Sunday 1 April 2018

Project Stargate and the Charles Jordan case

The TV program Sunday Morning, broadcast on the US network CBS, recently carried a story about the US government-sponsored remote viewing project. It can be seen online here.

It was a fairly typical piece on Project Stargate. In this kind of coverage it's rare to get much further than a few talking heads, old photocopies of declassified documents and a skeptic to provide balance. Talking of which, I’ve no idea what Sean Carroll talking about. Something about putting a receiver next to your head should pick up ESP? He didn't mention remote viewing at all. But in his defence, he might not have been asked about it. It felt like his bit was edited in from an entirely different story.

The clip from Sunday Morning talks about the Charles Jordan case. Charles Jordan was a customs official who helped smuggle drugs into the US. He went on the run in 1986. On 4 December, 1988 his case was covered on America's Most Wanted (series 2, episode 43). The remote viewers were asked to focus on him in April 1989.

Screenshot from CBS's Sunday Morning

Angela Ford (then called Dellafiore) was one of the remote viewers at that time and in her interview with CBS she describes it:

“I said the man was in Lowell, Wyoming, and I spelt it L-O-W-E-L-L. [...] Well, when my boss went to Customs and said ‘we’re still getting the Wyoming feeling,’ Customs said ‘As we're speaking we're apprehending Charles Jordan 100 miles west of Lovell, Wyoming’.”

Out of all the claims of success for Project Stargate, this one is perhaps the most striking. Tasked with finding a man on the run who, after three years as a fugitive, could be anywhere on the American continent, and yet succeding in naming a town within a hundred miles of his ultimate place of arrest is very impressive.

The sessions themselves were pretty typical except that each remote viewer was given the opportunity to use whatever method they preferred. This lead to all the sessions being carried out solo (ie, no monitor to prompt them) and a range of techniques, using written remote viewing, coordinates and dowsing over maps. How blind the remote viewers were to the target is not clear. In the original declassified documents Charlie Jordan is referred to as “the felon” or “the fugitive,” but Lyn Buchanan wrote in his book The Seventh Sense that the team were given a full debriefing on Charles Jordan.

There were about nineteen sessions on this target and five remote viewers contributed sessions. Angela Ford only did two: the one in which she mentioned an Indian reserve and the name “Lowel” and then a second session two months later but more on that in a bit.

I can't find the actual notes from Angela's first session [EDIT 20/08/18: someone emailed them to me and, from that, I could find them on the CIA site. Link at the bottom of the page], but in an undated report (that must be before 17 April 1989 because certain results from an RV session run on that date are missing, described as “pending”) there is a list of the team's findings to date.



The other three remote viewers who had completed sessions on this target put the fugitive in Mexico or south Florida. Angela's conclusion, now pinpointed as “Lovell, Wyoming” was definitely the odd one out.

The others continued to remote view Charlie Jordan but Angela did not. The other findings did not start to converge on Wyoming, but remained in the fairly typical idiom of places where fugitives might hide: farmhouses deep in the country, Central America, the Everglades in Florida. One dowsing session by Mel Riley ended on Minnesota, but that was as close as anyone else got.


Meanwhile, the FBI had been going through leads generated by the America's Most Wanted episode and had probable cause to search the property of Jordan's parents. There they found a videotape made by Jordan of his wife and their newborn baby in a hospital that they were able to identify as being in Denver.

They had already begun a search in Colorado around June 1989 when an eyewitness account of Charles Jordan in Yellowstone Park came in. He was found and arrested in Pinedale, WY on 16 June 1989.

What's interesting is that, in the CBS piece, Angela described how the remote viewers kept getting the Wyoming feeling and when they went back to tell their client they were told “As we're speaking we're apprehending Charles Jordan 100 miles west of Lovell.”

That's interesting because the project on Charlie Jordan had closed on 28 April with no further mention of Wyoming, so there were no extra findings in June for them to pass on to their client. Instead there is one final session dated 16 June at 9.00am run by Angela Ford. In the tasking document it is made clear that this session was prompted by the recent eyewitness account placing Jordan in Yellowstone Park. Angela is asked to describe his movements for the next two weeks. She reported that he was heading towards Biddle, Montana, via camp sites.


Charles Jordan was indeed found in a camp site (albeit nowhere near Biddle and actually about 250 miles south-west of Lowell) so that much is a hit but Angela doesn't seem to know that Charles would be arrested that day. I wonder if this could be where the “as we're speaking...” quote she gave comes from: when they passed on the session notes to their client later that same day.

As to where the original guess of “Lowell” came from, I don't know. Maybe a brief moment of psychic clarity. But I'd also like to know more about what was in that episode of America's Most Wanted.

References:

Summary of early remote viewing sessions on the Charlie Jordan project

Session notes from Angela's first remote viewing session

Session notes from Angela's second remote viewing session

10 comments:

Unknown said...

My name is Angela Ford and I am the psychic that worked the Charles Jordan case. The report you have on your blog is not mine and this information was not reported to Customs as mine.

You are correct that I worked two sessions. During the first session, I received the location as Lowell, Wyoming. That was it. There probably isn't a report.

The second session I worked was more or less to give an update on Jordan. I said he was on the move and I placed him west of Lovell, Wyoming. I said he was near an Indian burial ground and described what it looked like.

What tasking document do you have that makes it clear that the second session was prompted by the recent eyewitness account placing Charles Jordan in Yellowstone Park? When tasked with the second session, we did not know Jordan was seen in Yellowstone Park. When two high level Defense Intelligent Agency officials met with Customs on June 16,1989, they did not know there was an eyewitness account placing Jordan in Yellowstone Park. Customs told the DIA officials that "as we are speaking, Charles Jordan is being apprehended 100 west of Lovell Wyoming." They were surprised just like I was and others at Ft. Meade.

You are also correct that the psychics were debriefed on Charles Jordan. This occurred after the psychics worked the issue. They were not debriefed before they remote viewed the location of Charles Jordan.

Thank you.
Angela

Unknown said...

This is Angela Ford again.

I see in your comment you would like to know what was in the episode of America's Most Wanted. Why?

I want you to know that I knew nothing about Charles Jordan when I was tasked to locate him. I did not know he was on America's Ten Most Wanted list. I did not even know I was working a Customs case. I knew nothing. I worked in the blind.

When Customs first received my information as Jordan being in Wyoming, they didn't believe he would be there. They felt he was in the Caribbean or in Panama because he was a boater and lived in these places before.

Ersby said...

Hello Angela Ford. Sorry it’s taken me so long to respond. Thank you for taking the time to respond to my comments. I’m always glad to clarify my points if I seem vague or misleading.

I have edited the original post to add two links to the documents that cover your involvement in the Charlie Jordan project. They’re now at the end, under “References”.

The reason I say the second session (at 9am on 16 June 89) was clearly prompted by Jordan’s recent sighting is because it begins: “MISSION: Determine the route of travel and near-time destination of [redacted] who was recently sighted at Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.” Additionally, this session was the first attempt by Sun Streak to focus on Charlie Jordan since 27 April, almost two months before. Such a long gap before any activity suggests to me some new information. The DIA agents you wrote about may not have known that Jordan was being arrested, but I don’t see how they could have been unaware about the sighting, given that it appears on a dated Sun Streak document.

Your findings for that session, summarised, were that he was heading west, through Yellowstone National Park to Montana and then on towards Biddle, MT (ie, back east again) heading through the Big Horn Indian Reserve. Charlie Jordan was found in a campground near Pinedale, WY, which really isn’t anywhere near any of these.

As for the “debriefing,” it seems I mistyped. It should have been “briefing,” since Lyn clearly states that the remote viewers were told about the nature of the target before the sessions began. Here is the relevant section from his book:

“In 1989, the customs service was looking for Charles Jordan, on of its agents, who had been discovered engaging in drug trafficking. Jordan was on the run and everyone suspected that he was either in Mexico or was headed for South or Central America. When the tasking came in, the project officer at the time briefed us with the whole story. This was a severe breach of protocol, but was not unusual in real-world operational projects.” Buchanan, L, “The Seventh Sense: The Secrets of Remote Viewing as Told by a "Psychic Spy” for the U.S. Military”, p49

Finally, my reason for wanting to know what was in that episode of America’s Most Wanted was because in order to properly assess any psychic claim, one should at least understand what was generally known about the subject in the public domain.

Ersby said...

Someone kindly emailed me and pointed me in the right direction regarding the actual notes from Angela's first session. I've added a link to the post above, under "References". The front sheet to the document also confirms that - under the heading "Viewer tasking" which were the instructions given to the remote viewer - Angela was given the name of the target and that he was a felon.

Anonymous said...

So, in the end, what should we think ? Howe much psychic ability was involved in finding this person ? I don't really get it...

Ersby said...

According to other sources, Charlie Jordan was arrested without any input from Project Star Gate. The FBI received leads after America's Most Wanted included his case, and that allowed them to eventually finding and arresting him.

As for this session as being an example of psychic functioning, I couldn't say for sure. It is certainly among the most impressive. However, to say that there was no way for Angela to know about Jordan's case is not correct. Coverage of the case in the media could've fed into what she and the other remote viewers said. What is compelling, though, is that she was the only one to get anywhere near right, while the other viewers all reported more cliched locations, such as Florida and Central America.

Anonymous said...


Sorry, I put that link first under the wrong article.
It is interesting, is it not ?
https://books.google.ch/books?id=HqbGidVvPMAC&pg=PA2&lpg=PA2&dq=charlie+jordan+case&source=bl&ots=OZLiCviM4k&sig=ACfU3U2RsZXTBDL3-iEgK-RbUPqHGvZzQg&hl=de&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjXvciBt8noAhXj0qYKHddNBOUQ6AEwDXoECAsQNg#v=onepage&q&f=false

Ersby said...

That is interesting, thanks. According to that article, Jordan was found in the afternoon and arrested in the evening of the 15th, strongly implying that the RV session on the 16th must have been an after-the-fact test to see if Angela Ford - the only psychic to have even come close originally - could detect Jordan's change in circumstances.

The article also seems to say that the Charlie Jordan case was covered on "America's Most Wanted" twice, although with no dates we can't be sure that the second one was before or after Angela Ford's RV session or even if it had any relevant information for her had she actually seen it.

But it's nice to have the law-makers side of the story put into a little more detail. Thanks for finding this and letting me know.

Ersby said...

I deleted the comment in the wrong place, btw.

Anonymous said...

I was married to him in 1968. I knew he was odd so I left him in Mississippi in Oxford where we lived on campus. I met him in Fla. And that is where we were married
I'm not to shocked about all of this@