Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (65 page)

“No wonder California’s so fuckin’ weird,” Gordon says. “They must’ve done it right over Disneyland.”

“Great…” grumbles Skip, “so the next time I get abducted by aliens and bent over for an anal probe, I can blame it on those guys.”

“Or you could blame yourself for looking so sexy,” Twinker teases him.

“There’s an upside,” says Lloyd. “As I see it, contact with these otherworldly entities is a necessary, if unpleasant, part of our spiritual and evolutionary growth. After all, it’s the predator that forces its prey to evolve–or perish.”

“Wait–” says D.H., “you’re saying the aliens are predators?”

“As always, it’s more complicated than that…” says Lloyd. “What I’m suggesting is that the next stage in our evolution might not be physical, but instead, an evolution of consciousness. And since we live in a predatory universe, Nature may have designed, in her infinite wisdom, a predator that can only be detected by using certain desirable traits in our species–such as a highly developed sense of intuition, or psychic abilities. The development of those traits would then be necessary for the survival of the species as a whole. So for the sake of our own evolution, in other words, we should all become aware of these interdimensional entities that I’ve been telling you about. They’re already here, and have been for a long while. Our interaction with them is inevitable.

“Of course, our government doesn’t subscribe to that point of view,” Lloyd grouses, “and that’s why the whole business has been kept so hushed up. It’s interesting to note that right after the Roswell Crash–in the same month, actually–the National Security Act was passed, thus paving the way for the creation of a national intelligence agency. I’m talking about the CIA, of course, which was officially chartered in September of 1947. Not everyone knows this, by the way, but the Director of the CIA oversees the entire U.S. intelligence community–including all military agencies–and functions as the President’s principal advisor on most intelligence matters.”

“I’ll bet that really chafes the FBI’s ass,” Jimmy says.

“You can bet the military isn’t too thrilled with the situation, either,” Lloyd says. “Which leads to another odd coincidence from July of 1947 that interests me. When the debris from the Roswell Crash was shipped to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, General Walter Dornberger just happened to be assigned there. General Dornberger had been in charge of the Nazi rocketry program at Peenemüende, where thousands of prisoners had died as forced laborers. He escaped the Nuremberg trials only because he’d been brought to our shores by the CIC under Operation PAPERCLIP.”

“So you’ve got aliens, Nazis, and the CIA all involved in a big cover-up,” Jimmy says.
“Nice.”

“And the Men in Black are like interdimensional Secret Service agents,” Gordon extrapolates, “maintaining the cover-up with scare tactics, intimidation–even murder.”

“Something like that…” Lloyd concedes. “The world is a far stranger place than the nightly news would have you think. Expanded awareness is our only clear path for evolution, but counter-evolutionary forces are constantly hijacking our awareness with dullness and distractions. We’ve become like machines controlled by a haphazard series of shocks from outside. When we wake up to our situation and start seeing the bigger picture, it isn’t always pretty…. But if each of us is an immortal spiritual being having a temporal human experience, as I truly believe, then a large part of our experience must have to do with integrating human fears and limitations–and thereby overcoming them. To do that, you need to take a compassionate, eyes-wide-open approach. You have to look at
everything
going on in this world–the good
and
the bad–not just the mundane activities within your own circumscribed sphere.”

“But how do we do that if the government is deliberately keeping things hidden from us?” asks Gordon.

Lloyd huffs and says, “
That
, my dear boy, is where remote viewing comes in.”

A REMOTE VIEW OF REMOTE VIEWING

I
t’ll take Lloyd the next sixty miles to explain what remote viewing is and how it operates, but I’ll spare you the dialogue and just summarize his whole mind-warping lecture here:

Lloyd’s buddy, Harold “Hal” Puthoff, was responsible for getting the remote viewing program up and running at SRI International in the early seventies. Hal had been a Naval Intelligence officer who’d worked with the NSA at Fort Meade in the sixties, so he was known and trusted by the intelligence community. When Hal took a job at SRI as a laser physicist and started fooling around with parapsychology experiments on the side–with the big dream of demonstrating the reality of paranormal phenomena in SRI’s controlled laboratory settings–Hal’s CIA-connected friends were there for him, backing him up.

One of those friends was a former CIA agent named Cleve Backster, who liked to hook up houseplants to lie-detection machines and threaten to set them on fire, just to see if he could get a reaction out of them. Initially, Cleve had only wanted Hal to help him zap some ferns with laser beams, but when he saw how sincere Hal was about conducting parapsychology experiments of his own, he put Hal in touch with the self-described “psychic guinea pig,” Ingo Swann.

A wildly talented psychic, Ingo had been the star of several research projects at the American Society for Psychical Research in New York (right across from the Dakota at 5 West 73rd Street). During a series of experiments at the ASPR that had been designed to see if psychics could perceive the weather in distant cities, Ingo had coined the term “remote viewing” to describe what he was doing.

The experiments went something like this: Phone numbers for the weather bureaus of major cities around the country were put into identical opaque envelopes. An envelope was chosen at random by a third party and Ingo was told the city’s name. He then gave his impressions of the city’s weather (without having any prior access to national weather reports in newspapers or on TV). His results were weirdly impressive when feedback from the call to the weather bureaus was reported. Whether Ingo had visited those cities by astral-projection, or somehow tapped into the universal unconscious for his weather reports, no one was certain. But however he was doing it, his so-called “remote viewing” techniques seemed to work.

Cleve Backster persuaded Ingo to phone up Hal Puthoff and the two of them started up a long-distance conversation. They must have hit it off, because on June 4th, 1972, Ingo got on a plane to San Francisco and drove out to SRI International to meet with Hal. It probably helped that they were both were gung-ho Scientologists at the time. Hal had just reached Operating Thetan Level III and Ingo was at Operating Thetan Level VII–levels that are only reached after years of “auditing” and the successful completion of many secret (and outrageously expensive) Scientology courses. At OT Level III and beyond, those courses are supposed to confer supernatural powers upon the participants–or so claimed that thieving former Scribe to Jack Parsons and messianic, pathological liar, L. Ron Hubbard.
²

For Hal and Ingo’s first psychic experiment together, Ingo was asked to remote view and telekinetically manipulate a superconductor-shielded magnetometer in front of a group of skeptical observers at the Stanford University Physics Department. The magnetometer was used for high-energy particle physics experiments. It was buried under layers of mu-metal, copper, aluminum, and three feet of concrete designed to prevent its internal magnetic field from being disturbed by anything larger than a quark. Ingo was able to remote view the interior of the magnetometer and provide accurate descriptions of it right down to a gold alloy plate and a Josephson Junction deep in its electronic guts. He then penetrated its shielded magnetic core with his probing mind, causing fluctuations in the magnetometer’s signal output never seen before or since. Hal wrote up the results in a report that was circulated among several dozen scientists and his good friends in the intelligence community.

Around that same time, the CIA had found out that the USSR was pouring millions of dollars worth of resources into psychic spying efforts and other projects that delved into what the Soviets called
psychoenergetics.
Their inspiration had likely come from documents they’d seized after the fall of the Third Reich, mainly from Himmler’s
Ahnenerbe–
the infamous Nazi Occult Bureau. To keep up with the Soviets, the CIA decided they wanted to look into psychic spying, too. After reading Hal’s report, several CIA scientists showed up at SRI to watch Ingo identify the contents of sealed boxes in a series of double-blind tests. The objects that went into each box were selected by the scientists themselves and sealed away without anyone else’s knowledge. Ingo’s descriptions of the contents in the boxes were uncannily accurate (he identified a moth inside a box as “a brown, moving leaf,” to cite just one example). The CIA’s Technical Services Division ended up offering Hal funding for an eight-month pilot program at SRI to further explore psychic phenomena, starting in January of 1973.

Ingo stayed on board and a senior research physicist from Sylvania who’d heard about the project, Dr. Russell Targ, volunteered for a spot on the team and was accepted.
³

Andrija Puharich swung by SRI with the famed spoon-bender, Uri Geller, for six weeks of testing with Hal and Dr. Targ while Ingo was away in New York packing for the move to California. Uri spent his time locked up in a windowless, soundproofed room where he fondled silverware, correctly predicted rolls of dice in a closed box eight out of ten times, and drew reproductions of pictures as they were being drawn by observers outside the room. Many of those psychic high jinks were captured on film.

After Ingo’s return to SRI, the team used up the first five months of the pilot program trying to nail down certain willed effects of telekinesis (“remote influencing” is what they call that now). The effects, while at times impressive, proved in the end to be uncontrollable–or “intrinsically spontaneous.” Ingo suggested they go back to remote viewing, but Hal and Dr. Targ were stymied as to how they could make remote viewing seem like something the CIA would want to invest in. Plenty of reliable ways to find out about Moscow’s weather already existed. But then, during a visit to SRI, the famed UFO researcher, Jacques Vallee, made an inspiring suggestion. “All you need is an address,” he said. Ingo took that suggestion and came up with the idea of using coordinates. If he was given just the longitude and latitude of a target–in degrees, minutes, and seconds–that information gave away almost nothing. He could then retrieve impressions about the target without any preconceived notions–or “front-loading”–getting in his way. He would be able to spy anywhere on the globe (and beyond). It was perfect.

And it was perfectly irrational, said Hal and Dr. Targ. Geographic coordinates weren’t part of the natural world; they were just an arbitrary way for humans to divide up spaces on the globe. But Ingo pointed out that remote viewing didn’t seem rational on its surface, either, but it worked–so they agreed to try it.

Ingo went into the same windowless, soundproofed room that Uri Geller had made use of, and Hal and Dr. Targ picked ten coordinates off a map next door. In the session that followed, Ingo reeled off one correct response after another, describing basic features like “ice” for a coordinate in the Arctic region, “Ocean. I see Spain off in the distance,” for a coordinate in the sea off the coast of the Iberian Peninsula, and so on…. Concerned that telepathic overlay might be involved and Swann was only reading their minds, Hal asked his CIA buddies to send some double-blind coordinates–locations that neither the two scientists, nor Ingo, would know anything about. The CIA obliged and on May 29th, 1973, Ingo was given the coordinates for the first official CIA target.

At the start, Ingo just saw a cabin in the woods. He didn’t sense anything very interesting there, but Hal told him to look around.
Something
had to be there. So Ingo looked around and found something about a half-mile away from the coordinate. It seemed to be a hidden military installation. Ingo was able to sketch out a fairly detailed map. He had a strong impression of something underground, like a former missile base. (It was actually a secret microwave interception post and code-breaking facility located near Sugar Grove, West Virginia, manned by the Navy and the NSA). The CIA reported back that Ingo’s results were accurate in every detail, and even the relative distances on the map were to scale.

But that wasn’t all…. A few days later, Hal received a call from Pat Price, a fellow Scientologist (OT Level IV) who was offering to have his skills tested. Hal was a little reluctant, but “on an impulse” gave Pat the coordinates of the CIA target without telling him anything else.

On June 4th, 1973, Hal received Pat Price’s five-page response, which went into even greater detail than Ingo’s session. According to a CIA source, not only were Pat’s descriptions of the physical layout of the site accurate, but he even went so far as to provide “a list of project titles associated with current and past activities, including one of extreme sensitivity.” He also came up with the facility’s code name (“Hay Stack”).

With the CIA’s official confirmation of his skills, Pat Price was invited to join the SRI remote viewing team. At the same time, the CIA decided to renew its financial support for another two years. Coordinate Remote Viewing (CRV) was deemed worthy of a deeper look.

(Just for the record: The CIA funding for remote viewing dried up in 1976 due to fallout from the agency’s role in the Watergate break-in. However, new funding arrived shortly thereafter from a curious source–the Foreign Technology Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where crashed UFOs and dead aliens have been allegedly sent for study.)

Over the course of thousands of double-blind CRV sessions in the years that followed, Ingo Swann became convinced that remote viewing was an innate method of perception that transcended the physical constraints of normal cognitive awareness based on what we can see, hear, taste, smell, or touch. He believed it was an ability that everyone possesses–a sixth sense. He also believed people could be taught how to use it. But first he had to explain to his own satisfaction how remote viewing worked.