The Field

by Lynne McTaggart

  The men asked Hal to carry out a few simple experiments – nothing elaborate, perhaps just guessing objects hidden in a box. If they were successful, the CIA would agree to fund a pilot program. The two men from Washington later watched Swann correctly describe a moth hidden in the box. The CIA was impressed enough to throw nearly $50,000 at a pilot project, which was to last for eight months.

  Hal agreed to continue with the box-guessing exercise and for several months he carried out trials with Ingo Swann, who managed to describe objects hidden in boxes with great precision – far more successfully than could have been achieved by simple guessing.

  By that time, Hal had been joined by a colleague in laser physics called Russell Targ, who’d also pioneered development of the laser for Sylvania. It was probably no accident that another physicist interested in the effect of light through space would also be intrigued by the possibility that the mind could also breach vast distances. Like Hal, Targ also checked out as a good security risk for the classified operation because he’d been involved in security studies for Sylvania. Tall and lanky at 6 foot 5, Russ had a shock of curly hair, which sat back on his forehead – a dark-haired Art Garfunkel to Hal’s sturdier Paul Simon. There the resemblance ended; anchored to Russ’s face was a pair of black Coke-bottle glasses. Targ had terrible vision and was considered legally blind. Even his glasses only corrected his sight to a fraction of normal. His poor outward vision may have been one reason why he saw pictures in his mind’s eye so clearly.

  Targ had become interested in the nature of human consciousness from his hobby as an amateur magician. Many times up on the stage, he’d be performing some conjuring trick about his subject, taken from the audience, and although he’d have rigged the actual trick, he’d suddenly realize in the midst of it that he knew more information than he’d been told. He might be pretending to guess a question about a location and suddenly a clear mental image of it would pop into his head. Invariably, his own internal picture would turn out to be accurate, which only enhanced his reputation as a magician, but left him with many questions about how this could possibly be happening.

  It had been Ingo’s idea to try his hand at a real test of his powers – one that would more closely resemble how the CIA figured remote viewing ought to be used. He had the idea of using geographical coordinates as a quick, clean, non-emotive way to get to the spot. Both Puthoff and Targ were skeptical of such an idea. If they gave him coordinates and Swann guessed correctly, it might simply mean that he’d remembered a site on a map – he might have a photographic memory.

  They made a few desultory attempts, and Swann was way off target. But then, after fifty attempts, Swann began to improve. By Swann’s 100th coordinate, Hal was impressed enough to get on the phone to Christopher Green, an analyst in the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence, urging him to allow them to try a real test for the agency. Although Green was highly dubious, he agreed to give them a set of map coordinates of a place not even he knew anything about.

  A few hours later, at Green’s request, a colleague named Hank Turner6 produced a set of numbers on a sheet of paper. These represented extremely precise coordinates, down to the minutes and seconds of latitude and longitude, of a place that only Turner knew. Green took the paper and picked up the phone to call Hal.

  Puthoff sat Swann down at a table at SRI and gave him the coordinates. As he puffed on a cigar, and alternated between closing his eyes and scribbling on a piece of paper, Swann described a burst of images: ‘mounds and rolling hills’, ‘a river over to the far east’, ‘a city to the north’. He said it seemed to be a strange place, ‘somewhat like the lawns that one would find around a military base’. He got the impression that there were ‘old bunkers around’, or it could simply be ‘a covered reservoir’.7

  The following day, Swann tried again at home, and jotted down his impressions on a report which he’d brought in to Hal. Again, he got the impression that something was underground.

  A few days later, Puthoff received a phone call from Pat Price, a building contractor from Lake Tahoe, who also raised Christmas trees. Price, who considered himself a psychic, had met Puthoff at a lecture and was calling now to offer his services in their experiments. A florid, wise-cracking Irishman in his early fifties, Price said he’d been using his own version of remote viewing successfully for many years, even to catch criminals. He’d served briefly as police commissioner in Burbank, a suburb of Los Angeles. Price would be in the dispatch room and as soon as a crime had been reported, he’d scan the city mentally. Once he settled on a place, he’d immediately send a car to the location in his mind. Invariably, he claimed, he’d caught his man, just at the spot he’d visualized.

  On a whim, Puthoff gave Price the coordinates given to him by the CIA. Three days later, Hal received a package Price had posted the day after they’d spoken, containing pages of descriptions and sketches. It was obvious to Puthoff that Price was describing the same place as Swann, but in far more detail. He offered a highly precise description of the mountains, the location of the place, and its proximity to roads and a town. He even described the weather. But it was the interior of one peak area that interested Price. He wrote that he thought he saw an ‘underground storage area’ of some variety which had been well concealed, perhaps ‘deliberately so’.

  ‘Looks like former missile site – bases for launchers still there, but area now houses record storage area, microfilm, file cabinets,’ he wrote. He was able to describe the aluminum sliding doors, the size of the rooms and what they contained, even the large maps pinned on the wall.

  Puthoff phoned Price and asked him to look again, to pick up any specific information, such as code names or the names of officers. He wanted to take this to Green and needed details to dispel any lingering disbelief. Price returned with details from one specific office: files named ‘Flytrap’ and ‘Minerva’, the names on labels on folders inside filing cabinets, the names of the colonel and majors who sat at the steel desks.

  Green brought the information to Turner. Turner read their reports and shook his head. The psychics were totally off beam, he said. All he’d given him were the coordinates of the location of his summer cabin.

  Green went away, puzzled by the fact that both Swann and Price had described so similar a place. That weekend, he drove out to the site with his wife. A few miles from the coordinates, down a dirt road, he found a government ‘No Trespassing’ sign. The site seemed to match the descriptions of both psychics.

  Green began inquiring about the site. Immediately he got embroiled in a heated investigation of a security breach. What Swann and Price had correctly described was a vast secret Pentagon underground facility in the Blue Ridge Mountains of West Virginia, manned by National Security Agency code breakers, whose main job was to intercept international telephone communications and control US spy satellites. It was as though their psychic antennae had picked up nothing of note with the original coordinates and so scanned the area until they got on the wavelength of something more relevant to the military.

  For months, the NSA was convinced that Puthoff and Targ, and even Green himself, were being provided this information from some source within the facility. Puthoff and Targ were checked out as security risks and their friends and associates questioned as to their communist leanings. Price only managed to calm down the agency by throwing it a bone: detailed information about the Russian counterpart to the NSA’s secret site, operated by the Soviets in the northern Ural Mountains.

  After the West Virginia episode, CIA officials at the highest levels were convinced enough to try a real test in the field. One day, one of the contract monitors came to SRI with the geographical coordinates of a Soviet site of great concern to the agency. All Russ and Hal were told was that the site was an R&D test facility.8

  Price was the one they wanted to test. Targ and Price headed up to the special room, housed on the second-floor of the Radio Physics building – which had been electrically shielded with a double-walled
copper screen, which would block a remote viewer’s ability if it were generated by a high-frequency electromagnetic field. Targ started the tape. Pat removed his wire-rim glasses, leaned back in his chair, took a crisp white linen handkerchief from his pocket, polished his glasses, then closed his eyes, and only spoke after a full minute.

  ‘I am lying on my back on the roof of a two- or three-storey brick building,’ he said dreamily. ‘It’s a sunny day. The sun feels good. There’s the most amazing thing. There’s a giant gantry crane moving back and forth over my head … As I drift up in the air and look down, it seems to be riding on a track with one rail on each side of the building. I’ve never seen anything like that.’9 Pat went on to sketch the building layout and paid particular attention to what he kept describing as a ‘gantry crane’.

  After two or three days, once they’d finished the work on that site, Russ, Hal and Pat were astonished to hear that they’d had been asked about a suspected PNUTS, which is CIA-code for a Possible Nuclear Underground Testing Site. This place was driving the agency crazy. Everything in America’s intelligence arsenal was being thrown at this spot, to find out what on earth was going on inside. Pat’s drawing turned out to be extremely close to satellite photos, even down to a cluster of compressed-gas cylinders.

  Pat didn’t stop at the outside of the building. His descriptions included what was going on inside. He saw images of workers attempting, with great difficulty, to assemble a massive 60-foot metal globe by welding together metal gores, shaped like wedges of fruit. However, the pieces were warping and Pat believed they were attempting to find material they could weld at lower temperatures.

  No one in the government had any idea of what was going on inside the facility and Pat died a year later. Nevertheless, two years later, an Air Force report was leaked to Aviation Week magazine about the CIA’s use of high-resolution photographic reconnaissance satellites, which finally confirmed Pat’s vision. The satellites were being used to observe the Soviets digging though solid granite formations. They’d been able to observe enormous steel gores being manufactured in a nearby building.

  ‘These steel segments were parts of a large sphere estimated to be about 18 meters (57.8 feet) in diameter’, said the Aviation Week article.

  ‘US officials believe that the spheres are needed to capture and store energy from nuclear driven explosives or pulse power generators. Initially, some US physicists believed that there was no method the Soviets could use to weld together the steel gores of the spheres to provide a vessel strong enough to withstand pressures likely to occur in a nuclear explosive fission process, especially when the steel to be welded was extremely thick.’10

  When Pat’s drawings matched the satellite photos so well, the CIA assumed the nuclear spheres he saw must be manufactured for atomic bombs, and one assumption after another led the Reagan Administration to dream up what became known as the Star Wars program.11 Many billions of dollars later, it turned out to be a curve ball. Semipalatinsk, the site Pat had seen, wasn’t even a military installation. The Russians indeed were trying to develop nuclear rockets, but for their own manned Mars mission. All the rockets were to be used for was fuel.

  Pat Price couldn’t tell the American government what Semipalatinsk was used for, and he died before he could warn them off Star Wars. But for Targ and Puthoff, the Semipalatinsk sighting meant more than just a bit of psychic spying. This gave them some vital evidence about how remote viewing worked. Here was evidence of an individual who could take geographical coordinates anywhere in the world and directly see and experience what was going on there, even at a site that no one in the US had any knowledge of.

  But was any distance too far? The other amazing experiment was conducted with Ingo Swann. Swann was also interested in testing their assumption that a human beacon needed to be present at a site for a remote viewer to pick it up. He had a bold suggestion – a test that might strain all his skills. Why didn’t he try to view the planet Jupiter, just before the upcoming NASA Pioneer 10 flyby launch?

  During the experiment, Swann was embarrassed to admit that he’d seen – and drawn – a ring around Jupiter. Perhaps, he told Puthoff, he’d just mistakenly directed his attention toward Saturn. No one was prepared to take the drawing seriously, until the NASA mission revealed that Jupiter indeed had a ring at the time.12

  Swann’s experiment demonstrated that no individual needed to be present and also that humans could, in effect, ‘see’ or gain access to information at virtually any distance – something that Ed Mitchell had also found with his card tests when traveling to and from the moon.

  Puthoff and Targ wanted to create a scientific protocol for remote viewing. Gradually they moved away from coordinates to places. They created a box file which contained 100 target sites – buildings, roads, bridges, landmarks – within half an hour of SRI, from the San Francisco Bay area to San Jose. All were sealed and prepared by an independent experimenter and locked in a secure safe. An electronic calculator programmed to choose numbers randomly would be used to select one of the target locations.

  On the day of the experiment, they’d closet Swann or Price in the special room. One of the experimenters, usually Targ, because of his bad eyesight, would remain behind with Swann. Meanwhile, Hal and one of the other program coordinators would pick up the sealed envelope and head off to the target location, which was not disclosed to either the volunteer or Targ. Hal acted as the ‘beacon’ of focus – they’d wanted to use someone familiar to Swann or Price whom they could tune in on when attempting to find a mundane location. At the agreed start time, and for the next 15 minutes, Swann was asked to attempt to draw and describe into a tape recorder any impressions of the target site. Targ also would be ignorant of the location of the target team, so that he’d be free to ask questions without fear of inadvertently cueing Swann on the right answer. As soon as the target team returned, they would take the remote viewer to the target site, so that he’d get direct feedback of the accuracy of what he thought he’d seen. Swann’s track record was astonishing. In test after test, he had a high accuracy in correctly identifying his target.13

  With time, Price took over as chief remote viewer. Hal and Russ underwent nine trials with him, following their usual double-blind protocol of sealed target spots near Palo Alto – Hoover Tower, a nature preserve, a radio telescope, a marina, a toll plaza, a drive-in movie theater, an arts and crafts plaza, a Catholic church and a swimming pool complex. Independent judges concluded that Price had scored seven hits out of the nine. In some cases, like the Hoover Tower, Price even recognized it and correctly identified it by name.14 Price was noted for his incredible accuracy and also his ability to ‘see’ through the eyes of his traveling partner. One day, when Puthoff traveled to a boat marina, Pat shut his eyes, and when he opened them, blurted out, ‘What I’m looking at is a little boat jetty or boat dock along the bay …’15

  Hal even tested Pat on detail. He sent Green, the CIA boss, up in a small aircraft with three numbers on a piece of paper inside his breast pocket. Numbers and letters were known to be almost impossible to remote view accurately. Nevertheless, there was Pat Price ticking them off, even in order. He only complained of feeling a bit seasick and drew a picture of a kind of special cross, which he’d had the image of swinging back and forth, making him ill. It turned out that Green was wearing an ankh, an ancient Egyptian cross matching Price’s drawing, around his neck, and the necklace must have been swinging wildly during the ride.16

  Although the results of Price and Swann had been impressive, the Agency wanted to convince itself that this was not simply the work of the highly gifted or, even worse, an elaborate conjuring trick. A couple of the CIA contract monitors asked if they could try their hand at it. This appealed to Hal, who’d wanted to see whether ordinary individuals could carry out remote viewing. Each was invited to participate in three experiments, and both improved with practice. The first scientist correctly identified a child’s merry-go-round and a bridge, and the sec
ond correctly picked up a windmill. Of the five experiments, three were direct hits and one a near miss.17

  When the CIA’s test studies worked, Puthoff and Targ began gathering up ordinary volunteers, some naturally gifted, but unpracticed in remote viewing, some not. In late 1973 and early 1974, Puthoff and Targ selected four ordinary people, three of them SRI employees and one a photographer named Hella Hammid, a friend of Targ’s. Hammid, who’d never been involved in psychic research before, turned out to be a natural at remote viewing. In five of nine targets, Hella scored direct hits, as determined by independent judges.18

  Hal needed to go to Costa Rica for business, so he decided to use the trip to act as a long-distance target. On each day of his trip, he would keep a detailed record of his location and activities at precisely 1:30 p.m. Pacific daylight time. At the same time, Hella or Pat Price would be asked to describe and draw where Dr Puthoff was every day at that time.

  One day, when neither Hella nor Pat showed up, Targ stood in their place as the remote viewer. He got a strong sense that Puthoff was at an ocean or beach setting, even though he knew that Costa Rica is primarily a mountainous country. Although dubious about his accuracy, he described an airport and airstrip on a sandy beach with an ocean at one end. At that moment, Hal had taken an unplanned diversion to an off-shore island. At the designated time, he was just getting out of a plane at a tiny island airport. In every regard, save one, Targ described and drew the airport accurately. The only small error had to do with his drawing of the airport; he’d drawn a building looking like a Quonset hut, when in fact the building was rectangular. During the rest of his trip, Hammid and Price correctly identified when Hal was relaxing round a pool or driving through a tropical forest at the base of a volcano. They were even able to identify the color of his hotel rug.19