Judge Penn is one of the fairest minded individuals I have ever met. He is very clear about his own opinions and ideas about things, but he also doesn't let his own feelings enter into his judgments regarding the law. I believe that this great force of character was at least partially formed while he served as a lieutenant in the Marine Corps fighting in the caldron of war on Peleliu Island in the Pacific. (Putting it into perspective, the 1st Marine Division suffered casualties including 1,121 killed, 5,142 wounded, and 73 missing. That's a 36 percent casualty rate, of which he was one. Those losses resulted in tens of thousands of Japanese dead—an enormous battle in which the Marines were greatly outnumbered.)
Scooter's father, A.J. "Bud" Honeycutt, was also a Marine lieutenant fighting on the same island. They were friends at the time as well as comrades in arms. Scooter's father had the privilege of hauling a field artillery piece up the side of a mountain while fighting for every foot of ground they dragged it across. I have to add that her father is a retired Marine lieutenant colonel who fought in three wars—WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. He is a complex man, an honorable man, and a man loved by a lot of people in the mountains of North Carolina where he now teaches Sunday school at the local Methodist church and helps run a hospice for the dying.
The wedding was very close, personal, and attended only by family—which, for me, made it a memorable and emotional event. One problem gilded the event with a bit of mirth. Early in the morning of our wedding day, Scooter cut the wrapping off the turkey and discovered that it had spoiled. So, there we were, about 7:30 A.M. with the smelliest bird in the county and our wedding a few hours out.
When you live out in the country, 25 miles from any major city, it can be a problem replacing a turkey on Thanksgiving morning. I was scrambling. I hit three gas/quick shops before discovering a single frozen, rock-hard, twenty-six-pounder sitting in the back of a canned juice and ice freezer. I was afraid to check the "sell by date," and instead rushed it home to defrost. The only place large enough to fill with cold water to thaw it was the bathtub—which wouldn't hold water. So, between getting the rest of the house ready, I kept going in every ten or fifteen minutes to refill the bathtub. Luckily we had another shower, or we would have taken our showers straddling the turkey as well. By the time we were dressed and family began arriving, I was sitting with my suit pants rolled up, shoes and socks off, holding my right heel in the drain to keep the tub from leaking, while holding the bobbing turkey under water with my left foot. It took longer than I can recall to thaw the bird, so the actual wedding ceremony was repeatedly set back a number of hours. But it turned out to be a very fine turkey. It was also the first time that I had an opportunity to see most of the family in one room together, which pleased me and I know brought a lot of joy to my new wife, Scooter.
They say if you ever want to see what your wife will eventually be like, look at her mother. On our wedding day, Scooter's mom, also a Nancy, was as always the perfect Southern lady. I knew in my heart that I was one lucky man.
Early in 1985 we got into some very interesting targets at the lab, experimenting with words and language. The man who became my monitor for much of the time I was doing remote viewing was Dr. Nevin Lantz, a clinical psychologist. I also got to work again with Dr. Edwin May, who had been at the lab almost since its beginnings. Ed, Nevin, and I hit it off right from the start. Martha Thompson, the secretary, had a wonderfully dry sense of humor that I really liked; we became close friends as well. Beverly Humphries, the staff intelligence person, had dual undergraduate degrees from Stanford in the classics and anthropology and was a lot of fun to hang out with, even away from the office. With a great sense of humor, she was always up for a trip to the local miniature golf or Ming's for a Chinese lunch special. Russell Targ had already departed, I believe sometime in 1983, but Ingo Swann was still there, as well as other viewers—Hella Hammid, a professional photographer and lovely lady from Los Angeles; and two others I will call Keith and Gary.
There was also a man by the name of Jim Salyer who was the government's contract monitor and a hard man to get along with, although he and I never had any problems. All in all, it was quite a team, and team it was for the most part. We liked working with one another and everyone tried to make whatever we were doing fun.
As an example, in one series of experiments, which included a number of outbounder targets and trips to visit them, Ed had to hang out in a graveyard that had been randomly chosen as a target. While there, he picked a flower from an urn and laid himself out on the top of a grave slab, holding the flower over his heart, which of course was viewed as somewhat mysterious by those walking by. But it made a great target.
If the target turned out to be a restaurant, we'd sometimes eat there on our return for feedback. The differences in results, in my opinion, were phenomenal when it was fun to do, instead of being viewed as "a must do" chore.
In the first part of 1985 we did a series of targets that were "words." It was a complicated experiment, one that hadn't been tried before. It involved one team of people being located in the remote viewing room of the radio physics lab, while a second team was located all the way across the SRI compound in a trailer. The second team, the targeted team, consisted of Beverly, Nevin, or a third person. Their job was to generate a six-digit number using a pseudo random number generator. The first four digits were used as the designated page numbers in an Oxford dictionary, one of those gigantic seventy-pound books you couldn't steal from a library.
Once they turned to the appropriately designated page, they would count down from the upper left column as many lines as the number of the last two digits of the set. From that point they would use the next five-letter word as the target word. This would be spelled out along the edge of a blackboard by using gigantic letters printed in black on a white 12x12-inch card.
Once they had the target up, they would call the remote viewing room, say "ready," and hang up. As a remote viewer I would then be asked to concentrate on the blackboard (which I had never seen) and tell them what the word was, letter by letter.
We wanted to know whether or not one specific letter would come in better than another, if the remote viewer could see the actual word, or—and this was the "hidden from the viewer" part of the experiment—whether the viewer would get the word even when the letters were scrambled or turned upside down.
It was a difficult experiment for a viewer. From the outset you are front-loaded with believing that the word is going to contain at least one vowel—an a, e, i, o, u, or y. You are front-loaded with the knowledge of an entire alphabet, which immediately suggests an unlimited number of possible combinations. You are also front-loaded knowing there will be five letters. In short, a piece of cake.
I did nine word sets and got the following results: of nine words, I got the entire word correct twice, the words "flies" and "input." Of the remaining seven I got three letters correct on two, and two letters correct on two, and the remaining three one letter correct.
One criticism of the experiment was that it should have been pretty easy nailing at least one letter simply by guessing a, e, or i, the most commonly used vowels. But in the seven words I missed, I got no vowels correct and in fact, didn't give a single vowel as a response, avoiding them like the plague.
Of the two words I nailed, "flies" was set up on the blackboard rail in order, but the word "input" was scrambled. I can't remember the order of scrambling, just that the cards were both out of order and sometimes upside down or backward (letters facing the wrong way, or the card actually blank side out.)
What I noticed most about the experiment was the fact that the "idea" conveyed by the word was transferred as information, not the individual letters. In other words, I wasn't seeing individual letters; I was seeing images in my mind of birds flying against a background of sky, planes taking off, or small buzzing insects hovering over rotting food.
At least two other remote viewers did equally well, which began to give me a clear impression of the rem
ote viewing quality at the lab. I was beginning to understand that the lab at SRI worked in a totally different way than any other paranormal lab. They spent a great deal of time hunting for and locating high levels of talent in specific individuals. Then they tested the individuals they located. If the individuals they found could consistently produce good to excellent results, they would bring them in and use them for their experiments. This was producing a far better result than using volunteers from college classrooms, or other segments of SRI, or the local high schools.
It took a lot of time, effort, and expense to go out and do a presentation on remote viewing, test these larger groups of people, and finally winnow out the best through judging the individual results and retesting, but it made perfect sense. If you are going to study the paranormal, you go out and find people who can actually do what you want to study; you don't study a general population randomly in hopes of hitting someone who can do something that's considered extremely rare in the first place. I was beginning to understand why we got the results we did while other labs had such a hard time capturing PSI under the microscope of science.
But the remote viewers had to stay current and stay sharp. If you lost your edge for a lengthy period of time or burned out, you probably weren't going to be working as a remote viewer during the following contract period. This speaks volumes for Ingo, Hella, and the other remote viewer's abilities. They did years of uninterrupted work at SRI, some curtailed prematurely by death, as in the case of Hella, some retiring to pursue other more important issues in their lives, such as Ingo, and some still working for the same lab, although it is no longer located at SRI.
The other thing that took getting used to was the way things were set up inside the lab. Checks and counterchecks were set up, to ensure that the targets were always blind targets and the judging was also always done blind and without prejudice. The major assumption that was always underscored within the lab was an assumption that anyone in the lab could be cheating—viewers, researchers, or staff.
Rather than personalize it, we all accepted this as part of the cost of proving that whatever we accomplished was not in any way tainted with doubt. We had to do what we were doing without the slightest hint of irregularity, something I've never seen in any other laboratory, PSI lab or not.
Right when everything was going about as well as I could hope it would, my life was once again turned upside down.
Scooter and I were taking a June day off in 1985, spending it in the middle of Lake Miranon, a fourteen-acre lake in the middle of Robert Monroe's New Land subdivision. We were lying on a floating dock, anchored in the middle of the lake across from the dam—lounging in the early-afternoon sun, drinking iced tea, and just holding each other's hand—when it felt as though someone drove an iron spike through my upper left arm and shoulder. The pain quickly began to spread across my chest and down my arm. I knew immediately it was a heart attack—but I couldn't believe it. I shifted my weight and took a few deep breaths hoping it would go away. It only got worse. I must have made a grunting sound, or it was the look on my face that caused Scooter to ask me what was wrong.
"I slipped that disc out of place in my back," I replied calmly. "It really hurts this time."
"What do you want to do?" she asked.
"Maybe we'd better take a run in to the emergency room and have them x-ray it," I suggested, smiling. I didn't want to tell her that death was knocking at the door.
We loaded everything into the boat and calmly rowed back to shore. By the time we pulled the boat up onto the dam and carried everything down to the car, I felt as though a semitrailer was parked on my chest. I could feel my heart rate rising and the blood pulsing in my ears.
The most overwhelming emotion at the time was—sorrow at how much time I was going to miss being with Scooter. Nothing else seemed to matter. It just didn't seem fair that we spent a third of a lifetime hunting for and finally finding each other, only to have it so abbreviated. I didn't want to panic her, so I suggested that she take a shower and change out of her bathing suit before we drove to the hospital, which she did. I just changed and collapsed on the bed and waited for her. The pain was increasing, but I wasn't frightened, just very sad about it. I absolutely knew that I was going to die and there were only two things in my mind that concerned me. One was, when should I tell her what was really going on? I needed enough time to let her know that I loved her more than life itself and I wanted to tell her I was sorry for leaving her so soon. But, I also knew if I told her this, she might be injured trying to get me to a hospital.
I also wanted to be as awake and aware as possible during the dying process. I'd been through this once before but was confused then and didn't know what to do or what to expect. This time, I was going to be totally aware of what was going on during the entire process. This focus allowed me to put the pain aside, where I could sense it, but it no longer interfered with my thinking. By this time, my entire chest was on fire. When I put the pain aside and began to focus on what was actually happening around me, things began to slow down, almost as if a clock motor was beginning to rotate at a slower speed. We got into the car and began our long drive to the emergency room.
Many have asked me why we didn't just call 911, or the local fire department. Well, back then there was no 911 in Nelson County. The local fire department was a volunteer force, which was equipped to deal with some medical problems, but did not have a cardiovascular emergency trained technician on call. Since addresses were scattered throughout the county area, calling an ambulance would have meant that it could have driven around for the better part of an hour looking for the house. The best plan was a safe drive into the emergency room.
When we got to the halfway point, a decision had to be made between making a right turn and going to the University Hospital in Charlottesville, or making a left turn and going to the smaller country hospital in the smaller country town of Waynesboro. She asked me where I wanted to go and I said Waynesboro. I knew they could react to the problem a lot better probably in Charlottesville, but I didn't want to be drugged out of my awareness. So, she made the left and we raced over Afton Mountain and into Waynesboro proper.
I know we had to have hit every red light there was between entering the town and the emergency room. At each stop, I argued with myself over just telling her to pull over so that I could say good-bye to her before it was too late. And each time, a small voice inside me said, "Relax, you can make it another two minutes . . . it's only another two minutes." The more relaxed I became, the slower my heart would beat. The pain was there. I could reach out and touch it like a fire. I know if I had let it in at that point I would have passed out.
Eventually we pulled into the emergency entrance and she started to pull through to the parking lot. I stopped her. I couldn't sense my heart beating any longer. I was beginning to lose the feeling in my legs and arms, and my ears were beginning to give off a faint musical tone. My vision was becoming faded around the edges and I was going into tunnel vision. I instinctively knew that my heart had stopped. I reached over and took her hand and told her that I had lied and I was having a heart attack and that she should go inside and tell them my heart had just stopped. The last thing I remembered was the look of grief on her face as blackness closed in. I was overwhelmed with the sudden realization that I had not told her how much I loved her and how much she had meant to me. My last feeling was being very sad.
I wish I could say I saw God, or that I experienced a transition to a wonderful golden realm, but I didn't. It was as if in the blink of an eye, I was suddenly jolted awake and found myself lying flat on my back and looking up into the gentle eyes of a lovely older man who was looking into my eyes with a tiny flashlight.
"Welcome back," he said.
Indeed, my heart had gone into defibrillation and they wheeled me into the emergency room. While they brought in the crash cart, my heart stopped. Scooter called the only person she knew who was a heart doctor, and that was her mother's doctor—Dr.
Gorsuch. His office was just down the street and he came over immediately. So, it was his kind face I saw when I first regained consciousness.
I spent the next six days fading in and out of physical reality. The heart attack had disturbed the electronics of my heart muscle and they couldn't seem to stabilize me. Every now and then it would either go back into defibrillation, or just go completely erratic and stop beating. Each time, I'd know it was happening, because of the funny feelings I'd get first in the tips of my fingers and toes. Wonderfully mystical and eerie sort of musical sound would come to my ears, too. It was almost unearthly. Whenever it happened, I'd press the emergency button and tell the nurse over the intercom that my heart was stopping and she'd hit the "code blue" button calling for the crash cart. It was very unnerving to the nurses working in the intensive care unit. I'm not sure they were used to someone telling them he was going to step out of the physical before actually doing so. Eventually, they stabilized me enough to take a chance on moving me to the University Hospital in Charlottesville, where I had open-heart surgery.xiii
I've continued to explore through reevaluation what I learned from my experiences as a result of my heart problems. Later heart attacks resulted in sometimes days spent in intensive care units. Each time, my heart was weakened, and each time I fought my way back to a healthier condition. I had a severe attack in 1988, another in 1990, then 1991, and again in 1993. It seemed that each one was a little less critical. As I went through extensive testing following each episode we discovered that I was slowly but surely collateralizing the rest of my heart muscle—enlarging the smaller vessels to help feed oxygenated blood to the areas where it was most needed. The way I did this was by coming to an understanding about the very clear differences between living and dying.
The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy Page 25