Military and Intelligence Applications
...military historians had already documented the use of remote viewing during World War II. After the war, secret British army documents revealed that the wife of the head of the Royal Air Force - her husband was known as the "man who won the Battle of Britain" - was a "sensitive." She was credited with using remote viewing to locate enemy air bases that conventional methods had not detected. Another key military leader, the American general George S. Patton, believed that he was the reincarnation of a Roman general, and General Omar Bradley agreed that Patton seemed to possess a "sixth sense."
In the 1950's secret CIA-funded programs involving some psi research were code-named Projects Bluebird and Artichoke. In 1978 University of California psychologist Charles Tart surveyed fourteen psi research laboratories and found that five had been approached by government agencies interested in tracking their progress. During the Reagan administration, the House Science and Technology Subcommittee released a report containing a chapter on the "physics of consciousness." The report stated that psi research deserved Congress's attention because "general recognition of the degree of interconnectedness of minds could have far-reaching social and political implications for this nation and the world."
Why was this topic supported for two decades, under the watchful eyes of highly skeptical CIA and DIA contract monitors and a world-class scientific oversight committee? For one very simple reason: remote viewing works - sometimes. The "hit rate" for the military remote viewers was not wildly greater than the results observed in the clairvoyance experiments discussed in chapter 6, but when conventional investigation and intelligence techniques were at a loss to provide critical information on sensitive missions, sometimes remote viewing worked spectacularly.
For example, in September 1979 the National Security Council asked one of the most consistently accurate army remote viewers, a chief warrant officer named Joe McMoneagle, to "see" inside a large building somewhere in northern Russia. A spy-satellite photo had shown some suspicious heavy-construction activity around the building, which was about a hundred yards from a large body of water. But the National Security Council had no idea what was going on inside, and it wanted to know. Without showing McMoneagle the photo, and giving him only the map coordinates of the building, the officers in charge of the text asked for his impressions. McMoneagle described a cold location, with large buildings and smoke-stacks near a large body of water. This was roughly correct, so he was shown the spy photo and asked what was inside the building. McMoneagle sensed that the interior was a very large, noisy, active working area, full of scaffolding, girders, and blue flashes reminiscent of arc welding lights. In a later session, he sensed that a huge submarine was apparently under construction in one part of the building. But it was too big, much larger than any submarine that either the Americans or the Russians had. McMoneagle drew a sketch of what he "saw": a long, flat deck; strangely angled missile tubes with room for eighteen or twenty missiles; a new type of drive mechanism; and a double hull.
When these results were described to members of the National Security Council, they figured that McMoneagle must be wrong, because he would be describing the largest, strangest submarine in existence, and it was supposedly being constructed in a building a hundred yards from the water. Furthermore, other intelligence sources knew absolutely nothing about it. Still, because McMoneagle had gained a reputation for accuracy in previous tasks, they asked him to view the future to find out when this supposed submarine would be launched. McMoneagle scanned the future, month by month,"watching" the future construction via remote viewing, and sensed that about four months later the Russians would blast a channel from the building to the water and launch the sub. Sure enough, about four months later, in January 1980, spy-satellite photos showed that the largest submarine ever observed was travelling through an artificial channel from the building to the body of water. The pictures showed that it had twenty missile tubes and a large, flat deck. It was eventually named a Typhoon class submarine.
Scores of generals, admirals, and political leaders who had been briefed on psi results like this came away with the knowledge that remote viewing was real. This knowledge remained highly classified because remote viewing provided a strategic advantage for intelligence work. In addition, the agencies that had supported this research knew very well that the topic was politically and scientifically controversial. They had to deal witht the same "giggle factor" that has caused academic and industrial scientists to be careful about publicizing their interest in psi.
Scientists who had worked on these highly classified programs, including myself, were frustrated to know firsthand the reality of high-performance psi phenomena and yet we had no way of publicly responding to skeptics. Nothing could be said about the fact that the U.S. Army had supported a secret team of remote viewers, that those viewers had participated in hundreds of remote-viewing missions, and that the DIA, CIA, Customs Service, Drug Enforcement Administration, FBI, and Secret Service had all relied on the remote-viewing team for more than a decade, sometimes with startling results. Now, finally, the history of American and Soviet military and intelligence-sponsored psi research is emerging as participants come forward to document their experiences.
But it's always heartening to see a good effort.
