I remember getting a call from the automatic data processing officer at the headquarters in Arlington Hall Station, asking me if I actually had a WANG system. When I said yes, he was amazed, because they wouldn't authorize him one. It was more advanced than his IBM equipment, which still used old-fashioned punch cards, while I only had to save my programming to a removable disc and could back it up that way, doing everything virtually via the screen. I understand that when I left the unit in September 1984, within a couple of weeks the equipment was moved to the headquarters, where they said they could get more use from it. Not really a bad move, because it opened the door for the unit to obtain some of the first desktop computer systems, which were more conducive to the type of work being done there. If others in the command had been encouraged to open their minds, I believe the leap to desktops would have occurred much earlier.
At the end of 1983, the boss called me in and informed me that they had found a solution to the manpower problem. General Stubblebine had passed him a list of people he had met on his world travels who showed high levels of psychic functioning and the general wanted us to go out, interview them, and if appropriate, recruit them. This entailed a ten-day whirlwind overseas tour of six bases, where we sat and talked with potential future remote viewers. Before setting out on this debacle, I wrote a memorandum (which is still classified) stating my objections to this form of recruitment, as it abandoned the original methodology used for selection, which worked very well and should work again. There was no way you could tell, simply by talking to them, if people were psychic or would make stable remote viewers. But the memo was disregarded and we made the trip in early 1984.
Fred spoke with me just prior to departure and explained that if anyone could tell that someone would be a good remote viewer, it would be me. In other words, let the force guide me.
At the same time, unknown to me, a decision had been made to send three more officers to Ingo for training, even though Tom had only finished the first two stages and none of the follow-on stages had even been outlined. Tom told me later that he had a sense that Ingo was putting it together as he went, using Tom as sort of a guide, basing it on his ability to conform. A decision was also made to transfer the training from SRI in California to an office located closer to Ingo's home in New York City. The three people chosen to be additional trainees were Capt. Paul Smith, another captain I can't name and a woman civilian analyst from the headquarters.
Lieutenant Colonel Bee told me that all these people were selected based on a single recommendation from Mr. Swann, actually a demand, that they "not be" natural psychics. He said that his requirement was for otherwise bright and intelligent officers.
I have to state that I honestly understand Ingo's desire here. After the whirlwind trip and interviews with the proposed list of psychics (all considered naturally talented), my recommendation was to hire Lyn Buchanan and if possible rehire Mel Riley. My reasons were simply that as much talent as any of these people might or might not possess—it was impossible to say without testing—regardless, they would have to be amenable to altering their methods to fit within the severely restrictive protocols required in remote viewing. Most were not. In fact, a couple of them stated up front they would not alter their methods for anyone, under any condition.
Having said this, even with the potential being shown by the early stages of Tom's work, I felt it was way too early to introduce "non-talented" people to the project using an iffy or unproven training system. Not only was my concern disregarded, they added a fourth person to the list—Capt. Ed Dames, who was already known to others within the Fort Meade area as being obsessed with UFOs and extraterrestrials. I thought this was really unnecessary and said so. The boss told me that he wasn't being trained by Ingo to be a remote viewer, but was being trained so that he could understand how to "run" remote viewers—someone to give a break to Fred, who was also exhausted, being the only person now capable of running the remote viewing sessions. I filed my report from the trip and capitulated by formally filing my request for retirement.
I left the project prior to Tom's being able to demonstrate the results of his training with Ingo. I've since talked with Tom a little about his experience with the training. He states: "I believe Ingo's training worked. I feel like I was able to produce the necessary information about the site using Ingo's method, but that was by focusing on the process and not the site, as Ingo always instructed. I don't know how to say this—by using Ingo's method, the information came through, but I rarely felt like I (me, Tom) got the site. I got the information, but it was more like the site got me."
Tom said that his first-ever site, which he did with Fred as monitor and me as an outbounder, using the old SRI method, was the first time he actually "knew" he got the site, that he was actually there. With Ingo's method, he rarely felt he was there or at the site. The key difference, as Tom explained it to me, was that one method felt non-instructed and natural, and he felt like he was at the site and experiencing it, while with Ingo's method he felt more like he stayed in the room and the information about the site came to him.
These are important differences, because they indicate to me a possibility that Tom had a considerable amount of natural ability, the key ingredient, which everyone keeps saying isn't necessary with Ingo's training technique. I believe Ingo's training system works to some degree, but only with people who have demonstrated a natural talent for remote viewing.
I do know that Ingo was forced into an impossible situation. The contract monitor at SRI and someone at the command level in INSCOM were forcing the issue. Whether Ingo was ready or not, whether he had completed his testing of his training methods, and whether naturally talented people rather than non-naturally talented should have used it will never be known. The higher-ups wanted training, and they wanted it right then and there. So it was done. I think this did a disservice to Mr. Swann, the United State Army and some of its personnel, and eventually set the stage for tearing the unit apart. But then, who am I to be complaining? I had submitted my retirement papers and it was none of my business.
A request for retirement is just that—a request. The Army doesn't have to accept it. But, because the program was voluntary, there was little anyone could do to prevent it from being filed. I put the papers into the system and was told to expect an answer in approximately two weeks.
Five weeks went by, and it was as if my papers had vanished into a black hole. I called the man who was supposed to be driving the papers through the system and he was surprised by my call. He had shredded them a month earlier—at my request!
Enraged, I got into my car and drove over to his office. When I got there, I asked to see the signed request to have them withdrawn. He couldn't produce it. I asked him why he shredded them. His response was that when the commander of INSCOM saw them, he said he it was an obvious mistake, and that he was sending them back. When he got them, he shredded them, thinking I had agreed. After all, you never argue with the general. Well—almost never.
I called the general's private secretary and she said he wasn't in, so I asked to speak with the chief of staff. I told him what happened. He said the general had told him not to worry about it, "We can talk him into staying." He then asked me what would it take to induce me into staying on indefinitely.
My response was, "Nothing."
"Well, what if you retired from the Army and stayed on as a civilian employee of the Army?"
"No."
"How about GS-12?"
"No."
"How about GS-13?"
"No."
"Do you want a direct commission?"
"No."
"Do you want more money? To work as an independent contractor?"
"No."
"Well then, what in the hell is it that you want?"
I think my response was not what he expected. I said, "I just want to retire and go live in the country. I'm tired; there's no serious effort being made to replace me; and I'm not even allowed to talk to anyon
e in the same office with me."
He told me he would pass that along to the general. I sat down at the typewriter in the office I was standing in and retyped my request for retirement. I took a two-day leave and hand-carried it from office to office for signatures, the last office being General Stubblebine's.
When I carried it into his office and dropped it on his desk, I know he was certain that I was jumping ship. In my own mind, there was nothing else I could do. I was completely burned out. He signed the papers, but sadly, I think.
Part of my retirement request was that I got to use my accumulated sixty days of leave time as I wished. I tacked Thursdays and Fridays onto my weekends, giving me a three-day work week for the remainder of my service time, and planned a six-day Gateway Seminar at The Monroe Institute immediately. I continued to do remote viewings, but I think Fred sensed how tired I was. He began sliding more and more of the workload off onto Tom, who was doing fairly well, and Mel Riley was now back in the office, after returning from Europe, and he had always been an excellent viewer.
Just before departing for the Gateway Seminar, I was cleaning out some of my old files and noticed something that had been going on for some time. For nearly two years, they had been labeling my work with the numbers of viewers who had long since departed the unit, as an indication to anyone who paid any attention to statistics that they were fully operational with a handful of viewers of equal talent.
I confronted the boss with the information, and he told me that since they had been down to a single viewer for more than two years, they felt it would give me more protection. If anyone (presumably the enemy—whoever they might be) found out there was only one, they might get the idea that making me vanish would be a good idea. I didn't buy it then, and I still don't.
(I learned, many years later, that much of the original work by Hartleigh, Ken, and me was deliberately shredded. I could hypothesize that this was done to bury the fact that multiple viewer numbers were being used for single viewer[s]. But, I doubt that was the single greatest reason.)
I was leaving the office wondering where I would end up and what I would be doing. Once remote viewing gets under your skin, it's very difficult going cold turkey.
Chapter Twelve
Retirement
My second Gateway experience was better than my first, maybe because I arrived totally burned out, with no long shopping list of expectations in my pocket. My trainers were Bob Monroe's stepdaughter, Nancy Honeycutt, and her friend, a psychotherapist from Connecticut, Patricia Sable (now Baker, as in Kim Baker—race car driver/entrepreneur). It was a nice surprise seeing Nancy again. On the day she had met me previously on the back deck of the center building, she had no idea who I was. Now she knew that I was some kind of an intelligence agent with a greater-than-normal interest in the paranormal, in her father, and in what they were doing at The Monroe Institute. During my intake interview with Patricia, however, I simply said that I was a military warrant officer about to retire.
The entire week was significant because I was able to really chill out for the first time in years, and had a couple of interesting experiences. The first one requires some background if it is to be understood.
One day, way back at the beginning of my involvement with the special project, in late 1980, Fred and I were talking about the most embarrassing moments in our lives.
(For example, right after I had arrived at Arlington Hall Station, and having been pinned as a brand-new warrant officer, I was asked to sit in on a meeting in the War Room with General Rolya, two ranking diplomats from an allied country, and three additional Army generals representing other commands. Because I was representing my office, which was going to do a formal exchange with the specific country in question, I was dressed in my best uniform, with spit-shined shoes, and wearing all of my medals. After becoming as comfortable as one can be the first time at the twenty-four-person conference table, in the luxurious surroundings of what is essentially an executive meeting room behind vault doors, one of the people tasked with serving the function came around offering coffee. Of course, when everyone else took coffee, so did I. Unfortunately, I got a coffee cup with a cracked handle. When I picked it up, the handle came off and the cup, filled with very hot and freshly brewed coffee, dropped straight down the front of my dress uniform coat and into my lap. My slight grunting noise, a result of the highly heated fluid suddenly hitting me in the crotch, immediately snapped 23 pairs of eyes my way. So, there I sat with the coffee cup handle in my right hand, trying to act normal.
The general never broke stride. He stood up, carefully unbuttoned his dress uniform, and threw it across the room onto a chair remarking, "You're right, Mac. It's too hot for a coat in here." At which point, everyone else in the War Room removed their coats. The chief of staff had someone take my coat out to be cleaned while we were in the meeting, so that when we got up to leave, it looked as new and clean as when I came in. Embarrassing for me—quite. Would I follow that general anywhere on the planet, and cover his back? Hell yes!)
One of these "most embarrassing moments" happened back when I was a kid, maybe ten or eleven years of age. One of the best things about belonging to the Cub Scouts in Miami, Florida, which was being run by St. Mary's Cathedral, was getting out of the city—which meant getting out of the slums—for a few days. On one camping trip, we traveled out to an orange grove located in the extreme west of Miami, right on the edge of the Everglades. (Back then, the Everglades was a vast and mysterious swamp, where there are now million-dollar homes.)
We set up our tents and started playing a game called "Message to Garcia." This is where one kid has a message whispered into his ear and he gets twenty minutes to go hide, then he must make it in without being tagged and deliver the message by whispering it into the ear of the next kid. The real goal of the game you actually realize at the very end, when the last boy is asked to state the message to the group out loud, and it almost always turns out to have no resemblance whatsoever to the original message. Which is what the game is all about—clear communications and how important they can be.
We had been playing all afternoon, and around dusk it finally got to be my turn to go hide. I took off looking for the highest tree in the grove, which was about 150 acres. I had been watching the others and noticed that no one ever looked up. So, I had already made up my mind to find the largest orange tree I could and hide in it, which I did. I climbed up as high as I could go and wedged myself in the limbs and, because I was so tired, promptly fell asleep.
I told Fred, the next thing I know, I am awakened by the sound of my name being yelled by a lot of adults, who are spread out across the orange grove in a line, waving flashlights all about. It was about 4:00 A.M. when they found me. Embarrassing? Well—let's just say I missed the next three camping trips and pissed a lot of parents off. The worst part was that I ruined the game, because I couldn't remember the message.
Well, on the third day of Gateway, we were half way into the third tape of the day, when I suddenly felt as though someone had crawled into my CHEC unit (that's a Controlled Holistic Environmental Chamber)xi and sat down on my knees. I opened my eyes, pulled off the headset to yell at them, and noticed that it was a woman I'd never met, and not a participant in the Seminar. She was from India, and appeared to be middle-aged. She had a small, painted dot between her eyes, gray streaks through her hair, and was on the pudgy side, wearing native Indian clothing. She wore no shoes, but was wearing decorative items around her ankles and arms. She looked strangely familiar, although I was sure that I had never met her. I pulled my legs back out of the way and asked her what she was doing. She said she was there to talk. I said I didn't know her, at which point she sort of winked and waved her hand—and I had a sudden and instant recall of having met her before. This wasn't a suggestion, or a totally new experience; it was just as if I suddenly recalled our previous meeting. It had happened when I fell asleep in the orange grove. As I had been falling asleep, she had suddenly appeared and took m
y hand and led me to a place that was rose colored and had a place for us to sit. There she had introduced herself and we had talked all about what I was going to do with my life.
She smiled at the look on my face, and of course I went into shock and could not respond at all. To suddenly have instant recall about having planned out your life—the good, the bad, and the ugly—was a bit overwhelming. I told her I couldn't remember her name, which she then laughingly told me.
"Karanja! My name is Karanja."
Her name appeared in my head as she said it. I saw it with funny markings over the n as well as between the r and the a. I wrote it down in my journal later so that I wouldn't forget it.
So, I said, "Okay, Karanja. Why are you here?"
To which she responded, laughingly, "Just to talk."
"And . . . this time, I get to remember what we talk about?" I tentatively asked.
She waved her hand and I awoke at the end of the tape.
I didn't know what to make of the experience. It totally overwhelmed me. I asked the guy sharing the room with me if he had heard us talking and he said no. He did say that he had experienced a very strange light in the room, though, which had passed the outside of the small black curtain that closed off his CHEC unit. He thought maybe I had walked across the room and sunlight had been reflected off something I was carrying.
I told Fred about it later when I returned to Meade and we've always referred to her as the Swamp Lady, because that was the first place I had been introduced to her.
What is she? Who is she?
Well, the best that I have been able to come up with so far is that she is some aspect of myself—some projection of self, which is maybe interested in whatever I may be protecting myself from. Some of those I've told about her say she is my guide. Maybe so, maybe not, but I really have no idea who she is. I just know that once in a very rare moment in space/time, I sometimes see her and we talk. What we talk about is beyond my reach until after it has happened.
The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy Page 22