The Psychics and the Saucers

     One of the benefits of preparing last month's post was that it forced me to reread Jim Schnabel's excellent book on the U.S. psychic spies, or remote viewers. Schnabel is an excellent investigative reporter in the field of science, and he detailed his sources of information page by page, so I don't think we need doubt the broad details of his story. This is important, because one of the things the remote viewers discovered was that there was Somebody Else interested in the same things as them.
     They would lie down in a room with a sealed envelope containing the co-ordinates or a photo of the remote site to be viewed. Their eyes covered, and white noise circulating through their earphones, they used to "go into their zone", or induce an altered state of consciousness in which their psychic abilities could be concentrated. But, as explained in my last post, anything tinged with the religious, supernatural, or general strangeness tended to attract their clairvoyance.
     Thus, in 1980, when one of the psychics, Joe McMoneagle was targeting some site of special intelligence interest, his attention was caught by an object over the site. It appeared to be a flat metallic disc with rotating edges and was, he sensed, powered by some sort of plasma drive. He felt its altitude was 14,000 feet [approx. 4,300 metres] and it was traveling at 4,500 mph [7,200 kph]. Well, we've heard of many such objects inspecting U.S. and other N.A.T.O. military bases and missile sites. Why should the Soviet Union be excepted?
     Another psychic, Ingo Swann was remote viewing a Soviet submarine when he saw an object shadowing the sub from the air. When asked to identify it, he drew a flying saucer. As a footnote, Schnabel mentioned that the same story was recounted, without the names, by Howard Blum in his 1990 book, Out There. Although Blum claimed that the event took place at a special meeting in 1985, Schnabel's own sources informed him that the event and the meeting were quite separate. I mention this to show that these accounts derive from multiple sources.

"Accidental" results like these led Puthoff [the boss] and other officials ... to specifically target remote viewers against UFO incidents. McMoneagle, going down to his zone to find what he believed would be some operational target, was often surprised to find himself looking around the cramped, curved interior of an unearthly ship filled with skinny, large-eyed humanoids - who often stared back at him, wondering what the hell he was doing there. Facing off with aliens was rough business, it seemed, and on several occasions, McMoneagle returned from the experience drenched in sweat and xenophobic stress.

     During training, a fellow called Tom Nance was asked to view the far side of the moon, as well as the "face" on the Cydonia region of Mars. He sensed that some humanoid civilization had once lived in Cydonia. Given the same target, McMoneagle drew the alien makers of the site in detail. He sensed that "They" had fought for survival on Mars, had dispatched some sort of space lifeboat to earth, and perhaps built the Pyramids of Egypt. Considering that the Cydonia "face" has since been proved to be a natural formation, an example of pareidolia, this should serve as a warning to us. Going down into one's "zone" may be useful to connect to your hidden clairvoyance, but it is also a good way to connect with your subconscious imagination.
     A couple of others frequently investigated UFO targets, but when asked to attempt to confirm their results, Swann normally declined. In his opinion, it would be highly dangerous to entangle his mind with beings about whose purposes and powers he knew nothing, except that they were almost certainly experts in a field in which he was a mere dilettante.
     Nevertheless, Swann had two extraordinary adventures which he committed to "a few dozen pages of novelistic prose that he circulated among some friends." It started in 1983, when a friend from Capitol Hill asked him to do a job for some colleagues. According to plan, he met them on a street corner outside a museum in Manhattan. Introducing themselves by pseudonyms, they took him to their car and drove him, blindfolded to some underground installation a few hours outside of New York. The occupants appeared to be Marines in mufti. Having been led to a windowless room, he was given co-ordinates for some place on the moon. Up there, he visualised a number of monumental structures which did not appear to be made by either nature or man, if you get my drift. At the end of the day, they gave him several thousand dollars in cash and returned him to his apartment, again blindfolded.
     The second time, he was flown to Alaska and then taken by a helicopter to a remote lake, where he was informed that something was about to happen as if by clockwork.

As Swann stood there, he saw a mist form over the lake, and then an unearthly triangular object rose out of the lake, sucking up water and shooting out bright beams of light, and then zoomed off into the distance.

     Well, they asked him, can you tell us what it was? No way! he replied. Now that he had witnessed it, he had too much information overload to perform effective remote viewing. Besides, it scared him out of his wits.
       All that was unofficial. But there were at least two occasions when team members remote viewed strange alien craft and, when the sealed target envelope was opened, it revealed a UFO photographed by a spy satellite or spy plane. Don't you ever believe that the Government doesn't have concrete evidence about UFOs.
      One of the team leaders, Ed Dames used to get his viewers to perform an "open search" ie just to let their clairvoyance loose over the earth without a specific target, hoping it would help them to spy on UFOs. It didn't work out that way, but one of them did accidentally witness the Exocet missile attack on the U.S.S. Stark two days before it happened.
     But it used to take a lot out of the viewers, and one day the team got their own back. During an open search they started to see some sort of aircraft coming over Canada from the Arctic a few weeks in the future.  There were images of red and white, of livestock, of boxes, of a corpulent pilot, of an open cockpit with runners on the bottom. One viewer drew a picture of something with eight other objects in front.
     Dames saw the significance clearly: it was a planned terrorist attack. Probably somebody from the Middle East would be sending in an ultralight or modified helicopter, low enough to pass under the radar, possibly loaded with a nuclear bomb. He had to alert his friends in the intelligence community, because it would sound more credible coming from them than from a bunch of psychic spies.
      Just as he was about to run out for a telephone, his team stopped laughing long enough to explain that they had been describing Santa Claus and his reindeer!

Reference: Jim Schnabel (1997), Remote Viewers, the secret history of America's psychic spies. Dell Books, chapter 22
Up-date: The spy who saw the attack on the Stark has recently put his story on-line here.