychic research activity gained worldwide attention.
Figure 2. Russell Targ (left) and Hal Puthoff outside the Stanford Research Institute, 1977. Photo by Hella Hammid.
Since the beginning of 1973, we also worked with Pat Price, a retired police commissioner from Burbank, California. Pat had telephoned Hal and asked if we’d be interested in working with him. He said that he had used his psychic ability all his life, in particular to catch criminals in his work as a police officer. Of course, we accepted his offer. Until 1979, when we met Joe McMoneagle, Pat was the most remarkable psychic we’d ever encountered — and he remains the only one able to read printed words at a distance. Pat was a cheerful, even-tempered man. A young secretary who was typing Pat’s descriptions of distant sites once asked him if he could psychically follow her into the ladies’ room. His reply was, “If I can focus my mind on any place on the planet, why would I follow you into the ladies’ room?” That was Pat! Figure 3 shows Pat Price on the job.
Figure 3. Retired police commissioner and psychic Pat Price, the only person we know who can psychically read words. Photo by Hella Hammid.
FOUR AREAS OF REMOTE VIEWING APPLICATIONS
Once we learn how to perform remote viewing techniques (which you can do in Chapter 3), how might this process be applied? Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove, in his capacity as Director of the Intuition Network,5 proposed four broad areas of remote viewing applications: evaluation, location, diagnosis, and forecasting.
Evaluation
Evaluation might include weighing various alternatives, such as an investment or choices of technology or building sites. Evaluation often includes a mixture of psychic ability and nonpsychic intuition. I believe that intuition comprises the sum total of everything one has learned or experienced in the course of one’s life and stored in one’s subconscious mind; this background then works together with information that comes to one psychically. For example, when I was leaving SRI in 1982, I wondered where I would work next; the employment agency told me that I had destroyed a promising career in lasers by spending ten years doing ESP research. I sat in my office and visualized what my new place of employment would look like. An image of the nearby foothills led me to make inquiries of my friends who worked in the Lock-heed Missiles & Space research laboratory. (They were happy to have me return to my laser roots — if I promised not to get them into ESP research.) I believe that a combination of my psychic ability (the information that a job would open up for me at Lockheed) and my intuition (recognition of the foothills and knowing people at Lockheed) helped this image of my possibilities come together.
Location
Remote viewing has been used to find many things of value, including oil or mineral deposits, hidden treasure, and missing people — all of which have been objects of fascination for as long as people have tried to span space with their thoughts. The following story illustrates our experience with this application.
The Kidnapping of Patricia Hearst
On the night of Monday, February 4, 1974, a group of American terrorists kidnapped nineteen-year-old newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst from her apartment near the University of California at Berkeley, where she was a student. The kidnappers identified themselves as the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). They were radical anarchists whose slogan was “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.” The conservative, wealthy Hearst family was a perfect target for them. While the press was trying to find “Symbia” on the map, the Berkeley Police Department was trying to locate the daughter of one of the most prominent celebrities in San Francisco — namely the publisher of the San Francisco Examiner, and president of the nationwide Hearst newspaper syndicate.
The day after the kidnapping, the police remained clueless. It was such a desperate situation that the Berkeley Police Department was moved to think about asking for psychic guidance. They called the president of SRI on Tuesday afternoon, and our laboratory director asked us if we thought remote viewing could help. Pat Price said that he had often worked on this kind of problem. So we all piled into Hal’s car and drove to Berkeley to meet with the detectives on the case and visit the scene of the crime, where pistol shells were still scattered on the floor under the bed.
The kidnappers were known to be violent; two people had been badly beaten, and several neighbors had been shot at during the abduction. It was all quite strange and confusing for Hal and me, but Pat felt very much at home in the Berkeley police station. The detectives had a lot of questions they were planning to ask us. However, Pat stepped forward first and asked the detective who was working with us if he had a “mug book” of local people who were recently out of prison. Yes, they had just such a book. Pat took the book and laid it flat on a wooden table so that we could all see the pages. There were four mug shots on each page. Pat turned the pages after looking carefully at each picture. Then, about ten pages (forty people) into the book, he put his index finger on one of the pictures and said, “He’s the leader.”
The man Pat singled out from the mug book was Donald “Cinque” DeFreeze, who had managed to escape from California’s Soledad Prison a year earlier. Within a week, the detectives were able to verify Pat’s remarkable hit.
The police, of course, had no idea where to find DeFreeze. So they asked Pat if he could determine where he might be. Pat sat back in the old oak swivel chair, polished his glasses, and closed his eyes. After a moment of silence, he said, pointing, “They went that way. Is that north?” It was. Pat continued, “I see a white station wagon parked by the side of the road. But they’re not in it anymore.” The detective asked, “Where can we find the car?” Pat replied, “It’s just past a highway overpass, near a restaurant and two large white gas or oil storage tanks.” One of the detectives said he knew where that might be. Half an hour later, they found the abandoned car just where Pat said it would be. By that time it was midnight, and Hal and I were happy to go home to more peaceful surroundings. I think Pat could have stayed all night.
After that night, we had several additional opportunities to interact with the Berkeley detectives. As a side note, the most memorable of these for me was a trip to a potential SLA hideout. A detective and I were parked on a tree-covered hillside in the Santa Cruz mountains. The detective asked me if I knew how to handle a gun. I thought this was a surprising request, but I told him that I owned an automatic and knew how to use it. He then handed me his service weapon and said, “Cover my back.” He walked around the apparently abandoned house, and I covered him with the gun as he cased the building. I am sure he had no idea that my corrected vision is 20/200, making me legally blind! After that incident, I realized that I was way beyond my psychicalresearcher’s job description; I retired from the field, feeling that my graduate studies at Columbia had never prepared me for this.
Even during her brutal confinement by the kidnappers, Patricia Hearst had some knowledge of our activities. In her riveting autobiography, she writes:6
Paranoia must be contagious, for everyone in the house had caught it. When Cin [Cinque] came to me one day and said that the newspapers were reporting that my father had hired psychics to fathom out where I was being kept by the SLA I was paralyzed with fear. “Don’t think about any psychics now. Don’t communicate with them,” he told me. “Focus your mind on something else all the time.” I did as I was told. I did not want psychics or anyone else to point the FBI in my direction.
Though Patricia Hearst’s concern may seem puzzling, she was wise to be concerned about being killed by her captors if the police showed up at the door.
We continued to work with the Berkeley detectives, and I believe that the kidnappers could have been caught while they were still in Northern California if the Berkeley Police Department, the local sheriff’s department, and the FBI had worked together, instead of at cross purposes. (The SLA fiasco seems similar to the noncooperation of the FBI and CIA in the months before 9/11/01 tragedy, when there was essentially no information shared among the agencies. Everyone now agrees that there was plenty of information, but in both cases, it was poorly analyzed.)
The Berkeley Police Department did send a nice letter of commendation to SRI in the end, thanking us for our work on their behalf.
Diagnosis
Diagnosis of medical problems, mechanical problems, safety hazards, sources of human error, and health and environmental hazards are all possible applications for psychic and intuitive practitioners. Medical diagnosis, discussed at length in Chapter 5, is an intriguing example of diagnostic remote viewing. Edgar Cayce, Caroline Myss, and others have demonstrated and refined this practice, which is a much more analytical approach to remote viewing than the other, more intuitive applications we mention in this chapter. For reasons we don’t entirely understand, psychic diagnosis is much easier to do than ordinary remote viewing of an object in a box. This may be because it’s a more meaningful task, or perhaps the important psychic connection to another living being makes the difference.
I have been practicing remote diagnosis since 2002, and I find it much easier than other forms of remote viewing. Other experienced intuitives have similar experiences. Interestingly, people are beginning to leave me messages asking for diagnostic help.
One such message came from Dr. Jane Katra of Eugene, Oregon, my teaching partner for the past decade and coauthor with me of other books. “I seem to have a medical problem,” she said in a voicemail. “Do you have any ideas?” I closed my eyes, still sitting by the telephone, and saw red and blue lines going up her arm to her shoulder and into her brain. I left a peculiar message on her machine describing what I had seen. In her return call, I learned that she had been stuck in the thumb by a rose thorn, and that her face and lips were feeling numb as a result. Based on that information, I urged her to go to the emergency room because it now sounded to me like blood poisoning. In the emergency room, she was given a tetanus shot and antibiotics, and she quickly recovered. Of course, since my patient was Jane, this might have simply been a case of mental telepathy. The distinction is that, in mental telepathy, I could have picked up Jane’s mental impressions of her condition, which may or may not have been correct.
Forecasting
Jeffrey Mishlove and I both feel that the ability to forecast may be the most promising of all the applications of psychic faculties. Forecasting earthquakes, volcanic activity, political conditions, technological developments, weather conditions, interest rates, investment opportunities, and the prices of commodities and currencies constitutes an active and exciting area of study.
In 1982, I was part of a team of psychics and investors who wanted to see if it was possible to use psychic functioning to make money in the marketplace. We chose the silver market, and our highly successful efforts ended up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. You can read more about this, and many other forecasting adventures, in the Associative Remote-Viewing section of Chapter 4.
THE SKEPTICS
When I related the Hearst story to my publisher, he asked why we didn’t go after the $1,000,000 offered at that time by “The Amazing Randi” for any convincing demonstration of psychic abilities. Although I haven’t the slightest doubt about the existence of these abilities and their usefulness, I have serious doubts about the likelihood of a lifelong professional skeptic paying up, no matter what evidence he saw.
There is an active skeptical organization in America called the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP; pronounced “psi-cop”), of which Randi is a prominent member. Their desire is to subtly encourage you to deny your own experience of psi when it appears, with the goal of “saving” science from psychical researchers. They don’t do research, of course, and they don’t particularly want to know the truth. Rather, they actively interfere with researchers’ abilities to get money for their work. When given the opportunity, they waste the time of researchers and suck energy from the field. I give them as little attention as possible and, in spite of their efforts, I have had little trouble publishing my findings or getting research funds. I think it’s a serious error to empower these enemies of truth, but some researchers are happy to immolate themselves on the pens of the critics, as long as someone pays attention to them.
From his lifelong experience in the field, Ingo Swann understands this problem well, and perfectly describes the tragic situation in his book Natural ESP. Ingo writes:
Today it is a well-understood tactic of mind manipulation that if an unknown and unresolvable guilt can be established among a group of people (such as parapsychologists represent), that group can be controlled and subdued. As long as the target group accepts the possibility that the guilt might be true in some ways, it remains introverted and creatively unproductive. All its resources go into trying to resolve the “guilt” that does not exist in the first place.7
