“The more intention you place on hiding something, the more it shines like a beacon in psychic space.”
This is a quote from Pat Price in Third Eye Spies (2019), one time remote viewer (RV) at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), CIA contractor, and deceased legend of the PSY spook community, whose Las Vegas motel death still remains an enigma. He used to be able to scan what’s up on the other side of the globe using only his mind, a paper, and a pen.
His unmarked resting place at Valhalla Memorial Cemetery in North Hollywood is visited by Russel Targ, another PSY luminary, at the beginning of Lance Mungia‘s essential new mainstream doc on an old much denigrated fringe topic. One that, perhaps, should not have been left solely for the military to explore, as it presents an integral aspect of human experience, otherwise known as intuition.
Extrasensory perception, second sight, or psychic ability, is not really a rare occult phenomenon, rather an area of psychology requiring research so advanced in terms of our current capacities, that it has been preventively labeled para, i.e. a hoax. Maybe because it’s a Pandora’s Box of disturbing possibilities. This is where the physicists stepped in. And this doc is chock-full of top-tier scientists, high-grade spooks, plus a Nobel laureate and an Apollo astronaut thrown in, for good quantum measure.
Central to it though is Targ, an eighty-year-old physicist and laser specialist who joined SRI in 1972, and was part of the team researching psychic abilities and their operational use for the U.S. intelligence community for about a decade. At which point, he left the fold.
Now that 70 000 documents on remote viewing have been declassified, Targ’s happy that he can finally show them to the world without the Bond license.
‘You paid for them you deserve to see them.’
Thus we are whisked away on a joy ride of astonishing intel, and psychedelic twists and turns, delivered by people such as Kit Green, former senior CIA intelligence official, Life Sciences Division, Ken Kress, undercover CIA physicist, his every answer requiring vetting by the agency, Edgar Mitchell, NASA astronaut, Lunar Module Pilot of Apollo 14, Bernard J. Carr, professor of mathematics and astronomy at Queen Mary University of London, Hal Puthoff, electrical engineer, Director of SRI remote viewing, Dale Graff, Program Manager for Remote Viewing at the Defense Intelligence Agency, Alan Wallace, philosopher, expert on Tibetan Buddhism, Charles Tart, Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, the fabulous Brian Josephson, theoretical physicist and professor emeritus of physics at the University of Cambridge, also Nobel Prize winner… And the PSY rock’n’roll list goes on.
In earnest, there are some truly jaw dropping revelations in this cocktail of anecdotes, partial recall, and highbrow analysis, particularly for people that do not usually browse the net searching for PSY nuggets. Curiouser and curiouser in terms of national security, as we get to hear from the horse’s mouth (real horses, real mouths) all that sensitive info that has been only whispered about officially, but is essentially the core of conspiracy culture lore. Tin foil hats people won.
There’s also a chilling LSD-themed bit on Sidney Gottlieb, MKUltra godfather, mind control spymaster, and an overall nasty soul, who apparently had a charming streak, as do all sociopaths – Targ adds as an aside, he was ‘an equal opportunity misanthrope’.
These now are times where there is so much information floating around, it seems impossible to figure out its source, veracity, and most importantly – its intention. Some true and tested, some more than likely manufactured, most of it a cyber-mutated version of truth – strands of narratives that begot other narratives, a result of scientists mixing it up with psychics, conspiracy theorists getting their butts whipped by spooks, psychologists going rogue, morphing into shamans, all of them losing funding from the establishment forces that be – unless these forces have the words ‘military’, ‘intelligence’ or ‘defense’ in their titles.
Targ notes that the Russians spent millions of dollars investing in ESP, not only in the military sphere (the bit on Russian PSY betting clubs is gold), while the US lags behind due to a weird combo of high secrecy and low expectancy.‘The difference between the American scientific community and the Soviet scientific community is that at the highest levels of the Soviet scientific psychic research is taken seriously’ said Targ to Ted Koppel on Nightline way back in 1984.
The fun part is that it might be Soviet belief in dialectic materialism that kept the research going. If it works, and it does – it must be material. Therefore, plow on with the experiments.
Blame it on the Enlightenment or not, what Targ dubbed ‘the giggle potential’ of PSY according to the Western purely rationalist view seems to quickly evaporate after a beer or few in some high-ranking individuals. Just ask the somber Joseph McMoneagle, Vietnam vet who famously dodged mines, now RV legend, who regularly witnessed the skepticism fade into sotto voce claims of daemonic forces, or saintly attributes.
These assertions might well be correct, or not, we still don’t know, too soon to tell, in the meantime a man called Ingo Swann could have been channeling a deamon in 1973, or not, depending on how we view the ability to see through superconducting shielding. Or spotting that Jupiter has ice crystal rings, 500 million miles away, six years before Voyager 1 snapped it.
‘If you say that the mind is nothing more than the merchant property of the brain, you are just ignorant’, leave it to Alan Wallace, philosopher, to put it plainly, and out there.
This is our current state of oblique transparency, transient cosmologies, short-attention span insights, a world of RV international conferences, followed by quaint masquerade balls with US and Russian remote viewers, waltzing, public RV experiments, semi-banned Ted-talks, semi-censored Wikipedia pages, semi-self-censored articles in science mags, semi-eager House Committees on Intelligence Oversight, and straight-forward spoon-bender Uri Geller observations, ‘people who are valuable are never taken out, they are tempted’.
It’s all changing for the better, while changing for the worse. The fact that this doc is out might mean the jig is up. Or not. Maybe there is no jig. We are all deadpan serious, efficient as memes, about to dive into sarcastic laughter which covers the truth quicker than freshly erupted lava.
The devil is in the detail. If the old spook wisdom is that one can best hide in plain sight, then it goes both ways. It’s easiest to sabotage in plain sight, with a sly twinkle of talk-show host’s eye. Who can say with certainty that a side dis from a beloved mouthpiece blocked us going deeper on our path to inner revelation?
Will be signing off this review with drum-roll words from Professor Josephson talking of his ‘heretical’ interest in PSY phenomena, speaking volumes of the true state of affairs in contemporary academia, ‘fortunately people would not contemplate of getting rid of a Nobel Prize winner so I more or less had freedom in what I could do… funding was a different matter.’
As the man who made this doc concludes, ‘the most dangerous secret of all… is that anybody can be psychic.’ Depends on talent. Like music.
Imagine the implications.
★★★★✩
Author: ©Milana Vujkov
Lola On Film 