The Field (28 page)

The SRI remote viewing program (later housed at the Science Applications International Corp, or SAIC) carried on for twenty-three years, behind a wall of secrecy that is still erected. It had been funded entirely by the government, first under Puthoff, then Targ and finally Edwin May, a burly nuclear physicist who’d carried out other intelligence work before. In 1978, the Army had its own psychic spying intelligence unit in place, code-named Grill Flame, possibly the most secret program in the Pentagon, manned by enlisted men who’d claimed some talent in psychic phenomena. By the time of Ed May’s tenure, a who’s who of scientists consisting of two Nobel laureates and two chairs of department at universities, all chosen for their skepticism, sat on a government Human Use and Procedural Oversight committee. Their task was to review all of the SRI remote viewing research, and to do so they were given unannounced drop-in privileges to SAIC, to guard against fraud. All concluded that the research was impeccable, and half actually felt the research demonstrated something important.
²⁷
Nevertheless, to this day, the American government has released only the Semipalatinsk study, one tiny portion of a mountain of SRI documents, and then only after a relentless campaign by Russell Targ.
²⁸

At the close of the program in 1995, a government-sponsored review of all the SRI and SAIC data, carried out by Jessica Utts, a statistics professor at the University of California at Davis, and Dr Ray Hyman, a skeptic of psychic phenomena, agreed that the statistical results for remote viewing phenomena were far beyond what could have occurred by chance.
²⁹
As far as the US government was concerned, the SRI studies gave America a possible advantage over Russian intelligence. But to the scientists themselves, these results represented far more than a chess maneuver in the Cold War. It seemed to suggest that because of our constant dialogue with the Zero Point Field, like de Broglie’s electron, we are everywhere at once.

CHAPTER NINE

The Endless Here and Now

T
HE CIA MIGHT HAVE
been struck by Pat Price’s success with Semi-palatinsk, but that wasn’t the experiment which most impressed Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ. That one had occurred the year before and concerned nothing more cloak and dagger than a local swimming pool.

Targ had been with Pat Price in the copper-screened room on the second floor of the SRI Radio Physics building; Hal and a colleague had their electronic calculator randomly choose one of the locations, which in this instance turned out to be the swimming-pool complex in Rinconada Park in Palo Alto, approximately five miles away.

After 30 minutes, when it was likely that Puthoff had arrived at his destination, Targ gave Price the go-ahead. Price closed his eyes and described in detail, and with near-correct dimensions the large pool, the smaller pool and a concrete building. In all respects his drawing was accurate, save one: he insisted that the site housed some sort of water purification plant. He even drew rotating devices into his drawings of the pools and added two water tanks on site.

For several years, Hal and Russell had just assumed that Pat had got this one wrong. Too much noise to signal is how they usually phrased it. There was no water purification system there, and there certainly weren’t any water tanks.

Then, in early 1975, Russell received an Annual Report of the City of Palo Alto, a celebration of its centennial, containing some of the city’s highlights over the last century. While flicking through it, Targ was flabbergasted to read: ‘In 1913 a new municipal waterworks was built on the site of the present Rinconada Park.’ It also included a photo of the site, which clearly showed two tanks. Russ remembered Pat’s drawing and pulled it out; the tanks were exactly in the place that Pat Price had drawn them. When Pat ‘saw’ the site, he saw it as it had been 50 years ago, even though all evidence of the water purification plant had long since disappeared.
¹

One of the most astonishing aspects of the data amassed by Puthoff, Jahn and the other scientists is that they hadn’t been at all sensitive to distance. A person doesn’t have to be in close proximity to affect a REG machine. In at least a quarter of Jahn’s studies, the participants were anywhere from next door to thousands of miles away. Nevertheless, the results were virtually identical to those obtained when the participants were at the PEAR lab, sitting right in front of a machine. Distance, even great distance, didn’t seem to lessen a person’s effect on the machine.
²

The same had occurred with PEAR’s and SRI’s remote viewing studies. Remote viewers were able to see across countries, over continents – even out into space.
³

But the Pat Price study was an example of something even more extra-ordinary. The research that was emerging from labs such as PEAR and SRI suggested that people could ‘see’ into the future or reach back into the past.

One of the most inviolate notions in our sense of ourselves and our world is the notion of time and space. We view life as a progression that we can measure through clocks, calendars and the major milestones of our lives. We are born, we grow up, we get married and have children, and one by one collect houses, possessions, cats and dogs, all the while inevitably getting older and moving in a line toward death. Indeed, the most tangible evidence of the progression of time is the physical fact of our own ageing.

The other inviolate notion from classical physics is the notion that the world is a geometric place filled with solid objects with spaces in between them. The size of the space in between determined the kind of influence one object had on another. Things couldn’t have any kind of instantaneous influence if they happened to be miles away.

The Pat Price studies and the PEAR studies began to suggest that at a more fundamental level of existence, there is no space or time, no obvious cause and effect – of something hitting something else and causing an event over time or space. Newtonian ideas of an absolute time and space or even Einstein’s view of a relative space-time are replaced by a truer picture – that the universe exists in some vast ‘here’ where here represents all points of space and time at a single instant. If subatomic particles can interact across all space and time, then so might the larger matter they compose. In the quantum world of The Field, a subatomic world of pure potential, life exists as one enormous present. ‘Take time out of it,’ Robert Jahn was fond of saying, ‘and it all makes sense.’

Jahn had his own store of evidence showing that people could foretell events. Largely because of similar work conducted by Brenda Dunne at Mundelein College, Dunne and Jahn had designed most of their remote viewing studies as ‘precognitive remote perception’, or PRP. The remote viewers remaining behind in the PEAR lab were asked to name their traveling partner’s destinations not only before they actually got there, but also many hours or days before they even knew where they were going. Someone not involved in the experiment would use a REG to randomly pick the traveler’s destinations from a pool of previously chosen targets, or the traveler could choose the destination spontaneously and on his own, after setting off. The traveling partner would then follow the standard protocol of remote viewing experiments. He’d spend 10 to 15 minutes at the target site, at the assigned time, recording his impressions of it, taking photos and following the checklist of questions produced by the PEAR team. Meanwhile, back at the laboratory, the remote viewer would have to record and draw his or her impressions of the traveler’s destination,
from half an hour to five days before the traveler arrived
.

Of PEAR’s 336 formal trials involving remote viewing, the majority were set up as PRP or ‘retrocognition’ – hours or days after the traveler had left his destination – and were just as successful as those carried out in ‘real time’.

Many of the recipients’ descriptions matched the traveler’s photographs with breathtaking accuracy. In one case, the traveler headed to the Northwest Railroad Station in Glencoe, Illinois, and took one photo of the station with an oncoming train and then another of the inside of the station, a drab little waiting room with a bulletin board below a sign. ‘I see the train station,’ wrote the remote viewer 35 minutes before the traveler had even chosen where he was going, ‘one of the commuter train stations that’s on the expressway – the white cement of them and the silver railings. I see a train coming … I see or hear the clicking of feet or shoes on the wooden floor. ... There are posters or something up, some kinds of advertisements or posters on the wall in the train station. I see the benches. Getting the image of a sign …’

In another instance, the remote viewer at the PEAR lab jotted down his ‘strange yet persistent’ image that the agent was standing inside a ‘large bowl’ – and ‘if it was full of soup [the agent] would be the size of a large dumpling’. Forty-five minutes later, the traveler was indeed the size of a dumpling in comparison to the massive curved dome-like structure of the radio telescope in Kitt Peak, Arizona, he was standing under. Yet another PEAR participant described his partner in a ‘old building’ with ‘windows like arches’ which ‘come to a point on top almost’ but ‘not a regular point’, plus ‘great big double doors’ and ‘square pillars with balls on top’. Nearly a day later, the traveler arrived at his destination, the Tretiakovskaia Gallereia in Moscow, an ornate impressive building with special pillars in front, and a large double door beneath a pointed archway.
⁴

In other cases, the remote viewer picked up an impression of a scene on the traveler’s journey other than the ‘official’ one. On one occasion, the traveler intended to visit the Saturn moon rocket at the NASA Space Center in Houston, Texas. The remote viewer, meanwhile, ‘saw’ an indoor scene where the traveler was playing on the floor with a group of puppies. But that same evening, the traveler (who knew nothing of the remote viewer’s impressions) visited a friend’s home, where he did indeed play with a litter of newborn puppies, one of which he was prompted to take home with him.

The remote viewers even picked up information about events or scenes that had distracted their travelers from their main targets. One traveler, standing on a farm in Idaho and concentrating on a herd of cows, was distracted by an irrigation ditch several yards down the road. He was sufficiently fascinated by the ditch to photograph it and note it in his description. The remote viewer in New Jersey, picking up the scene before it had happened, made no mention of cows at all in his description, but he did say that he was getting an image of farm buildings, fields and the irrigation ditch.
⁵

Other scientific evidence supported the idea that human beings have the ability to ‘see’ the future. The Maimonides Center’s Charles Honorton put together a review of all well-conducted scientific experiments of most varieties. Usually they entailed having participants guess which lamps would light, what card symbols would be turned up, what number on a set of dice would be thrown or even what the weather might be.
⁶
Combining a total of 2 million trials comprising 309 studies and 50,000 participants, where the time between guessing and the event ranged from a few milliseconds to an entire year, Honorton found positive results with odds against them occurring by chance of ten million billion billion to one.
⁷

President Abraham Lincoln dreamed about his own assassination a week before he died. This is one of many good stories about premonitions and dreams foretelling the future that have entered into history. The problem for most scientists is how to test stories like this in the laboratory. How do you quantify and control for a premonition?

The Maimonides dream laboratory had attempted just this – to reproduce people’s dreams about their own futures in a credible scientific experiment. They’d come up with a novel procedure, using a gifted English psychic called Malcolm Bessent. Bessent had honed his special talent, studying many years at the London College of Psychic Studies under equally gifted and experienced hands in ESP and clairvoyance. Bessent was invited to sleep at the Maimonides laboratory, where he was asked to dream about what would happen to him the following day. During the night, he would be awakened and asked to report and record his dreams. In one instance, Bessent had followed the agreed procedure for reporting his dream. The next morning, another investigator who’d had no knowledge or contact with Bessent or his dream carried out the agreed procedure for randomly selecting a target among some art reproductions of paintings. It turned out to be Van Gogh’s Hospital Corridor at Saint-Remy. As a further precaution against bias, the tape of Bessent’s recounting of his dream had been wrapped up and mailed to a transcriber before the picture had been chosen.

As soon as the image was chosen, the Maimonides staff went into high gear. When Bessent woke up and left the sleep room, he was greeted by staff in white coats, who called him ‘Mr Van Gogh’ and treated him in a rough, perfunctory manner. As he walked along the corridor he could hear the sound of hysterical laughter. The ‘doctors’ forced him to take a pill and ‘disinfected’ him with a swab of cotton.

Later, the transcript of his description of his dream was examined. It turned out that Bessent had described a patient attempting to escape, while many people dressed in white coats – doctors and other medical staff – were hostile to him.
⁸