ONE REPORTER'S STAGGERING TRIP THROUGH …mindwiseconsulting.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Schoenmann-Minds...ONE REPORTER'S STAGGERING TRIP THROUGH THE WORMHOLE OF REMOTE VIEWING.

it ONE REPORTER'S STAGGERING

TRIP THROUGH THE

WORMHOLE OF REMOTE VIEWING.

BY JOE SCHOENMANN

96 LAS VEGAS LIFE MAY 2006

HIGH-RISE CONDOS FROM THE MID-$300'S

pinnaclelasvegas • 877.889.4144

'm in the middle of the UFO Congress, the annu-

al conference in Laughlin that brings together the

heavies in the UFO industry—abduction experts,

videographers with images of crop circles and craft,

specialists on the reverse engineering of alien tech-

nologies. I'm fascinated by the topic and so beg for

the chance to cover it each year—when I get a call

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At my first UFO Congress five years ear-lier a man claiming NASA credentials talk-ed about using remote viewing to go "out-of-body" to view sights and scenes from around the world. I thought it was little more than snake-oil sales.

The caller begins to talk again, his speech machine-gunning intricate details of things he knows and descriptions of people he's met through a lifetime of searching. Government types with top-secret clearances who see into the future, the past, on the moon and aboard alien craft.

Most of his information is common knowl-

edge for those who've been around the Area 51 "circle" for a while, and while I'm not an insid-er, I'm very familiar with the topic. So I start asking him questions to see if he's in the loop, to see if he can offer more than the standard government-conspiracy-New World Order di-atribe—all of it interesting but almost none of it provable.

"So what's on the moon?" He replies that some remote viewers have

seen a base on the moon face that's turned away from the Earth (exactly what many of these people believe). "What about all this End Times talk?" Some remote viewers, he says, are unable

to see pdst 2012, the year the ancient Mayan calendar ends. And, he adds, under the ice of Antarctica lies a metallic object whose radia-tion is creating an atmosphere much like that found on one of the moons of Jupiter; to locate it, he recommends renting the X -Files movie and looking at the coordinates on Mulder's GPS gizmo, which he says gives the location of the sub-ice object.

He had me for a while. Maybe it was my brain's attempt to preserve my sanity, or may-be it was the sneaking feeling that he may be a bit over the edge. So I ask him another ques-tion, this time personal, and he laughs. "Never touched drugs," he replies. "And the difference between schizophrenics and myself is that I'm not schizophrenic."

Before he hangs up, he gives me a directive. "Get in touch with Paul Smith."

The phone goes dead. As soon as I have a chance, I find an Internet connection and run an online search. Smith is a Boulder City na-tive, once employed by the U.S. Army to train remote viewers.

Ifs odd ®u ip I talking to some- . one who claims to have contacts with "top intel-ligence guys" that are utilizing the paranormal as a military tool. Images fill my head of gen-erals with medals barking orders, then turn-ing to a psychic to figure out where to launch bombs. But it would be downright scary to find out that those visions aren't far from the truth and that my new friend is not a lunatic.

Days after my brain cools, I call Smith, a re-tired Army major who served seven years in the Army's psychic espionage program. Smith tells of his experience training officers in remote viewing at Fort Meade, near Washington, D.C., in his 2005 book, Reading The Enemy's Mind, which was recently excerpted in the March 2006 issue of Reader's Digest.

Smith owns Remote Viewing Instructional Services Inc., a for-profit business in Austin, Texas, where he offers RV training—$2,000 for 40 hours of instruction—and does RV work for businesses. He's able to do this, in part,

that really drops me into the rabbit hole.

My editor says someone heard I was at the conference and

wants to talk to me. She hangs up and the phone rings almost

immediately.

"You don't know me," the caller begins. He talks in a blur of

names and locations, military acronyms and dates, interspers-

ing the fact that "someone" told him I'd be interested in this

kind of thing. Blazing through a world of intrigue, each story

an X-Fi/es-esque tale that takes more than the few microsec-

onds he allows to absorb, he comes to the finale: "Have you

ever heard of remote viewing?"

MAY 2006 LAS VEGAS LIFE 97

Compiled by Paul H. Smith

Remote viewing (RV) is a skill by which a person (a "viewer") can perceive objects, per- sons or events at a location removed from him or her by either space or time. In other words, one does not actually have to be there, nor does one need any so-called "physical"

connections, such as television, telephone, etc., to gain information about the target. Remote viewing exploits and improves upon what is more commonly called "psychic" ability (an overused word that has accrued unfortunate connotations), and works whether the target is in the next room or on the other side of the planet. Neither time nor any known type of shielding can prevent a properly-trained remote viewer from gaining access to the desired target. –Paul H. Smith

Smith is an RV expert and author of Reading the Enemy's Mind, among others. For more info on RV, visit irva.org .

tnAt 51cce,

Fig. 1 Some 50 hours before an Iraqi missile attack on the U.S.S. Stark in March 1987, Army Maj. Paul Smith, Fig. 2 During a stage three remote a Boulder City native, "saw" the

viewing practice session, writer

attack during a remote viewing

Joe Schoenmann came very close in session. His summary was deemed

his summary to describing the above

to be "off"—until two days later. photo, which was hidden from view.

because in the mid-1990s the military official-ly ended its remote-viewing program (though many believe it still goes on) and declassified related documents.

Introducing myself over the phone, I trip over my words as I try to conceal my skepti-cism. I finally give up and tell him the story of the "NASA" man from the UFO Congress years earlier who could zip around the world as a "spirit" or something, then zip back to his body and tell everyone what he saw. How can Smith, an ex-military man—and a Mormon, no less—say it's real?

Smith quickly makes a distinction: He's never said remote viewing is astral projection or out-of-bodiness. Instead, it's a carefully struc-tured process, first researched by the Russians in the late 1960s, with strict protocol designed by Dr. Hal Puthoff and Ingo Swann, the so-called fathers of remote viewing.

It was Swann's work with Puthoff that drew the CIA's attention in 1972. Swann describes in his autobiography how he read his first dic-tionary at age 3 and would do things such as take apart the family piano then put it back to-gether as a child. As an adult, he worked for 12 years in the United Nations and was in Korea in the 1950s, stationed within the Army's "up-per echelons." Swann is also known by many in the paranormal world as the greatest living psychic on the planet.

"No one has ever managed to harness out-of-body astral projection, I've never seen anybody prove evidence of that," says Smith, who is also working toward a doctoral degree in philoso-phy at the University of Texas-Austin. "With remote viewing, however, the military was able to track drug traffickers in the Caribbean, look at secret Soviet weapons labs, see Chinese nu-clear tests and on and on."

What about Area 51, the super-secret base 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas that has been a hub of controversy and conspiracy theoriz-

A BRIEF TIMELINE OF REMOTE VIEWING HISTORY

SEPTEMBER 1971 Ingo Swarm (below) begins psychokinesis research with Cleve Backster

DECEMBER 8, 1971 First remote viewing experiment (describing weather in Tucson, Arizona). Term "Remote Viewing" is adopted.

AUGUST 1972 Under Hal Puthoff's (right)

supervision, CIA

representatives

conduct first

evaluation trials with Swann.

SEPTEMBER 1972 Russell Targ joins the RV program at SRI.

OCTOBER 1, 1972 CIA awards Stanford Research

Institute (SRI) $50,000 exploratory contract.

OCTOBER 18, 1974 Targ and Puthoff publish

article on remote viewing

research in Nature.

1975 CIA terminates involvement in and funding of remote viewing, and Air Force Technology Division becomes the primary funder of SRI research program.

SEPTEMBER 1977 US Army's remote

viewing program

Gondola Wish is

established.

Hms© OWE, considered one of the top psychics in the world, co-created the

step-by-step process that enables virtually anyone to become a remote viewer.

ing for decades? Smith's been there, as have his advanced remote viewing students. "So far, they haven't turned up anything exceptional," he says of the base. "Buildings and military equipment. But you have to know something is there, or you have to find it."

So what about going under the soil to view the underground hangars? In Area 51 lore, it's believed there is a base, undetectable to satel-lites, located several stories into the ground.

"They can do that," Smith says, quickly add-ing what I later learn is a mantra in the remote-viewing community: If you can't verify it, how do you know what you "see" is real? "Anytime you can't get verifiable information, you have to take it with a pinch of salt. If you can't verify, you don't know if you're being accurate."

Then how can remote viewing be used to find secret spy bases—if we don't really know they're there? Or to find hidden weapons of mass destruction? Smith says verification in those cases might come later using human op-eratives. He adds that a military group, JT Task Force 4, found the accuracy of remote viewing in counter-narcotics intelligence to be twice as accurate as traditional spy techniques. What's weird, he says, is that it works even though no one understands how.

One theory entwines the Big Bang and the resultant elemental connections between mat-ter. Smith tries to explain by telling of an ex-periment where an atom was split, then the two halves of the atom were separated by miles. Even at that distance, the two halves remained, somehow, connected, changing orientations in concert with the other half. But so far, that's just a cool experiment. How it plays into re-mote viewing is anyone's guess.

Perhaps a more promising theory is one pos-ited in Entangled Minds (Simon & Schuster), a book released in April by Dean Radin, the former director of the Consciousness Research Division of the Harry Reid Center

for Environmental Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In his book, Radin tries to explain how remote viewing works.

"I believe that the only way it makes sense is to have a revised version of what we think the fabric of reality is," says Radin, Senior Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, a nonprofit in Northern California founded by former as-tronaut Edgar Mitchell with the mission to ex-plore the "frontiers of consciousness."

"This is essentially a physics problem," Radin says. "Physics is increasingly going fur-ther and further away from common sense ...

this is much broader than simply living sys-tems. We're talking about non-living systems, systems that are not human."

As for using math, the language of physics, to explain remote viewing: "I don't think any-one's smart enough yet to come up with math-

ematical proofs," he says. And if they did, it's doubtful that a layper-

son like myself would understand them. More universally understood is experience. If remote viewing is real, then can't a skeptic like myself learn? Smith suggests I call Angela Thompson Smith, a well-known remote-viewing teacher in Boulder City. Maybe she can help me "see" what remote viewing is all about.

Smith likes to teach more than one student at a time, so I bring a friend, an actor in the Rio's Tony and Tina's Wedding. He's skeptical but agrees, in part, because re-mote viewing might be excellent fodder for the comic book stories he's always writing.

Proving we're hardly adept at finding the unseen, we get lost on the way to her house,

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MARCH 1979 Remote viewers working with Dale Graff at Wright-Patterson

AFB and at SRI correctly locate

downed Soviet TU-22 recce

aircraft.

1980 Air Force Chief of Staff cancels

AF RV program,

1981-82 Puthoff and Swann develop

coordinate remote viewing (CRV) architecture.

JANUARY 31, 1986 After a year of holding operational

control, Defense

Intelligence Agency takes formal control of the RV program.

AUGUST 1990 Paul H. Smith (below) is

reassigned from the Ft. Meade RV unit to the 101st

Airborne Division

for Desert Shield/

Desert Storm.

1995 CIA begins

congressionally directed evaluation

of RV as an intelligence tool.

It is concluded that RV has no value as

an intelligence

tool. Significant questions

are raised about the completeness and accuracy of the study.

JUNE 30, 1995 CIA cancels Star Gate program. ))

MAY 2006 LAS VEGAS LIFE 99

JUNE 2001 First IRVA-

sponsored

remote viewing conference held at Texas Station

in Las Vegas.

MAY 2006 Fifth Annual IRVA Conference to be held in Las Vegas from May 12-14.

so she waits on her front porch and waves us down when we pass. Inside, she has hot water, instant coffee, tea, cookies and a book, her own: Remote Perceptions: Out-of-Body Experiences, Remote Viewing and Other Normal Abilities.

Much to our surprise, her walls aren't draped in black, there are no crystal balls on the table, the house is brightly lit, and she isn't wearing any wizard-like clothing. She seems normal, almost motherly. She does do one un-usual thing, however: She listens.

We pepper her with questions about re-mote viewing for more than an hour. She an-swers each of them thoroughly. When we've exhausted ourselves, she looks at us both for more. Nothing? Then she begins.

Despite reading up on remote viewing be-fore I arrive, it's still odd to hear her say that none of it involves hypnotism, trances, dark rooms or deep meditation. The process is sim-ple: Smith holds a manila folder upon which she has written a number-letter combination.

"S23JS032106" was the combination used on my last practice. Inside the folder is an image (usually a magazine photo) glued to a white sheet of paper.

I do the first test in her office at a card table as Smith sits a few feet away. My friend waits in the living room for his turn.

To begin, she merely says the number-letter combination; I repeat and write it on a blank sheet of paper at the same time. Then I do the same for the date ("March 21, 2006"), time ("11:15 a.m."), location ("Boulder City"), prac-tice level ("Practice Session 1"), monitor's name ("Angela Thompson Smith") and potential dis-tractions such as personal worries or sickness. Immediately after that, I'm asked to scrawl a doodle without thinking, whatever comes through my hand is to go down on the paper without hesitation.

When I'm done, I write an ideogram—a de-scription of the doodle. For one scrawl, I wrote:

"Goes right to a sharp point, breaks downward, makes an s-curve." And at this point, it was

NOVEMBER 28, 1995 Ted Koppel's Nightline reveals existence

of government remote viewing effort.

MARCH 18, 1999 The International Remote Viewing

Association is formed.

hard not to roll my inner eyes, because I wasn't "feeling" or "seeing" anything.

Then, somehow, there's a shift in the next stage. This is when I start to describe the image in the most basic terms by "dotting" the ideo-gram with my pen or finger, following its con-tour, back and forth, around, and saying any

"feeling" or "motion," with words like "hard," "soft" or "smooth."

At some point, maybe at all points for begin-ners, I started wondering what in the hell I was doing, and how any of this is going to work.

"I don't think this makes any sense," I say to Smith, who looks at me but remains silent. She does, however, give some help, saying "cor-rect" for certain descriptors and telling me to write "CFB," or Can't Feed Back, for those that are way off.

The process is taxing. I could almost feel the smoke coming out my ears. I was trying hard to let whatever "it" was pop into my head, but by somehow not trying. At the same time, I was fighting the tendency to put the pieces together and figure it out myself, yelling out,

"I got it! It's an eagle!" Time literally flies. After my first session, I wasn't exactly en-

thralled with my success. It was a photo of some Mediterranean-esque buildings against a sunset. I'd mentioned "structures," but overall the out-come of my "view" was less than impressive.

My second practice session sucked me in. I wrote "brown, soft, smooth, shiny, wavy." In my head, I saw snippets of very smooth waves and a lot of brown. But that made no sense—I couldn't stop thinking of waves and water, which is blue. In my summary, I wrote, "The target site is perceived to be something almost glassy, smooth, shiny against something rough, earthen. Water and Earth."

After I put down the pen, she asks if I'm ready to see it, then hands me the folder. I opened it and started to feel shaky. The pic-ture was of a sandy desert with mountains in the background. The sand was formed into perfectly smooth waves—an exact rendering

of what I had "seen" during the session. "Are you, okay?" Smith asked. Later, she said

I had looked like I'd seen a ghost. My friend, meanwhile, completely nailed

his third practice, describing almost perfect-ly a lush, green valley in the foreground and stark mountains in the back against a cobalt-blue sky. He seemed nonchalant. Later, he told me he was sort of denying it, trying to ratio-nalize it, trying to think of some other way it could have happened.

My last test on the second day sealed it. I mentioned a "gray and pink sky," feeling "damp and cold," it was "in a desert," that there was a "sunset," and sketched images of clouds and structures. I also "saw" a glimpse of tiny lights surrounded by black I didn't say or write the last "hit," though, because I was afraid it didn't match the rest of my descriptions. I wanted to be correct, to show that I had this ability.

Inside the folder was a picture almost iden-tical to what I saw in my mind: It was a pho-to taken from deep in the desert of a town, far away and black except for the tiny lights from windows and stores. The sky was pink and gray. The one thing I didn't get was the lightning shooting down from the sky.

On the way back to Vegas, I kept going over it in my head. How could I have done that? Where did it come from? I looked at it from every angle, trying to figure out if it was just coincidence or, or ... What? Nothing that I'd ever known before could explain what I had just done.

To the general public, remote viewing remains widely unknown. So it's hard to tell someone you just did some kind of ESP activity without benefit of a trance or hypnosis, and not have them think you're a wacko. That goes double for journalists, who are supposed paragons of objectivity.

But I couldn't keep my mouth shut about what I did up in Boulder City. I tried hard to explain it away as coincidence or accident, tried to think that maybe I said something to Smith that caused her to pick out photos she expect-ed me to "see." None of that was true. I did this thing, well enough to be convinced that something was happening. Not easy to admit for someone like me, a hard-wired journalist who has spent more than two decades looking at everything with a critical eye for the abso-lute truth. To admit as much almost seems a negation of not just my career, but, in some ways, who I am.

At the same time, it has stoked a profound new sense of discovery—and a greater urge to ask that mysterious caller more questions. E

100 LAS VEGAS LIFE MAY 2006