Four hundred years ago in the Massachusetts colony in the town of Salem, countless women were prosecuted for engaging in witchcraft. They were tried, convicted upon the testimony of witnesses, and burned at the stake. Two hundred years before that, a young French woman who claimed to be in direct communication with God was also burned by her English prosecutors. Just a couple of years ago, a Long Island teacher got in trouble for showing her students grave rubbings she had made on a summer vacation in Salem. Thus, with a deep sense of mistrust and indignant superstition, America’s elected officials and the bureaucrats who worked for them have persecuted and punished those who, for any reason, seemed to have trafficked in the realm of the paranormal.
It was with shock, perhaps, that many people reacted to the 1995 CIA disclosure that for years it had run a psychic spying program. Psychic spying? Taxpayer dollars going to fund seers and psychics? It’s true. In a two-part interview (to be concluded next issue), remote viewer Paul H. Smith describes his experiences in the Star Gate program as a psychic intelligence officer.
In early 1983, former special operations officer, Army Intelligence officer, remote viewer, and now author Paul H. Smith attended a meeting with Major General Albert Stubblebine III, the Commanding General of INSCOM, the U.S. Army’s Intelligence and Security Command, a meeting Smith describes in his forthcoming book, Reading the Enemy’s Mind (Tor/Forge, October, 2004). This meeting was a momentous introduction to what would become Major Smith’s entry into the world not just of psychic phenomena, but into a government program to train candidates to engage in psychic surveillance operations against selected targets.
Contemplating such a program, one would think that psychic spying against the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China would have been the only focus of these intelligence-gathering missions. But as Smith revealed in his conversation with us, taskers and mission handlers sent—on an ad hoc basis—remote viewers to find underground extraterrestrial sites, to Mars, and even to see if they could locate the whereabouts of the holy Ark of the Covenant. But these were unofficial explorations to see what the limits of remote viewing might be.
At the meeting with General Stubblebine, Major Smith remembers that the general passed around a bent utensil for members of the assembled military personnel to handle. Although Smith had seen bent metal before—he had worked on farms when he was a youngster—he had never seen anything like this: tines bent and twisted into shapes almost beyond recognition. He described the object as “creepy.” It was even creepier when Gen. Stubblebine explained that the forks weren’t bent by machines, or by “strength” or even a blowtorch. He said, “They were bent by the power of the mind.” This was something that anyone in that room could do, the general explained, by focusing the power of their individual minds. And this was Paul Smith’s introduction to a type of special military operations he had never seen before and that would change his life from that meeting forward. It would demonstrate to him that there existed an alternate reality and the human mind possessed the capability of perceiving information from it.
When, in July, 1995, the CIA revealed that it had recruited intelligence specialists like Paul H. Smith for a psychic espionage program—Smith is a retired strategic intelligence officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency—the startling truth also revealed was that our government actually employed the paranormal and the psychic sciences as a military asset to achieve policy objectives. This was despite ongoing denials of secret mind-control programs, disinformation about UFOs and experiments in exotic science, and official denials of any awareness of the existence of a paranormal reality. Worse, the memoirs of those participants in the remote-viewing program also revealed that we engaged in a form of psychic research in competition with the Soviets, who themselves were meanwhile waging a psi war against us.
In fact, according to a report written just three years ago by U.S. Naval Commander L. R. Bremseth, there actually existed a “psi gap” between the U.S. and the Soviets—in the Soviets’ favor—which caused anxiety in official U.S. intelligence services because of the realization that the psychic research was being conducted by the KGB and the Russian military intelligence service (GRU). This, Commander Bremseth wrote, was deemed to be a potential security threat for the United States. It was a threat realized even as early as 1962 by Lt. Gen. Arthur Trudeau in Army R&D, who had asked his deputy Lt. Col. Philip J. Corso for an assessment of a perceived Soviet ability to use individuals with psychokinetic abilities to alter the trajectories of incoming ballistic missile warheads. The U.S. had to catch up fast if it wanted to close the psi gap with the Soviets.
Thus, in the 1960s, among those who were urging the U.S. intelligence services to explore the possibilities of engaging in surveillance and intelligence-gathering via paranormal channels, there was a sense of urgency about a weapon that the Soviets could deploy against us for which we had no defenses. How can you defend against the psychic penetration of your most secret installations?
You could, only if you realized that the best defense was a good offense. That’s what the Central Intelligence Agency was looking into developing, and they found Hal Puthoff, Russell Targ, and Ingo Swann to start it. It was the kind of plan that would fly right in the face of 350 years of puritanical horror towards anything paranormal but for the fact that Puthoff and Swann needed to cast it in terms of good, hard, science: just another one of the senses that we had overlooked, a way of touching with one’s mind.
Currently the president of Remote Viewing Instructional Services, Inc., in Texas, a remote-viewing training company, Paul Smith was one of a handful of government personnel to be trained by the legendary Ingo Swann in the techniques of coordinate remote viewing, or CRV, and was the author of the remote-viewing program’s CRV training manual. Smith reveals that coordinate remote viewing, also called controlled remote viewing, was the heart and soul of an operation known as Star Gate, literally a psychic espionage program that ran throughout the Cold War and only became declassified less than ten years ago.
Within ufology circles, the different aspects of remote viewing are well known. It is now accepted as a given that even though individuals like Ingo Swann were especially gifted, remote viewing is not limited to those who are considered particularly psychic. In fact, Smith explains, most people have a kind of residual psychic ability that allows them to be trained as remote viewers, even though the skill level will probably vary. He compares it to learning piano. There are those who are musically and artistically gifted whose skills would surpass those who are less gifted even though just about anyone can be taught to play piano competently. Remote viewing is a similar skill, a learned ability to tune into one’s own perceptions about objects, people, or even events at remote locations without actually physically being there. But a surprise to early remote viewing trainers was that the process was not limited to targets in different locations, but rather to events that took place in different times. It was, Paul Smith says, an indication that events, places, and objects are linked in a way that may bespeak a reality or a nexus of reality not readily apparent in the everyday three-dimensional world that people live in. There is, remote viewers discovered, another reality where the elements of that world are related in different ways.
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Paul H. Smith and Hal Puthoff.
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All photographs courtesy Paul H. Smith.
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Ingo Swann told us that as far as a proof of concept of remote viewing is concerned, “It itself is the proof of its own being.” That is to say, you don’t have to look beyond the simple fact that remote viewing works or overburden logic to find proof that it works in order to substantiate its existence. But early in the program, the trainees did try to do just that: find a reason to explain the existence of the phenomenon.
Paul Smith explained that at the Stanford Research Institute, Hal Puthoff, Ingo Swann and others sought to deconstruct coordinate remote viewing in order to find an explanation that would put the normal back in paranormal; satisfy a need for remote viewing to be not “woo-woo” or New Age, but to be as tangible as the table around which the trainees sat everyday at lunch.
There was no shortage of theories to explain remote viewing. It could be a type of perception only, the training of someone to perceive things that were there, but not apparent to the untrained eye. But this fell short of the all-encompassing explanation sought. Alternatively, if one looked at it as simply an act of information retrieval from a vast database of human existence, theories to explain it went as far back as the 19th century Theosophists and Madame Blavatsky. Maybe it was kind of a database of all human events, a recording in a karmic hall of records. Paul remembers Ingo Swann as saying that such a concept added a judgmental aspect to the phenomenon that probably was a misconception.
Could there be a model for the reality of remote viewing that would satisfy scientists and yet operate within the realm of political acceptability as well, if it had to, because it was grounded securely in physics?
Happily, the answer was yes. As Paul Smith explained it to us, and as hewrites about the conversations between Hal Puthoff and Ingo Swann in Reading the Enemy’s Mind, the two men developed ideas from physicist David Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order, in which Bohm suggests, as paraphrased by Maj. Smith, that the implicate order is a “strange domain, involving atomic and subatomic particles and their often bizarre interactions.” In these reactions, not only can particles become waves as a result of the simple act of external observation, but they have a “virtual existence,” where particles can wink in and out of existence without violating the laws of physics.
Even more critical for the remote-viewing theorists was the principle of nonlocality, “the principle whereby influence can be exerted between particles across time and space instantaneously and without any intervening forces,” Smith writes in Reading the Enemy’s Mind.
Here, the instantaneous nature of this influence even exceeds the speed of light and defies what most people might call causality. Thus, it’s not as though particle A causes the instant alteration of particle B; they simply happen at the same time. Imagine that two particles, maybe separated by millions of miles in space and millions of years along our time continuum, simply flip at the same instant as if one particle is influencing another.
What implications might this have for remote viewing? “As Ingo Swann noted in one of our conversations, ‘The explicate [order of real objects and things] and implicate order are available to human consciousness at all times. People focus on the explicate order, but never focus on the implicate order.’ ” Perhaps this implicate order, as an aggregate of a particle collective, operates as the basis of this existence database of all things living and nonliving. It is the database, the matrix, from which remote viewers can retrieve the information about their targets, the locations of which are in the minds of the taskers and represented by the random number coordinates handed to the remote viewer at the beginning of each viewer’s journey.
This version of the matrix was conceived by Ingo Swann. Although now widely popularized in a series of motion pictures, the matrix was originally hypothesized as an “infinity of information points.” Each point, as Paul Smith described it to us, might be like the minute areas on a cosmic hard drive containing the stored sum of information from all things that ever existed, continue to exist, or—and this was a stunning concept—will exist. Past, present, and possible or potential futures all existed, Smith via Ingo Swann suggested, within one database. One only had to be trained how to retrieve it and one had to be able to explain to a chorus of skeptical bureaucrats that this was really science and not some spiritualistic whateveryoucallit.
The scientific model worked, however, and allowed practitioners to conceive of remote viewing not as a trip to a specific target but as a retrieval of information from the matrix where information about the target was stored. It was simply a process of accessing a hard drive, albeit an infinite one, by means of what Swann described as a “signal line,” a kind of carrier wave on which resided the bits of data that made their way into the minds of the remote viewers. But data is simply data, bits and pieces of larger impressions. How can a person be trained to decode these encrypted signals so as to make sense of them? “The key,” Paul Smith writes, “is human consciousness.” That’s where the decoding mechanism lies, and the analogy is to a radio receiver that turns the pieces of data into a stream of sound that a listener can perceive and understand.
For people trained in remote viewing, the actual perception or decoding of the psychic data takes place within the subconscious mind, below the threshold of consciousness. Most people, in fact the overwhelming vast majority of us, live our lives completely in the conscious mind, decoding signals from the everyday world so as to navigate our separate ways through life. We stop at red lights, pick up a ringing telephone, pull our fingers back from sharp objects, prop our feet up on a cushion or ottoman, and savor a hot cup of coffee in the morning. We sit down on a chair and expect not to fall down. We put a car into drive and feel the transmission engage. In short, we live in a world of sensations and physical impressions that conform to our expectations of what will happen. But what about those who know how to live in the subconscious? What impressions might they receive?
Perhaps, Smith suggests, individuals who are attuned to their subconscious perceive a very different type of signal. They may be more sensitive to the potential futures, may be more driven by what they call instinct than real-world logic, and may even talk about having ESP. Maybe these people are already in communication with the matrix, picking up a signal with data of a very different kind than people who shut out their subconscious mind.
For those trained in remote viewing, the practice is to listen to the messages forming in the subconscious, allow them to be observed, withhold levying a judgment upon them, and not impose upon them a conscious structure. This was the kind of training candidates for the DIA remote viewing program went through when Paul Smith was invited to join.
Therefore, if the matrix model works and if, indeed, particles separated from one another can influence each other’s state, is there a theory that might explain how all of this happened, how past, present, and future can coexist, and how it can be presented scientifically in such a way that the chief of staff or a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee might feel comfortable in making a funding recommendation for his or her boss? Perhaps there is, Paul H. Smith believes.
Assume for the sake of argument that the big-bang theorists are correct and that there was a moment, or an eternity, before time actually began when all matter in the universe—matter and energy being interchangeable—was compressed into a point so small it might not have been perceivable even had someone been around to see it. Everything that today comprises the entire universe was compressed into that point, forming a great link of all existence. This was the matrix at a state before time, a state before matter itself began to decay so as to form a measurement of time. In that state, there was complete locality, a micromatrix with all existence compressed into a single dot amidst emptiness. And then, for whatever reason, there was an explosion of all this compressed energy/matter and the bits and pieces of what was to become the universe flew apart from one another, just as they are flying apart from one another to this very day.
However, who is to say the link that once existed among every smidgeon of matter no longer exists? What if the energy that bound all that matter together before the beginning of time still binds all that matter together, only very stretched across what looks like, but probably is not, an emptiness of space?
The relationships among all aspects of existence and the fabric of time itself could simply be this microdot of the universe made huge over the course of billions of years. Might this, then, be the very foundation of the matrix Ingo Swann described when he and Hal Puthoff formulated their scientific theories to explain how and why remote viewing works? It’s a tantalizing possibility and might even be good enough science to keep the conveyor belt of government funding coming in, at least until corporate America caught on and figured the best way for Macy’s to find out what Gimbels was up to by remote viewing what was coming into the warehouse for Christmas.
Normally, the tasker or handler, the officer who’s managing the mission, knows the target but does not reveal it to the viewer or anyone working directly with him or her. Instead, the tasker provides the viewer with a number representing the target. The viewer does not know what or where the target is. He or she focuses on that number and then, by stages, gets additional impressions of what thing she is perceiving and commits these impressions to a series of notes. The higher the stage, the greater the detail the viewer is allowed to verbalize what he is observing. Initially, taskers used the coordinates of the target location in hours, minutes, and possibly seconds. But the viewers soon caught on to where in general the location was by the numbers themselves, requiring the taskers to use random numbers to represent the targets. The targets were only in the minds of the taskers, and the numbers represented what the targets were. Thus, the numbers were meaningless to the viewers on a conscious level, but provided a code which itself became a center of focus for the viewer who was then able to retrieve impressions of the target. In other words, Paul Smith writes, the subconscious mind has access to things the conscious mind does not. The viewers were trained not to impose their judgment or conscious assemblage of facts upon what they saw, but only to report the impressions they retrieved.
Paul Smith tells the story of being tasked by Ed Dames to a very different kind of target: Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. Weaving his way through and even filtering as much as he could of the conscious overlay of reality and left cranial hemisphere interpretation of the impressions he was getting, Smith said he made notes of “equipment, construction work, and a host of persons at the site.” What site could that have been on the surface of Titan? He said he “dimly perceived the great orb of Saturn, filling Titan’s bleak horizon.” And he had the impression of a “space vehicle falling away, irregularly shaped.” And there was a reference to “Armageddon.”
