Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, May 2019
An Historic Time when the CIA and the U.S. Army delved into Psychic Matters
by: Brent Raynes
In last months column, I described a number of anomalous incidents that took the reader back to the 1970s and to those memorable and thought-provoking remote viewing and psychokinesis (PK) experiments conducted at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and the nearby Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Laboratory, and the many mysterious occurrences that very credible scientists had personally witnessed.
One of the stories that I shared was the one reported from back late 1972 when laser physicist Hal Puthoff had phoned Christopher Kit Green at his desk at the CIA in Virginia. Puthoff, who was calling from SRI in California, informed Green that Israeli psychic Uri Geller appeared to have genuine ESP and PK abilities and that he could see things at a distance. Green expressed doubt about that last part, at which point Puthoff informed him that Geller was with him at that very moment and perhaps they might try doing a long-distance experiment right then and there. Green agreed.
Now in the account I drew my information from on this Puthoff had already informed me that he had “spent considerable time being interviewed” by this particular source, from which I based my account upon wherein Geller correctly identified the target, which included the word “architecture” and a drawing Geller did of something resembling “scrambled eggs” which was close enough to the target image as Green was looking at a page showing a human brain. But contrary to what I had read in this other person’s account, Geller did not speak directly on the phone with Green, nor was he the one who suggested Green select a book to use as a target.
I had sent Puthoff an email with a link to my column and asked him to let me know if he detected anything that might not be quite accurate. After all, he had been a direct participant in much of what I had written, and I always prefer whenever possible to connect with first person sources. So to set the record straight here is what Hal Puthoff wrote me on April 6th: “Thanks, really a fine article.”
“One erratum: In the experiment with Geller reproducing the word ‘architecture’ and drawing the ‘scrambled eggs’ for the brain, the experiment was actually even better than you described. First, I called Kit Green, but did not put Uri on the phone with him because we wanted to be sure there was no inadvertent cuing. Uri sat across the room from me and the phone during the experiment. Second, Uri did not specify that the target should be a book. Kit could pick anything, any object – he just happened to pick a book and open it to a random page.”
Though over four decades have elapsed since much of this pioneering remote viewing and PK study was conducted at Stanford and elsewhere, it certainly remains a very intriguing and significant footnote in the annals of parapsychology. I was recently introduced to a gentleman who lives near Huntsville, Alabama, is today 86-years-old, and back during that early historic period he ran an army program in the Huntsville area to investigate RV and PK. “Puthoff and Targ visited me here a couple of times,” he told me. “I went to Stanford also. I went to Princeton and worked with them on remote viewing and psychokinesis.” At Princeton he worked with Professor Eugene Wigner, a Nobel Prize winning scientist whose specialized field was quantum mechanics. I asked if he had any ability with RV or PK himself. “I tried it and I wasn’t worth a shit at it,” he admitted with a laugh. “I couldn’t do any of it. I was content to leave it to people who knew what they were doing.”
Joe H. Slate, Ph.D., a psychologist formerly connected with Alabama’s Athens State College (today University), who founded the International Parapsychology Research Foundation, has admitted that back in 1976 the U.S. Army Missile Research and Development Command funded the college to conduct a thirteen-month study of the human “external energy field,” which most of us know simply as the human aura. An electrophotographic process called Kirlian photography was utilized in this study.
Lorraine Warren
Famous ghost hunter Lorraine Warren, 92, passed away peacefully it was reported on the night of April 18, 2019. Writer Greg Newkirk, on an internet site called Week In Weird, gave some background on Lorraine and her late husband Ed Warren, who had passed back in 2006, a husband-and-wife paranormal team who had become celebrities in this field. Together they had created the New England Society for Psychic Research as well as the legendary Warren Occult Museum located at their home in Monroe, Connecticut. Newkirk wrote: “Ed and Lorraine Warren are best-known for their terrifying cases involving demonic dolls named Annabelle and (maybe) assisting in the Enfield Poltergiest case, but there’s one strange tale you won’t ever see in The Conjuring films: the time Lorraine met Bigfoot.”
It was described in their book Ghost Hunter, published back in 1989. It occurred in a very rural area of Tennessee – a place known as Flintville, a few miles east of Fayetteville. I remember it pretty well as I had made several trips to the area back in the day. Not while the Warren’s were there, though I did read of their visit in the April 22, 1976 edition of The Elk Valley Times & Observer, published in Fayetteville. However, I did meet a cryptozoologist named Lee Frank who had come in from New York (I recall he said he had previously investigated the Loch Ness Monster). He had interviewed the witnesses, and even had a very strange experience himself one night (dang, why didn’t I stay that night!) which he later wrote up in a magazine article. There were even mysterious balls of light reported in apparent conjunction with the creature appearances on occasion, causing a good deal of speculation at the time.
At any rate, here’s the link to Newkirk’s retelling of Lorraine’s Bigfoot experience.