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Technology Stocks : Ascend Communications (ASND) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (34960)	2/16/1998 1:26:00 AM
From: blankmind	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 61433

glenn do you qualify? we could use someone to do perform this function. you can be in charge of remote viewing and asnds future team. Remote Views: CIA signed up psychics as spooks By Robert Matthews WHEN faced with accounts of fortune- telling or spoon-bending, most scientists dismiss them as conjuring tricks or deception. But every so often science is confronted with an inexplicable phenomenon that seems to withstand scientific scrutiny. The so-called "remote viewing" of places by psychics is just such a phenomenon - and it gains extra piquancy by having been the subject of a CIA-backed research programme since the early 1970s. According to official documents that began to emerge last year, between 1972 and 1995 the CIA spent hundreds of thousands of dollars investigating the possibility that some people could "project" themselves into places thousands of miles away, and report back accurately what was happening. Now, after years of secrecy, the scientists involved in the experiments have given details of the project and its findings - and they make astonishing reading. The origins of the project are suitably bizarre. In 1972, Dr Hal Puthoff, a physicist at the Stanford Research Institute, was contacted by a New York artist named Ingo Swann who claimed to be able to demonstrate psychokinesis - the supposed ability to affect objects by mind-power. Dr Puthoff decided to put Swann's claim to the test, inviting him to SRI to take part in scientific tests. According to Dr Puthoff, Swann succeeded in affecting electronic equipment hidden behind an array of metal shields. And in a final flourish Swann mentally "looked" into the experiment and prepared a detailed drawing of its workings. Dr Puthoff wrote up a report of this extraordinary event and circulated it among scientific colleagues. Within a few weeks, he was visited by two officials from the CIA. They told him there was increasing concern within the intelligence community about the Soviet interest in parapsychology. They asked if Dr Puthoff could arrange for a demonstration of Swann's abilities. The results of experiments in which objects were hidden in boxes impressed the CIA sufficiently to commission Dr Puthoff to set up a more detailed study. If remote viewing were to be of any intelligence value to the CIA, questions such as how far away the site could be, and whether a "sender" had to be present at the target site, needed to be addressed. Early attempts to answer these question seemed disappointing. Asked to "remote view" Jupiter - 400 million miles away - Swann said he could see a ring around the planet. Swann himself wrote off his "discovery" as a mistaken view of Saturn, and the SRI scientists counted it as an error in an account of their findings written in 1977. But two years later Voyager 1 showed there was indeed a ring around Jupiter, a finding that amazed the astronomers. In the late 1970s CIA Director Admiral Stansfield Turner publicly admitted to using remote viewers By 1974, the SRI team was using another "psychic viewer", police commissioner Patrick Price, to target the Soviet nuclear weapons research centre at Semipalatinsk. The centre had been targeted by US spy satellites, which gave the investigators some benchmark against which to compare Price's descriptions. According to Dr Russell Targ, one of the CIA-funded researchers, Price's accounts were extraordinarily accurate, and again apparently prescient. Price described the construction of a 60ft-diameter metal sphere at the site, which was causing its designers many problems. Three years later, intelligence reports leaked to the US press said that US spy satellites had revealed that a beam-weapon device was being constructed at Semipalatinsk, with one of its main components being a 60ft-wide sphere. It seems the CIA chiefs were impressed. In the late 1970s CIA Director Admiral Stansfield Turner publicly admitted to using remote viewers, in one case to locate an aircraft which crashed in Zaire and could not be found using spy satellites. Most scientists, however, will consider such stories as unreproduceable anecdotes. Rather harder to dismiss, however, is a statistical analysis of the remote viewing phenomenon commissioned by the CIA from Professor Jessica Utts of the University of California, Davis. In results also published in the JSE, Prof Utts outlines repeated tests of remote viewers. These showed that the chances of getting at least the observed level of success by fluke alone were less than 1 in 130. Her conclusions make uncomfortable reading for those who would want to dismiss remote viewing as yet more X-Files bunkum: "Anomalous cognition is possible and has been demonstrated. This conclusion is not based on belief, but rather on commonly accepted scientific criteria." The question now is whether those scientific criteria need to be re-examined. Journal of Scientific Exploration, volume 10 No 1, obtainable from Dr Bernhard Haisch, PO Box 5848, Stanford, California, 94309-5848 USA.