Well—Fred was wrong. As the weeks passed and the other five individuals finished their times out at SRI, I continued to report on Wednesday afternoons and we would run through practice sessions. Usually two of us reported on the same day. On Wednesdays it was usually Ken Bell and me, but sometimes a retired Navy petty officer, Hartleigh Trent, would be there.
Ken and I hit it off from the outset. He was a very serious-minded counterintelligence officer who approached everything very logically, and it was easy to see that he took this very seriously. It took a long while, however, for him to open up and talk to me about his own experiences beyond those we shared in the group sessions. He was one of the best people I've known in developing his ability to meditate. He carries that ability into his martial arts and it makes a lethal combination. Eventually, we became very close friends and still are today. Ken lived in base quarters at Fort Meade, and could almost walk to work.
Hartleigh was a large man with a very dry sense of humor who loved collecting original hand-painted bird prints, and viewed himself as a sort of inventor. He worked as a government civilian at the NPIC (National Photographic Interpretation Center.) The Encyclopedia of the U.S. Military in 1990 described the center as a facility operated by the Central Intelligence Agency, charged with imagery analysis of satellite reconnaissance. We also became very close friends as the project progressed.
On one of my trips to his Maryland house, I left my wife, Peggy, drinking tea with his wife while he took me down the hill in the backyard to show me his new queen bee and her colony. We were standing there totally unprotected as he gently lifted the top from the hive and extracted the centerboard, where her nest was situated. Her soldiers were somewhat excited and were swarming all over us both, landing on our faces, exploring the insides of our ears and noses. He calmly pointed to her with his finger and explained that as long as you projected gentle and protective waves to her, the others would leave you alone. I found that he was correct. As he began to slide her back into the hive, however, Peggy appeared at the top of the hill and, seeing us completely covered with bees, let out a yell, "Oh my God!" By the time we had re-covered the hive and extricated ourselves, my eyes and nose were swollen to twice their natural size. We then sat on the back veranda while his Italian wife showed me how to make a home remedy for bee stings. That's the way Hartleigh was, larger than life, and always exploring it.
Over the course of a couple of months, I did 24 practice sessions, none of which exceeded the quality of my first attempt. It was very depressing. I could see some of the others having minor successes in their efforts, but for me there was only failure.
On my 25th attempt, something happened. I remember sitting in the small room trying to shut out the surrounding noise, concentrating on trying to imagine what the target could be, when I was suddenly disturbed by what felt like some kind of strange noise that wasn't in the room. I thought, "Could that be in my head?" I mentioned it. It was in some way connected with an open-faced building with some kind of funny lemon-green metal objects. It all seemed quite bizarre, but I dutifully reported everything anyway. At the end of the session I did some drawings that seemed to make some kind of sense to me, but really didn't depict anything that I was familiar with. The outbounder returned and we all loaded into the car to travel to the target site. I expected nothing more than another failure. When we pulled up in front of the base fire department, I could suddenly see all the fragments of my session falling into place. It was like suddenly seeing new information and recalling it, all at the same time. It wasn't perfect, but I knew that I had made significant contact with the target. Fred looked at me and said, "Now I guess we know what you were telling us about." And smiled.
In a very strange way, I suddenly felt as though everything I had experienced out in California had come all the way around the barn and landed in my lap again. Suddenly everything was connected in my head. It was as though I suddenly knew there was a special switch up there in my mind somewhere, and while I wasn't exactly sure how to throw it, I knew I could find it again. From that point on, I began to improve remarkably from practice session to practice session.
The weeks continued to pass and everyone was improving incrementally. No one person was pulling out ahead of the other, but we were all finding our special skill and honing it in slightly different ways. Eventually I was able to meet the rest of the crew as well.
Staff Sergeant Mel Riley was our only enlisted man. He was a photo interpreter who did a job similar to Hartleigh's, but worked in a building on Fort Meade. His job there was primarily operational security.ix From the outset I could tell that there was friction between him and Scotty. I was never sure if it was personality-generated or based on the fact the Mel was enlisted. In any event, it went on the entire time Mel was with the unit and Scotty was present. What I liked about Mel was the fact that he had spent time in Europe flying covert collection missions through East Germany. I had been aboard a few of those aircraft and personally preferred to keep my feet on the ground. I knew that he had been shot at more than a few times. He knew what it meant to put it on the line, which wasn't something everyone had the opportunity to do while serving the country.
The other participants who had gone through introductions to RV at SRI were two civilians. Since they prefer to keep their names private, I will refer to them as Frank and Nancy. Frank was a counterintelligence agent who worked out of the headquarters at Arlington Hall Station and Nancy worked in the same facility as Hartleigh, as a photo interpreter over in the Naval Yard in Washington, D.C. Besides these original six, there were four other participants, two of them civilian employees of the government and two intelligence officers. Due to their sensitivity about possible exposure, these participants will remain unidentified.
Early in the project we encountered a major glitch. An officer working in the Office of the Army Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence advised the assistant chief of staff for intelligence, Maj. Gen. Ed Thompson, that we were probably operating not in compliance with the directives regarding human use. Since the CIA's involvement in the early fifties with LSD experiments and mind control, all programs using people were sensitive to meeting certain human use requirements, and ensuring that all participants gave informed consent regarding their participation. We all had to fill out a pile of forms, which were forwarded, along with a classified request, to operate the project up through the system to the Army's surgeon general. Many felt that the requirement was stupid and time-consuming, but I didn't. It was clear to me from the problems that I was having in adjusting to some of the experiences that someone less stable might slip over the edge. So we stopped practicing for almost two months while they processed the paperwork. I found out much later that the science side of the project actually took it a lot more seriously out at SRI. They would actually establish a human use oversight committee to maintain vigilance over their experiments and methods—something never done on the military side.
Before, there had been some hilarious events during our practice trials at Fort Meade. Acting as an outbounder for one of the other viewers, I drew as a target a small tourist gift shop on one of the main highways leading into Washington, D.C. When I got there, the instructions said to spend fifteen to twenty minutes looking at the gifts and then report back, which I did. I did not know that the owner, who was sitting in a rear office, had been watching me on a security monitor system. When I got back, Fred, the viewer, and I loaded into the car for our return visit, which was the feedback portion of the remote viewing exercise. We all descended on the gift shop, moving among the aisles examining things, but of course not buying. The owner, still in his office, noticed that I had returned and this time had brought friends. Feeling that his place was being "cased or targeted," he called the local police. When the police car pulled up outside, the remote viewer and monitor immediately left the store without notifying me. I was "apprehended" and questioned.
"What are you doing? Where are your buddies? Why are you casing this st
ore?"
I had to think fast.
I laughed and said that I was a consultant working for a production unit out of Los Angeles. They used me to search out possible shooting locations for scripts they were considering.
The owner beamed at the possibility that his store might be considered for a scene in a movie. He quickly dismissed the police, saying that he had made a mistake. I spent nearly an hour in the owner's office drinking coffee with him and talking about the script and what might be needed. I left him with a promise to send him my card and information on the movie should they decide to shoot it in the Maryland area.
When I got back to the office, everyone laughed about what happened. In truth, it was a difficult situation, and one that I might not have been able to talk my way out of.
On another occasion, the outbounder for one of the military viewers was a woman. The specific target selected was a restaurant with a peculiar façade. What we didn't know, but probably should have, was that it was also well known to the police as a location where prostitutes sold their wares. After standing on the corner for approximately twenty minutes, she was "apprehended" and hassled by a couple of officers doing their duty. She returned to the office absolutely mortified. Needless to say, there was no direct feedback for that viewer.
During this stand-down period, I stuck to Arlington Hall Station and worked full-time in my office there. I remember being concerned, while we all waited for approval from the surgeon general, that the project wouldn't continue. It seemed inconceivable that it wouldn't, given we had the full support of our own commander at INSCOM, Brig. Gen. William Rolya; Army Chief of Staff General Meyer; and Secretary of the Army Clifford Alexander. In fact, I was somewhat amazed at the level of exposure such a small project got. Access to the project was not only controlled by level of clearance, but it was designated an "access by name only" operation. This is not a matter of trust, but of controlling access only to those who have a direct need to know. This is usually reserved for the most sensitive kinds of projects, where life and death matters are always at hand or operatives are in deep cover and at great risk. We knew the Russians were working with psychics. I suppose others were concerned that if the Russians got wind of what we were doing, they might take action to neutralize our facility in some way. This was a major stretch of the imagination for most, but a very real possibility in the minds of others. I suppose it depended on just how real one felt the project was.x
Originally I was told that the project, first named "Gondola Wish," was approved to operate for three years, primarily as an OPSEC function. The first year was to be used for training, the second for collecting information by targeting U.S. intelligence operations for which ground truth was known, and the third year to be spent analyzing the results and evaluating the potential threat. I was told that I would only participate when needed, and at most two afternoons a week. This was sufficient to piss off my boss, who was ordered to allow my absence by the chief of staff, and could do nothing about it. While this was in essence true—he actually couldn't do anything about it officially, except live with it—I could see the issue beginning to appear in my in basket, with small notes that said things like, "I need you to do (whatever it might be at the time), if you aren't too busy hanging out with the chief of staff." Normally, I'd pitch the notes, but they started to appear more frequently. What I didn't know at the time was that Ralph was already considering his retirement in three or four years and I was possibly one of the warrant officers being groomed to take his place. One of the reasons for bringing me into the office was to train me for the day that I would retire from the Army, at which time I would be an eligible and long term replacement.
I wasn't cooperating and I was afraid that it was going to start showing up in my annual officer's evaluation statement. I vacillated for many months, trying to decide whether or not I should continue with the special project, at risk to my career. A number of events made the decision a lot easier than I thought it would be.
Eight months into the project, the accuracy of our viewing against ground truth targets was beginning to be noticed in the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence. Some details we were able to provide about ongoing U.S. intelligence operations were, to be frank, scary. At the same time, we began to notice an unusual level of interest being shown toward our office by others within the building. We were the only locked and sealed special-access room inside a locked and special-access-controlled building. People with the highest-level clearances were not allowed behind our green door, but the rank of those who were was not going unnoticed. A decision was made that to maintain the integrity of the operation we would have to find another place from which to operate.
At the time, Fort Meade was already overstaffed and space was at a minimum. There were no standalone buildings anywhere on the post that anyone knew about. After a visit to the base engineering office however, we discovered some buildings that had been condemned and were scheduled for imminent destruction. This was an old cook's school that existed back during the war—the big one—WWII. The old school consisted of six two-floor barracks buildings, a single-level administration building, and an Army mess facility. It was empty and had not been occupied for probably fifteen years. It took going to the post commander, but we succeeded in getting a freeze put on destruction, and moved in. The site was excellent, sitting under a grove of huge live oaks in a large field directly across from Kimbrough Army Hospital.
Building 2561 was the old mess facility (Army dining hall), and was essentially one long, open room. The first thing we did was to remove the numbers from the buildings. When you entered, the first third was red clay tiles, one foot square, which were actually black from years of grease and dirt. There was a raised area in the tiles where the huge ovens and stoves had once set, and a giant overhead steel hood for removing the fumes. Against the wall was a very large quarter-inch-thick iron plate that was originally a heat shield for the ovens. It was about six feet high beginning at the floor and stretched about twelve feet along the wall across from the entry door. The place was filthy, with holes in the plaster, and we couldn't tell what color the actual floor covering was. It reminded me of the old mess halls at Fort Jackson that were being torn down when I attended basic training back in 1964. We spent an entire weekend cleaning the floors and repairing the walls. We also had to re-patch some of the heating pipes that ran along the wall, which were covered with a wrapping that looked suspiciously like asbestos. Most of the red tile had to be scraped clean, using paint scrapers, (down on all fours), then rescrubbing with steel wool. All in all, it was a very nasty business. I think most would have been surprised to see so much rank doing the grunt work.
We used the raised tile areas to support our long row of steel safes; the garbage area was used for storage; the single bathroom got a unisex label (probably the first on Fort Meade); and the old storeroom became Scotty Watt's new office. The rear wall behind his desk was a loading ramp with double steel doors, so we had to hang a curtain to cut the draft across his backside during the winter. Over time we continued to add to the building, a wall here, temporary office dividers there, nicer furniture, desks, chairs, tables, etc. But initially it was pretty Spartan.
Across the small road was building 2560. It had a front entry room; three RV rooms; an observation room, from which someone could monitor a session using audio only; and a break room, which we filled with more comfortable furniture and all-frequency lamps. Fred eventually turned it into a small greenhouse with more than a few dozen plants. We went to great lengths to ensure that very few visitors ever got to see that specific building. It was where the viewing took place and we didn't want our feelings about the place disturbed. Eventually, the front room became the operations officer's and Mel's office area.
All the work we did was on off-duty time and weekends. This meant a two-and-a-half-hour commute each way for me, and more impact at home. I wasn't totally open about what I was doing with Peggy, which only caused more probl
ems between us. But the difference in the RV atmosphere between the new building and the old was like midnight and high noon. For all intents and purposes, we dropped off the face of the planet.
The only outward appearances that changed were the doors and windows. Security cages were installed across the windows and painted to blend in, and the mostly wooden doors were replaced with steel ones and high-grade security padlocks. There were never more than three or four civilian cars parked out front, and everyone wore civilian clothing, so we generated very little curiosity. Without building numbers, we seldom had visitors who didn't belong there.
At the end of 1978, our project underwent a major change. Up until that point we were only evaluating the effectiveness of RV against known targets. Some of our reports were being passed around areas of the Pentagon and were being viewed with great interest. Our accuracy against many of these targets was even more astounding since only the people in the Pentagon who identified the targets with coordinates knew what was actually located in those positions. Some of the targets were even deliberately skewed to see what would happen.
As an example, I was handed an overhead photograph of an aircraft hangar surrounded with planes and told there was something inside the building that was of interest. My job was to target the building and tell them what it was.
At first I was angered by the request. Doing a remote viewing without any front-loading at all is difficult enough, but now they were showing me pictures of the buildings I was targeting, which caused me a tremendous problem with overlay. Nevertheless I relaxed back onto the worn leather couch and prepared by closing my eyes and trying to relax, emptying my mind. I'd come a long way in just seven months and I would do what I could. I tried to forget about the building completely and challenged myself with opening only to the target of interest. That's all they really wanted to know about, I kept telling myself, so that's all that I would concern myself with.
The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy Page 13