Remote Viewing

I first heard about remote viewing in the 2009 film The Men Who Stare at Goats which was more of a parody of real experiments done by the military into the paranormal. The film (starring George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges, and Kevin Spacey) is based on Jon Ronson’s 2004 book of the same title. The film got me interested enough to read the book which is about attempts by the U.S. military to employ psychic powers as a weapon.

In the book The Men Who Stare at Goats, Ronson gets into the U.S. Army’s exploration of how “New Age” paranormal concepts such as ESP were given serious consideration as having potential military applications of the paranormal.

The book’s title refers to attempts that were made to kill goats by staring at them and stopping their hearts. A three-part British TV series in 2004, Crazy Rulers of the World, was based on the book.

I got thinking about all this again when I heard the recent podcast “Spooks and Psychics: Inside the Military’s Top-Secret ESP Unit” on a podcast I really enjoy, To The Best Of Our Knowledge.

The podcast talks about one successful example of remote viewing (RV) which is the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen target, purportedly using extrasensory perception (ESP) or “sensing” with the mind. In the example, a remote viewer was asked to “look” into a building in Russia by concentrating on a photo of it in a closed envelope. One soldier described a building on a shoreline, which smelled of gas and industrial products that had inside of it a large coffin-like object with fins, like a shark.

A few months later the CIA received satellite imagery showing that the Soviets had constructed a new ballistic missile submarine. It was later known by its NATO designation,  Typhoon class, but at the time of the remote viewing it was known in the USSR as the Akula. Russian for “shark.” This is purported to be one of several true examples of the military’s paranormal activity research.

My own investigations led me to another quite serious investigation in the book Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government’s Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis by Annie Jacobsen. She examines the now declassified papers that came from government attempts to locate hostages, fugitives, secret bases, and downed fighter jets, and gather other nations’ secrets using the paranormal. It went as far as to try to predict future threats to national security. She says that the intelligence agencies and military services involved include CIA, DIA, NSA, DEA, the Navy, Air Force, and Army-and even the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

As the podcast noted, remote viewing experiments have been criticized for lack of repeatability, which scientists demand, but it may be that a successful remote viewing is a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence for a subject and just not repeatable. There is no scientific evidence that remote viewing exists, and so it generally falls under “pseudoscience,” although it is physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, parapsychology researchers at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), who are generally credited with coining the term “remote viewing.” They wanted to distinguish it from the closely related concept of clairvoyance.

Ronson’s book first looks at the small group of U.S. Army officers in the late 1970s and early 1980s who wanted to use paranormal phenomena, some New Age philosophy, and elements of the human potential movement for intelligence-gathering.

Some of these efforts included First Earth Battalion Operations Manual from 1979 which you can now buy from Amazon! and a “psychic spy unit” established by Army Intelligence at Fort Meade, Maryland, in the late 1970s that was the focus of the film. This was the Stargate Project, established in 1978 by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and SRI International (a California contractor) to investigate the potential for psychic phenomena in military and domestic intelligence applications.

The Stargate Project was terminated and declassified in 1995 after a CIA report concluded that it was never useful in any intelligence operation. But conspiracy theorists seem to believe that its successes have been hidden from the public and are still being used covertly.

The “men who stare at goats” were Special Forces soldiers who supposedly experimented with psychic powers against goats at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, at the now-decommissioned “Goat Lab” medical training facility. Legend (and probably only a legend) is that one soldier was able to kill a goat simply by staring at it.

The middle section of Ronson’s book jumps to more modern psychological techniques like the military programs from the post-9/11 War on Terror at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and the psyops in Iraq. The connections seem tenuous, but maybe I am naive.

I was much more interested in the parts of the book dealing with the 1950s Army psychic program, and later the CIA’s MK-ULTRA “mind control” research program of experiments on human subjects that intended to identify and develop drugs and procedures to be used in interrogations. Early CIA efforts focused on LSD-25 to see if they could weaken an individual and force confessions through mind control. Could it be used to make Soviet spies defect against their will, or could the Soviets do the same to the CIA’s own operatives?

The MK-ULTRA project is now well known and it appears in many films, TV shows, books and even songs.

Ronson suggests that the “psychic warriors” are again active in the U.S. military again. Put your tinfoil hats back on.

Signs

Jeff looking for signs

Most people would not see any connection between the newly released film Hope Springs with Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones, and a film from earlier this year called Jeff, Who Lives at Home. I saw the former in the theater last week and watched the latter on DVD a few days ago. Very different films. I liked both of them a lot.

Hope Springs is about a couple that after 31 years together go to Great Hope Springs, Maine to work with a famous therapist to try to rediscover the reasons why they married so long ago.

In the other film, Jason Segel plays Jeff who is simply looking for meaning in his life. He is a stoner slacker who has been pretty much written off by his brother and mother, but he knows that signs are leading him towards meaning.

The connections are signs.

Jeff was powerfully influenced by the film Signs. That’s a film that focuses,in  B-movie thriller style, on an alien-invasion and was directed by M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable).

The film tracks a series of signs and portents that come to a  family in Pennsylvania who wake up one morning to find a 500-foot crop circle in their backyard. The news tells them that crop circles are being found all over the world.

Jeff, Who Lives at Home was directed by the Duplass brothers, Jay and Mark, who have directed some rather eccentric and funny films like The Puffy Chair, Baghead and Cyrus.  Jeff, Who Lives at Home  is more of a major studio, major names film, but it is still an odd one in all the best ways.

Kay and Arnold have been married for 31 years. Jeff has been on the planet for 30 years. They are both searching for answers because they can see the signs.

The couple has a therapist as a guide. Jeff has only himself to interpret the signs. He reminds me of the father in the TV show Touch that I wrote about earlier who is trying to find the red thread that his son sees.

Everything is connected. Everything has a purpose.

Jeff is living in his mom’s Baton Rouge basement. He watches TV, smokes pot, eats junk food and does not go out into the world. One critic said that Jeff,  in his soul, is a “character out of Dostoevsky – a holy fool.” He believes that “random” events (a television infomercial, a wrong number, a stranger on a bus) are not random. There are no accidents in the universe.

More than ten years ago, I read the book There Are No Accidents: Synchronicity and the Stories of Our Lives by Robert H. Hopcke, who is a Jungian marriage and family psychotherapist. (A therapist, like in Hope Springs. Coincidence? Of course not.)

The book explores the nature and role of synchronicity.  It was Carl Jung who coined the term “synchronicity” to describe those odd “coincidences” and events that seem to tell us something, teach us and sometimes turn our lives around. They make life a  grand, mysterious story.

From the book’s promtion: “A woman is set up on a blind date with the same man twice, years apart, on two different coasts. A singer’s career changes direction when she walks into the wrong audition. A husband gives his wife an unexpected gift—after she repeatedly dreams about that very same item.”

But how do you identify these coincidences as signs and uncover their significance so that they turn our lives towards greater meaning?

Some of the stories in the book – a woman is set up on a blind date with the same man twice, years apart, on two different coasts; a singer’s career changes direction when she walks into the wrong audition; a man gives his wife an unexpected gift, after she repeatedly dreams about that very same item – will trigger memories of your own synchronicities.

One of Jung’s favorite quotes on synchronicity was from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, in which the White Queen says to Alice:

“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards. The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday–but never jam to-day.’
‘It MUST come sometimes to “jam to-day,”‘ Alice objected.
‘No, it can’t,’ said the Queen. ‘It’s jam every OTHER day: to-day isn’t any OTHER day, you know.’
‘I don’t understand you,’ said Alice. ‘It’s dreadfully confusing!’
‘That’s the effect of living backwards,’ the Queen said kindly: ‘it always makes one a little giddy at first–‘
‘Living backwards!’ Alice repeated in great astonishment. ‘I never heard of such a thing!’
‘–but there’s one great advantage in it, that one’s memory works both ways.’
‘I’m sure MINE only works one way,’ Alice remarked. ‘I can’t remember things before they happen.’
‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,’ the Queen remarked.