The second point to make is that the psychic technology Vallee imagines depends on the manipulation of time as well as space.52 What I read him reading in the history of folklore is a future technology projected, somehow, back into our present. Such a hypothesis—which is a common trope in science fiction, not to mention well within the imagination, if not the present technology, of contemporary physics—implies that these need not be space aliens from another planet. They may well be human beings from another time, from the future. They may be us. The future technology of folklore that Vallee is imagining here, in other words, is a technology that we may be using on ourselves to manipulate our own past, to control, as it were, our belief systems and mythologies that lie well below the present political system or cultural fad of the day.
It is precisely these religious systems that control our history for Vallee, hence his privileging of Jung in the concluding third part of Fastwalker: “It is not starvation, not microbes, not cancer,” Jung writes and Vallee quotes now, “but man himself who is mankind’s greatest danger; because he has no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating in their effect than the greatest natural catastrophes.”53 Hence, to employ an overused metaphor that is nevertheless quite apt here, mythologies and beliefs can be seen as the “operating systems” of that cognitive and behavioral software we call culture. What Vallee is imagining, then, is a kind of “re-writing of the computer code” from the future, before the viruses that determine us now can take over and crash the system for good.54
Third and finally, it is worth underlining the basic disillusionment, which is also an awakening, that appears with such poignancy in The Invisible College. Monroe had confessed his own disillusionment with respect to religion. Vallee now expresses his own with respect to science. Vallee once thought that science was enough, that it would eventually recognize the reality of paranormal phenomena and so generously and definitively expand our conception of what it means to be human. Essentially, he believed that science could and would rewrite our code. The Invisible College closes with the confession that he no longer possesses such a faith. Science cannot supply the key to our psychic crisis. How could it? Its strict commitment to a method that only recognizes objects prevents it from even admitting the presence of psychical phenomena, which are objects and subjects at the same time. How can a method that denies the very reality of the subject study the magical and mystical qualities of that subject? The answer: it cannot.
Nor, though, will we find our answer “in some secret file in Washington.”55 The solution to our psychic crisis, he suggests in the very last lines of the book, “lies where it has always been: within ourselves. We can reach it any time we want” (IC 209). Which is to say, once again, that the solution lies well outside the present parameters of the scientific method. It lies rather in the fundamental mystery of human consciousness, in the subject doing the science. It lies in us.
The Present Technology of Folklore: Computer Technology and Remote Viewing in the Psychic Underground
Vallee had very good reasons to end his book on a note suggestive of both government intelligence and the primacy of human consciousness, as the lived context in which he wrote The Invisible College was deeply informed by a small group of elite government-sponsored scientists interested in artificial intelligence, information theory, quantum biology, the mind-matter interface, and the physics of consciousness. Vallee interacted with these scientists at SRI, an independent research institute in Menlo Park that contracted with the U.S. military for various secret research programs. Vallee in fact worked for one SRI program, which was not secret at all, and became indirectly involved in another, which definitely was.
The first program was something called the Augmentation of the Human Intellect, for which Vallee worked for a little over one year, from February of 1972 to April of 1973. This project was erratically managed and frustrated him, but in its more interesting moments it also involved him in cutting-edge technology and government conferences that were a part of the early development of a global communication network sponsored by the Pentagon called the Arpanet.56 The Arpanet would eventually morph into the Internet in the early 1990s, effectively changing the world of communications, and just about everything else, in the process.
The same project also put him in touch with individuals who worked for the intelligence community, including the NSA (National Security Agency), whose initials were jokingly said to stand for “Never Say Anything” or “No Such Agency” (FS 2:160). Vallee quickly grew disillusioned with such people once he realized how little they actually knew about paranormal subjects and how impossible it was to ever really know who was telling the truth. It all struck him as a very silly and childish game. Hence the negative conclusion of The Invisible College concerning those “secret files in Washington.” He had had quite enough of all that.
The second SRI program, housed one floor down from the first in the Electronics and Bioengineering Laboratory, was a research project that was initially conceived as a series of quantum biology experiments designed to answer the question of whether the human mind can affect very small-scale quantum processes. If such a thing were possible, a kind of mind-matter interface could in turn be imagined that might allow for the mental control of quantum machines and supersmall circuits. Through a series of truly remarkable events, this initial research project quickly morphed into a very different sort of animal, this one dedicated to exploring the intelligence potentials of using gifted psychics to accomplish what came to be known as “remote viewing.”
Historically speaking, this program was originally set up by Stanford alumn Harold Puthoff in the spring of 1972. Puthoff is a laser physicist who had written a textbook on quantum physics and had worked as a naval officer for the Defense Department laboratory before he arrived at SRI. After hearing Puthoff lecture at Stanford, Russell Targ, another accomplished laser physicist at that point working for Sylvania, approached Puthoff and asked to join his research group.57 This was no sudden interest on Targ’s part, though. In 1965, he had founded the Palo Alto Parapsychology Research Group (the PRG), a small collective of scientists, intellectuals, and interested individuals (including Vallee in the early ’70s) who met regularly—for a time, according to Vallee, in an A-frame house built exactly on the top of the San Andreas fault—to discuss issues surrounding the subject of parapsychology. It was in this way that Puthoff and Targ became the early leaders of the SRI group.
Much had already transpired by the time Targ joined Puthoff, however. It all began when a New York artist by the name of Ingo Swann saw a research proposal that Puthoff had written in the office of a colleague in New York. Swann wrote Puthoff on March 30, 1972, outlining his psychokinetic experiments in the psychology department of City College of New York and suggesting that he may be able to help Puthoff investigate quantum biological effects, that “boundary between the physics of the animate and the inanimate.”58
Puthoff invited Swann to SRI for a set of initial experiments in June of that same year. Physicists from Stanford’s Physics Department and its Linear Accelerator Center joined Puthoff in testing Swann’s alleged abilities. They certainly set the bar high enough. Swann arrived only to learn that they wanted to see if he could manipulate the recorded output of a superconducting magnetometer or quark detector, a kind of supersensitive compass used to register subtle magnetic fields that was located in a vault below the building. It was protected by “a mu-metal magnetic shield, an aluminum container, copper shielding, and most important, a superconducting shield.”59 To the great puzzlement of the physicists, Swann successfully and dramatically altered the output of the magnetometer in their presence. He even described a gold alloy plate that was part of the apparatus. “Impressed” was a gross understatement. Puthoff invited Swann back for an eight-month series of experiments.
Upon his return, though, Swann quickly grew bored with the standard parapsychological tests and suggested instead that he be allowed to vie
w distant places and objects, anywhere in the world. “There was an awkward silence.”60 Finally, they decided to give in to Swann’s request, as a diversionary game, if nothing else. The results were no game, though. They were stunning. They initiated a three-year double-blind study of what they were now calling “remote viewing,” an expression chosen for its relative neutrality over better-known terms, like the earlier psychical research categories of “telepathy at a distance” or “traveling clairvoyance,” or the occult expression “astral travel.”
Not that Swann was any less fantastic. Vallee, who was working at SRI just one floor up when all of this transpired, notes that Swann’s impossible ability to describe and manipulate the magnetometer through several feet of concrete and even stop its output resulted in one government-related group contemplating killing him, for if he could do this, “he could just as easily detonate a nuclear weapon at a distance” (FS 2:192). Vallee describes another scene in which “all hell broke loose” when Pat Price, their other star seer, remotely viewed a supersecret site, even noting the codes and labels on some important files locked inside cabinets.61 “They didn’t know whether to shoot us or congratulate us,” Puthoff told Vallee (FS 2:214). Intelligence breaches aside, the results of Targ and Puthoff’s experiments with Pat Price at SRI were almost immediately published in the prestigious British science journal Nature.62
Vallee’s journals from this time, which he appropriately entitles “Psychic Underground,” are especially fascinating, exploring things like “our psychic computer conference” and “the software of the soul” (FS 2:317, 471). In the privacy of his journals, he could even speculate in a kind of techgnostic code about “a level of reality where information is common to all beings.” “Perhaps,” he went on, “that level has singularities—points that stick out of the information fabric. Each of these singularities becomes the root of an individual being.”63 (One is reminded here of Myers’s notion of the personality as a “chain of memory.”) In another entry, he explains how Puthoff once confessed to him that he was called from time to time by some secret group within the government to have his psychics do remote viewing of places where suspected UFO bases were located (FS 2:211). When Vallee, then, published an exoteric public document in 1975 about the existence of an esoteric “invisible college” interested in combining the cutting edges of mysticism, science, and technology, he very much meant it. There was indeed just such an invisible college at SRI, and he was on its faculty.
Vallee, however, did not simply speculate about these matters in his published and private writings. He also contributed concrete research models toward their study, professional dissemination, and practice. He made at least two major contributions to the remote-viewing program at SRI. One was a position paper he addressed to Puthoff and Targ dated January 8, 1973, and entitled Alternative Scenarios for Long-term Research on Paranormal Phenomena, which essentially argued for a “mixed strategy that combined open and secret research” (FS 2:504). This is clearly the model the group adopted, hence Vallee’s The Invisible College, which appeared two years after this position paper. Hence Targ and Puthoff’s Nature essay and their Mind-Reach (1977), a book that sets out in surprising detail the early history and theory of the secret remote-viewing program at SRI. Indeed, they even traveled to Prague, Czechoslovakia, in July of 1973 to share their parapsychological researches with colleagues in Eastern Europe and Russia, who were deeply involved in similar research projects. Puthoff summarized their work at SRI. Swann gave a paper on Scientology as an appropriate paradigm for studying and extending paranormal powers.64
The other contribution Vallee made to the SRI remote-viewing project was his suggestion to Ingo Swann that the group consider using “addresses” to locate targets in what they were beginning to suspect was a kind of hyperdimensional field of superconsciousness.65 Working on the model of a computer programmer, Vallee essentially argued here that the human mind needed some such address to locate what it was seeking, even if it were an artificial or “virtual” one (FS 2:196). The group eventually adopted this idea, at first using longitude and latitude coordinates (which are arbitrary artificial constructs anyway) and later, at least in the Stargate Program at Fort Meade, shifting to arbitrary computer-generated numbers after the unusual discovery that, indeed, the nature of the “address” did not matter.66
It was also during this time that the SRI group engaged in detailed experiments with Uri Geller, the Israeli superpsychic who had become famous for his psychical and telekinetic feats, including multiple apparent teleportations that would have delighted Charles Fort. Geller had come to SRI through Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, himself a dedicated psychical researcher.67 Significantly, Geller attributed his powers to a childhood encounter that he had at four or five in a Tel Aviv city garden, where a beam of light from a hovering, high-pitched UFO struck him down, “exactly like that scene in the John Travolta film, Phenomenon,” he explained. Shortly after this, a spoon “melted” in the little boy’s hand as he tried to eat his mother’s soup.68 Vallee treats Geller at some length in The Invisible College, basically concluding that his powers were a mixture of trick and truth.
What should we do with such impossibilities? I have written my own two chapters on a tiny slice of this story, as it intersected the history of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, through Targ.69 The truth is, however, that we now have extensive accounts of these government-funded psychical activities by the scientists, remote viewers, and military officials who were intimately involved, and these from a variety of philosophical perspectives and moral evaluations.70
Historians of American religion have not even begun to process and evaluate these histories, which is rather odd given the base fact that the entire program was founded on what is essentially a religious presupposition, namely, that human consciousness is not bound to the body or brain. I wish to emphasize this point. Indeed, I wish to force the issue by pushing it to its completely impossible but perfectly real extreme. Consider the case of Joseph McMoneagle. In a stunning second chapter of his book Mind Trek, McMoneagle describes collapsing in an Austrian restaurant in 1970 and finding himself floating above the street in the rain outside. He marveled at how the raindrops passed through his arm and how he had no visible feet. “I understood very clearly by that time that I couldn’t really die.” The experience was exhilarating. So he decided to follow the car that was rushing his body to the hospital. He might as well have been Superman: “The entire trip was spent cruising just above the car, zipping up, down, and through the overhanging telephone and electric wires.” After being pulled up and out of the emergency room, backwards, “as if I were falling upward through a tunnel,” he felt a warm sensation at the back of his neck, which then spread to the rest of his subtle body and intensified . . . and intensified . . . and intensified . . . until it approached a state of being he calls “exceedingly-outrageous-fantastic.” We return to the familiar theme of the mystical and the erotic: “The closest I can come to giving an example that most people would understand is that it was like the peak of a sexual climax times twelve times ten to the thirty-third. That would be twelve with thirty-three zeros after it. (Sexual peak times 12 × 1033, or a normal climax times 12,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.)” The math carried theological connotations for McMoneagle. “So this is what God is like!” he exclaimed. He knew immediately that he “had been absorbed by a Being of Light, with unimaginable qualities and quantities of power, goodness, strength, and beauty.” Then a voice in the Light commanded him to “Go back. You are not going to die.”71
It would be easy, of course, for the skeptic to declare all of this “purely subjective,” except for the historical fact that Joseph McMoneagle, empowered by these unimaginable metaphysical energies, returned to life as commanded and became the premiere remote viewer for the U.S. government’s secret paranormal program. Now he could do things like remote view, in 1979, the interior of an immense Soviet Naval structure in northern Russia, incl
uding a weird submarine inside that fit no present standard. He also estimated the launch to be about four months in the future. McMoneagle was angered when he learned that the analysts scoffed at his work for a number of reasons, including the fact that the building was well off the water and so could not contain an immense sub. McMoneagle had his “I told you so” moment, though. About four months later, within just a few days of his prediction, American spy satellites showed the never-before-seen Typhoon submarine (560 feet long) being floated out to sea through a channel the Soviets had recently dug from the building to the icy waters. Physicist Edwin May, who directed the remote viewing research from 1985 until 1995 and worked very closely with McMoneagle, described his friend and colleague to me as “the most certified psychic in the country.”72 The intelligence community certainly agreed. In 1984, it awarded McMoneagle a Legion of Merit for “producing crucial and vital intelligence unavailable from any other source.”73
So much for the “purely subjective.”
Never quite happy with the leadership and direction of his research group, Vallee resigned from SRI on April 9, 1973, in order to manage his own software-development group for two teleconferencing projects on the Arpanet at something called the Institute for the Future. He would now be working even more closely with the science policy makers in Washington, including the National Science Foundation. In 1976, he pursued these business ventures further and became an independent computer entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, much to the disappointment of Hynek, who always thought he should be a professor somewhere, like him. But Vallee had seen firsthand what happened to university professors when they showed too much freedom of thought and theory. He certainly wanted none of that. And he treasured the intellectual freedom that a life in the visionary computer industry would give him (FS 1:424). He would now apply to high technology and the business world the exact same critical-thinking skills, the same interdisciplinary boldness, the same magical structures of consciousness that he had applied to astronomy and folklore. It was a career decision that, by all measures, worked. Vallee would become a successful international businessman, even as he continued to write science-fiction novels, books on finance and computers, and more creative works of ufology.
Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred Page 25