By Paul H. Smith
Author of Reading the Enemy's Mind
I didn’t dream that I would discover first hand that ESP was real. I certainly never imagined that one day I might find myself using mental powers to fight the Cold War. Now, more than twenty years from the day I was recruited, it still seems fantastical if I think on it too long.
I did have adolescent dreams of intrigue. I grew up with James Bond, and longed for the glamorous life of a spy. I also read science fiction, some involving ESP – telepathic animals, or alien strangers marooned on Earth, hiding their psychic powers from suspicious human neighbors. But that was all fantasy – or so I thought by the time I got around to joining the no-nonsense United States Army. I was wrong.
One day, in a scene right out of Men In Black, all that changed. With no warning that such a thing might exist, I was recruited to become a remote viewer – a specialized kind of psychic spy – for the US Government.
How I was chosen to become a remote viewer is a convoluted tale, which you’ll find among the pages of my book, Reading the Enemy’s Mind. Suffice it to say that this event profoundly altered the course of my life in ways I could not have predicted. Before the decade was out, I and the diverse group of folks I met in what came to be known as CIA’s Star Gate Program had poked our minds into nearly every corner of the world and identified threats to American security, helped to capture narco-traffickers on the high seas, searched for kidnaped hostages, and spied out the secrets of many a potential foe – all without leaving our windowless building hidden among the trees on an Army post in Maryland.
Along this journey some astonishing things happened. Using remote viewing I accurately foresaw an Iraqi surprise attack on an unwitting American warship fifty hours before it actually happened. I experienced at the sub-atomic level the powerful energy flux from what may have been a Soviet particle beam weapon. I helped describe a turncoat secret agent who was giving away the CIA’s secrets to its nemesis, the KGB. Though we had our failures, I also watched my fellows pull off similar, sometimes even more sensational feats. The impossible we did every day – the miraculous didn’t seem to take much longer.
These are not the fevered meanderings of an addled brain. They are matters of official record, now largely declassified by the US Government.
So what is remote viewing? According to the government training manual on the subject, it is "The acquisition and description, by mental means, of information blocked from ordinary perception by distance, shielding or time." In other words, it is the ability humans have to perceive real impressions, concepts, and sensory experiences at a distant or hidden location using the powers of the mind alone. There is, to be sure, much more to it, but not enough space to explore it further here.
Most surprising is that remote viewing eventually became almost like just another job. “You know what amazes me about this, Paul?” one of my friends said to me one day as he prepped for yet another trip into the ether. “This doesn’t amaze me anymore!” But that was only partly true. Many of our forays into mind-space became routine; after all, how many secret Soviet laboratories can you visit, and how many drug-smuggling boats can you trace before boredom sets in?
Still, there was the occasional miracle that could astonish us government remote viewing “spooks,” even jaded as we were. Some of these, too, are recorded in my book.
Now there is a whole new generation of people to talk to about remote viewing and to teach how to do it. Much of the amazement I experience comes now through their eyes. As I watch a novice viewer have her first success in describing a place to which she has never physically been; or when I share the astonishment of a more advanced student when he uncovers intrinsic, complex details about a person or an event, the identity of which had been kept hidden from him until now, I remember the excitement I felt when I first accomplished those same kinds of things.
Not many months ago, I had just such an experience when, unbeknownst to her, I gave a young woman taking my Intermediate Course the task of describing the main building of the top secret National Security Agency. Within a few minutes, and without knowing consciously what the target was, she reported the following information:
[the people who work here] synthesize information from a lot of different sources and on different topics from all over the world. They are gathering information from satellites, information on world events, political uprisings, weather, and putting it together in classified reports.
She went on to summarize quite accurately the sort of information she found in some of these reports as:
...a summary of events in world hot spots such as the Middle East, China, etc. The reports include information on food supplies, population census data. They are composites of data and facts in order to predict future events, used in scenario planning and actions for deployment
Until she was finished and I showed her a picture of the location to where she had sent her conscious awareness, she had no clue that she had “been” to the famous spy agency. Yet in these words and others also recorded at the time, she described it almost perfectly. I admit to being unexpectedly amazed once again at remote viewing’s power.
Appropriate to the theme of this magazine, remote viewing does indeed involve a phenomenon – one whose cause-and-effect we don’t understand, and one we barely know how to use. But that’s where the fun begins: Those who elect to delve into remote viewing know we’re at the frontier. Beyond us beckons terra incognita – unknown terrain, luring us on with promises of amazements yet to be had.
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