Brent Raynes AP Magazine
1. Secret PK studies of “unsuspecting amnesiac abductees”?
New England ufologist Raymond Fowler, in his book The Watchers (1990), described how back in 1968, he had learned about a joint Air Force and NASA study of PK (psychokinetic) subjects. An Air Force employee working with the project allegedly told one of these PK subjects that their good information was sent on to the CIA in Washington, D.C., and that the CIA suspected a connection between psychic phenomena and UFOs.
Back in the early 1980s, there was a person who had been deeply involved in parapsychology who suddenly retired from the field. While I cannot go into many details because of the sensitive nature of our conversation, I will state that this person, who was working on psychokinesis with other parapsychologists from coast to coast, learned from a member of the secret service “we’ve got a list of you people.” “That’s why I got out of active research,” this researcher (who also studied UFOs) told me. I was told that Betty Hill was even present during one of this researcher’s successful PK experiments. Fowler came to suspect that the CIA may have been using the Air Force/NASA psi project to locate “unsuspecting amnesiac abductees” for “special study.”
2. Remote Viewers and UFOs
As we all know today, in 1995 it was big news when it was revealed by major media outlets like CNN and Newsweek that, over a two decade period, $20 million dollars had been invested in a joint project of the Defense Department and the CIA to employ and study sixteen “remote viewers.” A decade earlier, in 1985, physicist Russell Targ and experimental psychologist Keith Harary revealed details of a “remote viewing” program at SRI (Stanford Research Institute) in their book The Mind Race. These authors described then how the government had been supporting a “multi-million-dollar program” at SRI International to experiment with “remote viewing” techniques, though the media hardly took much notice at that time.
French born scientist Dr. Jacques Vallee, author of a number of books on the subject of UFOs, and a colleague of the late astronomer and Air Force consultant Dr. J. Allen Hynek, discovered that many gifted remote viewers had also had UFO-type experiences going back to their childhoods. “When it turned out that many of their subjects had experienced UFOs, they brought me into the project on a strictly confidential basis to document that aspect of the problem,” Dr. Vallee told me in an interview. We were both giving talks at a UFO conference sponsored by the ARE (Association for Research and Enlightenment) at Virginia Beach, Virginia, back in December 2005. This organization was founded by the late “Sleeping Prophet” Edgar Cayce, who had a heavily documented history of very accurate psychic readings. “Edgar Cayce himself had mentioned that some of his gifts came after an incident when he was a teenager,” Dr. Vallee told his audience. “I think he was in the forest, where there was a globe of light and inside the globe of light there was a figure that he took I think to be a lady who asked him what he wanted. He said he wanted the power to help people, to heal, and after that incident his life started changing. That is a fairly common occurrence among people with special psychic gifts.” In our interview, Vallee told me that the phenomenon of UFOs was “far larger than current speculation” allowed. “It raises questions about consciousness, about the nature of reality, and about human history on the earth.”
“As a life long alien abductee, I can attest to the validity of the PSI/UFO connection,” Bret Oldham, author of Children Of The Greys, told me after reviewing this data with me. Before moving recently to Nevada, we worked closely together for four years on a lot of UFO and paranormal cases here in Tennessee. “Throughout my many years of research I have often interviewed other alien abductees who had returned from their experiences with some form of psychic ability that was not present before these events began. Another common theme was an increase in paranormal activity that would center around the particular individual and/or their house. Many abductees and experiencers also gravitate toward the healing arts just as Cayce did. Especially in the area of energy healing. This also coincides with an increased awareness of these new found abilities after an alien contact event.”
“My first abduction event happened when I was only five years old and soon after I began a life filled with spirit contact. I could often hear them, feel them and sometimes even see them. I also had an innate ability to use energy healing even though at the time I had no idea why. Since those early years, I have refined these gifts and use them to help others both in this plane of existence and in the spirit world. I now firmly believe that those who are taken by these beings, whether they are indeed extraterrestrial or they are ultraterrestrial, are being taken using dimensional portals. This process changes our vibrational frequency causing it to speed up to more closely match that of the spirit world and perhaps other unknown dimensions. This shift somehow opens up these psychic abilities in the individual being taken. Case after case the findings are the same. The correlation of PSI and UFO’s is undeniable.”
3. Uri Geller, Terrified Scientists, and the CIA
One of SRI’s most controversial and interesting test subjects was the famed Israeli metal bending psychic Uri Geller. Hal Puthoff revealed that the CIA had requested and paid for the tests done on Geller at SRI. Less well-known were the experiments conducted by a small group of physicists and engineers at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, a secret nuclear weapons facility a short distance from SRI. Some of the staff at this lab were presumably concerned that if there was anything to Geller’s purported PK abilities, then the movement of a few grams of nuclear material by only a few centimeters could either set off or sabotage a nuclear device.
Soon after the experiments began, very strange and disturbing events were described by the scientists and their families. Some reported seeing the apparition of a miniature flying saucer hovering in various rooms; giant birds were seen walking through their gardens, and in the case of one physicist and his wife, at the very foot of their bed the apparition of an arm with a hook instead of a hand; including a strange recorded voice and later a phone call, both from the same sounding metallic voice that warned (in the phone call) for the scientists to cease their work with Geller.
The recorded voice mentioned in the previous paragraph, occurred in a makeshift lab shortly after an infrared camera had recorded, for several seconds at a time, inexplicable patches of radiation up high on a wall, whereupon a tape recorder then picked up a strange, unintelligible metallic voice that no one heard at the time. A CIA contract manager named Rick was called in and listened to the tape. Though there were few recognizable words on the tape, Rick was quite surprised when he discovered on the audio the codename for an unconnected top secret project that he was certain none of the personnel at Livermore had any knowledge of. He was also quite puzzled over the claims of the scientists when he found them sweating and even weeping as they told their stories, as he knew them to all hold high-security clearances and to be unusually psychologically stable.
Geller himself seemed quite puzzled by the Livermore events. “They’re always bewildering, strange, mysterious, but they would never hurt anyone,” he told me in a phone conversation about his abilities. He felt that what happened was something that he had “nothing to do” with. “But for those credible, quite prestigious scientists to see such phenomena is just mind blowing,” Geller concluded.
4. U.S. Government Documents linking UFOs and the paranormal
“There have probably been more books written on UFOs I would guess than any other subject,” Tim “Mr. UFO” Beckley told me in an interview. “I mean, there are just thousands of them. Even the Library of Congress, at one point, put out a bibliography of UFO books, and they had like 7,000.”
I pointed out to Tim that that particular bibliography was mentioned in John Keel’s UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse (1970). Tim then revealed to me that the author of that publication, Lynn Catoe, had actually been a very “good friend” of John Keel’s! In fact, Tim recalled how early on in the 1960s he had been giving a lecture at a Congress of Scientific Ufologists conference in Parma, Ohio, when both John and Lynn had sat in on his presentation together.
Regarding the bibliography, Keel had written:
Recently the U.S. Government Printing Office issued a publication compiled by the Library of Congress for the Air Force Office of Scientific Research: UFOs and Related Subjects: An Annotated Bibliography. In preparing this work, the senior bibliographer, Miss Lynn E. Catoe, actually read thousands of UFO articles, books, and publications. In her preface to this 400-page book she states:
A large part of the available UFO literature is closely linked with mysticism and the metaphysical. It deals with subjects like mental telepathy, automatic writing, and invisible entities, as well as phenomena like poltergeist manifestations and possession. Many of the UFO reports now being published in the popular press recount alleged incidents that are strikingly similar to demonic possession and psychic phenomena which has long been known to theologians and parapsychologists.
That’s the closest that you could actually get to the government making a statement about flying saucers,” Tim quipped wryly. “It’s in an official book printed with taxpayer money.
5. Crisman, Maury Island, and JFK
Who exactly was Fred Lee Crisman of the famous Maury Island incident of June 21, 1947? Allegedly Crisman’s friend and co-worker Harold Dahl was operating a salvage boat in Washington state’s Puget Sound, near what as known as Maury Island, when six doughnut shaped 100 foot diameter objects appeared in the sky. One appeared to be having mechanical difficulties, they claimed, and discharged a large quantity of silvery foil and hot slag fragments, both onto the beach of the island and into the water. Supposedly, in this shower of metal, Dahl’s 15-year-old son, who was onboard the boat, suffered an injury to his arm and the family dog was killed from the metal hail. Later two USAF intelligence officers died when their B-29 crashed near Kelso, Washington. It was returning to Hamilton Air Force Base in California with fragments of the Maury Island slag, and after an interrogation of Crisman and Dahl. The Air Force came to dismiss the case as a hoax, but a number of ufologists (including Ray Palmer and Kenneth Arnold, the famous UFO sighter whose experience on June 24th of that same year ignited a worldwide media sensation about this phenomenon) feel there was more to it.
Interestingly, shortly after the incident, Dahl claimed an MIB type encounter. Crisman, of all things, was subpoenaed by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison in November 1968, as he had been identified as one of the three “mystery tramps” in Dallas on the day of John Kennedy’s assassination. Garrison’s investigators implied that Crisman had been part of an “undercover” operation that may have involved the CIA! And Crisman was no stranger to strange stories and involvements it seems, and as Palmer pointed out, back in June 1946, in a sci fi magazine called Amazing Stories (edited by Palmer), he published a letter then (a year before the Maury Island caper) describing how he and another airman nearly lost their lives in a cave in Burma fending off some sort of alien machine that fired strange rays at them! Though the magazine was sci fi, the letter’s contents were allegedly about a real event.
Crisman, of Syrian ancestry, was a pilot who allegedly worked for the CIA as a “disruption agent.” “Around the time Mothman appeared in 1966, …..apparently JFK conspirators Fred Crisman and David Ferrie, descended on Pt. Pleasant,” author Andrew Colvin has written.
“Crisman stayed in the Seattle area most of the time,” Colvin noted in a radio interview. “He was involved with disrupting progressives in the Seattle area. He worked for Boeing for a while. He would go in and discredit a key person. They usually had a target – a movement or group that they were trying to disrupt. Crisman was really good at turning people against each other. He did that at Boeing.”