The next day, as I was leaving for work, Peggy informed me that I would have to find another job or else. My normal hour cool-down period that day extended to something like three hours. I was beginning to feel like a slave—chained to the job, the viewing, a pitiful small area surrounding my desk, and the space of my mind. That's when everyone always asks themselves what else can get worse, right? I got a call out of the clear blue from my son, Scott.
It had been nine years since I had seen him. When I got over the first few seconds of shock, I asked him how he was doing.
"Well, that's what I'm calling you about," was his response. He proceeded to tell me that he was being harassed at school by a lot of bullies and there were a lot of racial incidents. He said his grades sucked. He had thought about it and decided that he was going to leave Miami and come to live with me.
I went numb all over. How do you tell a very young child that he is trying to jump from the frying pan into the fire, when your heart is yelling, "Go get him"? There was nothing more that I could want than to be with my son again, but where he was, he at least had a home to come home to. Peggy and I were at each other's throats; I was the only one doing the remote viewing at work; and I was close to the breaking point emotionally. I had to make the right decision in a handful of seconds, and it had to be the right one for him and not me.
I told him that if he moved in with me, I would expect that his grades could never fall below a B—actually, I said, A's would be better. I would expect him to follow my rules, and they might be even stricter than his mother's. And, he'd lose contact with all his friends. I reminded him that I would also have to be at work all day, and the time we could spend together at that moment wouldn't be too great.
I listened to a huge sigh across the phone line. I could feel the last of the air leaking from his rescue boat. My very soul felt as though someone had poured it full of molten lead. God, it's hard even now, remembering how much my heart hurt right at that moment. I could taste his pain, when I hoarsely asked him to put his mother on the phone.
She told me which public school he was in and my heart sank. It was probably one of the toughest schools in Miami from a small kid's perspective—lots of gang violence and all the other possible problems that could exist in a single school. I asked her to move him to my old high school. I was sure that if she went down there and spoke with someone and they knew he was my son, they'd find a way of getting him in. I discussed his home situation and she assured me that while she was trying to hold the line with him, it was mostly a school issue. I hung up hoping she would carry through, which she did. I wrote Scott a letter, hoping that it would explain how I was feeling, and I received it back in the mail unopened some weeks later.
I was extremely depressed for a long time. There wasn't anyone at work I could talk with about it. Had Ken still been there, I probably would have discussed it with him. But, he wasn't, so I bottled it all up. I would sometimes sit at night in my living room, watching the moon cross the horizon through the window. It seemed like seven lifetimes ago that I had wondered what a blood-colored moon looked like on the other side of the world. Now I knew. It looks exactly the same no matter where you're standing, and like the moon, no matter where you stand, all your folly and all your human strengths or weaknesses stand with you.
I went back to work, trying to do the best I could with the targets that were still pouring in through the project door, but I was mentally stretched about as thin as I could be. By the end of the following week, I received word that my father had finally lost his war with throat cancer, and Peggy and I headed back down south to bury him next to my mother.
When we arrived in Miami, we got a room at a local motel and went immediately to the morgue to sign the release forms for the transfer of his body to the funeral home. I asked them for his possessions and they told me there weren't any. That's when I lost it. All his life, my dad had worn a simple wedding band and it had never been off his finger. If he had wanted to remove it, he couldn't have done so without cutting his finger off or the band itself. It was welded into the calluses at the base of his finger and palm. I asked to see the body and the clothes he was brought in with. They could find his body but not the clothes. His ring finger had the deep white groove where the ring had been, but it wasn't there now I demanded to see the head coroner and when he came into the room I pulled my identification out and pushed it into his face.
"See this! I'm an Army intelligence officer. You find my father's wedding band, or you'll wish you never met me."
Peggy was pulling on my arm and telling me to calm down. I guess I was a bit out of control. But in minutes they found his clothing, wallet (probably with more money in it than he came in with), and the gold band they had cut from his finger. I don't remember much after that, except noting that the death certificate stated "Death from Malnutrition." When they forced him into the hospital, he refused to eat. Whenever they attempted to put a tube in him, he'd find some way to rip it out. At least they were honest about his having starved himself to death.
If it sounds like I have a lot of rage here, I do. It is plain to me that there are separate medical facilities in this country for different people and the differences really aren't based on color or race, it just looks that way. It's based on how much money you have or what kind of a credit rating you can muster. Someone can be a good human being all their life, they can be honorable and just, even-handed, as well as caring about others. But, if he or she doesn't have the right kind of bank account, he or she will get the minimum. I'm not talking about just my father here, or my mother. I'm talking—from experience—about half the combat vets who live in this fine country. I challenge any who think they're taken care of in some automatic way, to go out on the street and check it out for themselves. There's a lot of eyewash going on.
I returned from Miami with a heavy heart and somewhat past exhaustion.
My trip down to The Monroe Institute had made a noticeable difference in my remote viewing. Even if no one else noticed it, I felt certain that if I were to actually work personally with Bob Monroe over a longer period of time, I might even be able to learn to control my spontaneous out-of-body events. The Hemi-Sync tapes I was using were the only means I had of actually relaxing and putting my mind in a state where I could continue to do remote viewing. I told Fred what I thought and he agreed. So I generated a ten-page request and recommendation on how I could spend time with Bob Monroe and learn even more. I attached an estimate for what it would cost and gave it to my boss. This document floated its way up the chain of command and was eventually approved. I picked up a check from the disbursing officer and Fred and I traveled back down to TMI for another visit with Mr. Monroe.
We proposed to Bob that I spend elongated weekends with him, working in his lab Friday through Monday, over the course of fourteen weeks. The intention would be that together he and I would develop and cut a specific Hemi-Sync–style tape that would be tailored for my use in learning to control my out-of-body experiences, as well as toward further improving my remote viewing. He agreed that he could help.
Back at Fort Meade, Peggy took the news quietly and unemotionally. We were trying to calm things down between us, and things actually seemed to be getting better.
The problem was, now I would be leaving Thursday night for the Institute, and working through until I returned sometime on Monday. Tuesday through Thursday I would continue to do remote viewing. It was hoped that during my absence Tom could begin to carry some of the remote viewing load.
Just prior to my beginning with Monroe, Robert Cowart had begun having severe pains in his back, along one side of his spine. It actually in some ways resembled the beginnings of Hartleigh's problems. So, Robert started making trips to Walter Reed Medical Center to get it checked out. As it got worse, he stopped traveling to the West Coast for training with Ingo. This left only Tom. Tom once showed me two of his best remote viewings and they looked very impressive. When I pressed to find out if they had been bl
ind or double blind, he said he couldn't go into the specific methods he was using because he was under orders not to discuss it with me. Again, I was being pushed away from the subject matter and the new guys. I backed off.
Aside from those two remote viewings, I never saw either Robert or Tom perform an operational remote viewing. My sense at the time was that the office was in deep trouble. It was apparent to me, if no one else, that I was the only one doing remote viewing in the project, and at the time I was seeing no evidence of anyone to follow. I started reminding them that my retirement date was less than a year away. I didn't actually have to retire, because I was only hitting my twenty-year mark, and could have stayed another ten years. But, I knew if I continued at the pace I was keeping, I would never make it to thirty years. I left the following Thursday evening for The Monroe Institute and my first long weekend with Bob.
The schedule was pure Bob. We'd start at a very reasonable 9:00 A.M., and work until Bob got tired, which was usually around 1:00 P.M. He'd retire for a nap—what he usually called "waiting for a long-distance call from overseas"—then we'd begin again around 3:00 P.M. and work a couple more hours. If he extended the hours, it was usually in the evening. Sometimes we'd work together until seven or eight.
The first six days we spent cutting a tape, which he said would only work with me. Since he wasn't absolutely sure how his mixture of set signals would affect me, he started with a baseline signal and we built from there. The signals were modified as we went, dependent on my subjective reporting. Sometimes he would tweak the frequency just a bit and I'd have a sudden urge to urinate. At other times he'd tweak the signal a little bit and I suddenly couldn't remember what the word "color" meant, and couldn't describe anything with color in it. It was all fascinating, but eventually we developed a very powerful tape that would actually make me feel as though my entire body was vibrating and hovering about six inches off the bed in the control room. From there, it was increment by increment, learning how to roll over without moving my body, all the while doing practice remote viewing from sealed envelopes and what he liked to call exploration sessions.
The exploration sessions were interesting. He was continually tweaking the dials while I was exploring, and watching my physiological response as reported though electrodes. I always felt as though I was completely detached from my body and stretched beyond time and space. I learned to completely disassociate myself from the reality around me and to immerse myself in another place in space/time. As we progressed, things became easier and easier for me, and the input became clearer. During actual remote viewings we noticed that the electrodes recording my leg and arm voltages would actually invert. You could watch them on the meter as one side dropped and the other rose until they completely inverted and began traveling in the opposite direction. Bob seemed to think that this was exciting and very meaningful. When we demonstrated it to Fred, he seemed to think so too. But, I wasn't so sure. Maybe my body had always done this no matter what I was doing, as long as I was relaxing. In fact, I learned much later that my body does exactly the same thing as I'm going to sleep. As things progressed and got better, Fred started showing up on some weekends to observe. One weekend he brought some tasking in a sealed envelope, which he handed to Bob. I asked him where it came from and he said he couldn't tell me.
Detailed descriptions of this tasking and the results are in my first published book, Mind Trek. The seven sets of coordinates turned out to be all located on the surface of Mars. Even I was stunned by the result.
The weekends came to an end sooner than I expected. Time flies when you are having fun, I guess. On my return to the unit, I wrote a report about the events that occurred and my experiences and recommended the exposure for any serious remote viewer. This report was passed upward through the command and eventually reached the headquarters and the general. He liked what he saw, and decided that there should be some kind of a program for his other officers—something that would help to open his staff's minds, and give them a leg up on thinking out of the box.
In addition to intelligence collection, I believe the general saw remote viewing as a method of actually thinking out of the box to the extent of being able to see or realize answers to problems that would not normally be considered. In this sense I believe he was very much ahead of his time.
In any event, because of our relationship with The Monroe Institute and Bob's senior staff, our office was contacted and I drove into Arlington, where I spent an entire afternoon in the general's office describing my experiences while at The Monroe Institute.
An uncomfortable feeling was beginning to grow in my gut. I was beginning to get a sense that something else was going on that I wasn't quite seeing. Within a week of my visit with the general, our office was tasked with developing a program at The Monroe Institute that would benefit the common officer in the headquarters. At the same time, the general was starting to hold parties where he would invite in only certain, hand-selected people to participate in trying to bend spoons with their minds.
When I had the discussion about the Institute with the general, I had stated that I didn't feel it was something the average officer in his command should participate in. Someone who wasn't accustomed to thinking in an open way about the paranormal or about unusual events in their life, or someone who was locked into a specifically restrictive religious belief that didn't allow for such activity, could find this severely damaging. One only had to look at my own life to see that at a minimum it was terribly corrosive to my close relationships. But I guess the message didn't get through or wasn't given much of a priority.
Part of the difficulty in setting up a program like a Gateway at the Institute for INSCOM officers was that it couldn't look like what it was. The program also couldn't mix INSCOM officer personnel with civilians. The command was worried, and rightly so, about what information might be shared with strangers in the open discussions after tape sessions. So, Bob Monroe and Nancy Honeycutt, his executive director, were asked if they could develop a program similar to the Gateway Seminar, only for handpicked INSCOM personnel. They agreed that it could be done, but only within certain restrictions.
Nancy Honeycutt had been involved with the creation of the Institute from the very beginning. She had started out as the only full-time employee, supporting all of the work and research involved. Her participation involved acting as personal secretary, one of the first trainers, full-time office manager, courier—and she had even soldered most of the connections in the wiring harnesses they used for programs in local motels before he was able to relocate to a permanent building. She was one of his first explorers to be experimented on with his Hemi-Sync system of frequencies in the development of the specific tapes now used in programs today. Having such a wide range of experience, she was able to completely redesign the normal Gateway Program and tone it down to a military group within a matter of a few weeks. They called it the RAPT program, for "Rapid Acquisition Personnel Training."
Still having considerable reservations about such overt military participation in such a program, I brought my concerns to the headquarters in a written memorandum, which I delivered on August 23, 1983. In part it said:
"The experience is intended to expand man's consciousness and broaden his perception of reality. This is accomplished through a patented technology, which synchronizes right/left brain interaction and produces peak amplitude within the optimum brain wave activity areas. This allows thought while in higher-order brain wave states conducive to original thinking and/or holistic idea formulation."
As to how the program actually operated, I responded that it was "six days of intensive tape exercises, with each tape followed by a discussion relevant to the experience. This could range from personal (emotional), to group (intellectual) by nature. Approximately one- to two-hour discussion periods with Robert Monroe were presented in the adjoining David Francis Hall. Topics covered there were generally philosophic in nature. Various films and tapes were presented following the above
talks, which were designed to enhance the overall experience. Talks were also given by other TMI personnel, with direct reference to the professional/medical association, New Land concepts, and may include a tour of the newly constructed M.I.A.S. experimental laboratory" Back then, M.I.A.S. stood for "Monroe Institute for Applied Sciences," which was later changed to "The Monroe Institute."
Regarding what could be expected, I simply stated: "Intellectual horizons would be broadened and new concepts of perception would be unavoidable. Light and heavy emotion-packed responses will result from the intensive tape experience. The experience can be expected to alter the participant's personality with regard to interpersonal relationships."
I was emphatic in noting: "While out-of-body experiences (OBEs) were known to spontaneously occur as a result of the technology used, this was not the purpose of the program. Personal value derived was completely dependent on the degree of participation or effort which anyone put into the experience."
I explained, "M.I.A.S. does not 'push' a specific philosophic, spiritual, or intellectual position on anyone. They do try to open the human concept of experience and consciousness."
I stressed, "The group identity will have a direct result on the effectiveness of the experience. In this case because of the all—'military-minded' group, unless participants across the board are willing, and urged to divest themselves of peer pressure, rank consciousness, ego-based self protectiveness, etc., the experience of the whole would be seriously diluted."
The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy Page 20