The Field (26 page)

A few hours later, at Green’s request, a colleague named Hank Turner
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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’.
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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.
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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.’
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 …’
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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.
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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 second correctly picked up a windmill. Of the five experiments, three were direct hits and one a near miss.
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