During the Cold War, United States Intelligence Agencies
discovered that the Soviet Union was using psychic spies and astral travel to
spy on the USA. The CIA and the Department of Defense received funding to
determine whether psychic spies and astral travelers were charlatans with no
true abilities, or if it was truly possible to “see” without being physically
present. Concerned that the term “psychic spy” would alarm the general public,
our government named those they studied and worked with “remote viewers” or “RV”.
The theory behind remote viewers is they can enter a
trance-like state that separates their mind from their body, enabling them to
travel to any area in the world. There are approximately 90,000 pages of
declassified CIA documentation regarding The Stargate Project, which was in
operation from the 1970’s through 1995. However, the termination of Stargate
does not mean that psychic spying has ended; it continues to this day under
other code names.
Astral travel is essentially the same thing: by entering an
altered state of consciousness, an individual can project their
thoughts/mind/soul to another place.
The CIA conducted experiments and then formal training based
on science with strict controls. Beginner experiments were used to determine if
a person truly had psychic abilities. An example is to place the subject in a
chair, their eyes closed or blindfolded. A card from a deck is pulled in
another room and the subject must be able to tell the interviewer that there
is, in fact, someone in another room with playing cards, and which card they
pulled.
As a subject shows psychic tendencies, all of which are carefully
monitored and recorded, experiments become larger, covering greater distances and
requiring more detail. They might be given coordinates (latitude/longitude) and
asked to describe what they see there. The best psychics are also adept at
drawing what they have seen, which is later compared to what is actually in
that location. It could be the Kremlin, a battlefield, or something mundane
such as a simple house or a gravesite of a person who is not famous and whose
name would not be previously known.
The experiments form a ladder in which more subjects are
discontinued as the tasks become more difficult, requiring more precision,
until only the best remain. Even then, all their information is checked by ground
operatives and verified through other Intelligence means.
An example of one of the more difficult experiments is
described in the CIA declassified document involving Taurus 1 and Taurus 2, in
which a psychic spy was placed aboard a submarine, which was submerged. Five
hundred miles away, two investigators appeared at a given time but at a place
unknown to the psychic. The remote viewer’s assignment was to find the two
investigators and describe the place.
In one such experiment, the investigators stood beside an
oak tree located at the top of a hill in Portola Valley, California. The
psychic described the place and when later shown six similar photographs, he
was able to select the correct one based on his vision/remote viewing session.
In 1983, a then-classified document warned that the USSR and
China were both actively engaged and fully supported by the highest government
levels in psychoenergetics, the study of the links between the human psyche and
mystical forms of energy. It is considered a subschool of psychotronics, which
encompasses telekinesis. The report further stated that this poses a potential threat
to U.S. National Security. (This document was part of the GRILL FLAME
documentation declassified by the CIA.)
Since the Cold War, the United States along with more than a
dozen other countries have actively engaged in training remote viewers. By
recruiting the individuals who showed the highest aptitude in psychic testing,
the CIA and the Department of the Army found that training them based on
scientific principles and proven techniques, they could increase their
abilities substantially.
Declassified documents show that experiments, testing and
training proved conclusively that remote viewing could indeed obtain operationally
useful information.
I read countless pages of declassified documents in
developing the character of Vicki Boyd, the CIA psychic spy, in my
Black Swamp Mysteries Series. I often take true stories from previous decades and update
them to the present day. The steps Vicki goes through in entering a trance-like
state is taken directly from the narratives of real psychic spies. Below is an
excerpt from
Vicki’s Key:
Vicki took a deep
breath and felt her chest rise and fall in a pattern similar to sleep. She
cleared her mind of the dozens of details and thoughts that threatened to
hijack her concentration and focused instead on the steady sound of the water
surrounding her.
Though her eyes
remained closed, she felt the room grow white around her and then she was
whisked upward like a bird catching its broad wings on a current of air and
allowing it to take her away.
She was weightless. It
felt effortless to spread her wings and be transported high above the ground,
above the treetops and rooflines, soaring toward the clouds. It was a beautiful
summer day, the sky a shade of blue that set the Carolinas apart; dotted here
and there with fluffy, white clouds that danced with her every movement.
She felt like an
eagle. As she glided on the air current, she became acutely aware of her
eyesight; it was stronger than a human’s—so strong that she could see a rabbit
emerging from a row of hedges nearly a mile away. The tiniest bird was clearly
visible and eggs in treetop nests shone like beacons.
She dutifully turned
eastward. In the blink of an eye, the clouds were gone. In their place was a
solid, deep blue the shade of a passionflower, almost purple in its cavernous
intensity. Beneath her were shades of brown. Gone were the flowers of North
Carolina, bursting in their kaleidoscope of brilliant colors; gone were the
trees with their extensive range of greens that ran the gamut from peridot to
deep moss. In its place was the Moroccan desert, its sands stretching in
various shades of fawn across the earth. Buildings rose in blocks of yellow-
and reddish-brown, their height their only distinguishing characteristic from
the shifting sands. She soared above jagged crags that rose from the ground
like hilltops created from the variable winds.
“Northeast of Kabul,
Afghanistan. Headed toward Pakistan. Foothills of the Himalayas.”
“Your mission,” Sam
said, his voice soft but firm in her imagined earpiece, “is to locate a remote
village. Only one road leads in through the mountains, isolating it from the
rest of the country.”
In a fraction of a
second, she had covered hundreds of miles. There was much more to the Hindu
Kush to her east—into Pakistan and even further into India—but her focus
remained on a relatively smaller area west of the Pakistan border. She
travelled northward, then turned to the south, and then back north.
The foothills of the
Himalayas rose beneath her, their peaks reaching past the clouds. It was
beautiful, even heavenly and yet forbidding. She moved past mountain peaks
coated in ice so thick that even the harsh sun so close overhead could not melt
them. She peered into cavernous crevices so deep that if they were filled with
water, they would rival the depths of the ocean. As she moved down the
mountains, she soared past mountain goats whose reddish brown coats almost
blended seamlessly with the mountain rocks, their movement the only factor that
gave them away. The ground beneath their feet was simply rock and dirt, and she
wondered fleetingly how they could possibly survive in such an inhospitable
land.
Then she was moving
toward a strip of green that stood out from the sandy and mountainous terrain,
guiding her inward. As she moved past the mountain range, she noted a passage
that could barely be considered a road; it was just a footpath that wound its
way around the edge of a mountain. The shoulder consisted of rocks no larger
than the palm of a hand, and as a mountain goat navigated it, its hooves kicked
pieces that careened downward hundreds of feet.
***
