The Central Intelligence Agency has recently declassified more information from its remote view program, called Project Stargate. This program was started in the 1980's and ran until it was shut down in 1995.
According to accounts from people who worked with the program, one of its most important contributions to parapsychology research was a protocol by which a significant percentage of people could be trained as effective remote viewers. This is an old idea in the occult community, referred to as "astral projection" or "travel in the spirit vision." According to the lore, if you can learn to do it correctly, you can obtain all sorts of information about faraway places that you otherwise could not possibly know.
Slate reported this week that in with this latest batch of declassified material is an account of an attempt to remote view the planet Mars, which apparently took place in 1984. That was early on in the program, and my understanding is that at that time the protocol was still in development. Nonetheless, a transcript of the session contains some interesting and possibly testable pieces of information - once humans finally are able to travel to the red planet.
If people like Elon Musk are right and we're going to be on Mars in the near future, this seems like a perfect test for remote viewing. If we do find evidence of humanoid aliens on Mars, even long dead ones, that would suggest that this session was at least partially accurate. It is true that humanoids living in Martian gravity would most likely be taller and thinner than we are, as low gravity tends to have that effect on many forms of life. On the other hand, if nothing is found, something else was likely going on.
One possibility is that the Subject was psychically tuning in to the Monitor. It is not mentioned whether or not the Monitor knew the contents of the envelope, but that is an important piece of information when you're dealing with allegedly psychic powers. It even can be important if said "psychic" is just really good at reading body language, and that's why double-blinds are so important in parapsychology research. Tall, thin aliens are what most scientifically literate people would expect on Mars, and of course anyone could guess that their clothes would be strange.
We have yet to see signs of life detected by the several rovers we have sent to Mars. A Martian meteorite discovered a number of years ago seems to have some markings that may have been produced by microorganisms - though there have been some alternative scenarios presented since then that could explain them. What we do know for sure is that Mars is a whole planet, and it's hard to say what might be lurking there, just waiting to be discovered.
According to accounts from people who worked with the program, one of its most important contributions to parapsychology research was a protocol by which a significant percentage of people could be trained as effective remote viewers. This is an old idea in the occult community, referred to as "astral projection" or "travel in the spirit vision." According to the lore, if you can learn to do it correctly, you can obtain all sorts of information about faraway places that you otherwise could not possibly know.
Slate reported this week that in with this latest batch of declassified material is an account of an attempt to remote view the planet Mars, which apparently took place in 1984. That was early on in the program, and my understanding is that at that time the protocol was still in development. Nonetheless, a transcript of the session contains some interesting and possibly testable pieces of information - once humans finally are able to travel to the red planet.
After this introduction, you’ll find a seemingly unedited transcript of the interview, a dialogue that reads like some fragment of a lost Samuel Beckett play. You need not crawl through the full seven pages of dialogue to get a sense of its strangeness. Here’s a representative sample from the start. (All ellipses in the following are original to the document and seem to indicate long pauses.)
"[Subject]: … I’m seeing, ah … It’s like a perception of a shadow of people, very tall … thin, it’s only a shadow. It’s as if they were there and they’re not, not there anymore.
[Monitor]: Go back to a period of time where they are there.
Sub: … Um … (mumble) It’s like I get a lot of static on a line and everything, it’s breaking up all the time, very fragmentary pieces.
Mon: Just report the data, don’t try to put things together, just report the raw data.
Sub: I just keep seeing very large people. They appear thin and tall, but they’re very large. Ah … wearing some kind of strange clothes."
In what follows, the conversation jumps around rapidly as the monitor directs the subject to investigate different coordinates, providing no other information. As the subject does, he describes some of the sites of interest that he notices, including a large “obelisk” that reminds him of the Washington Monument, “rounded bottom carved channels, like road beds,” and, most strikingly, “pyramids … like shelters from storms.” In those structures, he finds the shadowy people he had seen before, hibernating. “They’re an ancient people,” he tells the monitor. “They’re ah … they’re dying, it’s past their time or age.”
If people like Elon Musk are right and we're going to be on Mars in the near future, this seems like a perfect test for remote viewing. If we do find evidence of humanoid aliens on Mars, even long dead ones, that would suggest that this session was at least partially accurate. It is true that humanoids living in Martian gravity would most likely be taller and thinner than we are, as low gravity tends to have that effect on many forms of life. On the other hand, if nothing is found, something else was likely going on.
One possibility is that the Subject was psychically tuning in to the Monitor. It is not mentioned whether or not the Monitor knew the contents of the envelope, but that is an important piece of information when you're dealing with allegedly psychic powers. It even can be important if said "psychic" is just really good at reading body language, and that's why double-blinds are so important in parapsychology research. Tall, thin aliens are what most scientifically literate people would expect on Mars, and of course anyone could guess that their clothes would be strange.
We have yet to see signs of life detected by the several rovers we have sent to Mars. A Martian meteorite discovered a number of years ago seems to have some markings that may have been produced by microorganisms - though there have been some alternative scenarios presented since then that could explain them. What we do know for sure is that Mars is a whole planet, and it's hard to say what might be lurking there, just waiting to be discovered.
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