When I got within about six weeks of retirement, I began moving my stuff down to the Col. Mustard House, near Nellysford, Virginia. By the time I reached retirement, I was living in Nelson County, Virginia, deep within the Blue Ridge Mountains and commuting to Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, deep within city concrete and impossible traffic. On a good day it was a drive of about three hours and 45 minutes. So, leaving for work my final weeks at Meade meant hitting the road around 4:10 A.M., something I was perfectly comfortable with. It gave me a lot of time to think about what I was planning and doing. The most difficult decision I was going to have to make was whether or not I could commit to another serious relationship. I had done so much damage to myself and others in my first two attempts that I didn't want to spoil a good thing by reliving history.
I thought long and hard about making the decision, spending weeks agonizing over it before finally making up my mind. Eventually, logic and good sense won out.
Having been a soldier for twenty years, I knew that death could come out of nowhere at any time. Having had the near-death experience in Austria in 1970, I was also aware that nothing really matters in life other than that you are living it true to yourself. For quite a few years I had forgotten that. Scooter was now gently reminding me, in her own way.
I decided the only way I could ever muck up a third marriage was to be in one, and the only way not to muck it up was to try to do the best I could without constantly living in fear of the consequences. I came to the conclusion that a decision about marriage has to be made without fear. I decided the only fear I had at that time was not being with her. I loved her too much and just couldn't walk away from her.
Because I was in a black project, and very few people knew me, my retirement ceremony was held in camera, secretly and quietly within the project building. Scooter was invited to attend and the building was sanitized for her benefit. I was very surprised when the assistant deputy chief of staff for HUMINT called everyone to attention and presented me with an award, the Legion of Merit. In my experience, few people receive them—usually those who have made major contributions at a much higher level in the bureaucracy. I was even more surprised to see that part of the certificate referred directly to the work I had done within the project.
When my boss handed me my final orders, he asked if there was anything I felt I had to say as a parting comment. The words I wanted to say were "I'm proud to say that I've done twenty years in the service of my country and am walking out the door with my integrity still intact." That would have been meaningful. But, instead I simply said, "I am proud to have served with so many good people and I have surprisingly managed to survive a career of twenty years without anyone ever having to give me a direct order." This was kind of a small dig about how difficult it was to get me to do anything in any other way than my own. I shook everyone's hand and we left. Because I'm psychic, I knew what they didn't–it wouldn't be the last time I'd be seeing them–and it wasn't.
Scooter drove me and my gradually growing folder of papers around the base for a couple of hours while I was formally checked out of everything. She held my hand while I exchanged my active duty ID card for one showing that I was retired; she helped me scrape the bumper stickers off my car; and she looked the other way while I deregistered my firearms and threw them into the trunk. These don't sound like very important things today, but back then, when I was doing it for the final time, I was choking all the while on a very large lump in my throat.
On that final day, I was not only leaving he special project where I had spent 71 months doing remote viewing, but I was also walking away from the twenty years of service to my country in what could only be described as having been a major love/hate relationship, especially the 151 months–that's twelve years and seven months–that I had served continuously overseas. My multiple tours of duty in Europe, the Far East, and various islands had all been active (real mission) tours during the Cold War and there was almost as much satisfaction about what I had been able to accomplish, as there was a trail of destruction in my relationships with people–and not just ex-wives.
Serving in the kinds of intelligence positions I had been in, I hadn't made more than a handful of friends in my entire twenty years of service–not lasting ones anyway. There wasn't much to show for a large chunk of my history. Most of what I had accomplished over those years was and still is classified. So, in any of my new endeavors there would be little that I could share with anyone I might meet or make friends with. I could envision the following repetitive scenario:
POSSIBLE NEW FRIEND(PNF): "You did what for twnty years?"
ME: "I was an intelligence officer in the Army."
PNF: "Doing what, exactly?"
ME: " A little of this, a little of that."
PNF: "Oh. Er…I see."
ME: "What do you do?"
PNF: "I'm a commodities broker for a major bank in New York. We generate capital . . . etc., etc."
As you can see, with a history like mine, you can really generate a great deal of interest in yourself as a human being. It's almost guaranteed to convince someone to invite you over for dinner to chew the fat.
Right after my retirement, I took six months off and wrote a book. It is a still-unpublished novel originally titled Gods That People Play. It's filled with all the stuff I couldn't put anywhere else because it was too gruesome. It's a horror story. I don't think Scooter particularly enjoyed reading the manuscript. The part about the elevator door opening and the severed head rolling out into the hallway really got to her. I know my new friend and agent in New York, Ms. Eleanor Friede, called me at 2:00 one morning and her exact words were "Thanks a lot you son of a bitch, now I can't sleep." (Everyone who knows her knows that Eleanor was never a person to mince words or feelings. I love her dearly for it. She's retired now, and her partner has to deal with me, which is no easy task.)
Anyway, the book was about an underground lab somewhere in the desert where they were injecting a very special mix of DNA into animals to increase their intelligence. Step two was the small step up to humankind, or designer beings who could be used as weapons. Step three . . . well . . . maybe one day I'll get it published.
The other reason I wrote the book was because things suddenly were not faring very well in the remote viewing world. Right after I retired, General Stubblebine retired as well. He got into it one too many times with his own boss and a decision was finally made by the ACSI to replace him with someone who wasn't quite so progressive. So, the new INSCOM commander became a Maj. Gen. Harry Soyster, who had a reputation for being anti-anything-paranormal, the immediate effect being a termination of funds and spaces required to run the project. This affected both the special project at Fort Meade and the lab at SRI-International in California.
This was not a decision based on common sense or anything else material to the endeavor. It was one I believe was made purely at the request of those who didn't want to be caught dead standing next to a psychic. While we had been making a lot of friends in the clandestine world of intelligence gathering by providing valuable support, we were also scaring the shit out of a lot of people who owed their positions, promotions, and livelihood to politics, and were talking a good talk, but never walking the walk. It wasn't fear that we'd know their deepest and darkest secrets, it was plain old-fashioned fear—that if someone caught them supporting something they themselves would naturally ridicule, then by association they too would be ridiculed as well. Simply put, they didn't have the stomach or the courage for it.
All the funding had been approved on a year-to-year basis, and only then based on how effective the unit was in supporting the tasking agencies. These reviews were made semiannually at the Senate and House select subcommittee level, where the work results were reviewed within the context in which it was happening. So, decisions for renewal, funding, and a continued use of our particular approach to intelligence collection wasn't being made lightly, nor were these decisions being made by some crazed monkey hiding out
in a bell tower.
In fact, a number of times I traveled to one of the buildings on Capitol Hill and sat in front of one of those committees and was asked to demonstrate my remote viewing ability. In many of those cases they would not let us bring a folder full of possible targets to pick from, which would have been a better protocol, but we had to respond to targets a senator or congressman, or one of their aides, had preselected and brought into the room. It is a terrible shame that some of these events were not photographed or recorded—or maybe they were, but not to my knowledge.
Sometimes the targeted envelopes were presented wrapped in a thin sheet of lead. A precaution to prevent me from using my x-ray vision, I'm sure.
In one case, I knew I would have to do a remote viewing for the head of an agency. The specific agency unfortunately cannot be named here, but it has its very own acronym and is in the top six. I was nervous about the possible outcome because my boss at the time informed me the day before that based on its outcome we might or might not be in business the following month. So I decided to do the remote viewing ahead of time, before we ever left the office.
A few days later, when we were comfortably seated in front of the "senior executive" for that agency, he made a big deal over carefully pulling the target envelope out of a briefcase with a combination dial lock. I then made an equally big deal out of pulling a folder out of my own briefcase, which contained his result. At the time, it was impossible to tell from the expression on his face if he was impressed or not, and he never said a word. He just carefully locked both the envelope and folder away after reading the information. I never got to see what was in the envelope, so I never got any direct feedback, but we soon started getting a lot of tasking out of his office. I guess in hindsight I actually did know what was in the envelope, or I would have gotten feedback—only it would have been negative. Sometimes feedback can be detrimental to your work—something seldom mentioned by many claiming remote viewing expertise.
Immediately after retiring from the Army, I submitted a request for employment to the laboratory at SRI. I thought this would be a place I could continue to pursue remote viewing, but under somewhat less stress. I also felt that I could contribute to the continuing research by volunteering my expertise. But I received no response at all to the first two letters I sent to SRI. During this same time, I submitted a formal proposal for a training program to my old office, with a suggestion that if they needed assistance I could be hired as an independent contractor."xii I also proposed a completely new type of system for manipulating the database materials and tracking remote viewers and their idiosyncrasies. It was already clear to me from the conditions of the office when I left that they were going to have increasing difficulty and I felt I could at a minimum search out and identify specific talent areas using some new ideas that I had been cooking for some time.
I never got any of the proposals back from my old office. In fact, I never got any of my submitted materials back from my old office. What I did get was a telephone call from Lieutenant Colonel Bee. He said, in very clear words, they weren't interested. It was also clear from my short discussion with him, that they were totally pissed off for my having retired and wanted nothing further to do with me. This was made emphatically clear with the suggestion that I not call there anymore. In a sense I could understand their feeling, but in another sense, I had the right to the same respect that any other person would have submitting a proposal. It left me feeling like an abandoned stepchild.
Since I had moved in with Scooter, I was also beginning to feel guilty watching her drive off to the Institute office every morning while I sat around the house. I functioned well as a "built-in heating module" for Caesar and Higgins, but I was getting anxious about doing something else more helpful. So, one evening Scooter and I discussed the possibility of starting a company and selling consulting services using remote viewing as an application for business. I wasn't sure I could produce enough work to justify it, but we decided to go ahead and create the company anyway. We agreed that we would give it two years to see if it would succeed. As a result, within sixty days of my retirement, Intuitive Intelligence Applications, Inc., was born as a Virginia corporation. Now, all I needed to do was find some work.
This time, rather than write, I called the lab at SRI and asked them to please ask Hal to give me a call. A few days later, Hal finally called me back. In response to my query about my letters, he asked me if I would fly out and talk with him. He offered to pick up the tab, so I accepted. Hal was very clear in making me understand that it wasn't a job offer, but he was willing to talk about it, so I went.
I met with Hal at a pancake house within walking distance of the lab. We couldn't meet at the lab because my clearances had been retired along with me a few months before. In our discussion over breakfast, I learned that he had been reluctant to respond to my letters for a number of reasons.
First, he said they only had funding for about another year and a half. That meant he was already looking for new funding, and they'd need as much of the remaining funding as possible to continue operations until they found the new source.
Then, after hesitating for a number of minutes and playing with his pancakes, he finally said that he had been informed by people from my old office that I was unable to do remote viewing without a very specific kind of monitoring and that he'd been told that it was specific enough that it would make me very difficult to work with under laboratory conditions. This was totally unexpected, and shocked me.
I asked who had told him this and he responded that he had gotten it from the boss, and the boss had based it on information provided by the operations side of the house.
I couldn't believe my ears. I just kind of sat there. It hurt and angered me at the same time. I poured some more coffee while I fought the urge to start cursing and throwing things. After a few minutes of silence I said that this information was totally wrong—he had been grossly misinformed. I told him that I didn't even need a monitor to do my remote viewing. In fact, I explained, I had spent the better part of my career as a remote viewer teaching myself to do remote viewing under any circumstances. I just couldn't understand why someone in my old office would have said those things. In fact, at the time, I wasn't sure he wasn't shining me on.
We sat there for a bit not talking. Finally I offered him a suggestion. He could hire me as a remote viewer on a test basis, week by week. If after a trial period he found that he wasn't satisfied with my viewing, or that I couldn't carry my own weight at the lab, we could call it quits and part as friends. He agreed and I got a temporary contract for three month's work at the SRI lab. My clearances were reactivated, transferred, and reinstated. I processed into the lab and started work the following month.
Since that conversation with Hal back in early 1985, two other people working at SRI have confirmed that some of the people in my old office had done their best to sabotage any possibility of my employment at SRI. But depending on who was telling the story, the names seemed to change. I have never had any way of knowing who specifically pushed the issue from my old office. I have always preferred to believe that it wasn't the people whom I considered friends. It just wasn't within the character of friends to do that to one another—for any reason—even if they had been ordered to. But, it was clear from what I was being told that someone at Fort Meade, probably somewhere in the management, was trying to prevent my working for SRI. Whoever it was may have been using a number of others, or at least their names, as a cover. Whoever it was failed miserably, because I was now an employee of the SRI lab.
Within a few weeks of my beginning work there, my contract was renewed for a year, then again, repetitively, for every year the project operated out of SRI.
It really felt good working at the lab, because the environment wasn't as charged as at Fort Meade. I was also making considerably more money than as a remote viewing warrant officer. It wasn't Mercedes Benz time, but I wasn't worried about paying bills either. Mostly, it felt good to
be contributing again.
At first I was disappointed in not getting to see Ingo very much or spend time with him because he was always in New York when I was in California, or in California when I was in Virginia. But, it didn't take a professor of logic to understand that keeping us apart was probably deliberate. At the time I didn't understand why and I still don't, although I now have some theories.
As was done at Fort Meade, I was assigned a number identifier in the lab at SRI, which was #372. This meant that now my remote viewing work was showing up as 001, 518, 508, 776, 345, and 372 and also under some of the numbers that had been used for Hartleigh, Ken, and others. At least as long as I was with the lab my number remained, and still remains, the same.
It didn't take long for some of the agencies that I had been supporting at Fort Meade to notice that I had moved, as there was an increase in requests for operational support from the lab—which I was sure didn't go over in a really big way with my old office.
Chapter Thirteen
Exploring New Territories
With a good income and finally settled into Col. Mustard House, Scooter and I finally set our wedding date for Thanksgiving Day, November 22, 1984. I had just received my final divorce papers from Peggy and was getting used to being no longer tuned to God, country, and flag. It was strange, but not uncomfortable, because it finally gave me a chance to relax a bit. Let someone else worry about all that world security stuff for the time being.
We planned our wedding to be held at home. We asked Scooter's uncle, Judge Carleton Penn, her mother's brother, to officiate over our vows, which he agreed to do. As if that weren't great enough, he also offered to make some of his world-famous Southern-recipe oyster stuffing for the turkey. He sat on the bench up in Loudon County, Virginia, for many years. (Now retired, he still sits on the bench in other counties throughout Virginia; in fact, I think he works even harder since his retirement.)
The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy Page 24