I reproduce here the first section of this chapter that addresses the experiments conducted at the Stanford Research Institute with Ingo Swann and others. This is solely for study purposes.

The Central Intelligence Agency and the Church of Scientology

Two men sit at either end of a long table. They seem to be highly alert yet withdrawn from their physical surroundings. They sit with arms raised. One repeatedly describes a mountain in the air. The other calls out “give me EIs”. The first responds by saying “confusion, fear, dread”. Following such shorthand prompts, he is picturing an explosion, a great cloud of ashes pumped into the atmosphere. He is picturing an explosion at Bikini atoll in 1946. Or rather, he is psychically tuning into an event in space and time. For eleven years he was paid by the U.S. government to seek out and detail targets in this way. At the time, he was a sergeant in the U.S. Army.

Since 1972, the U.S. intelligence community has spent millions of dollars training psychic spies. This is not a wild conspiracy theory cobbled together by cranks. Admiral Stansfield Turner, head of the CIA from 1977 to 1981, has admitted as much to camera. His testimony is supported by many of the project's participants.

This psychic spying is called “remote viewing” by its purported practitioners. Psychic spies claim to have directed the Libyan bombing. They also claim to have given targets for SCUD missiles in the Gulf War.

In 1972, physicist Hal Puthoff was working at the Stanford Research Institute in California. SRI is well known as a centre for government funded projects. Puthoff's expertise was in lasers, but in his spare time he dabbled with parapsychology. Puthoff wanted to demonstrate the existence of paranormal phenomena. He undertook simple experiments in remote viewing. Coloured designs were sealed in envelopes or objects put in boxes. The remote viewer was to describe these contents. Convinced by his experiments, Puthoff privately circulated his results.

For some time, the CIA had been concerned at reports that the Soviets were funding psychic projects. Expertise in telepathy was being claimed. The Soviets were even allegedly employing psychics to hex opponents by telepathy, even to the point of killing their targets. Puthoff was approached soon after his material was circulated. The intelligence community paid $50,000 for a year long project into psychic phenomena. Puthoff chose to use the money to continue his research into remote viewing.

Puthoff recruited Pat Price and Ingo Swann and put together a team which also included Uri Geller and the author of Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, Richard Bach. Puthoff's brief was to find a way of adapting remote viewing for espionage purposes.

After only a few days, Swann was bored with envelopes and boxes, and suggested that he be given map coordinates instead. He offered to report the terrain at the given coordinates. His accuracy was allegedly so high that smaller and smaller targets were selected. From mountain ranges down to single buildings. Puthoff wanted to eliminate the possibility that Swann had somehow memorised the whole globe.

Advised of this progress, the CIA offered a target to test the claims. The target was an agent's holiday home which did not appear on any map. But the coordinates were slightly wrong. Swann told his “monitor” that he could see nothing but trees. He was encouraged to find the nearest interesting feature. Swann described buildings which he said were a secret military complex.

Pat Price homed in on the same target and added detail. The CIA were staggered that such a base actually did exist close to the wrong coordinates. Science writer Jim Schnabel, who debunked the British crop circle phenomena, claims that when he checked the coordinates he discovered a secret satellite tracking station.

Despite Swann's protests, Puthoff had maintained his work with the envelopes and boxes. He was also working with his psychic team on telepathy and the ability to guess randomly generated numbers. Some of this work with Swann, Price and Geller was published in the book Mind-Reach. Co-written with psychologist Russell Targ, this book was a best seller in 1976. John Wilhelm in his book The Search for Superman, alleged that the experiments were paid for by the Naval Electronics Systems Command, and was critical of the alleged results.

Geller may not have been involved in the work undertaken for the intelligence community, but he was later involved in a company formed to find mineral deposits and oil by remote viewing.

Puthoff, Price, Swann and several others in the SRI team shared the same explanation for “remote viewing”. They were convinced that remote viewers were leaving their bodies and travelling to the locations they were describing. They held in common a jargon phrase for this - “exteriorization with full perception”. ...

Leading skeptic Martin Gardner attacked the experimental design given in Puthoff and Targ's Mind Reach. In an article later published in Science Good, Bad and Bogus, Gardner commented that 14 Scientologists were involved in the project.