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  • The Amazing Story of the Clairvoyants Who Observed Atoms

    The Amazing Story of the Clairvoyants Who Observed Atoms

    From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 6 No 4 (Aug 2012)

    In few, if any, science textbooks or records of Nobel laureates will you find the name of a bona fide and publicly acknowledged occultist or clairvoyant. This, however, is not because such individuals never contributed anything to the history of science. On the contrary, it is due to a profound hubris and acute myopia within the institution of Science that talented metaphysical pioneers have not been credited with scientific discoveries and insights that were ahead of their time. In this material, excerpted from Chapter 6 of my book The Grand Illusion (Vol. 1), we hone in on the startling work of two such metaphysicists in particular.

    Occult Chemistry: Leadbeater and Besant

    From 1895 to 1933, Annie Besant (1847-1933) and Charles Leadbeater (1854-1934), two of the best known theosophists and metaphysicians of the 20th century, conducted clairvoyant investigations into all of the then known elements and certain compounds in order to observe the so-called “fundamental building blocks” that composed them, as well as their general structure. This involved the apprehension of visual information at sub-microscopic levels far beyond the ability of the eyes to perceive. The term for this kind of clairvoyant perception today is micro-psi (Besant and Leadbeater referred to it as “magnifying clairvoyance”).

    The initial investigations were collected and published in the first edition of Occult Chemistry in 1908 (the book was subtitled Investigations by Clairvoyant Magnification into the Structure of the Atoms of the Periodic Table and Some Compounds). A second edition of the 1908 material was issued in 1919. The sum total of Besant and Leadbeater’s clairvoyant observations of the chemical elements were collected and published posthumously in a third edition of Occult Chemistry in 1951.

    An article entitled “Occult Chemistry” appeared in the Theosophical publication Lucifer in 1895 (the year Leadbeater and Besant began their collaboration) and was reprinted as a separate pamphlet in 1905. In it, three chemical elements, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, were clairvoyantly examined and their analyses presented tentatively to the public by Besant and Leadbeater.

    Hydrogen, the first chemical atom selected for analysis, and possessing the lowest atomic weight, was found to be composed of eighteen smaller entities. Clairvoyantly it was seen to consist of six small bodies, contained in an egg-like form. According to Leadbeater/Besant, it rotated with great rapidity on its own axis, vibrating at the same time, and the internal bodies performed similar gyrations. “The whole atom spins and quivers, and has to be steadied before exact observation is possible,” they wrote.

    The six little bodies are arranged in two sets of three, forming two triangles that are not interchangeable. Further, the six bodies are not all alike; they each contain three smaller bodies – each of these being an ultimate physical atom – but in two of them the three atoms are arranged in a line, while in the remaining four they are arranged in a triangle.1

    The Ultimate Physical Atom (UPA)

    Figure 1. The hydrogen “micro-psi atom.” The UPAs are the heart-shaped objects designated a plus or minus sign denoting either an inflow (minus) or outflow (plus) of energy. Stephen M. Phillips argues that each triangle is a single hydrogen nuclei and that the micro-psi observation has somehow bonded two together. The mid-sized circles are therefore quarks, and the heart-shaped entities sub-quarks. (Source: Occult Chemistry by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater.)
    Figure 1. The hydrogen “micro-psi atom.” The UPAs are the heart-shaped objects designated a plus or minus sign denoting either an inflow (minus) or outflow (plus) of energy. Stephen M. Phillips argues that each triangle is a single hydrogen nuclei and that the micro-psi observation has somehow bonded two together. The mid-sized circles are therefore quarks, and the heart-shaped entities sub-quarks. (Source: Occult Chemistry by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater.)

    As noted, in 1895 – when physical atoms were still thought to be the most basic unit of matter – Leadbeater and Besant observed in the early stages of their investigation that hydrogen was not a unity but was composed of eighteen smaller units. These smaller units they dubbed an “ultimate physical atom” (UPA), and later took to referring to them as “Anu” (singular and plural) – the Sanskrit term for this new entity. They had no way to determine the exact size of the UPA but they found it existed in two varieties: positive and negative (or Yin and Yang). The positive and negative aspects wound around each other in opposite directions (somewhat like the snakes on the caduceus, or the helical structure of DNA), forming the UPA.2

    According to Besant and Leadbeater, the UPA was a very complex entity, with only its main characteristics provided in their diagram. “It is composed entirely of spirals, the spiral being in its turn composed of spirillae, and these again of minuter spirillae.”3 In addition to this reference to the subatomic fractality of “matter,” they correctly declared that the Anu was definitely not the electron. The spirals composing the UPA, if unwound, would actually be found to be circles or strings – twisted around on themselves many times to create the helical form depicted.

    Oxygen was found to consist of 290 minor atoms and nitrogen of 261. Now, this is where it gets even more interesting. When Besant and Leadbeater divided the number of UPAs in oxygen by the number of UPAs comprising hydrogen (18), they arrived at 16.11, almost exactly the atomic weight of the oxygen atom (16). This procedure yielded the same precision with nitrogen, an even more complex structure than oxygen, and therefore much more challenging to apprehend clairvoyantly for the occultists. In fact, this uncanny precision continued right through the entire table of known elements of the time (minor human counting errors notwithstanding).

    Although science had not identified such a thing as the ultimate physical atom, Besant and Leadbeater had identified this tiny entity as comprising physical atoms. Moreover, by using hydrogen as the standard (being the first element in the periodic table – itself being composed of eighteen UPA), they were able to ascertain the atomic weight of the elements by dividing the number of UPA they observed by eighteen. Should Besant and Leadbeater have been merely “delusional cranks,” we should not expect this kind of amazing result.

    As a matter of fact, this ability to deduce the accepted atomic weights of the elements from the number of UPAs they observed was the only thing Occult Chemistry had in common with the chemistry of 1895.4

    Noteworthy is the way the UPA was depicted by Leadbeater/Besant as being created by an upwelling of force from a higher-dimensional source – just as in the hyperdimensional physics advocated by Paul LaViolette, David Wilcock, Richard Hoagland, and others researching aether physics. (Those readers interested in the notion of an aetheric medium and its false elimination from mainstream science are referred to in my The Grand Illusion 1.) The models of physics on the cutting edge have been left with no choice but to incorporate other dimensions or ‘levels’ of reality to account for today’s scientifically observable phenomena. Furthermore, Leadbeater and Besant’s clairvoyant analysis provides intimate and detailed verification of the hyperdimensional torsion and/or spin forces embedded in the ‘aether’, which I write about extensively in The Grand Illusion 1.
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    How They Arrived at the UPA

    Leadbeater and Besant explained: “Any gaseous chemical atom may be dissociated into less complicated bodies; these, again, into still less complicated… [T]he fourth dissociation gives the ultimate physical atom. This may vanish from the physical plane, but it can undergo no further dissociation on it.”5 (emphasis added)

    Note that in their description of the UPA is a hint of multidimensional behaviour (this becomes relevant shortly). Interestingly, in 1888, the co-founder of Theosophy (it was founded in 1875), Helena P. Blavatsky, pre-empting Leadbeater and Besant by at least seven years, explained in The Secret Doctrine that on the next higher plane (etheric), what then-current science considered an undecomposable unity would – to higher perception – prove very complex. Water, for example would feature “many other constituents” besides just hydrogen and oxygen.

    As theosophists, Leadbeater and Besant would have anticipated the composition of the elements they clairvoyantly inspected (having obtained some hard-to-get samples via Sir William Crookes) to be much more complex than scientists of their time believed. They were right.

    Believe it or not, there appears to have been another earlier clairvoyant ahead of the game. At a time when Isaac Newton (a Hermeticist, though not clairvoyant) was arguing that matter was composed of impenetrable atoms given motion by outside forces, Emmanuel Swedenborg taught that matter was made up of a series of particles in ascending order of size, each of which was composed of a closed vortex of energy which spiralled at infinite speeds to give the appearance of solidity.6

    Two types of UPAs were observed by Besant and Leadbeater (see Figure 2), and they were identical in every way except “the direction of their whorls and of the force which pours through them. In the one case force pours in from the ‘outside,’ from fourth-dimensional space, and passing through the atom, pours into the physical world [‘male’]. In the second, it pours in from the physical world, and out through the atom into the ‘outside’ again, i.e., vanishes from the physical world.”7 (This was the “female” UPA.)

    Figure 2: The Two Types of Ultimate Physical Atoms, Male and Female (Source: Occult Chemistry by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater)
    Figure 2: The Two Types of Ultimate Physical Atoms, Male and Female (Source: Occult Chemistry by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater)

    In agreement with present-day aether researcher Paul LaViolette, David Yurth states in Seeing Past the Edge that these two opposite or mirror image particles constitute what we now refer to as matter and anti-matter states.8 This makes sense in light of Leadbeater and Besant’s comments that the positive/male UPA flows its creative energy outwards into our reality while the negative/female (anti-matter) counterpart transmutes energy from our reality back into the aether.

    Leadbeater and Besant said that if the higher-dimensional energy flow was stopped even momentarily, the whole manifest universe would disappear, “as a cloud melts away in the empyrean. It is only the persistence of that flow which maintains the physical basis of the universe.”9 LaViolette (among many others) has vindicated our two eminent occultists on this point, agreeing that without this constant flow,

    the subatomic particles and energy waves composing our physical universe would gradually dissipate, disolving [sic] into a state of uniformity. What would remain would be the ever-present, vast, and unfathomable multi-dimensional consciousness, of which we are a part, and whose now featureless calm “surface” had once generated our beautiful physical universe.10

    Physicist Nassim Haramein also supports this view, stating that, “without spin, none of reality can come to exist. All things spin!” Haramein agrees that “spin is fundamental to creation and objects that appear to be inanimate exist solely because spinning atoms within allow the objects to radiate, and hence, appear in our reality.”11 How did Leadbeater and Besant (and Swedenborg) know with such certainty so far in advance of science that our “physical” world’s source of origin is the aetheric medium’s spin dynamics?

    Besant and Leadbeater described the ultimate physical atom as a sphere, slightly flattened, with a depression at the point where the force flows in, causing a “heart-like” form. “Each atom is surrounded by a field,” they wrote, “formed of the atoms of the four higher planes, which surround and interpenetrate it.”12 If this is accurate, then etheric, astral and mental particles are of increasingly large size (physicists are searching for these “super particles” without realising they have already been quietly discovered).

    Leadbeater and Besant’s depiction of the UPA was fundamentally toroidal and way ahead of their time: “It turns incessantly upon its own axis, spinning like a top; it describes a small circle with its axis, as though the axis of the spinning top moved in a small circle; it has a regular pulsation, a contraction and expansion, like the pulsation of the heart.”13 Spin was first proposed in physics thirty years later by Goudsmit and Uhlenbeck in 1925 and was confirmed in electrons by Phipps and Taylor in 1927. The circular precessional motion described by the axis of the spinning UPA would later become known in physics as Larmor precession. Though the expansion and contraction (radial pulsation) described by Leadbeater and Besant is still unknown to physicists today, LaViolette points out that this description is quite plausible in the context of the ancient aether physics.14

    The UPA’s spinning motion is common to globules in complex plasmas,15 and as we see in Chapter 9 of The Grand Illusion, many of Leadbeaters’ and other metaphysicists’ clairvoyant observations can be accounted for in light of plasma dynamics. For instance, when exposed to an electric current the UPAs, as depicted by Besant and Leadbeater in 1919, arranged themselves in physical rows of “particle chains” – just like globules in complex plasma, as illustrated by A. Piel et al.16 In this UPA formation the depression of one UPA receives the aetheric flow of its neighbouring particle and then passes it out through its own apex, and so on.

    In Occult Chemistry Leadbeater refers to the UPA as having a certain level of apparent consciousness, and our best occultists and mystics (and scientists) all seem to agree that the universe is indeed conscious at all levels. It is interesting, as Jay Alfred points out, that David Bohm’s research into plasmas yielded the observation that electrons in a plasma configuration began to act as if they were part of a larger, interconnected whole, so much so that he frequently had the impression that the electron sea was “alive.” Mircea Sanduloviciu and colleagues have even created plasma spheres that can grow, replicate and communicate, fulfilling most traditional requirements for biological/living cells.17

    The links between consciousness and the spiralling energy inherent in the multidimensional fabric of the cosmos are increasingly being elaborated on by modern science. It is interesting to note some of the parallels between modern toroidal models and the fundamentally toroidal model Besant and Leadbeater described during their clairvoyant investigations. While Wilcock states that the aether’s substance naturally forms itself into a spherical formation because of the near-uniformity of the aetheric pressure on all sides, as well as the fact that it is the most ‘harmonic’ shape, he acknowledges that changing energy densities in the aether can cause these spheres to warp to some extent. For instance, they may stretch and flatten to create a donut-like shape, otherwise known as the torus, a model employed by Wilcock, Haramein18 and string theory.

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    Occultists’ Vindication Arrives Via Dr. Phillips

    In the late 1970s Stephen Phillips, then a physics graduate student at the University of California, happened across some of the diagrams from Occult Chemistry. Contrary to what we might expect of most physicists, he took a serious interest in the material, and the end result was a major technical validation of the data obtained by Leadbeater and Besant.

    Dr. Phillips discovered that “Besant and Leadbeater’s clairvoyant descriptions of the chemical elements are completely consistent with the Quark, Quantum Chromodynamic and Super-String theories of modern subatomic physics.”19 This he detailed in depth in his 1980 book The Extra-Sensory Perception of Quarks, in which Phillips reconciled Occult Chemistry with modern physics. Because of his work, “Occult Chemistry now stands as a glittering testimony to the validity of Besant and Leadbeater’s claims.”20

    To clarify, a UPA’s ‘whorls’ are the ‘strings’ of modern string theory. Phillips suggests, based on comparisons between the occultists’ whorls and the ‘strings’ of string theory, that “[a] whorl is a closed, 26-dimensional, bosonic string (the reported presence of spherical ‘bubbles in koilon’ in 7th-order spirillae imply that whorls extend beyond the sixth, compactified dimension, so that they must be 26-, not 10-, dimensional strings,)” and also that “[t]he UPA is a subquark state of a superstring composed of ten strings, i.e. the superstring is itself a composite object.”21

    Thus, Phillips has reinterpreted Besant and Leadbeater’s observations to be not those of atoms, but of subquarks and quarks. The notion of quarks was only introduced into modern physics decades later in 1964 by Gell-Mann and Zweig.22 Quarks are the building blocks of so-called ‘elementary’ particles, and are generally accepted as existing by the scientific community today.

    However, Phillips’ model is actually a subquark (or composite quark) model. In it subquarks make up quarks, quarks make up elementary particles (protons, etc.), elementary particles make up atoms, and so on. Thus, Phillips has identified the UPAs as subquarks, and, as Donald DeGracia reports in Beyond the Physical: A Synthesis of Science and Occultism, he calls his subquarks “omegons” to indicate they are the final and smallest form of physical matter (omega is the final letter of the Greek alphabet). Phillips shows, through rigorous quantitative procedures, that “the sub-quark combinations predicted by his model are almost in exact agreement with the detailed structures presented by Besant and Leadbeater.”23 He has successfully correlated the structure of the UPA with superstring models: the UPA itself is the ‘superstring’ of modern subatomic physics.

    However, please note: the only way Phillips could get the numbers generated by his theory to match the actual observations of Besant and Leadbeater was to infer that when they were observing the subquark structure of an atom, they were not observing one atom but two atoms that had somehow fused together – as a result of their interference with and observations of these entities – to create a diatomic arrangement. This might have resulted from the spreading of the particles’ wave packets/de Broglie waves caused by the mental stabilisation of the particles by the theosophists, removing the uncertainty in their momentum, therefore increasing the uncertainty of their spatial locations.

    From a slightly different angle, the procedure, in effect, may have ‘teased out’ some of the inherent non-locality of the particles’ de Broglie waves/wave packets in time-space or ‘reciprocal space’ so as to influence their locations in space-time:

    [E]ach particle would become so delocalised that there would now be just as much chance of finding it near an adjacent atomic nucleus as there was in finding it in the much smaller space occupied by the nucleus prior to its coming under observation… their wave functions would eventually overlap significantly, leading to a non-vanishing probability of their mutual strong interaction.24

    The clairvoyantly observed structure of micro-psi atoms (MPAs) consisted of two overlapping triangular formations, with each triangle containing nine UPAs, while the contemporary view of hydrogen is of a lone electron orbiting a nucleus of one proton. However, from the viewpoint of modern quark theory, that lone proton is actually an arrangement consisting of three quarks. Phillips further claims that each quark is in turn made up of three subquarks, meaning the hydrogen atom consists of nine subquarks. Because in Besant and Leadbeater’s hydrogen there were two triangles each of nine UPAs, Phillips’ conclusion is that each triangle must correspond to an atom of hydrogen as understood by modern science, meaning that the hydrogen structure observed by Besant and Leadbeater was actually made up of two atoms of hydrogen.

    In the end, there are far too many correspondences between what Besant and Leadbeater observed and what is now scientifically known about subatomic behaviour, to dismiss their work.

    The shapes they described, the fact that they observed isotopes… before isotopes were widely recognised in science… and a host of other relevant observations; all of these are ideas that were completely unknown to the science of their day.25

    The table on page 62 provides a partial overview of Leadbeater and Besant’s clairvoyant observations as compared with subsequent scientific discoveries.

    “Some micro-psi anticipations of scientific discoveries and ideas.” Note: Brendan Murphy’s comments in italicised brackets. (Source: Stephen Phillips, Extrasensory Perception of Subatomic Particles, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 9(4), 489–525, 1995.)
    “Some micro-psi anticipations of scientific discoveries and ideas.” Note: Brendan Murphy’s comments in italicised brackets. (Source: Stephen Phillips, Extrasensory Perception of Subatomic Particles, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 9(4), 489–525, 1995.)

    As DeGracia points out, Phillips has shown that to comprehend the finer points of Occult Chemistry one requires an advanced understanding of modern physics. Besant and Leadbeater described the quantum nature of physical matter in 1895, exactly as science would thirty years later and more. How did they know about quarks and subquarks so far in advance of their official scientific discovery?

    To gain some comprehension of how controversial the terrain we tread here, the existence of sub-quarks was only recently scientifically accepted, and even then not unanimously. Yurth reports that in the 1990s an armada of 450 scientists confirmed the existence of sub-quarks with an “unprecedented” level of scrutiny, and still physicists at the American Physical Society, MIT, Princeton and Columbia University succeeded in suppressing the publication of the research data in such mainstream publications as Scientific American, Physics Letters, Physics Review and Nature.26 Thank goodness for free scientific enquiry, eh?

    Regardless, Besant and Leadbeater were obviously capable of perceiving the fundamental nature of matter using occult means, the siddhis. According to Leadbeater, there is a tube-like structure that protrudes from the Ajna, or third-eye chakra of the etheric body, and it is by means of utilising this tube as an organ of vision that one can exercise micro-psi. As we can see, there is good reason to believe him. This psi faculty/ability is one of the siddhis Patanjali wrote about in his Yoga Sutras circa 400 BCE.

    In Aphorism 3.26 of the Yoga Sutras (c. 400 BCE), the earliest known treatise on yoga, its author Patanjali refers to a particular siddhi in which a yogi can gain “knowledge of the small, the hidden or the distant by directing the light of a superphysical faculty.”
    In Aphorism 3.26 of the Yoga Sutras (c. 400 BCE), the earliest known treatise on yoga, its author Patanjali refers to a particular siddhi in which a yogi can gain “knowledge of the small, the hidden or the distant by directing the light of a superphysical faculty.”

    One more interesting thing about sub-quarks highly pertinent to our occult leitmotif: the sub-quark’s track looks the way it does because in our space-time continuum the particle exists and then does not exist, exists and then does not exist. The discovery of the sub-quark constituted the very first scientifically verified instance of multi-dimensional behaviour in a measurable physical entity: “…in the rarified environment of the particle accelerator, the sub-quark exists-disappears-exists-disappears with a consistent, repeated, predictable frequency pattern…”27

    Leadbeater and Besant stated that the UPA – like the sub-quark today – could vanish from its plane but could undergo no further subdivision. It is truly the most fundamental aspect of physical matter at our density level. The scientific verification of Leadbeater and Besant’s observations clearly indicates the human ability to peer into domains non-existent to our ordinary senses and science’s conventional equipment – domains our most fundamental known ‘particles’ (standing wave structures) venture rhythmically in and out of. Yurth comments that this brings us “literally to the Edge of creation.”28 Do pause and let all of that sink in for a moment.

    Conclusions

    Our occultists are quantitatively and qualitatively vindicated from almost every conceivable angle. (I cover more angles than we have space for here in The Grand Illusion 1.) If we accept Phillips’ conclusion that ultimate physical atoms (UPAs) are sub-quarks rather than atoms, as Leadbeater/Besant once thought, then it is from dedicated occultists that we have obtained the first and possibly most accurate and detailed depictions of them and the aetheric medium that spawns them. On top of that, we must credit the initial discoveries of several isotopes to Leadbeater and Besant.

    Overall, the interrelated combination of clairvoyant observations, string theory, and ‘anomalous’ research findings that the Standard Model cannot explain – but which aether models easily incorporate – is too powerful to ignore.

    Brendan D. Murphy’s website is http://www.brendandmurphy.net.

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    Footnotes:

    1. Annie Besant & Charles W. Leadbeater, Occult Chemistry: Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements, 1919
    2. Annie Besant & Charles W. Leadbeater, Occult Chemistry, 1950
    3. Ibid
    4. Donald DeGracia, Beyond the Physical, 109
    5. Besant & Leadbeater, 1919
    6. See Victor Zammit, A Lawyer Presents the Case for the Afterlife, Ch. 2, www.victorzammit.com
    7. Besant & Leadbeater, 1919
    8. David Yurth, Seeing Past the Edge, 252
    9. Besant & Leadbeater, 1919
    10. Paul LaViolette, Subquantum Kinetics: A Systems Approach to Physics and Cosmology
    11. Nassim Haramein, What is the Origin of Spin?, www.theresonanceproject.org/pdf/origin_of_spin.pdf
    12. Besant & Leadbeater, 1919
    13. Ibid
    14. Paul A. LaViolette, Genesis of the Cosmos, 238-9
    15. Jay Alfred, Our Invisible Bodies, 49
    16. Ibid., 50
    17. Ibid., 65-8, 133-4
    18. See www.theresonanceproject.org/research.html for Haramein’s model
    19. DeGracia, 110
    20. Ibid. See also Phillips
    21. Stephen Phillips, Extrasensory Perception of Subatomic Particles, Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 9, No. 4, 1995, 489-525
    22. Ibid., 110-11
    23. Ibid., 111
    24. Phillips, 1995
    25. DeGracia, 113-5
    26. Yurth, 255
    27. Ibid, 54-5
    28. Ibid, 55

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  • Does Telepathy Conflict With Science? Many are Starting to Think Not

    Does Telepathy Conflict With Science? Many are Starting to Think Not

    From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 6 No 4 (Aug 2012)

    Recently, journalist Steven Volk was surprised to discover that leading skeptical psychologist Richard Wiseman has admitted that the evidence for telepathy is so good that “by the standards of any other area of science, [telepathy] is proven.” Mr Volk goes on to write, “Even more incredibly, as I report in Fringe-ology, another leading skeptic, Chris French, agrees with him.”

    Mr Volk might even be more surprised to learn that back in 1951 psychologist Donald Hebb wrote this:

    Why do we not accept ESP as a psychological fact? [J.B.] Rhine has offered enough evidence to have convinced us on almost any other issue… Personally, I do not accept ESP for a moment, because it does not make sense. My external criteria, both of physics and of physiology, say that ESP is not a fact despite the behavioural evidence that has been reported. I cannot see what other basis my colleagues have for rejecting it… Rhine may still turn out to be right, improbable as I think that is, and my own rejection of his view is – in the literal sense – prejudice. (emphasis added.)

    Four years later, George Price, then a research associate at the Department of Medicine at the University of Minnesota, published an article in the prestigious journal Science that began:

    Believers in psychic phenomena… appear to have won a decisive victory and virtually silenced opposition.… This victory is the result of careful experimentation and intelligent argumentation. Dozens of experimenters have obtained positive results in ESP experiments, and the mathematical procedures have been approved by leading statisticians…. Against all this evidence, almost the only defense remaining to the skeptical scientist is ignorance.

    But Price then argued, “ESP is incompatible with current scientific theory,” and asked:

    If, then, parapsychology and modern science are incompatible, why not reject parapsychology? …The choice is between believing in something “truly revolutionary” and “radically contradictory to contemporary thought” and believing in the occurrence of fraud and self-delusion. Which is more reasonable?

    So, here we have two skeptics in effect admitting that if this were any other field of inquiry then the experimental data would have carried the day by 1950.

    Like Price and Hebb before them, both Wiseman and French hold that the claim of telepathy is so extraordinary that we need a greater level of evidence than we normally demand. Why should this be so? Most people believe in the reality of telepathy based on their own experiences, and are puzzled by the description of telepathy as “extraordinary.”

    It is even more puzzling when surveys show that a large proportion of scientists accept the possibility telepathy exists. Two surveys of over 500 scientists in one case and over 1,000 in another found that the majority of respondents considered ESP “an established fact” or “a likely possibility”: 56 percent in one and 67 percent in the other.

    Polls such as this suggest that most scientists are curious and open-minded about psi. This, however, does not seem to be the case in one field: psychology. In the former study only 3 percent of natural scientists considered ESP “an impossibility,” compared to 34 percent of psychologists. In fact, the most prominent skeptics of psychic abilities today – such as Wiseman, French, James Alcock, Susan Blackmore, and Ray Hyman – are psychologists. An exception is biologist Richard Dawkins, but like Wiseman and French, he is also on record as saying the existence of telepathy would “turn the laws of physics upside down.”

    Psychologist James Alcock recently wrote that the claims of parapsychology “stand in defiance of the modern scientific worldview. That by itself does not mean that parapsychology is in error, but as the eminent neuropsychologist Donald Hebb pointed out, if the claims of parapsychology prove to be true, then physics and biology and neuroscience are horribly wrong in some fundamental respects.”

    But neither Alcock, Hebb, Wiseman nor French ever bother to explain how the claims of parapsychology “stand in defiance” of science, or how “physics and physiology say that ESP is not a fact.” Indeed, it is rare for a skeptic to ever back up this claim with specific examples. As I show in my book Science and Psychic Phenomena, on those rare occasions they do, they invariably invoke the principles of classical physics, which have been known to be fundamentally incorrect for more than three quarters of a century.

    However, a number of leading physicists such as Henry Margenau, David Bohm, Brian Josephson, and Olivier Costra de Beauregard have repeatedly pointed out that nothing in quantum mechanics forbids psi phenomena. Costra de Beauregard even maintains that the theory of quantum physics virtually demands psi phenomena exist. And physicist Evan Harris Walker has developed a theoretical model of psi based upon von Neumann’s formulation of quantum mechanics.

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    Ray Hyman’s 1996 argument (in the Skeptical Inquirer) that the acceptance of psi would require we “abandon relativity and quantum mechanics in their current formulations” is thereby shown to be nonsense. Contrast Hyman’s statement with that of theoretical physicist Costa de Beauregard, who has written “relativistic quantum mechanics is a conceptual scheme where phenomena such as psychokinesis or telepathy, far from being irrational, should, on the contrary, be expected as very rational.”

    As mentioned earlier, adherence to an outmoded metaphysics of science seems much more prevalent among psychologists than physicists. Skeptics such as psychologist Susan Blackmore are fond of saying that the existence of psi is incompatible “with our scientific worldview” – but with which scientific worldview? Psi is certainly incompatible with the old scientific worldview, based on Newtonian mechanics and behaviourist psychology. It is not incompatible with the emerging scientific worldview based upon quantum mechanics, the neurosciences, and cognitive psychology.

    Even before quantum mechanics began to supersede classical mechanics in the 1920s, many physicists were much more open to investigating psi phenomena than most psychologists seem today. An astonishing number of the most prominent physicists of the 19th century expressed interest in psychic research, including: William Crookes, inventor of the cathode ray tube, used today in televisions and computer monitors; J.J. Thomson, who won the Nobel Prize in 1906 for the discovery of the electron; and Lord Rayleigh, considered one of the greatest physicists of the late 19th century, and winner of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1904.

    Of course, for their efforts in investigating these and other unusual phenomena, these men were often criticised and ridiculed mercilessly by their colleagues.

    But modern physics is very different from the classical physics of the 19th century, and it is time the skeptical psychologists realised this. The great psychologist Gardner Murphy, president of the American Psychological Association, and later of the American Society for Psychical Research, urged his fellow psychologists to become better acquainted with modern physics:

    …the difficulty is at the level of physics, not at the level of psychology. Psychologists may be a little bewildered when they encounter modern physicists who take these phenomena in stride, in fact, take them much more seriously than psychologists do, saying, as physicists, that they are no longer bound by the types of Newtonian energy distribution, inverse square laws, etc., with which scientists used to regard themselves as tightly bound…. psychologists probably will witness a period of slow, but definite, erosion of the blandly exclusive attitude that has offered itself as the only appropriate scientific attitude in this field. The data from parapsychology will be almost certainly in harmony with general psychological principles and will be assimilated rather easily within the systematic framework of psychology as a science when once the imagined appropriateness of Newtonian physics is put aside, and modern physics replaces it.

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    Sources

    J.E. Alcock, Parapsychology: Science or Magic?, New York: Pergamon, 1981
    J.E. Alcock, “Parapsychology: the Spiritual Science”, Free Inquiry, 5 (2), 1985, 25-35
    Olivier Costa de Beauregard, “Quantum Paradoxes and Aristotle’s Twofold Information Concept,” in Laura Oteri, editor, Quantum Physics and Parapsychology (New York: Parapsychology Foundation, 1975), 91-102
    Olivier Costa de Beauregard, “The Expanding Paradigm of the Einstein Theory”, in A. Puharich, editor, The Iceland Papers (Amherst: Essentia Research Associates, 1979), 161-191
    Christopher Evans, “Parapsychology – what the questionnaire revealed”, New Scientist, 25, January 1973, 209
    Hyman, The Evidence for Psychic Functioning: Claims vs. Reality, Skeptical Inquirer, March/April 1996, 24-26
    George R. Price, “Science and the Supernatural”, Science, Volume 122, number 3165, August 1955, 359-367
    Mahlon Wagner & Mary Monet, “Attitudes of College Professors Toward Extra-Sensory Perception,” Zetetic Scholar, 1979, 5, 7-16
    E.H. Walker, “The Quantum Theory of Psi Phenomena”, Psychoenergetic Systems, Vol. 3, 1979, 259-299

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  • Time, Entanglement & Consciousness

    Time, Entanglement & Consciousness

    From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 6 No 4 (Aug 2012)

    Over the past year [2011-2012] a number of new, potentially momentous, discoveries have been made in the realms of quantum and particle physics. On the one hand, they stand to rock the very foundations of modern physics and the common-sense reality that most people live their everyday lives by. On the other hand, these same discoveries lend further support to the reality of both paranormal phenomena and the literal veracity of ancient wisdom. In particular, I am here referring to three recent announcements:

    1) In late April 2012 a research team from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology reported on an experiment involving the generation of light pulses travelling faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. This work involved forcing a wave peak on a pulse of light to move from back to front along the light beam as the light itself was travelling at the standard speed of light, such that the pulse travelled faster than the speed of light in a vacuum.1 If refined, such a technique could possibly allow information to be sent faster than the speed of light. This work follows on the heels of a major brouhaha over another alleged instance of faster than light speeds.

    A consortium of scientists reported in September and November 2011 that subatomic particles known as neutrinos had been measured travelling faster than the speed of light while passing through 730 kilometres of rock from the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research, formerly known as the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, to the OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) particle detector in the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, Italy.2

    Standard modern mainstream physics theories, many based in large part on Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity (first proposed in 1905), have long assumed that the speed of light in a vacuum is the upper limit of how fast anything can travel, and therefore if these experimental results are correct, some of the most basic assumptions in modern physics will need to be reevaluated.

    For months the debate raged over whether the neutrinos really were travelling faster than the speed of light; the consensus view held that there was some flaw in the apparatus, calculations, and/or analysis. Ultimately, based on carrying out further experiments, including at other labs, it was announced that “the original OPERA measurement can be attributed to a faulty element of the experiment’s fibre optic timing system.”3 Still, given the apparently solid work on light pulses mentioned above, I personally wonder if, just perhaps, OPERA did indeed capture some superluminal (faster than the speed of light) neutrinos, even if not all neutrinos travel so fast.

    A major objection to the possibility of superluminal travel of any form is that it will upset cherished notions of time and temporal ordering (conventional thinking asserts that the past must occur before the present which must occur before the future). From our perspective, particles (including particles of light, or ‘particles’ of information) travelling faster than light might be viewed as travelling backwards in time (arriving one place before they depart from another place), or through other dimensions, and open the possibility of effects occurring before causes (although exactly what ‘before’ means in this new notion of time is open to debate). That is, the concept of retrocausality (the future influencing the present and the past), which many people (including many theoretical physicists) instinctively reject, would have to be taken seriously.

    2) In quantum mechanics the concept of entanglement occurs when particles interact and are then separated, but they are still somehow correlated (or more accurately, anti-correlated) in terms of their characteristics. Acting on one particle will result in an effect or outcome on the other particle, even if a considerable distance physically separates the particles and there is no direct conventional physical or energetic link between them. To use a crude analogy, if two different roulette wheels in two different casinos are entangled in a quantum mechanical sense, whenever one roulette wheel comes up red the other will come up black.

    Einstein referred to quantum entanglement as “spukhafte Fernwirkung” (spooky action at a distance), but it has been demonstrated experimentally numerous times, and the effects of entanglement seem to propagate either instantaneously or at a speed thousands of times faster than the speed of light (which is highly perplexing). Up until now quantum entanglement has generally been limited to very small microscopic objects, such as subatomic particles, atoms, isolated molecules, and microscopic crystalline structures. In December 2011 a group of physicists from the University of Oxford, the National Research Council of Canada, and the National University of Singapore announced the successful quantum entanglement of two macroscopic (approximately 3 mm in size) diamonds at room temperature and separated by a distance of about 15 cm.4

    3) The wave function in quantum mechanics can be viewed as a mathematical or statistical way to describe the probabilities that certain properties will occur in a system of quantum particles (and ultimately, one can argue, everything – all of the known universe – can be reduced to a system or systems of quantum particles). And ‘quantum collapse’ (collapse of the state vector) can be viewed as the ‘freezing’ of this set of probabilities into one possibility or outcome, the one observed or measured, in the ‘real world’. But is the wave function simply, or truly, just a mathematical and statistical convention describing our limited knowledge of reality (perhaps with some currently unknown ‘reality’ underlying it)? Is the wave function to be understood as a description of the state of our knowledge? Or is the wave function itself a ‘real’ entity, a distinct state of reality – that is, is there a tangible, physically real, wave? Is the quantum state a real physical property of a system and not just a statistical description of our knowledge, and does ‘quantum collapse’ correspond to a real physical process?

    In November 2011 researchers M. F. Pusey, J. Barrett, and T. Rudolph (MFP and TR are in the Department of Physics at the Imperial College London, and JB is in the Department of Mathematics at the University of London) presented a new analysis and theorem as to the meaning of the wave function in quantum mechanics.5 According to their analysis, given some basic assumptions, the wave function must have a physical reality. However, in my opinion, they have not ultimately ‘proven’ that the wave function is objectively real. Rather, they have logically limited the possible interpretations of the wave function. By my view, their analysis appears to demonstrate that unless all quantum particles (that is, in effect, all entities in the universe) are somehow related or connected to each other through both space and time, then the wave function must be a real physical object. They seem to reject the notion that everything in the universe could be connected in some manner, for it is generally assumed that although quantum entanglement occurs in some cases, not everything is entangled with everything else. Furthermore, it appears to me that one of the assumptions underlying the analysis of Pusey, Barrett, and Rudolph is that retrocausality (the possibility of the future affecting the past) is impossible.

    Each of these three developments in physics is important, and fundamentally paradigm shattering. The least controversial of the three is the quantum entanglement of the diamonds, for the experimental results are clear and definitive. But the entanglement of macroscopic diamonds at ordinary room temperature under ordinary conditions demonstrates, I believe, that those who have long argued that quantum entanglement (and other ‘mysterious’ quantum effects as well) is limited to the microscopic world and can have no real consequences in our everyday lives are wrong.

    Quantum Entanglement & Telepathy

    Indeed, in a general (and, I would add, rather unconvincing) way, there has long been talk in some circles that certain psychic or paranormal phenomena such as telepathy (direct mind-to-mind communication) could be due to quantum entanglement.6 Now the entangled diamonds appear to provide strong evidence that such entanglement and correlation of information is possible. In my experience telepathy tends to work best when one is in a mental state decoupled from the immediate surrounding environment, which allows the mind of one individual to couple or entangle with the mind of another individual (or individuals). Like minds in telepathic rapport, diamonds best maintain their quantum entanglement when they can be decoupled from ‘distractions’ or the entanglement is stronger than the ‘distractions’ (in the case of the diamonds, ‘distractions’ might include such phenomena as being ‘excited’ by environmental changes, like temperature or physical movement). Of course most hardcore physicists tend to dismiss telepathy as nonsense even though they accept the quantum entanglement of diamonds.

    Solid Support for Retrocausality

    The issue of anything with the ability to carry information travelling faster than the speed of light, be it particles or light pulses, is highly controversial. As the edifice of modern physics has been constructed, with so many fundamental equations dependent on the speed of light as a constant and upper limit for temporal relationships, superluminal transfer of information breaks down the conventional concept of time, the future and past become confused, and the spectre of retrocausality raises its ugly head (well, ugly for status quo thinkers!).

    Yet there is solid support for retrocausality on several fronts. A group centred in Vienna, Austria, headed by Anton Zeilinger, has experimentally demonstrated that the decision as to whether or not two particles at a quantum level are entangled or in separate quantum states can be made after the particles have been measured (and may no longer exist).7 This means that at a quantum level actions in the present or future can reach back into the past!

    However, actions reaching back into the past are not limited to a quantum level. There is now strong parapsychological support for retroactive influences on the human mind. As I briefly mentioned in a previous edition of New Dawn,8 Dr. Daryl J. Bem of Cornell University has carried out a successful series of “retroactive facilitation of recall” experiments demonstrating that the future can influence the present and the past (in the case of the studies by Dr. Bem, students studying for a test after the fact improved their performances on a test already taken – that is, classic retrocausality, or effects occurring before their causes, was demonstrated).9

    As in the case of the entangled diamonds, the experimental physical evidence – in this case light pulses travelling at superluminal speeds and actions at a quantum level reaching back into the past – helps supply a theoretical foundation for psychic or paranormal phenomena that, although well attested to by competent researchers, are generally dismissed by mainstream scientists.

    The theoretical work on the wave function of quantum mechanics dovetails, in my assessment, with that which many mystics and psychics have been espousing since ancient times: In a fundamental way we, the entire universe, all entities, are interconnected at some level (the level of interconnectedness differing among various entities) and time is not what it superficially appears to be. In my opinion the work of Pusey, Barrett, and Rudolph opens, at the level of quantum mechanics, the age-old argument between the ‘physicalists-materialists’ who fundamentally believe there is nothing more to reality than matter and energy, and those who believe ‘ultimate reality’ involves something more and beyond matter-like and energy-like entities as generally construed by classical physics.

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    Consciousness is Fundamental

    But what could be beyond matter and energy? One possibility is consciousness, and I believe that consciousness can be equated with thought, mind, mental constructs, information, and ultimately knowledge. And rather than being a secondary phenomenon that arises from matter and energy, at the most fundamental level consciousness may be independent of matter and energy. Max Planck (1858-1947), the originator of quantum theory and winner of the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics, stated in a 1931 interview:

    I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.10

    This is a very interesting, and powerful, statement. In these terms, the statistical or probabilistic interpretation of the quantum wave function can be viewed as a genuine description of a system in a ‘pre-matter’ and ‘pre-energy’ state that only takes on a physical reality when affected by consciousness (and simple observation will affect any quantum system).

    Returning to the analysis of Pusey, Barrett, and Rudolph, I believe they conclude that the quantum state and wave function are ‘real’ in a physical-material-energy sense based on several assumptions. They assume that a quantum system can be isolated from the rest of the universe, both spatially and temporally – and in particular they assume that the future will not influence the past, so an apparatus or system separated by “a sufficient time period” will not affect an earlier apparatus or system. They also assume that measuring devices respond only to the physical properties of the entities that they are measuring. If the assumptions of Pusey, Barrett, and Rudolph can be shown to be wrong, their work can then be interpreted to demonstrate that rather than the wave function and quantum state being physically real, there must be something more to the universe and cosmos beyond simple matter and energy.

    I interpret various lines of experimental evidence, ranging from modern physics (such as the work on faster-than-light particles and quantum effects that may be interpreted as going backwards in time) to parapsychological studies (demonstrating that the future can influence the past), as clearly falsifying the assumptions of Pusey, Barrett, and Rudolph. At a most fundamental level it appears there are connections throughout space and time. Just as diamonds can be entangled, nothing is truly isolated. Ultimate reality lies beyond the physical and material. What is this ultimate reality? Our best conception may be encoded in what we think of as consciousness. The mystics and sages of the ages, as well as Max Planck, were right. Consciousness is fundamental. Consciousness underlies and is the source of everything else, including all that we regard as the material universe.

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    Footnotes:

    1. Ryan T. Glasser, Ulrich Vogl, and Paul D. Lett, “Stimulated Generation of Superluminal Light Pulses via Four-Wave Mixing”, Physical Review Letters, PRL 108, 173902, 5 pages, 26 April 2012.
    2. T. Adam, N. Agafonova, A. Aleksandrov, O. Altinok, P. Alvarez Sanchez, A. Anokhina, S. Aoki, A. Ariga, et al, “Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam”, article dated 17 November 2011, available from http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897 and http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1109/1109.4897.pdf (Accessed 18 November 2011). See also: Adrian Cho, “Where Does the Time Go? One experiment sees neutrinos traveling faster than light. If the result can’t be replicated, it may never be explained away”, Science, vol. 334, 1200-1201 (2 December 2011); Alex Knapp, “New Evidence Casts Doubt On Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos”, article dated 28 December 2011, available from www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2011/12/28/new-evidence-casts-doubt-on-faster-than-light-neutrinos/ (Accessed 20 January 2012); Clara Moskowitz, “Warped Physics: 10 Effects of Faster-Than-Light Discovery”, article dated 24 September 2011, available from www.livescience.com/16214-implications-faster-light-neutrinos.html (Accessed 20 November 2011); Jason Palmer, “Light speed: Flying into fantasy”, article dated 23 September 2011, available from www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15034414 (Accessed 18 November 2011); Jason Palmer, “Neutrino experiment repeat at Cern finds same result”, article dated 18 November 2011, available from www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15791236 (Accessed 18 November 2011); Jason Palmer, “Speed-of-light results under scrutiny at Cern finds same result”, article dated 23 September 2011, available from www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15017484 (Accessed 18 November 2011); Natalie Wolchover, “What Would It Be Like to Travel Faster than the Speed of Light?”, article dated 23 September 2011, available from www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/neutrinos-faster-speed-light-2044/ (Accessed 20 November 2011).
    3. Sergio Bertolucci, “Neutrinos sent from CERN to Gran Sasso respect the cosmic speed limit”, article dated 8 June 2012, available from http://press.web.cern.ch/Press/PressReleases/Releases2011/PR19.11E.html (Accessed 19 June 2012).
    4. K. C. Lee, M. R. Sprague, B. J. Sussman, J. Nunn, N. K. Langford, X.-M. Jin, T. Champion, P. Michelberger, K. F. Reim, D. England, D. Jaksch, and I. A. Walmsley. “Entangling Macroscopic Diamonds at Room Temperature”, Science, vol. 334 no. 6060, 1253-1256 (2 December 2011).
    5. Matthew F. Pusey, Jonathan Barrett, and Terry Rudolph, “The quantum state cannot be interpreted statistically”, article dated 14 Nov 2011, available from http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.3328 and http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1111/1111.3328v1.pdf (Accessed 19 January 20120).
    6. Note that phenomena generally regarded as “telepathic” may include a mixture of phenomena due to different causal mechanisms; thus some forms of telepathy may be the result of quantum entanglement and other forms of telepathy may be due to electromagnetic radiation, particularly in the extremely long wavelength and extremely low frequency range.
    7. Xiao-song Ma, Stefan Zotter, Johannes Kofler, Rupert Ursin, Thomas Jennewein, Caslav Brukner, and Anton Zeilinger, “Experimental delayed-choice entanglement swapping”, Nature Physics, www.nature.com/naturephysics, DOI: 10.1038/NPHYS2294, 6 pages, published online 22 April 2012; Caslav Brukner, “Quantum physics mimics spooky action into the past”, press release date 23 April 2012, available from www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-04/uov-qpm042312.php (Accessed 8 May 2012).
    8. Robert M. Schoch, “Thoughts Have Wings”, New Dawn, January-February 2011, 11.
    9. Daryl J. Bem, “Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 100, no. 3, 407-425 (March 2011); abstract available from http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/100/3/407/ (Accessed 20 August 2011); author’s typescript version of the paper available from http://dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf (Accessed 20 August 2011).
    10. Max Planck, [Interview comments] The Observer (London), 25 January 1931; quoted in Joseph H. Fussell, “Review and Comment” on the book Where is Science Going? by Max Planck (1933), The Theosophical Path, vol. 43, no. 2, 198-213 (October 1933).

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  • Time Travel & The Multiverse – Many Worlds: Many Timelines

    Time Travel & The Multiverse – Many Worlds: Many Timelines

    From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 6 No 4 (Aug 2012)

    Time travel has enchanted and intrigued us since the earliest days of fiction, when authors such as H.G. Wells, Samuel Madden, Charles Dickens and Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau stretched and challenged our imaginations with images and tales of men and women who invented amazing machines and devices that could take them back in time, or forward into the future. Because of the restrictions of light speed, and the paradoxes of going back to the past without damaging the future timeline, and a host of other obstacles and challenges, we, in fact, have remained stuck in the present.

    Our scientific knowledge and technological achievement has yet to catch up to the limitless dreams of our imaginations. But perhaps just because we have yet to achieve time travel in our universe, in our particular point along the cosmic arrow of time, doesn’t mean it isn’t achievable… and maybe the key is the universe itself. Are we limiting ourselves to our understanding only of the laws and possibilities of our universe, and leaving out of the equation other realities, other universes, with other laws and forces, paradoxes and limitation, possibilities and potentialities, far beyond our own?

    In 2011, quantum physicists at the University of California at Santa Barbara, led by Andrew Cleland and John Martinis, designed a “quantum machine,” as they call it, that might one day lead to proof of time travel and parallel universes. Their machine, a tiny little teleporter barely visible to the naked eye, involves making a tiny metal paddle cool to its ground state, the lowest energy state permissible by the laws of quantum mechanics, and then raising its energy slowly by a single quantum to produce a purely quantum state of motion. They even were able to put the device in both states at once, so it vibrated both slowly and quickly at the same time, in another sort of Schrodinger’s Cat state of superposition. They posited that we can only see one of these potential states at once, and upon the act of observation, the state then splits into additional universes.

    Perhaps there is a plethora of multiple or parallel universes all around us, but we cannot see them.

    Wormholes could also be another possibility for teleportation, as physicist Max Tegmark suggested while attending a panel in January of 2008 at MIT to discuss the science behind the movie Jumper starring Hayden Christiansen, about a man who can teleport all over the world at will. Tegmark, asked about the science behind the science fiction, remarked that a wormhole was one possible way of getting something quickly across space-time. However, after admitting that wormholes do appear to be theoretically possible, Tegmark commented that the actual trip would be rather gruelling because of the instability of the wormhole. “It could collapse into a black hole, which would be kind of a bummer.”

    Many scientists look to the possible existence of other levels of reality, or other universes, as a way to make time travel work outside of the restrictions of light speed and paradoxes. Imagine another universe alongside our own where the laws of physics are so completely different, that what is impossible here is mundane and trivial there. Multiple worlds, even, where each is different from the other, or perhaps an infinite number of universes where many would be exactly like our own. Hey, you might even exist in some of them just the way you are right now. In others, you might be rich, famous, handsome or even a cockroach! In fact, perhaps you might even be invisible in one of them!

    But we are getting away with ourselves here. When talk turns to the multiverse and other similar concepts, it’s easy to start dreaming of science fiction worlds with every possible kind of life and all sorts of amazing machines and devices… and time travellers passing effortlessly back and forth between the past, present and future as if it were nothing more than a visit to a few Saturday morning garage sales.

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    Parallel Universes

    Parallel universes have long been a mainstay of science fiction films and stories. Parallel universes can exist individually, or grouped together as the “multiverse,” and offer the possibility of a totally different reality in which someone, or something, can exist, or hop back and forth between. The laws of nature may be different in one parallel universe as they are in another, and in respect to time travel, would provide multiple versions of the future in which someone could exist, or not exist at all. Light speed limitations may not exist in a parallel universe, and the paradoxes that keep us from travelling back in time would be null and void if we could jump into a different historical timeline.

    Two great fictional examples of a parallel universe would be “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” written by English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, and C.S. Lewis’s “The Chronicles of Narnia,” both of which involve some sort of portal or wormhole, such as a rabbit hole or a large piece of furniture, through which a person can enter into another realm.

    Theoretically, parallel universes may be the result of a single random quantum event that branches off into an alternative universe. This is the “Many Worlds Interpretation” or MWI, of quantum mechanics, originally formulated by physicist Hugh Everett in 1957. It posits that each time a different choice is made at the quantum scale, a universe arises to accommodate that choice, thus creating infinite new worlds popping up all the time.

    These new worlds are being constantly created and could cause problems for a potential time traveller. Physicist David Deutsch wrote in “Quantum mechanics near closed timelike curves” for the 1991 Physical Review, that if time travel to the past were indeed possible, the many worlds scenario would result in a time traveller ending up in a different branch of history than the one he departed from. Deutsch, of Oxford University, is a highly respected proponent of quantum theory, and suggests quantum theory does not forbid time travel, but rather sidesteps it, referring to the traveller’s ability to go into another universe, a parallel universe, and avoid the paradox limitations.

    Deutsch’s idea of parallel universes, the multiverse, or “shadow universes” was described in his interview with the Guardian UK in June 2010 (“David Deutsch’s Multiverse Carries Us Beyond the Realm of Imagination”) as being “co-incident with, somehow contiguous with, and weakly interacting with, this one. It is a composite, a layer cake, a palimpsest of universes very similar but not quite identical to each other.”

    The number of these shadow universes could be enormous, and Deutsch points to photon experiments that suggest possibly a trillion of them or more. He also suggests that future-directed time travel will essentially only require efficient rockets, and is on the “moderately distant but confidently foreseeable technological horizon.” When it comes to past travel, the multiverse might save a time traveller from the pesky Grandfather paradox. He uses an example of a writer who wants to go back in time with a copy of Shakespeare’s Complete Works and help the bard complete Hamlet. It can happen, but in the multiverse view, “the traveller has not come from the future of that copy of Shakespeare.”

    Another off shoot of the MWI is the Many-Minds Interpretation, which extends the MWI by positing that the branching off of worlds occurs in the mind of the individual observer, introduced in 1995 by theoretical physicist H. Dieter Zeh, Professor Emeritus of the University of Heidelberg and the discoverer of decoherence.

    The Many-Minds Interpretation was widely criticised and somewhat ignored, mainly because of issues involving the theory that the mind can supervene on the physical as the mind has its own “trans-temporal identity.” The mind may select one identity as its own non-random “reality,” yet the universe as a whole remains unaffected, which presents additional problems when dealing with different observers ending up with the same measured realities. The actual process by which the mind of the observer would select the single, measured state is not explained by the MMI.

    Alternate timelines, each with their own forward arrow of time and their own history, may exist then, allowing time travellers to jump into another version of history and override those pesky paradoxes. Imagine being able to jump into a timeline where you do get your dream of marrying your high school sweetheart, but, finding out she’s an evil tramp as soon as you say “I do,” you could jump back into your original historical timeline, where you didn’t marry her and instead ended up three years later marrying her sister, your true soul mate, and lived happily ever after.

    Kaku’s Three Ways to Defeat the Paradoxes of Time Travel

    Noted theoretical physicist Michio Kaku (pictured below), author of Parallel Worlds and Hyperspace, writes in his newest book, Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration Into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation and Time Travel, of three ways around the paradoxes of time travel. The first is that you simply repeat past history and fulfil the past, and that everything you do once you are back in time was meant to happen anyway, a sort of destiny.

    This opinion is also mirrored in the views of famed physicist and superstring theory proponent Brian Greene, author of The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality and The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. Greene writes that outside of the quantum world, in the classical science of the grander scale, we exist static and unchanging at various locations in what he calls the “space-time loaf” of block we call space-time. These moments are unchangeable and fixed. Using a wormhole, if one were to indeed go back in time to a certain point, or date, one would find there is only one version of that date, and that your presence back in time would simply be a part of the original version of that moment. That moment has one incarnation, though. “By passing through the wormhole today and going back to that earlier time you would be fulfilling your ironclad destiny to appear at that earlier moment.” He points to the wormhole time machine itself as the culprit, with one opening or the other passing through time more slowly than the other end, but each opening is still going forward in time. Thus, there will also be a limit as to how far back in time you could travel in the first place.

    The second of Kaku’s paths around the paradoxes involves having some free will to change the past, but within limits, so that you could go back and try to kill your grandfather, but something would prevent you from doing so. The gun might lock up, or you might drop it and shoot your foot instead and end up in the hospital. No matter what, you would somehow be prevented from knocking off your Grandpappy.

    The third involves the universe splitting into two universes to accommodate the time traveller. His example offers someone going back in time to kill their parents, and in one timeline the people look like your parents, but are different because you exist in a different timeline.

    The many worlds approach could solve all the paradoxes in two ways. First, if we imagine the timeline of our universe as a line drawn on a board, then we can draw another line to represent the universe that branches off from the first. When you go back into the river of time, the river forks into two rivers, and one timeline becomes two timelines, and so on, and so on. Say you planned to kill your own father. You go back in time and you do the dirty deed. If the river of time does indeed have many forks, this would not be a problem. “You’ve just killed somebody else’s father. In that timeline, you don’t exist, but you exist because you jumped the stream,” Kaku writes.

    This idea would also solve another thorn in the side of physicists when discussing time travel: the radiation effects of entering a wormhole, which would no doubt destroy any time traveller, and also end up in a loop, the feedback becoming so strong it destroys the wormhole. “If the radiation goes into the time machine, and is sent into the past, it then enters a new universe; it cannot reenter the time machine again, and again, and again.”

    Kaku points out that the main problems involving time travel and wormholes specifically centre on the issues of the physics of the event horizon, as in the stability of the wormhole, the deadly radiation and the wormhole closing once it was entered. Solve those issues and time travel might be a piece of cake!

    Well, not a piece of cake… All physicists agree that once they come up with a Theory of Everything that unites the four universal forces of electromagnetism, gravity and the strong and weak nuclear forces, and formulate a complete theory of gravity and space-time, then time travel might be as close as finding a wormhole big enough, stable enough and open enough to get a time machine through. Not to mention the sheer amount of energy necessary to do this, which might require harnessing the power and energy of a neutron star, or finding that elusive exotic matter scientists are looking for, or a good source of negative energy, and we are far from doing any of these things.

    Oh, then there is the problem of creating the machine. And let’s not forget finding or creating a wormhole that could handle it! An interesting problem was brought up by physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies, author of About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution and other books. In an interview with Discovery.com called “Is Time Travel Possible?” he discussed wormholes as time machines and potential time travel tourists from the future, but with the caveat that “theoretically, it would take more than 100 years to create a 100-year time difference between the two ends of a wormhole, so there’s no way that our descendants could come back and tell us we’re wrong about this.” So, it’s all about timing, then… pun intended.

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    The Multiverse Theory

    The multiverse is the most widely mentioned theoretical “time travel paradox killer,” because it involves more than just one parallel universe, thus allowing for an increasingly possible world where the laws of physics are just right for time travel. If we can get from here to there, that is.

    There may be a massive number of other universes out there, possibly even an infinite number, or maybe just twenty or seventy. While our astronomical observations cannot at this time detect them, it is most definitely a theoretical possibility that many cosmologists and physicists are considering. These universes may or may not be like ours. In fact, they may or may not even have the same laws of physics or distribution of matter, or even number of spatial and temporal dimensions. Some will undoubtedly be “dead” and others will have life forms that we cannot recognise or even imagine. Others still may have duplicates of us living their own separate lives and timelines. Maybe, Big Bangs are going on constantly, 24/7/365 all the while creating new universes.

    The multiverse theory is not new, especially for readers of science fiction and fantasy, where other worlds beyond ours is a given. The actual term was coined in the year 1895 by psychologist and philosopher William James, and is now a mainstay of theoretical and quantum physics, as well as a part of our religious beliefs, mythological stories, and spiritual/New Age thought. The multiverse has been equated with everything from the Kingdom of Heaven of the Judeo-Christian Bible to the Akashic Field or Hall of Records or various planes of existence of more metaphysical and spiritual thought, to the multiple timelines and dimensions of paranormal and anomalous concepts.

    Cosmologist Max Tegmark took the multiverse theory to the next level by creating a classification level for potential other worlds:

    LEVEL ONE: Domains beyond our cosmological horizon – the least controversial type, what lies beyond the vantage point, yet likely has the same laws/constants, just with possibly different initial conditions than our own.

    LEVEL TWO: Universes with different physical laws/constants, other post inflation bubbles, far more diverse than Level Ones, these bubbles also vary in initial conditions as well as other seemingly immutable aspects of nature.

    LEVEL THREE: Quantum universes/Many Worlds Interpretation – exist alongside us on the quantum level where the random quantum processes cause the universe to branch into multiple copies, one copy for each possible outcome.

    LEVEL FOUR: Ultimate Ensemble – Other mathematical structures, where ALL potential alternate realities can exist, anything and everything is possible in terms of location, cosmological properties, quantum states, and physical laws and constants. These exist outside of space-time.

    Each level of multiverse has its own characteristics that separate it from the other levels, and for our purposes, the focus for time travel would be on those we humans could exist in, and possible travel between. One of the ways Tegmark differentiated the levels was by stating that in Level One our doppelgängers could live somewhere else in three-dimensional space, but in Level Three they would live on another quantum branch in an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space. Yet, as the Many Worlds Interpretation states, likely not be able to interact once the split into another branch occurs. Those found in Level Two might be like “bubble universes” that have different physical laws and constants, and each new bubble is created by splits that occur when spontaneous symmetry breaks occur in Level Three.

    Tegmark describes these levels in detail in his book Universe or Multiverse, and states that the key question isn’t so much whether there is a multiverse, but rather how many levels it has. He admits that nature may have tricked us into thinking our vantage point was the extent of reality, a fixed view of the world around us. “Einstein taught us that space is not merely a boring static void, but a dynamic entity that can stretch (the expanding universe), vibrate (gravitational waves), and curve (gravity).”

    Many scientists refer to the multiverse as more of a “pocket universe” concept, indicating different regions in space-time that are unobservable, but still a part of our one Universe. Inflationary cosmology does state these pocket universes can be self-contained, with different laws of physics, different particles and forces and possibly even different dimensions.

    Even the popular string theory allows for potentially trillions of possible universes, each one compatible with relativity and quantum theory. Michio Kaku states in Physics of the Impossible that, “Normally communication between these universes is impossible. The atoms of our body are like flies trapped on flypaper. We can move freely about in three dimensions along our membrane universe, but we cannot leap off the universe into hyperspace, because we are glued onto our universe.” Gravity, however, can freely float into the spaces between universes. Kaku also points to one theory where dark matter, which is an invisible form of matter surrounding our galaxy, might actually be “normal” matter in another universe.

    But the question remains, can we travel back and forth between these different worlds with different laws and arrows of time? Again, theoretically, it would require a shortcut through space and time… like a wormhole… and a means of safely getting through that wormhole should it be stable and traversable. So even though the multiverse theory takes care of some of the paradoxes by offering up alternate timelines and histories in which one can both go back to the past and kill their grandfather (while not killing him at the same time), it appears as though there is still no realistic way of actually doing that.

    The multiverse also allows for alternate futures as well, and for multiple, alternate versions of “you” to exist in any number of historical timelines with different outcomes depending on the choices you make in each baby bubble universe.

    In an article titled “Riddles of the Multiverse” for PBS.org’s August 2011 Nova series, University of Southern California Professor of Physics and Astronomy Clifford Johnson was asked straight out about whether or not the multiverse could ever be “visited” by humans. His response was that we must first work out the physics of these other universes, in order to determine when and whether it makes sense to “cross over from one to the other.” He did admit it is possible the stuff we are made of, the matter and forces that make us and hold us together, may not allow us to ever leave our four-dimensional universe and go to another. Imagine doing so and well, coming undone!

    For now it seems we just don’t yet have the brainpower and technology to leap and jump between worlds, to cross timelines and experience as many pasts, presents and futures as we would like. That knowledge and technology may exist, though… out there… somewhere in time.

    Reprinted, with permission of the publisher, from This Book Is From the Future: A Journey Through Portals, Relativity, Wormholes and Other Adventures in Time Travel, © 2012 Marie D. Jones & Larry Flaxman. Published by New Page Books a division of Career Press, Pompton Plains, NJ 800-227-3371, USA.

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  • Remote Viewing Revelations From the US Military to the MoD

    Remote Viewing Revelations From the US Military to the MoD

    From New Dawn 102 (May-June 2007)

    Surprising new evidence reveals that the British Government showed an active interest in using psychics for espionage purposes. In a document obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by UFO author and investigator Timothy Good, it was discovered that the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) undertook a study between 2001 and 2002 to investigate the efficiency of remote viewing.

    For those who don’t know, remote viewing – also called ‘travelling clairvoyance’ – is the ability to perceive places, persons and actions using psychic means. As is now well known, the US Army and various other tax payer supported government agencies, including the CIA, investigated and utilised remote viewing during the 1970s and 1980s.

    Now that it’s been declassified, all of the documentation pertaining to the British MoD’s remote viewing study can be obtained from their website – or so they claim. In one section it states that the results they obtained were largely unsuccessful and “undoubtedly disappointing with no one achieving any useful performance as an RV subject.” However, given the fact that untrained novices were used in the study, as well as the fact that the remote viewing methods they employed left much to be desired, this is not surprising.

    The MoD initially attempted to recruit 12 ‘known’ psychics who had advertised their abilities on the Internet. When every single one of them refused to be a part of the program, however, novice volunteers were drafted instead. One of the tests conducted involved blind-folding participants, and asking them to psychically determine the contents of sealed brown envelopes. Around 28% of the participants were successful in this endeavour. Most of them, the report states, were hopelessly off the mark.

    According to a spokeswoman for the MoD, their £18,000 remote viewing study “was conducted to assess claims made in some academic circles and to validate research carried out by other nations on psychic ability.” She adds: “The study concluded that remote viewing theories had little value to the MoD and was taken no further.”

    UFO investigator and author Nick Pope, who worked for the MoD for 21 years, suggests there may have been an undisclosed purpose to the study. Given its timing, he says, the study may have concerned military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. “It can only be speculated,” he says, “but you don’t employ that kind of time and effort to find money down the back of the sofa. You go to this trouble for high value assets. We must be talking about Bin Laden and weapons of mass destruction.”

    In response to media criticism for “wasting taxpayer’s money” on a project seen as being ludicrous, MoD defended their actions, perhaps indicating they take the subject of parapsychology – a so called “pseudoscience” – far more seriously than they would have the public believe.

    “I don’t think this was a waste of public money,” says Pope. “Many people will say so, but I think it is marvellous that the government is prepared to think outside the box. And this is as outside the box as it gets.”

    Parapsychology – the scientific study of psychic phenomena – has been around since at least the 1800s. However, it wasn’t until the 1930s, when J.B. Rhine began conducting ESP experiments under controlled laboratory conditions at Duke University, that parapsychology became a legitimate scientific field. Since that time, knowledge in this area has rapidly advanced, and, thanks to improvements in experimental design, the presence of psi (psychic or paranormal phenomena) – which is generally weak and inconsistent – can now be detected far more easily. Also of aid to this process is the use of meta-analysis, a new statistical tool, whereby the results of many different studies can be successfully combined to render the aggregate result statistically significant.

    In his fascinating book Entangled Minds, parapsychologist Dean Radin – a man with impressive credentials, who once served as a scientist at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) where he worked on a highly-classified program investigating psi phenomena for the US government – says we should no longer be trying to determine if psi exists, but how psi works. “After a century of increasingly sophisticated investigations and more than a thousand controlled studies with combined odds against chance of 10104 to 1, there is now strong evidence that some psi phenomena exist,” he explains.

    In light of the fact that parapsychology is now a sophisticated and legitimate branch of science, and has been for many years, one can’t help but wonder why the MoD’s rather expensive remote viewing study was of such poor standard. It simply defies logic. Why, in other words, didn’t their study draw more heavily from the impressive body of knowledge accumulated over years and years of parapsychological research? And why didn’t their methodology follow the well-known and highly successful controlled remote viewing (CRV) protocols developed by Ingo Swann and utilised in STAR GATE and other programs? And how come, when they couldn’t recruit the twelve ‘known’ psychics for the study, they settled for novice volunteers?

    By tracing the history of modern remote viewing, we can begin to answer these questions.

    Ingo Swann

    One of the most important figures responsible for today’s understanding of remote viewing is Ingo Swann, a scholar, artist, scientist and natural psychic. After acquiring a pet chinchilla, which, he discovered, “could read and apprehend” his thoughts, Swann developed an interest in psychic phenomena. When he began to move into the circles of those studying such phenomena, he soon became acquainted with Cleve Backster. Backster, a New York polygraph operator, is famous for his experiments in “primary perception,” in which he demonstrated, with the use of polygraph equipment, that every single type of living tissue, even the bacilli in yoghurt, possesses some degree of sentience. Swann worked in Backster’s laboratory for a year.

    Soon after that, Swann participated in a series of psychic experiments for the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR). According to Time-Life, a typical experiment would take place as follows: “Swann would sit in an easy chair illuminated by a soft overhead light, virtually immobilised by wires that hooked him up to a polygraph machine, which monitored his brain waves, respiration and blood pressure. Puffing away on his cigar, he would, as he put it, ‘liberate his mind’; then he would be asked to describe or draw his impression of objects that were set out of sight in a box on a platform suspended from the ceiling.”

    “At first,” says Swann, “I was not very good at this kind of ‘perceiving’, but as the months went on, I got even better at it.” The term “remote viewing,” coined by Swann and a research assistant at the ASPR named Janet Mitchell, was used to describe a particular kind of experiment conducted by Swann at around this time. Whilst in an out-of-body state, Swann would attempt to “see,” then report on the weather conditions in distant cities.

    Swann became more heavily involved in parapsychological research, when, in 1972, he agreed to work at SRI for Harold Puthoff, a highly successful physicist. Puthoff, after reading the seminal book Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain in which he heard about the work of Cleve Backster, was eager to conduct some parapsychological experiments of his own. The research project conducted by Puthoff – then later by him and another physicist named Russell Targ – was initially funded by the Sciences Research Foundation of San Antonia, Texas. Later on, when their successful remote viewing work at SRI began to gain wider attention, they started to receive funding from other government agencies, including the CIA.

    In one early remote viewing experiment at SRI, Swann was accurately able to describe – and sketch in great detail – the features of a uniquely designed magnetometer buried six feet in concrete beneath the floor. Not only that, he managed to affect the equipment’s output signal, as displayed on a strip chart recorder. Another subject, a photographer by the name of Hella Hammid, was able to accurately describe five out of nine target sites, resulting in odds against chance of more than 500,000 to 1.

    Thanks to the advent of coordinate remote viewing (CRV) – now called controlled remote viewing – numerous complications were eliminated. For example, it was no longer necessary for a person – known as the ‘beacon’ – to visit the spot that was chosen as the remote viewer’s target. This enabled remote viewing to be more easily used for espionage purposes.

    CRV is a method by which coordinates are employed to identify the target to be viewed. The coordinates used, however, needn’t be geographical in nature. They can be, and usually are, completely random numbers. Once a particular target has already been ‘visited’ by a remote viewer, and this target has been assigned a set of random coordinates, it is possible for another remote viewer to ‘visit’ the same location – which could be any point in time and space – simply by focusing on the same set of coordinates. The theory behind how this works is based on Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious. “Once these numbers have been assigned,” writes British author and paranormal expert Colin Wilson, “they become part of the psychic ether, much as the letters assigned to a website on the Internet will enable anybody to access the site.”

    During the Cold War, when the American government discovered they were lagging behind the Soviet Union in paranormal research, they grew concerned, thinking the Soviets might use their newly acquired knowledge for hostile purposes. Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, published in 1970 by two Western authors named Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder documented that numerous scientists throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were starting to take parapsychological research – or ‘psychotronics’ – very seriously indeed.

    “But interest in psychic phenomena within the ruling circles of Cold War leaders on both sides of the Atlantic remained very much a hidden agenda,” writes Jim Marrs in Psi Spies. “Officially, the United States had no interest in nonexistent phenomena.” However, a 1972 CIA report, released years later, proves agency officials were concerned about Soviet psychic research, even though, at the time, organisations such as the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) were beginning to give parapsychology a bad name, as was the media.

    As quoted by the editors of Time-Life, the aforementioned CIA report stated, “Soviet efforts in the field of psi research, sooner or later, might enable them to do some of the following: (a) Know the contents of top secret US documents, the movement of our troops and ships and the location and nature of our military installations. (b) Mold the thoughts of key US military and civilian leaders at a distant. (c) Cause the instant death of any US official at a distance. (d) Disable, at a distance, US military equipment of all types, including spacecraft.”

    The first remote viewing research program conducted by Puthoff and Targ with CIA funding was named project SCANATE. Held at SRI, the program went on for two years, yielding some remarkable results. The CIA, happy with the success of the program, felt their money was being well-spent. A CIA intelligence consultant named Joseph A. Ball, who, according to Mind Wars author Ronald McRae, was commissioned to evaluate SCANATE, allegedly said the project “produced manifestations of extrasensory perception sufficiently sharp and clear-cut to justify serious considerations of possible applications.”

    According to McRae, the AiResearch Manufacturing Company of Torrence, California, another consulting firm, was also contracted by the CIA to evaluate SCANATE, reaching essentially the same conclusion as Ball.

    As well as Swann, another notable member of the SCANATE team, and an equally successful remote viewer, was a former police commissioner named Patrick H. Price, who died suddenly of a heart attack in July of 1975. As a result of conducting a highly successful operational test for the CIA, in which his descriptions of a missile and guerrilla training site in Libya were confirmed by the CIA’s Libyan Desk officer, Swann helped ensure that government funding for project SCANATE would continue. Also of help to this process was the publication of SRI’s remote viewing research in a prestigious technical periodical, Proceedings of the IEEE, the editor of which was almost fired for choosing to deal with such controversial material.

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    Operation GRILL FLAME

    By the late 1970s, when the SRI team began receiving sponsorship from the US Army instead of the CIA, an operational unit of soldiers trained in remote viewing – known by many as the ‘psi spies’ – was created in order to help gather intelligence during the Cold War. One of the first units of remote viewers created by the US Army was called GRILL FLAME, previously named GONDOLA WISH. According to Joseph McMoneagle, one of the original psi spies, the Army interviewed around 3,000 people for GRILL FLAME, selecting, in the end, a total of six.

    Early on, the members of GRILL FLAME practised remote viewing using a variety of different experimental methods. Consciousness-altering techniques such as Transcendental Meditation (TM) and biorhythm were tested, but proved to be of little value. Remote viewing in an out-of-body state was also found to be largely unsuccessful, in that, although it could be achieved, the viewer would often lose interest in the mission at hand, focusing instead on the awe-inspiring nature of the experience. The team decided, in the end, to adhere to Swann’s structured CRV methodology, as this produced the most consistently accurate results.

    While in an out-of-body state, Robert Monroe, founder of the Monroe Institute for Applied Sciences – which, among other things, was used to screen remote viewers for GRILL FLAME and other programs – discovered he was being ‘observed’ by a group of strangers, one of whom appeared to be a powerful female psychic. He felt they were trying to probe his mind. Shaken by the experience, Monroe asked the GRILL FLAME team to investigate the matter. They soon discovered that the Soviet Union had a psi spies team of their own. “The Soviet KGB,” says Marrs, “laboriously screened more than a million people in an effort to locate ‘super naturals’, persons with the greatest amount of psychic power. These super psychics became the Soviet Union’s psi spies, sometimes assigned to seek out their Western counterparts.”

    For many years, the two teams indulged in a game of harmless psychic cat and mouse with each other, but that’s as far as the matter went. According to former military remote viewer Mel Riley, the two teams had a kind of “gentleman’s agreement” with each other, which involved keeping the existence of the opposing team a secret from their respective bosses, so as not to cause trouble for each other.

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    In 1985 GRILL FLAME came under control of the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA). From that point onwards, the unit codename underwent several changes. GRILL FLAME became CENTER LANE, then SUN STREAK, and finally STAR GATE.

    According to many of the original psi spies, the unit went downhill once it was placed under civilian control during the late 1980s. At around this time, two female trainees named Angela and Robin showed up. Called “the witches” by the others, they practised channelling, tarot card reading and automatic writing in place of CRV, consequently obtaining poor results in their work. The entire unit became something of a joke, especially when congressmen began to visit for psychic “readings.” By 1990, all of the military-trained psi spies had left the unit, leaving “the witches” in charge. Some of them retired. Others joined different units within the US Army.

    During its full operational period, before things went awry, the psi spies unit provided information of critical intelligence in hundreds of very specific cases. “On scores of occasions,” writes Swann, “this information was also described within government documents as being unavailable from any other source(s).” He continues: “Also contrary to popular belief, the program operated throughout its history under the very watchful eyes of numerous oversight committees, which were both scientific and governmental. During the seventeen and a half years it ran, it provided support to nearly all of the United States intelligence agencies.”

    Early on, most of the operational missions conducted by the psi spies involved investigating targets in the Soviet Union. Being highly classified and concerning issues of national security, the unit received little or no feedback about the success of these missions. One of the most talked about missions that the psi spies were asked to undertake was conducted by McMoneagle, who managed to correctly describe, in thorough detail, a new type of Soviet Submarine, which was then being constructed in a secret facility in Severodvinsk.

    Another mission noted for its stunning success was undertaken in May of 1978, in response to a plane crash that occurred in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). The plane, a Soviet Tupolev-22 bomber, was seen as being invaluable to the Americans, who wanted to recover the wreckage in order to examine its communication equipment. Two remote viewers working independently of one another, Frances Bryan and Gary Langford, each managed to draw detailed sketches of the area where the plane crash occurred. The plane was eventually located within barely 5 kilometres of the spot they had both described.

    The story of military remote viewing hit the mainstream press in late 1995, but not before the CIA had arranged for the American Institute of Research (AIR) to conduct a biased review concerning the value and success of STAR GATE. Their aim was to discredit remote viewing and other psi abilities, in order to thwart public interest in the subject. Jessica Utts, a professor of statistics with a positive opinion on psi phenomena, and Dr. Raymond Hyman, a professor of psychology and luminary of CSICOP – in other words, a fanatical sceptic of anything remotely ‘paranormal’ – were chosen to lead the review. “It was a good strategy to select evaluators from opposite camps; it gave the appearance of balance to the evaluation – an appearance that is deceiving,” writes W. Adam Mandelbaum in his book The Psychic Battlefield.

    The report evaluated only three remote viewing projects, which were carried out within one year towards the end of STAR GATE, a period of decline for the program. The other 16 or so years that it ran (though under numerous different codenames) were totally disregarded. Moreover, according to Dr. Edwin May, former director of remote viewing research, the AIR panel was denied access to an estimated 80,000 pages of program documents, due to their highly-classified nature. And, to make matters worse, the panel interviewed only three remote viewers involved in the program, all of whom were of “the witches” variety, in that they commonly relied upon tarot card reading, automatic writing and other unconventional methods to obtain their information. Ergo, only the very weakest data was used in the AIR evaluation.

    The AIR report states, “The evidence accrued from research, interviews and user-assessments all indicate that the remote viewing phenomenon has no real value for intelligence operations at present.” It also mentions, however, that a “statistically significant effect” had been observed in laboratory remote viewing experiments. Despite these findings, the report goes on to mention that, “no compelling explanation has been provided for the observed effects… to say a phenomenon has been demonstrated we must know the reason for its existence.”

    One can’t help but wonder if the real purpose of the British MoD’s remote viewing study was to further discredit the phenomenon. It was, after all, something of a joke – especially in comparison to the remote viewing program undertaken by the US government. Or, perhaps, as Nick Pope suggests, its real purpose has not been disclosed to the public.

    In his book Psi Spies, Marrs claims that several separate unofficial sources have informed him the US government’s remote viewing program never truly ended. It only ended in the eyes of the public – just as the CIA intended. According to these sources, says Marrs, “the remote viewing methodology was simply moved to even more secret government agencies where its use continues today.”

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    References

    ‘MoD Defends Psychic Powers Study’
    ‘Defence Chiefs Spend £18,000 on a Mystic Experiment to Find Bin Laden’s Lair’
    Ministry of Defence – Remote Viewing

    http://www.dailygrail.com – ‘Remote Viewing Revelation’

    Buchanan, Lyn, The Seventh Sense (Paraview Pocket Books, New York, NY, 2003)
    Graff, Dale E., Tracks in the Psychic Wilderness (Element Books, Inc, Boston, MA, 1998)
    Gruber, Elmar R., Psychic Wars: Parapsychology in Espionage – and Beyond (Cassell plc, UK, London, 1999)
    Mandelbaum, W. Adam, The Psychic Battlefield: A History of the Military-Occult Complex (Thomas Dunn Books, New York, NY, 2000)
    Marrs, Jim, Psi Spies (AlienZoo Publishing, Phoenix, AZ, 2000)
    McMoneagle, Joseph, Remote Viewing Secrets (Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc., Charlottesville, VA, 2000)
    Radin, Dean, Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Perception in a Quantum Reality (Paraview Pocket Books, New York, NY, 2006)
    Wilson, Colin, Alien Dawn: An Investigation into the Contact Experience (Virgin Publishing Ltd., 1998)

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
    For our reproduction notice, click here.