Chief Investigative Reporter George Knapp and Photojournalist Matt Adams
Updated: Jul 17, 2009 9:19 AM PDT
The Heaven's Gate UFO cult didn't do any favors for the credibility of remote viewing when 39 of its members committed suicide in 1997. What pushed the cultists over the edge was a prediction by a prominent remote viewer that the rapidly approaching Hale-Bopp comet was being chased by a gigantic alien spaceship on its way to wipe out the earth.
More recently, another big-name remote viewer said he had pinpointed the spot where famed pilot Steve Fawcett crashed his plane, though the pinpoint was off by a just a smidge -- 50 miles.
"It definitely has value. Is it perfect? Far from it," said retired Army Intelligence Colonel John Alexander.
Col. Alexander knows from first hand experience that remote viewing is not just a weird fad or the equivalent of Madame Zelda's crystal ball -- it was taken very seriously by the U.S. government and other countries.
He was assigned to find out how far the Russians were ahead of the Americans in developing their own psychic warriors. The CIA spent 20 years and millions of dollars developing scientific protocols that, in effect, allow people to project their consciousness to other places and other times.
"What we call it is non-local reality. There is a universe of info out there that people tap into it through various means, remote viewing being one of them," he said.
Nevada's legendary military base, Area 51, was the target in one counterintelligence operation, Alexander says. Remote viewers were given coordinates for the base to see if they could peer inside, and they did.
The viewers saw weird black aircraft inside the hangars, years before the existence of the stealth fighter was acknowledged. To the dismay of the Air Force, they also saw a second secret project -- the B-2 bomber. The Pentagon freaked.
"Scared, because the point was we understand counterintelligence, we understand putting up programs to protect it, but how do you protect against something like this," he said.
"I had one instance where I described an attack on an American warship 50 hours before it happened. Described it in great detail and nobody believed it was going to happen. We all thought it was fantasy. Fifty hours later, it happened exactly as I described it," said author and remote viewer Paul Smith.
Smith, who grew up in Boulder City, literally wrote the book on remote viewing. He's the author of the training manual used by the Army. Like many other veterans of the classified program, he now teaches others how to do it through books, DVD's, and one on one sessions.
Remote viewing has become an industry, of sorts. Many of its best-known practitioners came to Nevada a few weeks ago for their annual convention -- to hear or make presentations and to hawk some merchandise.
New students are looking for practical benefits, but there are limits. For example, say you suspect your politician husband of fooling around. "In practice, it's hard to do because you want to be blind to the target. A remote viewer should not know what the target is upfront, because if you do know, there is all this mental noise going on," said Smith.
A remote viewer named Sherry was so impressed by remote viewing impresario Ed Dames that she now helps market his instructional merchandise. She doesn't need to peer into Area 51 to know that it works. "I misplaced cameras and car keys and use it for that kind of stuff. I also needed an attorney one time and I used it for that," she said.
So much for uncovering the secrets of the universe.
According to Dames, Nevada's capital Carson City should expect a major earthquake within the next five months. But before you sell your property up there, keep in mind that Dames has been wrong in quite a few of his predictions.
(Source: Las Vegas Now)
