Have you been in a ganzfeld experiment?

 My new project is a book about ganzfeld experiments in psi research. I'm keen to avoid yet another telling of the debate over the various meta-analyses and instead want more about the people involved. As such I'm looking for anyone who's participated in a ganzfeld psi experiment, either as an experimenter or judge, sender or receiver. If you're happy to answer a few questions about it by email, then please drop me a line at in_the_ganzfeld@outlook.com

Many thanks in advance.

Andrew

The curious case of Charles Brewin and Frank Johnson

 On 9th November 1903, a civil war veteran and tailor, Charles Brewin walked out of his house in Burlington New Jersey and disappeared. Police searches extended all the way to New York after a hat and note with his name on it were found on a New Jersey ferry but were unsuccessful in solving the mystery.

About a year and a half later, a man named Frank Johnson arrived in Plainfield, Vermont from New York and found employment and lodgings. He was a quiet man, a churchgoer and entirely unremarkable.

Then on the 24th or 25th June 1907 a trolley conductor named Alfred Woolman was in Plainfield when he saw a man he recognised as Charles Brewin on his trolley car. But when he addressed him, the man insisted he was called Frank Johnson and knew nothing of any Charles Brewin, and swiftly left the trolley.

Woolman went to get Brewin’s brother and son and they returned to Plainfield where they found Brewin/Johnson again and tried to persuade him that he was Charles Brewin. But Frank was adamant and they failed to change his mind.

This encounter was described in a local paper where a friend of Frank Johnson, Dr Buchanan, took particular note of it. His father, Mr Buchanan was a chaplain in Burlington and he thought his father might know Charles Brewin. And then, on June 30th, he got a call from Johnson’s landlady Mrs Dunn to come at once: her tenant had woken up saying his name was Charles Brewin and he didn’t know where he was, apparently under the impression that he’d left Burlington the previous day.

He went at once, with his father, and found the gentleman in question pale and weak but otherwise fine, now answering to the name of Brewin and seemingly having no memory of the past four years. Brewin and Mr Buchanan did know each other and he was later reunited with his family and, initially, returned to Burlington. After a little over a week, he and his family moved back to Plainfield and returned to the job he’d held previously when he was Frank Johnson.

That was a brief summary of the case as described by James Hyslop in 1913, vol 7, no 4 of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. There are some contemporary newspaper articles that paint a slightly different picture (ie, that Brewin’s memory returned while he was in hospital) but the number of witnesses Hyslop spoke to lends it the most credibility.

It’s a curious and fascinating case but why would a psychiatric case be written up in a psychical journal?

Hyslop had a theory that episodes like these (and he’d collected about five or six) weren’t the result of internal mental processes but external psychic influences. He went to great lengths to check those few details of Frank Johnson’s pre-1915 history. Each fact: former employees, pastors of churches he attended, even the existence of Johnson’s sister, Anne, for whom he had life insurance had no basis in reality, and did not even have parallels to Brewin’s life apart from them having the same date of birth (22nd February) albeit on different years.

Hyslop had hoped to use hypnosis to try and unlock the secrets of Brewin/Johnson’s missing years but Brewin’s doctor (not Dr Buchanan) wouldn’t allow it. As such, after Hyslop had exhausted his attempts at tracking down Frank Johnson’s life in New York, he finished his research and wrote up his findings.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect for me is the strange dreams he had while he was Frank Johnson. He would often tell his manager, Miss Mary Brown, about these dreams and she recalled that some of them had prophetic qualities.

Hyslop wrote “He [Brewin] frequently told of his dreams of this kind [ie, predictive], but Miss Brown and her niece could remember clearly only the two mentioned, and one more recalled a little later.” and he summarises two of these such dreams…

"On the morning of the fire in the dyeing establishment he told Miss Brown of a dream that he had the night previous.

This he told before the fire occurred. It was that she had a fire in the store and that she was almost burned to death. Such a fire did occur that day and Mr. Johnson rescued Miss Brown who would have otherwise been burned to death. Miss Brown showed me the scars on her arm caused by the fire."

And…

"At another time they had sent a fur coat home after repairing it. The owner complained that the lining was in tatters when it came back. Miss Brown and Mr. Johnson did not understand it, and the coat was brought back.

He then dreamed that he took the coat to New York, went up an elevator, saw a little short man, and was told by him that the skins for the lining were not the right kind.

He then said he would take the coat to New York, which he did the next day, and met the man he had seen in his dream and went through the scenes of the dream itself."

It’s an interesting question: What does a man who doesn’t exist dream about? I could be poetic and suggest that, with no past to dream about, Frank Johnson had to dream about the future, but the supporting evidence is scant. Two dreams in two years (in the third dream, Johnson described how his old boss had been injured and then a year later his business went bankrupt – not very compelling) would not be worth much were it not for Miss Brown mentioning that it frequently happened.

I’ve been trying to find a more recent case of a sustained second personality with no luck. If anyone knows of one, or if they know what the more modern terminology for a case like this is (“double consciousness” doesn’t seem to be in current usage) please leave a comment.

References:

Hyslop, J. (1913), A Case of Secondary Personality, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, v7, n4, p 201-229

“Lost Memory Has Returned,” The Paterson Morning Call, Tuesday, 2nd July 1907, p2

“Brewin is Back In Plainfield,” The Paterson Morning Call, Tuesday 9th July 1907, p1

newspapers found on Fulton Post Cards

I’m not sure but I think you need a US/Canadian IP to access this.

Remote viewing the Iranian Hostage Crisis 1979-81

 Background

The Iranian Hostage Crisis began on 4 November 1979 and was initially an anti-US demonstration in the Iranian capital of Tehran. Students, angry at the US agreeing to give medical treatment to the deposed and exiled Shah of Iran, occupied the grounds and buildings of the US Embassy, holding the staff there hostage.

This was not the first such demonstration in Iran that year and, although the US authorities were angry at the situation, it was assumed that it would only last a few days at most. However, when the Ayatollah Khomeni praised the actions of the students, it became something more important and the occupation continued, with 52 hostages being held for 444 days.

The remote viewing project, then called Grill Flame, began work on the hostage crisis within a month and continued to work on it for almost all of the time that Americans were in captivity: the last session is dated 13 January 1981 and the hostages were released one week later.

I wrote a book about the entire crisis called America’s Imaginary Hostage Crisis so if you’re interested in a deep dive into the data, then this is definitely recommended…

But for this blog, I’d like to assess the claims of success that you often see reported in articles or books.

The first is Joe’s recalling of the team being called into a special session on the day the occupation began.

The beginning of the crisis

In the early part of November 1979, I received a call at 4:00 A.M. asking me to report directly to the office [...] So, I arrived not knowing that the American Embassy located in Tehran, Iran, had been invaded by Iranian revolutionaries. It was still dark when all six permanent and part-time remote viewers joined the operations officer, Fred, in the office. He said it was going to sound like a strange request, but that a number of Americans had been taken hostage in a location overseas, and they needed our help in identifying them. He then threw a pile of a more than a hundred photographs onto the tabletop—tell us which are the hostages and which are not. He left the room and left us to the problem.

McMoneagle, Joseph. The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy: The Remarkable Life of U.S. Government Remote Viewer 001 . Crossroad Press. Kindle Edition. 

Occasionally he recounts this story in talks and presentations, sometimes with the addition that he got it 100% correct.

The story is problematic for a couple of reasons. First, the US authorities knew exactly who was on the US embassy compound at the time the Iranians took over. Indeed, embassy staff in Tehran were calling Washington to keep the US government informed as the Iranians were arriving. Secondly, as mentioned before, this had happened before (in February 1979 the US  Embassy had been occupied in an almost identical event) so the initial reaction to the actions of the students was not one of panic. The US authorities were confident that, after the students had been given some publicity, the Iranian police would move in and clear the compound.

So there’s no reason for an early morning session as described. It doesn’t exist in the declassified articles, nor is it included in lists of sessions or summaries of notable events. So it was either totally unofficial, not even sanctioned by the Grill Flame management, or it didn’t happen at all.

Operation Eagle Claw

Often in articles regarding Grill Flame and the hostage crisis, their role in the operation to rescue the hostages is mentioned. This military plan called Operation Eagle Claw took place in late April 1980, at a time when all of the hostages were still held in the embassy compound.

On 23 April, the remote viewing team were ordered to leave the Fort Meade site, where they were based, and move into three rooms booked in the Best Western Motel. For the next two days they’d run a grueling series of sessions targeted at different parts of the Embassy: twenty sessions in under forty hours.

The army operation taking place in Iran at this time ended in tragedy. Faulty equipment meant the mission was aborted and then, as they were about to return, a sandstorm whipped up and in the ensuing confusion, a helicopter crashed into a plane and eight servicemen died while the rest retreated back to safety.

During the session at the motel, two remote viewers reported seeing something violent. On 24 April at 4pm, Fern described a “quick raid” while describing the Deputy Chief Mission Residence (area I).

“[..] Report the activity as two o’clock in the morning.”

“It’s one of complete mayhem.”

“Tell me what makes you say that.”

“I don’t know.”

“Report the raw imagery to me.”

“People scurrying. Guards scurrying from their cots.”

“Go on.”

“Just a quick impression of a very foreboding quick action.”

“All right. Move in time again one more hour in the future. Three o’clock in the morning. Three o’clock in the morning.”

“I can’t get rid of this imagery of a quick raid.”

Endersby, “America’s Imaginary Hostage Crisis” p98, Kindle

And the second example is often credited to Nancy Stern although it was actually Hartleigh Trent who conducted session CCC84. In her book “Phenomenon” Annie Jacobson writes:

Declassified documents indicate that on April 24, 1980, Nancy S. was conducting Remote Viewing (RV) Session CCC84 when she broke down. The tasker noted, “Admin note 0300 Hours in Iran,” or at 3:00 a.m. local time, Nancy S. reported she was having trouble getting the target she’d been sent to, which was a building in Tehran code-named India. Instead, she said she saw “an attacking force of some kind.” She apologized and stated that perhaps she was “hallucinating.” What she saw was “weird and illogical” but “very vivid, horrible. Like a bad dream…” Her descripion was of “Big chest, big big gorillas. Great big chest beating gorilla leading these apes… they had tiny 9 inch long rockets, hundreds of them.” She apologized again and said she’d “never lost control like this before.” 

Putting to one side any confusion between Nancy or Hartleigh, the fact is that the remote viewing sessions had twice described violent or disturbing scenes. But this was because they weren’t blind to the target, nor to the aims of Operation Eagle Claw. They’d been fully briefed on the topic and so it is not surprising that scenes of armed exchanges would be reported. It’s worth noting, however, that the US forces retreated long before any chance at engaging with enemy troops could take place.

The news about the tragic end of Operation Eagle Claw broke during two sessions being run simultaneously. Both were cut short as the remote viewing team were brought together to watch the TV news. According to McMoneagle, Nancy was deeply upset at this and, in fact, she soon left the team and would never complete another remote viewing session.

Richard Queen

The next most famous claim concerns Keith Harary’s description of a session he undertook in July 1980.

I received an urgent morning call asking me to report to SRI. I met with a tall, expressionless man who served me a cup of hot coffee before we retired to the white room and got to work.

"We have a person who needs a description," the monitor said, offering me not a clue. Though I hardly understood the process, the question triggered a cascade of impressions about a person in a debilitated state of health. "He seems to be suffering from nausea," I said. "One side of his body seems damaged or hurt." I wondered whether the person I was describing might be some business person or a head of state.

"Where will he be in the next few days?" the monitor asked, again without inflection. I suddenly felt the sensation of sitting on an airplane that was taking off.

"On an airplane," I said.

The target turned out to be the hostage Richard Queen, held by Iranian militants and now desperately ill with multiple sclerosis that affected his nerves on one side. In part due to my input, I was later informed by contacts at SRI, President Carter dispatched a plane to bring Queen home.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/articles/200411/confessions-star-psychic

Keith Harary was working for SRI in July 1980 and he had recently run a number of sessions against the Hostage Crisis. But SRI work focused on the hostages is largely missing from the declassified archives. Any contemporary notes from this particular session targeting Richard Queen are absent, possibly because it wasn’t part of the Grill Flame Project. The first time it is mentioned is in 1983, in an overview of the Grill Flame project when it is listed among a number of “successful viewings for the DoD/intelligence community”. But there are no further details. And Harary himself has issues with how psychic his vision had been.

“Were my impressions psychic? The hostages had been flooding the news for months.

Reports about Queen's health problems, including the issue of "a lame shoulder," had been in the news as well. I don't know whether such reports infiltrated my unconscious without my realizing it, but it would make sense to consider that possibility before the paranormal alternative.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/articles/200411/confessions-star-psychic

Conclusion

Ultimately, the efforts of the remote viewing team were not well-received and a report written after the crisis was over stated:

“Comparison of the reports with returnee debriefings revealed a very low correlation between actual hostage locations/ conditions and inferences drawn from Grill Reporting. Only seven reports could be positively correlated with actual location or condition. Approximately 59

reports revealed a possible or partial correlation.

However, these same reports often included erroneous data. Sixteen reports contained inconclusive data making correlation highly subjective. Eight reports were noted as being poor from an administrative/ procedural standpoint and therefore being of no value. One hundred and twelve reports were found to be entirely incorrect.”

https://archive.org/details/CIA-RDP96-00788R001000340002-3

So, how much of the data produced by Grill Flame was used operationally? None. The  entire project had been for training purposes, something that the remote viewers were not aware of. But by now, despite the results, Grill Flame had other projects to work on and it seems that simply being involved in the Hostage Crisis had raised its profile and secured its funding for another few years, at least.

A Corpse Not Buried For Nineteen Years

On this day two hundred and fifty years ago (16 July 1768), a woman was finally laid to rest in London after an apparently very literal interpretation of the terms of a will meant that she remained unburied for almost two decades.

According to the Gentleman's Magazine and the Annual Register for 1768, a close relative of the woman passed away and left a clause in his will that she should receive an annual sum of £25 "as long as she is on the Earth." According to the website Measuring Worth, the value of £25 in the mid-eighteenth century in today’s money is at least £3,150 and possibly much higher.

Hence, when the woman died, her husband did not have her interred but instead rented a room above a stable in South Audley Street where she was placed in a "decent coffin." Thus, fulfilling the terms of the will (at least the meaning if not the intention), he continued to receive the yearly sum. The Annual Register put the rent of the room at £5, giving him a clear profit of £20 a year.

It wasn't until the husband died that the landlord, wanting to do some work on the building, discovered the body. After this she was laid to rest having served her husband for rather longer than "til death us do part."

References:

The Gentleman’s Magazine, vol 38, 1768. p 347
Annual Register for the year 1768, p 138

Scientific evidence for the existence of Ents

One thing I have learnt is that if you have a database large enough and a knowledge of that database that's extensive enough, that it’s possible to come up with some pretty peculiar findings which are seemingly backed up by hard data.

An Ent, yesterday

A few years ago I was a volunteer at the Bristol Regional Environmental Records Centre, and after a few months I became pretty familiar with the extensive database they have and the sort of information it included.

One day it occurred to me that if you look for veteran trees (ie, over a hundred years old) whose location data had changed, then that would be evidence for Ents, the tree-people from Lord Of The Rings.

Bringing up the data for veteran trees was easy enough, but I found I had to go through the spreadsheet myself to find an occasion where the location data had changed.

I found plenty of examples of trees with vague location data, but I also found three occasions where the previous data didn’t match aerial photography. I decided those were the best case for the existence of Ents, so I extracted the data, popped them on a map, and here they are!

I showed it to my manager at the time, and he said it was interesting that they seemed to be guarding the border.

Joe McMoneagle and the Abrams M1 tank

A few months ago, a commenter on this blog asked if I was going to look into Joe McMoneagle’s successful remote viewing of a prototype tank (then called the XM-1, later to be named the M-1) in 1980. Well, I finally got round to going through the various papers relating to that project today, so here are my findings.

The session is often listed among the US military’s best remote viewing work and it has been described as a test for the remote viewers, where Joe McMoneagle was given a photograph of a hangar surrounded by aircraft and told to remote view what was inside. For example, Paul Smith writes:

“Parked inside the closed hangar at the time of the remote viewing session was an XM-1 tank. It had been moved there explicitly for the purposes of putting the remote viewers to the test. A good viewer would have to set aside any preconceived notions of what should be inside an airplane hangar to get at the real target.” [1]

However, the original documentation doesn’t back up this version of events. Also, it is misleading to present this session as a one-off event. Rather, it was part of Project 8003 which contained twenty-four sessions conducted between January and September 1980. Project 8003 was primarily targeted at an enemy facility related to tanks. The session in question (D-29) differed in that it was a request to remote view an American tank.

Most of the sessions in Project 8003 were conducted by the same interviewer (#66 in the transcripts, which would be Fred Atwater) who, over time, became more knowledgeable of the target as different targeting data was used as the project progressed.

Joe himself completed six sessions in Project 8003. The first two had geographical co-ordinates as his targeting method and did not raise anything particularly pertinent. In the next two sessions he was given a photograph of the building in question and it was in the second of those two where he first talked about and drew tanks. This session took place on 9 May 1980.

The next session Joe completed was on 25 June 1980. In this, Joe was given geographical co-ordinates and asked to go back in time and view the target area at one-week intervals beginning 7 May 1980 and continuing to the present day. Most of his session notes and sketches are of tanks, specifically the production and distribution of tanks. But by then Joe may have been aware of two sessions that took place with other remote viewers on the 17 June where the targeting material was a photograph of a tank. By now, any idea that the remote viewers were still blind to the nature of the target for Project 8003 is difficult to justify, and it certainly isn’t the case for the interviewer who would have seen all of the targeting material.

The famous session, D-29, took place on 5 September 1980. D-29 was to have been held simultaneously with D-28 on the same target, using a sealed envelope containing a photo as the targeting data. This would explain why Joe had a different interviewer, since Fred Atwater was conducting the other session. However, D-28 was cancelled due to too much noise.

In the report for D-29, this change of interviewer is highlighted as precluding the chance of cuing from a knowledgable source, but the interviewer is labelled #14 and the notes identify him as “Mel” (in all probability, Mel Riley).

However, remote viewer #14 conducted several sessions in project 8003, including one where the targeting material was a photo of a tank. In other words, if Mel recognised the Project number 8003, he would no longer be blind to the target.

Interviewer instructions for session D-28, which I assume

would be the same for D-29

All of which is academic since Joe McMoneagle doesn’t actually talk about a tank during session D-29. This surprised me when I sat down to read the transcript since every retelling of this story involves Joe remotely viewing a tank. For example, Paul Smith writes:

“His sketches were unmistakably of a tracked armored vehicle.”

But I can’t understand which sketches he’s referring to. The only exterior sketches from D-29 are these:

Which do not resemble a tracked armored vehicle to me. While Joe describes a multi-personnel vehicle, he doesn’t call it a tank. In fact, he clearly says he doesn’t know what it is. Some of the descriptors he gives can be related to a tank, but others cannot.

What is most interesting are the sketches of the interior. These resemble a tank-like environment inasmuch as they are cramped and the walls are lined with buttons and screens.

Any attempt at trying to find an interior photo of the prototype XM-1 has been difficult, with this being the best I could get. And even then, I don’t know how old this photo is.

It is difficult to assess how this session was received at the time. The Grill Flame members were certainly very pleased with it. The typed session notes have a lengthy memo at the end of it explaining how remarkable this kind of correspondence was, using these protocols. Also, a handwritten list of sessions for Project 8003 has the words “big hit on OPSEC” written next to this entry.

But the initial response from external judges seemed cooler. There is a document in the archive where the analyst’s response is censored, but there is a comment afterwards that suggests it wasn’t too positive.

“Although supposed to be an eval of potential usefulness, it was performed by indiv. having no appreciation for the RV phenomena. Second AMSAA eval is expected to be forthcoming.”

The second analysis took a while coming. D-29 was not considered as important as the then-ongoing Iranian hostage crisis, and kept being passed over for other matters. In April 1981, in reply to a request, Grill Flame received a letter from Capt Kenneth Bell of the Special Actions Branch promising that Mr Kramer, the analyst, would be finished by the end of that month. But after this, I can find no further information on this matter.

Nevertheless, D-29 was considered by the Grill Flame management to be good enough to be one of the sessions shown to Vice President George Bush in 1983 when he had a briefing on the remote viewing project.

References

[1] Smith, Paul. Reading the Enemy's Mind: Inside Star Gate: America's Psychic Espionage Program (p. 131). Tom Doherty Associates. Kindle Edition.

An accidental logic puzzle

As is usual for me on a weekend morning, I was browsing through an old newspaper that shared the same date as my current self. Today I was reading one from thirty years ago, 29th April 1987, when I noticed that the division for Group Four in the European Under-21 Championship formed a little logic puzzle: it was possible to look at it and work out all of the results of the tournament to date.

It isn't a difficult puzzle nor, I'd imagine, that unique but it kept me entertained for a few minutes. Plus, it reminded me of that example of Accidental Poetry I found several years ago.

Pat Price’s remote viewing of URDF-3, Semipalatinsk, USSR in 1974

One of the biggest successes of the US government-sponsored remote viewing project came very early on in its history. In 1974, in only its second full year of existence, the CIA requested that SRI use Pat Price to remote view a Soviet target: URDF-3 (Unidentified Research and Development Facility No. 3). In popular psi literature, it is usually described in the most dramatic terms possible: that no one knew anything about the site and that on commencing the remote viewing session Pat Price immediately closed his eyes and saw a huge crane passing over his head.

Given its importance as an example of psychic functioning, I thought it was worth looking as this event in some detail, using documents from the declassified archive.

The earliest mention of this experiment I can find is an appendix to a meeting held on 31 May 1974, where basic protocols were laid down: that the sessions would be “guided” by someone knowledgable about the site; but giving as little cueing as possible and then, over a period of a few days, introduce more information about the site to Pat Price “recognizing that the additional information supplied to the viewer at this point is at the cost of calibration within the experiment.” [1]

The initial data given to him at the start of the experiment would be a map with the site marked on it and some drawings to help Price identify the location when he remote views it.

On the 17 June 1974, the NPIC (the National Photographic Intelligence Center, who’d be supplying the data against which Price’s statements would be compared) and the NED (can’t find this acronym!) were both contacted for help in evaluating the data. It seems that the source was to be disguised before judging, and instead of overtly being from a psychic, it was going to be attributed to a janitor: someone with little technical knowledge but open access to URDF-3.

Semipalatinsk URDF-3, from top of gantry crane.

Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/martintrolle/12286235835

Also at this time, a member of ORD (Office of Research & Development) visited SRI for two days, 17-18 June. During this time it was alluded that the SRI program was in danger of being closed, unless certain targets were met.

This was followed by another visit from the ORD on the 28 June, and the report on this visit stated that “the progress was disappointing” and “it appears that a pot pourri of small experiments were to have been conducted on an ad hoc basis on whatever subjects were around.”

I mention these two visits to put the URDF-3 session into some kind of context: the SRI project was falling behind schedule and Targ and Puthoff must've been keenly aware of the pressure from their sponsors.

On 27 and 28 June two meetings were held, the second one by telephone, to fine tune the experimental methods. The conclusions to this meeting were written up in notes on the appendix from the meeting held in May. [1]

Now the protocol specified that the person who knew about the target would not be physically present during the sessions, nor would Price be given any drawings before the sessions began.

More details regarding the protocol were given in a memo dated 3 July 1974 (ie, five days before the sessions were to begin). This memo stated that there would be three stages to the protocol. It also mentioned that, during stage two, Price would be told that the sponsor for this experiment was a government agency.

The experiment itself ran from 9-12 July 1974. The majority of information about the details of this period of time comes from a report dated 4 December 1975 “An Analysis Of A Remote-Viewing Experiment of URDF-3” by D. Stillman, a nuclear analyst from the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, working from sketches and tape recordings. [2] It’s worth noting that the plan to disguise the psychic nature of the data had been dropped but Stillman says in his introduction that, if anything, he would like psychic functioning to be true.

At the start of the experiment, Price was given the map co-ordinates (50°09'59"N 78°22'22"E), was shown the site’s position on a number of maps, and told that it was 60 miles WSW of Semipalatinsk and 25 to 30 SW of a river and he was told it is a scientific military research and test area. Once he began remote viewing, he found the river and then the location. Stillman reports:

“He says the area he’s looking at has low one-story buildings that are partially dug into the ground giving the effect (as seen at ground level) of very short, squatty buildings, whereas they are actually fairly roomy on this inside. This description could very well describe a first look at the Operations Area at URDF-3.”

Source: http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/russia/semipalatinsk-16_nuc.htm

From Google Maps, imagery dated 2005

Price then started describing tests being run that were related to the space program, followed by drawing a map of the research facility and the area which was incorrect, apart from the information already given to him.

Most of the data from Price in day one is wrong, and he shows an inclination to be led by the questioner, such as when the scientist in the room with Price during the session (probably Russell Targ) makes a suggestion as to what something he’s describing might be, Price says “You could be right,” before the scientist quickly reminds Price that he knows nothing about the target.

The famous crane hit did not happen during day one, but in the evening. Midway through the first afternoon session, Price mentioned a crane and some low boy trucks. Later that day, the person knowledgeable about URDF-3 (possibly Ken Kress) must have spoken to SRI because Hal Puthoff called Pat Price with instructions to draw crane and the security fence around the perimeter, which Pat Price had also mentioned in passing on day one.

The drawing of the crane was handed in on the evening of day one, and the tapes from day two (10 July) begin with a discussion of them, mentioning the size of the crane: 150 feet in height. Stillman wrote: “He [Price] said he didn’t realize how large the gantry crane was until he saw a man walking by one of the crane wheels.” And Stillman followed this with the observation “It seems inconceivable to imagine how he could draw such a likeness to the actual crane at URDF-3 unless: 1) he actually saw it through remote viewing, or 2) he was informed of what to draw by someone knowledgeable of URDF-3”

However, Stillman did not seem to have noticed that, until then, Price had frequently described features of a considerable size, such as an array of telegraph poles, a village, an airstrip, etc. It looks as if Price was working from the assumption that his work would be compared to aerial photography and the only data available would be something visible from a distance. As such, when he was given a clue that he had described something US intelligence knew to exist, he changed its description to one of great size.

Price’s sketch of the perimeter fence is only of a small section, and he doesn’t mention that there are actually four fences at URDF-3. However, Stillman drew in a perimeter fence on one of Price’s sketches because he could see that the shape was broadly similar to the fences around URDF-3.

Despite the success of the crane sketch, the rest of Price’s work on day two is largely unremarkable. Since his description of the huge crane did not match his earlier description of the building it interacts with, he spent a lot of time devising a complicated system including a second, smaller gantry crane, as well as drawing a large domed building and cement silo that Stillman says don’t exist at URDF-3.

Apart from the crane, there is another hit often attributed to the session: a large steel sphere under construction. It is not in the report by Stillman, which only covers the first two days in any detail. The third and fourth days supplied a lot of data but nothing that could be checked at that time.

So it must be from these two days, 11 and 12 July, when Pat Price described and drew large steel spheres mid-manufacture, in the form of individual gores, to be welded together. It is claimed that “Pat Price had been right, and he had described the spheres and the special welding techniques before anyone in the United States knew they existed.” [3]

The existence of these spheres was made public in a dramatic fashion in May 1977. Major General George J. Keegan, head of Air Force Intelligence had been trying (unsuccessfully) to convince the US military that the Soviets were building a particle beam weapon at Semipalatinsk for some years. When he retired, he went public with his suspicions and spoke to a writer from Aviation Weekly. [4] This sparked a public debate on the issue, with President Carter, the Defense Secretary, the CIA and the DIA all speaking out against the retired Major General’s conclusions.

While other research (and, eventually, complete disclosure from the Soviets) discredited the particle beam weapon theory, what was important to SRI was the detail about the steel spheres, constructed piece by piece, using a special welding method. Just as Pat Price had described.

It’s a shame that Stillman did not mention this or include any of day three’s six sketches in his report. Regrettably, the other analysis of Price’s work (W.T.Strand, “Memorandum for the Director, Office of Technical Service; Subject: Evaluation of Data on Semipalatinsk Unidentified R&D Facility No. 3, USSR; 20 August 1974”) is unavailable.

This means the earliest mention we have of this success is in Winter 1977, in a paper called “Parapsychology in Intelligence: A Personal Review and Conclusions” by Ken Kress, the CIA agent managing this particular experiment. He only mentions it in passing, though.

“In general, most of Price’s data were wrong or could not be evaluated. He did, nevertheless, produce some amazing description, like buildings then under construction, spherical tank sections, and the crane.” [5]

Price’s sketch of these sphere was published in 1983 in the heavily censored report Grill Flame Operational Tasks. On page seven, there is a sketch of metallic strips in the shape of a sphere segment, labelled “Sphere Fabrication”. [6]

There are a few issues with this as a piece of evidence. The first and most obvious is the date on the sketch. The handwritten date reads “6-18-74” which, if accurate, would mean it was drawn about one month before the URDF-3 work began. The other date, the rubber-stamped one, reads “7-18-74” which places it six days after the URDF-3 sessions were completed. Either way, this drawing does not appear to come from the four-day experiment. Additionally, throughout the sketches reproduced in Stillman’s report, whenever Price makes lengthy notes about a feature he does so in cursive writing, but in this sketch he has switched to writing in upper case.

There are the words “from prior” next to the handwritten date, so it’s possible that this is a redrawing of a sketch that SRI no longer had. This is likely since the session notes and tapes were not kept at SRI but sent off to be analysed. There is a letter from SRI to the CIA in 1986 asking for these to be returned but the reply stated that, apart from Stillman’s report, they couldn’t locate the other material. If this sketch is a reconstruction, one has to wonder how accurate it is and what was it based on.

The final problem with this sketch is related to the one immediately above it. Two sketches are labelled “Cyclinder clusters,” I assume to resemble the cluster of cylindrical tanks seen in photos of Semipalatinsk.

However, in Stillman’s report, this sketch is described as a “cement silo-like building” and not related to a cluster of cylinders at all. The details of Price’s descriptions have been removed in order to emphasise the similarity of the overall shape. If this sketch has been mis-labelled to increase the apparent level of success, has the sketch of the sphere sections also undergone a similar process?

Pat Price’s remote viewing of URDF-3 is frequently cited as a great success of psychic functioning. The dramatic similarity of Price’s drawing of a gantry crane with the sketch based on photographic intel makes it a popular choice when listing evidence for ESP. But this needs to be put into some kind of context: Price generated a great deal of data. Stillman was given about four hours of taped conversation from days one and two, seventy-nine pages of transcripts from days three and four, and a total of thirty sketches.

Furthermore, Price was not completely blind to the nature of the target and also someone knowledgeable about the location specifically asked him to draw the crane. Given this, it is hardly surprising that, on occasion, Price described features that could reasonably be compared to the actual location.

The final word on the issue should go to Stillman who, in his conclusion, wrote:

“In trying to determine the validity of this remote viewing experiment, the worth of the data to the eventual user has to be considered. If the user had no way of checking, how could he differentiate the fact from the fiction? In the case of URDF-3, the only positive evidence of the rail-mounted gantry was far outweighed by the large amount of negative evidence noted in the body of this analysis.”

References:

[1] Appendix I: Suggested Protocol for Operational Remote-Viewing Exercise dated 31 May 1974 with handwritten notes added on or after 28 June

[2] D. Stillman (1975) An Analysis Of A Remote-Viewing Experiment of URDF-3

[3] Schnabel, J. (2011)Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America’s Psychic Spies, Random House Publushing Group

[4] Detailed summary of Aviation Weekly article.

[5] Kress, K.A. (1977) Parapsychology in Intelligence: A personal review and conclusions”

[6] Puthoff, H.E., Lavelle, L.A. (1983) "Project Grill Flame Operational Tasks"

Ingo Swann’s remote viewing of Jupiter

With Juno in orbit around the planet Jupiter, I felt like going back and looking at another space probe that visited Jupiter, only this time, it was the mind of a psychic that travelled, not a piece of high-tech equipment.

By the Spring of 1973 the SRI research into remote viewing, funded by the CIA and lead by physicists Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ, had been going for around half a year.

Ingo Swann, a psychic who worked extensively on the project, was tired of Earth-bound co-ordinates and wanted to see if it were possible to remote view extra-terrestrial locations. With that in mind, Ingo arranged with another psychic, Harold Sherman, to remote view Jupiter and then compare their findings to the data from the probe Pioneer 10 which would fly by that planet in November/December of that year.

Although it wasn’t part of the CIA-funded work, Targ and Puthoff agreed to carry out the session with Swann according to SRI protocols. Sherman carried out his session in Arkansas, many hundreds of miles from SRI in California. The sessions took place simultaneously at 6.00pm PST on 27 April 1973.

This session has been reported as a great success for Ingo Swann as he saw a ring of rocks circling the planet: something that no one had even imagined at that time. As far as astronomy was concerned, Saturn was the only planet with a ring system.

There are many different versions of this story. Most get confused between Pioneer 10 (which did not detect Jupiter's ring in 1973) and Voyager 1 (which was the first to detect them, but that wouldn't happen for another six years, in 1979). Also, some versions of events specifically state that Ingo describes a ring of rocks, and that after the session was over they took this information to astronomers who all dismissed it as nonsense.

The original transcript is available online at this site linked to in this sentence. Although this is dated 1995, the section containing the transcript is very close to the version given in Mind Reach (1977) by Targ and Puthoff, and is also broadly similar to the version as told in Swann's book To Kiss Earth Good-bye (1975), so I think that part is pretty reliable.

EDIT 29/01/17: this contemporary transcript is now available on the CIA site (links to a pdf).

The passage that is usually quoted with reference to rings around Jupiter is:

"Very high in the atmosphere there are crystals... they glitter. Maybe the stripes are like bands of crystals, maybe like rings of Saturn, though not far out like that. Very close within the atmosphere."

This phrase “maybe like rings of Saturn” together with a sketch of a ringed planet, is considered evidence that Ingo Swann saw Jupiter's rings before they were scientifically detected.

However, this is not a “ring of rocks” as some versions state. It's a band of crystals. And this raises the question if this “band of crystals” was actually recognised as a ring of rocks at the time, or if that interpretation was only arrived at after the data from Voyager 1 was known in 1979.

It is instructive to look for reports on Swann's remote viewing session before 1979, to see if it mentions Jupiter's ring system.

The first I found was an article in the National Enquirer, 9 September 1975. In the paragraph where it talks about Swann's findings, it reads:

“Swann said Jupiter possessed a poisonous “bitter cold” atmosphere “of myriad colors – yellow, red, violet, some greens, like a giant fireworks display.” He said that he saw what looked like a “tornado” and also observed “winds of terrific velocity”. He detected “powerful magnetic forces.”

No mention of any rings around Jupiter, even though the story claims that science later confirmed all of his findings.

The next one I found was from the San Fransisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle for 10 April 1977. It read:

“Each [ie, Swann and Sherman] spoke of glittering ice crystals, winds of terrific velocity, great mountain ranges and powerful magnetic forces.”

Again, no mention of any rings.

Also in 1977, Targ and Puthoof's book “Mind Reach” was published. This described some of their (non-classified) work into remote viewing. One of the episodes they wrote about was Swann's mission to Jupiter, but they don't mention any ring system, either. In fact, quite the opposite. They wrote:

“The descriptions sounded reasonable; nothing was particularly at variance with any known facts.”

I doubt they'd say that if Swann had just told them that Jupiter had a ring system. So this source, too, doesn't include Swann's prediction.

Swann wrote about this session himself in 1975 in his book To Kiss Earth Goodbye. His version of the famous sentence comparing Jupiter to Saturn reads: "maybe the stripes of Jupiter are like bands of crystals, like rings of Saturn" which doesn't sound like a description of a ring system.

It's difficult to find an exact point where the claim begins to be made. The best I can make is in 1982-83. In 1982 James Randi wrote about Swann and Sharmer's session in his book Flim-Flam, but there is no mention of any rings. Meanwhile, in 1984 in the Skeptical Inquirer, we find a quote:

“Earlier, they had discovered the rings around Jupiter years before their existence was scientifically established by satellite photographs.”

This sentence is referenced to the November 1984 issue of a sci-fi magazine named Analog. This appears to be the earliest I can find of the claim. Unfortunately, SI is only in snippet view on Google Books, and I can't find Analog magazine for 1984 at all, so I can't check out their references.

I think this inability at recognising Ingo's “band of crystals” as a “rings of rocks” tells us that this is an example of a bit of creative interpretation. Also, it's worth mentioning that later in the transcript from 1973 Ingo Swann talks about “those cloud layers, those crystal layers” so I think it's safe to assume the “bands of crystals” were referring to the bands of colours already seen across Jupiter's visible surface from Earth and had nothing to do with any as-yet-undiscovered ring system.

Jupiter, from a 1961 illustration (From Astronomy by Patrick Moore)

Fewer train reservations before disasters

In 1956, E.W. Cox wrote an article for the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research in which he looked for evidence of precognition of fatal train crashes (10 fatalities or more) in the numbers of reservations bought for that particular train, with the hypothesis that any form of precognition would be visible in a drop in reservations for that train on that day.

I do not have a copy of the original paper by E.W.Cox, but I did find a page on the internet which had his data, as well as an examination of his methods. The page is currently (25th Aug '15) unavailable, but I have put a link at the bottom of this article.

He examined the data in two ways: one was to look at the data day by day. In this, he compared the reservations for the crash day with the previous seven days. The second way was to compare the crash day reservations with the same day on the previous four weeks.

His measure of success was if the number of reservations was the lowest of all the other days. This he called a hit, and its chances of success are calculated as 1 in 8 for the daily data and 1 in 5 for the weekly data.

He did this for 28 crashes.

For the monthly data, he found ten days when the lowest number of reservations fell on the day of the crash. In other words, ten hits out of twenty-eight trials, with a 1/5 chance of success. This is statistically significant at p=0.04, z=1.76 (one-tailed) or odds of 1 in 25.

For the daily data, there are nine hits for the twenty-eight days, with a 1/8 success rate. This gives use p=0.005, z=2.54 (one-tailed) or odds of 1 in 185.

The data are as follows:

(It's worth noting that Cox could not get all the data he needed, so when he had a gap, he inserted the average number for that set of data. I've highlighted those figures in brown. Figures in yellow are the lowest figures for that particular journey.)

However, as the psuedo-scepticisme article points out, the data sample is too small to support a binomial distribution. Taking the rule of thumb that np>=5 (n=number of trials, p=probability of success) there aren't enough data points to justify a binomial sample. In the case of the daily data np equals 28 * 0.125 = 3.5. Additionally, Cox allowed tied hits to stand, suggesting to me that the binomial method wasn't the right one to use.

I decided to take a look at the data myself, but this time I looked at whether the reservations for a particular day were significantly above or below the average for that set of weeks or days. I thought that this would be a more sensitive measure of success, especially given that some of the hits were by a margin of three or less reservations in difference.

I found that for the daily data, the day of the crash was significantly below the average (ie, fewer sales) seven times. This is the highest figure for this category, which supports the idea that precognition lead people to make fewer reservations on that day. However, there were also three occasions where the sales of reservations was significantly above the average. This makes it comparable to D-4 when there were five below average and one above.

On the weekly data, the day of the crash had seven occasions when it was significantly below average and four times above. This is actually worse than D-28 which also had seven below average but only two occasions when it was above. In fact, using Cox's original method, D-28 has ten hits out of twenty-eight, just like the day of the crash does.

I'm no statistician, so I encourage anyone to look at the spreadsheet I used, and perhaps suggest improvements. This can be downloaded here.

https://www.mediafire.com/?mwnxfrztogdt836

References:

Cox, W. E. (1956). "Precognition: An analysis. II. Subliminal precognition." Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 50, 99–109. as cited in the article “Précognition subliminale lors d’accidents de train : relecture critique d’une recherche de W.E. Cox” http://www.pseudo-scepticisme.com/Precognition-subliminale-lors-d.html

The Arizona Experiments

About half a year ago I had a discussion about The Arizona Experiments on an internet forum. Since then, the forum has closed but I kept my notes on the topic and I decided it was worth writing about again.

The Arizona Experiments were a series of ten trials designed to test the precognitive dreams of a man called Chris Robinson. They were conducted in Arizona by Dr Gary Schwartz of Arizona University. Over the course of eleven days and ten nights, Chris Robinson would write down his impressions of his dreams. In the following morning, he and Gary Schwartz would get a phone call from a third party who chose a location at random from a possible pool of twenty local destinations.

Gary receives the call in the morning telling him the location of that day's target

The results, as summarized in the published paper, were

“The primary pattern of themes of information per day matched its respective location as well as associated events for the day. The patterns of evidence indicate that selective attention and perceptual priming were insufficient to explain the complete set of findings. The data can be interpreted as consistent with CR‟s hypothesis that the presence of spiritual mediation can sometimes be inferred from the appearance of highly improbable and organized patterns of significant events in real life.” (Schwartz, 2011)

This experiment was originally carried out in August 2001 and submitted for publication in 2003 to the Journal for the Society of Psychical Research, but was rejected due to methodological flaws. This caused a (very) minor fuss on the internet at the time, to the effect that the SPR had been taken over by skeptics. Eventually it found an outlet in the pages of the Journal of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies some ten years after the experiment was carried out.

The majority of the paper describes the ten trials in some detail, as well as the similarities between the notes made overnight and the locations themselves. For example:

“On Day 4, the primary themes were “suns, mirrors, LCDs, telescopes, Mount Olympus (after his 35mm camera), airplanes, hangers, and a pitched propeller).

CR was taken to Kitt Peak National Laboratory (at the top of a huge mountain) to the world‟s largest Solar Telescope.

CR and PE ate lunch at a nearby airport restaurant with hangers that had a large pitched propeller in front. None of the other nine locations had this unique pattern of themes.”

[...]

On Day 7, the primary themes included “dust, dust everywhere, including on the floor in a building, a court room, and a train robbery.”

CR was taken to Old Tucson, a western theme park that is also used as a movie set. There is dust “everywhere” at Old Tucson, including a room purposely designed with a completely dusty floor.
A large train has been used in more than 100 movies involving train robberies.

Old Tucson includes a courtroom. None of the other nine locations contained this precise pattern of themes.” (Schwartz, 2011)

I found some of Chris Robinson’s videos that he made of the actual visits to a few of the sites. Watching them gives a little more idea about how Gary and Chris went about matching Chris’ notes to the locations.

For example, at the Old Tucson studio (day seven), the fundamental theme is “dust”, so they go around looking for dusty things, even going so far as to ask people if they’ve seen any dusty rooms. This is why they find unique examples of Chris' descriptors during the day: because they are highly motivated and actively looking for them. So when the paper says they didn't find that particular combination of descriptors on any other day, is that really because they weren't there or because they weren't looking?

About the Kitt Peak Observatory (on day four), Chris says he didn't dream on that particular night, so he relied on the notes he made in London. In the video there are two full ring binders of notes beside Chris in his room, which I assume are his notes. So the amount of data not represented in the paper is pretty substantial. Also, Chris has plenty of ways he can interpret these images and Gary Schwartz, too, is not immune to similar leaps of logic.

For example, one of the primary themes listed in Chris' notes for this day is "Pitch". This is mentioned in the footage in Chris' room, it is mentioned again in the car and finally Gary links the clue of "pitch" to the angle of the telescope. In the published paper, "pitch" does not appear. Instead it is now "pitched propeller". Also "dish" is missing from the paper and "LCD" has been added.

A number of descriptors not reported in the published paper

Also, in the video there's a close up of the page of Chris' notes that reads “Olympus – Greek – Mountain Screens – Screen Pictures” etc, and you can just about see the writing on the other side of the page. At the top of the page, it's possible to read “4th August”. But the Kitt Peak trial was carried out on the 5th of August. They are using notes that were actually meant for a different day.

This shot from a TV documentary shows a page from Day 4, which was held on August 5th.

But the words "4 August" can be seen written at the top of the previous page. 

In other words, these notes were supposed to relate to a different day.

And looking at the video, other notes for the Kitt Peak Observatory were “Ring – Diamond – Screens – TV – Projector – Not 4 Sale” and “Cake – cream.” These are all absent from the paper.

In Chris Robinson's hour-long video of the events of this day Gary asks Chris what the key words are, not in the hotel before he found out the target for that day, but in the car as they're driving along the road, after he knows the target location. Chris, too, may not be completely blind to the target by now since he was next to Gary when he got the call to find out the location, and also Gary Schwartz had already looked for the correct route on a map while sitting beside Chris. According to the long video they key words are "pitch, sun, mirror, Mount Olympus, screens, dish."

Day four is the only day when we have enough footage and knowledge of the actual prediction to make a meaningful comparison to what was written up for publication and what actually occurred. Given the disparity between the two accounts of that day, I suspect that other days have had a similar amount of interpretation. Far from being evidence of psychic functioning, I prefer the theory that, given two large sets of data (Chris’ notes and that day’s target) correspondences are bound to be found.

References:

Schwartz, G. (2011) “Exploratory Blinded Field Experiment Evaluating Purported Precognitive Dreams in a Highly Skilled Subject: Possible Spiritual Mediation?” Journal of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies, Vol 34, Number 1, pgs 3-20.

Roll, M. (2003) "More Censorship: Gary Schwartz's Experiments with Dream Detective Chris Robinson," http://www.cfpf.org.uk/ 21 December 2003

Chris Robinson's footage of the Arizona Experiment, day four

Chris Robinson's footage of the Arizona Experiment, day seven