MIND-REACH by Targ & Puthoff    

 

PREFACE

 

Remote viewing – a human perceptual ability to access, by mental means alone, information blocked from normal perception by distance, shielding, or time.  That is the subject of this book.

 

What can now be told is that for more than two decades it was also the subject of an intense government effort fueled by Cold War concerns as to whether there was a credible threat to the United States from a known, similar large-scale effort being pursued in the then Soviet Union.  The story told here is how that program came to be.  In response to a request from the CIA, we tell how we initiated and built up the remote viewing program at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) to both serve a number of clients in the intelligence and DoD (Department of Defense) communities, and to generate a dense data base for scientific evaluation.  As time went on, the research effort described in the following pages evolved into a highly-classified, special-access program carried out under such codeword project names as SCANATE, PHOENIX, STUNT PILOT, SUN STREAK, CENTER LANE, GRILL FLAME and STAR GATE.  These names, and the program efforts they covered, only became public knowledge beginning in 1995 as the Cold War wound down and a declassification effort was mounted based on President Clinton’s Executive Order Nr. 1995-4-17, entitled Classified National Security Information.  That Executive Order reversed to some degree the maxim “when in doubt, keep it classified.”  On September 6, 1995, the CIA Public Affairs Office publicly admitted for the first time their involvement in setting up the program in a release entitled “CIA Statement on ‘Remote Viewing’.”  And now, some 90,000 pages of documentation on the two-decade-plus program have been declassified and are available, both at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in College Park, Maryland, and by purchase of a 14-CD “Star Gate Collection” from the Information and Privacy Coordinator, Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, D.C. 20505.    

 

Despite the increasing constraints brought on by the classified aspects of the program, we struggled to obtain permission to provide to both the scientific community and the lay public as much as we could about remote viewing and related phenomena.  This book, and our first scientific publications in Nature[1] and in the Proceedings of the IEEE[2] (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), are the result of that struggle.  And as a result of this open publication, other laboratories soon became interested in the work, set up their own programs and independently replicated the experiments.  One example, now in operation for more than two decades, is the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory established by the Dean of Engineering, Robert Jahn.[3]

 

Now, with the release of certain of the classified aspects of the program, we can “break the code” of some of what the reader finds here.  Chapter 1 begins with a remote viewing by Ingo Swann of a site 3000 miles away from our Menlo Park, California laboratory in response to a request by a “skeptical colleague of ours on the East Coast.”  Read “CIA officer monitoring the project.”  In Chapter 3 we describe remote viewer Pat Price’s result when targeted on the same site.  The site described turned out to be a sensitive government installation.  In an evaluation of this 1973 experiment, finally declassified in 1996, we find the CIA project officer stating that “Pat Price, who had no military or intelligence background, provided a list of project titles associated with current and past activities including one of extreme sensitivity.  Also, the code-name of the site was provided.  Other information concerning the physical layout of the site was accurate.”[4]  That result generated an intense and significant response from the intelligence community as they attempted to determine how the information might have been obtained by more prosaic means.  What helped to settle the issue at that point was the generation of similar results when, in response to tasking, we had our remote viewers target on Soviet facilities.  (The first Soviet site Price was targeted against was an unidentified R&D facility at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan.  He claimed to see a “damned big crane” where a person only came up to the axles on the wheels.  He drew the sketch shown in the accompanying photo which can be compared with an artist’s conception derived from satellite photos.  He then went on to describe correctly other aspects of the site and its activities.).  Again, the vignette described at the end of Chapter 7 concerning an “East Coast Colleague who was collecting information about the different scientists who had worked with Uri” (Geller) was yet another CIA officer.  Similarly for our “skeptical government visitor” in Chapter 1 who agreed to be a subject in a series of three of our standard remote viewing experiments and who rendered the merry-go-round result shown in Figure 2.  And so it went. 

 

We found that leading this double life, scientists in the “White World,” intelligence providers in the “Black World,” was not without its ironies.  Once, while making a presentation to a small select group at CIA on some excellent results recently obtained on an operational target, one of the attendees suddenly leaped up from his chair and exclaimed “Wait a minute; I know what’s going on!  This is a psychological test of our gullibility, and I want whoever is taking notes to know I’m not buying it!”  And he stomped out of the room.  (We continued with our briefing.)  When dealing with our public skeptics we often felt like those scientists before us who experienced skepticism from their unwitting colleagues for their belief in the possibility of an atomic bomb while, meanwhile, they were preparing to detonate one in the New Mexico desert.

 

On the other hand, we were pleasantly surprised to find that the higher the level of the officials that we briefed (and this included congressmen, military leaders, National Security Council staff, and various Agency Directors), the more acceptance there seemed to be.  Perhaps the intuitive capacities of high-functioning executives predispose them to be more open to the concept of extraordinary human functioning.  Certainly it makes them more enthusiastic for practical applications of such functioning, if verified.  Or there may be some support for the idea often expressed in psi research that those who make it to the top in our hierarchical societal structure may, at least unconsciously, tap into psi reserves of their own when they have to make key decisions based on insufficient data.  In any case, the phenomena we were describing seemed time and time again to have struck a resonant chord in these upper echelons.

 

With the passage of time many of the details of the classified aspects of the program have become public knowledge, sometimes from surprising sources.  For example, in response to a question from a student while giving a speech at a university, ex-President Jimmy Carter revealed an incident that we thought would never see the light of day.  A Soviet plane went down in Zaire, and spy satellites failed to locate the wreckage.  CIA Director Admiral Stansfield Turner then turned to remote viewers who found the plane, and agents on the ground were dispatched to the location in a successful recovery mission.  In other tests carried out by CIA personnel, Price was successful in describing the interiors and locating the coderooms in two foreign embassies.  The operations officer concluded “It is my considered opinion that this technique – whatever it is – offers definite operational possibilities.”[5] 

 

As a result of our successes, we were tasked with developing a training program for the Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) at Ft. Meade, Maryland.  Several intelligence officers went through this program and went on to use their newfound skills in operational applications.  As recently as 2001, an assessment of the use of remote viewing under asymmetric warfare conditions was the topic of a Marine War College thesis.[6]

 

Eventually, as the program expanded in response to additional funding/tasking from the Army, Navy, Air Force and various elements of the intelligence community, the entire effort was consolidated under the aegis of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).  Further discussion of the now declassified aspects of the program and its evaluation can be found in scholarly journals[7] and books[8] and in memoirs written by the participants. 

 

However, the true significance of the program lies in the broader issues:

 

·             Just how such a large-scale, multi-year, multimillion dollar program as the one described here could get started and survive in a skeptical if not outright hostile milieu of modern government, corporate and public sectors of society;[9]

·             What remote viewing is, and its characteristic strengths and weaknesses;

·             How remote viewing relates to our current scientific paradigm;

·             The courageous personalities of the first visionary remote viewers involved;

·             The response of both scientists and the public at large;

·             And its importance for our understanding of human capabilities.

 

It’s all here, told firsthand by the authors of this book as events unfolded in modern circumstances during a new look at an ageless phenomenon.

 

Despite the ambiguities inherent in the type of exploration carried out in our program and described in detail in this book, the integrated results attest to unequivocal evidence of a human capacity to access events remote in space and time, however falteringly, by some cognitive process not yet understood.  This leaves us with the conviction that this fact must be taken into account in any attempt to develop an unbiased picture of the structure of reality.

 

Perhaps one of the most encouraging statements ever made to us occurred at the conclusion of a highly classified briefing we gave to a congressional intelligence committee.  We were approached afterwards by one of the congressmen who said “Although I see why we must pursue this as a matter of national security, what is truly most significant about these studies is what they tell us about the human potential.”

 

 

Harold E. Puthoff, Ph.D.

Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin

Austin, Texas

 

November 2004