Shawn Ryan Show - #122 Edwin C. May - Psychics in Space, Dream Telepathy and Remote Viewing Saturn

Episode Date: July 22, 2024

Edwin C. May is an author and former Director of the CIA's secretive Stargate Project. Edwin, a nuclear physicist (Ph.D.) by trade, spent many years at Stanford Research Institute studying ESP (extras...ensory perception) and psychokinesis. In 1985, May founded the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory, which would ultimately become the Stargate Program. May worked directly with former SRS guest Joe McMoneagle researching the remote viewing phenomenon. After the closure of the project, May founded The Laboratories for Fundamental Research, a multi-disciplinary research facility that studies psi phenomena via rigorous protocols and analyses techniques of modern science. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://lairdsuperfood.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://helixsleep.com/srs https://shopify.com/shawn https://trueclassictees.com/srs https://expressvpn.com/shawn https://hillsdale.edu/srs https://ShawnLikesGold.com | 855-936-GOLD #goldcopartner Edwin C. May Links: Books - https://www.lfr.org/book-store Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/stores/Edwin-C.-May/author/B00MLS5MWK Laboratories for Fundamental Research - https://www.lfr.org/lfr Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:27 Benefits vary by card, other conditions apply. Mr. Edwin C. May, welcome to the Sean Ryan show. Well, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm looking forward to it. Man, I have been looking forward to this interview for a long time. Ever since he kind of popped up on my radar
Starting point is 00:00:51 with Joe McMonagle brought you up several times and his wife Scooter and eventually connected us, which I'm super thankful for. And man, I'm just totally fascinated with this subject with remote viewing, ESP, Stargate. And so I just, I want to say thank you so much for coming. You're most welcome. It's a pleasure to find someone with the excitement
Starting point is 00:01:17 that you already have for this discipline because that's rare in this country for sure. Really? Yes. I don't know. I think it's a growing subject again then, because I see a lot of people that are interested in it. Well, you probably have heard the phrase that it's the work of the devil. I've heard that several times.
Starting point is 00:01:35 Yeah. Just a brief anecdote on that. I had a contract from the Air Force by $1.5 million. And a nameless senior Air Force official said that's the work of the devil kill that program and they took the money back. Really? Yes. Didn't even want to look into it? No. Interesting. Yeah. Because we're not the only ones looking into this from what I understand the Russians are. Yeah. Who else is looking into this? Actually, there was a Hungarian fiction writer
Starting point is 00:02:07 by the name of Arthur Kersler. I don't know if you've ever heard of him or not. When he passed away, he bequeathed a huge sum of money to Edinburgh University in Scotland to do sci research. And when they first started that, they did a worldwide search to be, who would be the first professor to occupy that chair, and an American won that search.
Starting point is 00:02:31 Bob Morris is his name. He moved to Scotland, and everybody was nervous at the university about all this weird stuff. He became head of the British Society of Psychology, not parapsychology. He spawned about 100 graduate students in PhDs in parapsychology. And then the Edinburgh University wasn't in fact proud of this, and it was on the front page of their website.
Starting point is 00:02:59 So it's an amazing school in Scotland today even. How many governments are looking into this? Are you aware? Certainly the Russians are. Hungarians are with not a lot of effort. There's a big effort going on in Brazil now. In Brazil? Yeah. And of course, Scotland. And Darby in the UK, a number of schools.
Starting point is 00:03:29 What is it? At Greenwich University, there's a group doing work there. Who would you say is maybe on the forefront of this? Right now, beside our group, I mean, seriously, I would say at Monroe University, they're doing very, very good work. Monroe? I'm sorry. Monroe Institute?
Starting point is 00:03:52 They don't do parapsychology research there. I didn't hear what you said before. At Monroe University, they're doing excellent work there. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Well. Okay. Well, I can't wait to dive in. It's like I said, I'm fascinated.
Starting point is 00:04:09 So kind of how I want to do the interview is we actually, we had spoken at breakfast about a kind of an aptitude test. Am I correct on that? That's a good way to word it. Yeah. On if somebody may have Capabilities call it remote viewing remote viewing yes So it's an aptitude test for remote viewing so I think that would be a great way to kick off the interview
Starting point is 00:04:37 Okay, so we'll start there And then we'll get right into kind of how this popped up on your radar and how you eventually became the director of the Stargate program, which I gotta be honest, I can't even believe I'm sitting across from you right now. So super fascinating. Thank you. But everybody gets a gift on the show.
Starting point is 00:05:01 I don't know if you knew that. I did not. So there's yours. Oh boy, is it edible? Actually, it is edible. Go ahead, dive in there. I was just being goofy about it. Go ahead, open it up.
Starting point is 00:05:16 Oh, okay. Little something for the ride home. Those are Vigilance Elite Gummy Bears. Oh my goodness. They're legal in all 50 states. Oh, too bad. I was hoping for a real. And they're made right here in the USA. Fantastic.
Starting point is 00:05:33 In Tennessee, I hope? Actually, they're made in Michigan. Okay. Hey, hey. But- Thank you, that's kind. You're welcome. So we'll kick it off with a introduction. And this might take me about 30 minutes to get through because you have such a extensive
Starting point is 00:05:53 background. So go for it. Here we go. You hold a degree in experimental nuclear physics, the executive director of the cognitive science laboratory Previously part of the ESC ESP program at SRI International that's Stanford Research Institute Spent 40 to 49 years studying psychic research You were the previous director of the US government's program to apply ESP to matters of national security interest
Starting point is 00:06:27 Also known as stargate in 1996. You founded laboratories for fundamental research, which is still active today The author of over 90 peer-reviewed papers and over 300 technical reports You've given public talks about intelligence collection at the World War II famous site Bletchley Park in the UK. Presided over 70% of the funding, $22 million and 85% of the data collection for the government's 22-year involvement into parapsychological research, accumulated over 12 years experience in experimental nuclear physics research, fluent in a variety of 3G and 4G computer languages including F, Fortran, IDL, Visual Basic, MATLAB, SQL, and various machine codes
Starting point is 00:07:25 traveled off into Moscow beginning in 1992 and has become friends with the US's former enemy, the KGB. I can't wait to dive into that. And your colleagues are physicalists. That is, consciousness is an emergent property of the brain and does not survive death. What am I missing? No, not a thing.
Starting point is 00:07:49 Well, one issue how Stargate came into existence, the name, because that was the last of about seven or eight names preceding it. I've always wondered that. Yeah. The one I walked out of the Pentagon with a Colonel who was in charge of all this stuff. And he said, guess what? We've changed the name of the project. It's now called Quantum Leap.
Starting point is 00:08:09 And I said, do we have to? Quantum Leap Progress is the smallest possible progress at above zero. And Stargate was then born as a result of that. Wow. Wow. Why did they change the name so much in the beginning? Well, because these were unclassified names and it was part of security to keep it secure. Okay.
Starting point is 00:08:30 There was Center Lane, Grow Flame and a whole bunch of stuff like that. Interesting. Interesting. I'm nervous about this test I'm about to take. Oh, don't be. It won't hurt at all. I promise. What if I flunk it? Probably will. Most people do. Don't worry about it. Oh, don't be. It won't hurt at all. Promise. What if I flunk it? Probably will. Most people do. Don't worry about it. Oh, man.
Starting point is 00:08:49 Now, I want to give you a little background about it. When we humans, and I presume you're a human, some of my friends are questionable about that with regard to me, but most humans have multiple conversations going on at the same time in their head. You're worrying about the lighting and all that, and you're having a conversation with me. I'm thinking, well, gee, what am I going to do for dinner? I hope this thing doesn't go too long.
Starting point is 00:09:12 That kind of internal conversation. But it's not relevant for what's going on at this moment. So we edit it out of our count, what comes out of our mouth. We all do that. That's just part of being human. And so why not allow someone trying to be psychic to do the same kind of internal editing? So I'm going to tell you a little bit about what a potential remote viewing target is not going to be.
Starting point is 00:09:40 For example, if you get a mental image picture of your mother cooking a hot apple pie and it's cooling on the counter in the kitchen, please, please don't tell me about it because there's no food in this target pool. There's no indoor sites by this point. There are no people here. There are no buildings. I mean, there are no inside shots and so on. There's no human artifacts like rakes and shovels
Starting point is 00:10:06 and things like that. No transportation devices. All that stuff, if it comes in your mind, just don't put it down on your paper, don't tell me about it. Other than that, it can be anything outdoors, period. Anything. So only outdoor stuff.
Starting point is 00:10:21 That's right. Interesting. So that allows you, and it worked beautifully for us, to allow potential participants or subjects, if you will, to have that internal sensor. It reduces the background noise substantially and allow what psychic ability can emerge from the noise. So only, okay, so when I'm doing this,
Starting point is 00:10:43 only think about viewing something from the exterior or that's outside. Yeah, and I have a stylized interview with you about that to aid that. I don't know what the target is. The concept is called double blind. You don't know what the target is. I don't know what it is. And in fact, when you're remote viewing, it hasn't even been chosen yet in the computer.
Starting point is 00:11:06 So I can't cue you or cue you in some way. Well, maybe it should be a kangaroo riding a camel across the desert, except there are no animals in this thing either. So the whole idea is to just reduce the internal noise. Also do not expect a multimedia extravaganza between your ears. Most people, even our most, like Joe McManigal, say it feels like he's guessing sometimes. So it's not a vivid thing, which we'd like it to be, but it isn't. Would it be better to explain the aptitude test
Starting point is 00:11:45 before I take it or after? I'm not sure what you mean. Well, I would like to talk about what I'm about to do. Okay, go ahead. Or should we just do it and talk about it afterwards? Let's just do it and we'll talk about it afterwards. Here we go. Yep.
Starting point is 00:12:03 Moment of truth. It's some moment. Yeah. Okay, let me. Do I draw with my, do I close my eyes? No, no, no, no, hang on. Well, I'd like you to just write your name and the date and time anywhere on the corner somewhere. It doesn't matter where you put it.
Starting point is 00:12:23 What is today? Today's May 9th. May 9th, and it's about 25 after, 35 after noon. Now, like any kind of a job, I have to instruct you what it is I want from you. So when you're ready, I'll give you what's called the tasking, what I'm asking you to do. And it's very simple. Okay. Let me So when you're ready, I'll give you what's called the tasking, what I'm asking you to do. And it's very simple.
Starting point is 00:12:47 Okay. Let me know when you're ready. I'm ready. Okay. Sean, please access and describe a photograph I'm going to show you in about 15 minutes or less from now. Okay. The idea is to put down whatever pops into your mind first. Don't overthink it. Whatever pops into my mind first.
Starting point is 00:13:10 Subject to the conditions we mentioned. And you can tell me as you write it in words or draw pictures or build it out of clay or whatever you want to do with it, doesn't matter. So you're thinking about it. Don't think about it, just respond to it. Talk to me. Drawing what came to my mind first. Which is it? Should I tell you what I'm drawing? You can't show it to me even.
Starting point is 00:13:53 Should I keep drawing? Well, no, no, just capture what your experience is. Okay, that's a circle on top of a point. Is that what it is? That is a pyramid with the moon above it, and then this is some kind of, I don't know, I was envisioning some kind of like circular, maybe cloud above it. Fair enough, don't go into that detail. Okay. Maybe cloud above it. Fair enough. Don't go into that detail. Okay.
Starting point is 00:14:26 Suppose you could sit on top of what you call the pyramid and gaze out in front of you. What do you see? It can't be animals. Can't be any of that. What does the landscape look like? Okay. What did you write? I wrote a barren desert with a couple of dead trees.
Starting point is 00:14:53 Okay. With no leaves on them. All right. Excellent. Let's take a short break here. Okay. We'll come back to it in a moment. Interesting thing about a break is we don't want to talk about what your experience
Starting point is 00:15:05 is or anything like that. We'll talk about something else like what are you going to have for dinner? What movie did you recently see? Did you see the Oppenheimer movie at all? That was a strange movie. Don't go. Okay. I can tell you a...
Starting point is 00:15:20 Is this the Civil War movie? No, no, no. This is over the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer built the atomic bomb. Oh? No, no, no. This is over the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer built the atomic bomb. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't believe I just say I'm not letting go of what I'm... All right. So when we're finished here, I'll give you a link to an Amazon Prime movie called The
Starting point is 00:15:41 Day After Trinity. And that is an accurate portrayal with the real people that did the work. It's an excellent film. Okay, let's get back to it. I'll retask you. The paper? Pardon, no. The paper's good enough. And I want to get on record by saying the interview procedure that I learned,
Starting point is 00:16:00 that I'm using with you, to a great deal I learned from Mr. Russell Targ. He was brilliant at that job and I honor him for teaching me that. Excellent guy. Okay, onward. So retasking. Sean, please access and describe a photograph and drawing or pictures or words about a photograph I'm going to show you say say, 10 minutes from now.
Starting point is 00:16:25 Go for it. Could this, this is a different one? Nope, same picture. What if something different's in my head? Write it down. Helps if you write words to help me understand the squiggles that you draw as well. OK.
Starting point is 00:16:44 What you got? I got a house, which is actually a concrete house. Okay. A big pond. All right. And then just vegetation trees. Excellent. Okay, and now I'm gonna surprise you.
Starting point is 00:16:59 We're gonna cut the session off now. Okay. Why do you think I'm doing that? Exercise is complete? Because I'm drawing something completely different than what I did before. Well, no. I'm doing it because we like, as humans, to fill in the blanks. Well, there's a house there that must have XYZ on it, or that pyramid must be whatever
Starting point is 00:17:22 it happened to be. So we'll call a stop to it. And I now do a look, the job comes to me. Now, the target has not yet been chosen. I have no idea what it is. So I cannot, I'm gonna analyze your results. Bear with me one second here, a little bit of homework in here.
Starting point is 00:17:43 This computer, oddly enough, is very slow. May I have the sheets, please? Thank you. Excellent. Okay. Now, see, I can't put words into your mouth. For example, here you say you draw a building and it's very clearly the shape of a building. So I have no trouble thinking it's not a kangaroo.
Starting point is 00:18:18 It's a building. So you get credit for that. What I'm doing, and I don't want to get into the technical details, it's called fuzzy set analysis. I'm trying to encode what you said in a way that this computer can understand to do the arithmetic with LUCMA, no hands. Interesting.
Starting point is 00:18:35 Yeah. Okay, we've got trees. And we got this stuff here, and I'm not gonna describe what I'm doing here, because this is going to be public, and we don't want people to have to guess this list I'm doing here. This circle thing that you drew here, what did you say here? That is a body of water, a lake or a pond. Okay, thank you.
Starting point is 00:19:03 Okay, I think that's pretty good. Pressure's on me, not on you. I feel nervous. I feel anxious. If you're anxious, so am I. All right, all right. I want this to work really well. Okay, now the computer goes to work by itself.
Starting point is 00:19:22 What it means is it still hasn't chosen a picture yet. Really? Yeah. Now it doesn't pay any attention to what I put in there because that would be cheating. In other words, choose a picture that matches what you said. That's not happening in the code. It just doesn't do that.
Starting point is 00:19:37 But now it's going to randomly pick the picture for us. This is a demonstration. The participant is Ryan, and this is trial number one. And I'm sure. Hmm. You'll be rather pleased about this. Pretty good. No way. Are you kidding me? No, why? Can I sit? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:20:21 Well, lots of trees, big concrete buildings, and there's a pyramid on top. Where's the body of water? Buzz off. Actually, the metric here... Can I show that on camera? Would that be possible? Sure. I just want the audience to see how awesome
Starting point is 00:20:47 my remote viewing capabilities are, so there it is. Not bad for a first attempt actually, quite good. We have a metric called figure of merit. And the way that is, there are 300 photographs in here. It's gonna be anyone, any one of merit. And the way that is, there are 300 photographs in here. This could have been any one of them. And we had a team of people, like nine people, encode them in such a way that a computer could understand them. It's technically called a fuzzy set,
Starting point is 00:21:17 and let's not go there any further. But that's been precoded. So what I did was to get a fuzzy set of your response. And then the computer does a Venn diagram, although not technically, but something like it, and said, how close is your description? Two things it asks. How accurate was your response? In other words, of all the things in the target, what percentage did you get right? The answer to that question is about 53% of what you said was correct in the target. But that isn't enough. I went out of all the things that you said, what percentage of what you said was correct? I mean, see the difference? One is what percentage
Starting point is 00:21:59 of the target did you get, and the other part is what percentage of what you said was right. Maybe you said everything was correct. No. Actually, you said 52% of what you said was correct. The product of those two numbers is what we call the figure of merit. And when that's above a certain threshold, and when we use this to make money on the marketplace, that threshold is 0.452. Your number was 0.28. It wasn't good enough to bet money on. Okay. But only about 20% of Joe's is, or 20% of Angela Ford's are.
Starting point is 00:22:36 No kidding. It's a very high. In fact, it almost never misses above when it's that good of a remote viewing. So congratulations, Sean. I'm really pleased you did the damn good job of it. History, economics, the great works of literature, the meaning of the U.S. Constitution. Did you study these things in school? Probably not. Or even if you did, maybe it's time for a refresher. Time and technology have changed a lot, and that's why it's important for a refresher. Time and technology have changed a lot,
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Starting point is 00:25:35 So what is this? So if I was, what would you have me do next? Go on with the interview. If I was, if you were looking at me to see if I had these capabilities, would that be a, let's move on to the next test or would that be a- Yeah, but not right away. Thanks for showing up. If we need you, we'll be in contact.
Starting point is 00:25:57 Not quite. I mean, tell me why it would be a mistake to have you do it again right now. Because I would overthink it. Not only that, one has to ask the musical question, from where does the information arise? We, my colleague and I have been worrying about that a long, long time. That is, did you get it from looking into the future and seeing the picture? Another precognition?
Starting point is 00:26:26 If you did that, but 20 minutes from now you have a different picture, how would you be able to sort that out in your mind, which precognition pays attention to it? No. So we only collect data, like with Angela Ford, two sessions a week. Two sessions a week? Yeah. That fast of sessions? Wow. Actually the fastest one, one of our participants is a psychologist named Nevin.
Starting point is 00:26:55 And I say, okay, here's, please access and describe the same thing I just said to you. So he said, oh, there's a tree and a path, I quit. It was over in about three seconds of it. There's gotta be something more, but no, that's exactly all that was there. He just nailed it. No kidding.
Starting point is 00:27:14 Yeah. So I got a 50% on the, like a 53%, I believe you said, on the drawings and a 52% on what I said was actually in the photograph. Yeah, exactly. So what would be a close the book, don't contact us, we'll contact you, thanks for showing up? Well, never on a single issue like this.
Starting point is 00:27:39 Okay. Give in a hint. I don't know if Joe would like this, but it's the data. I have something close to 1,500 remote viewings done by Joe. And five pictures are chosen, only one is the right answer at each trial. And so there's a 20% chance of getting it right by luck alone. His score is 44% hit rate. Statistically, that's off the charts. But think about it, that means 56% of the time he blows it.
Starting point is 00:28:15 Interesting. And he's one of the best people we've got. Interesting. So how was it? Was it fun? I want to do it again. No, I'm not going to let you. I know, I know. We can do that. I'll tell you, I can do this. In fact, I work primarily through Zoom now.
Starting point is 00:28:31 I've got a woman in Milan, Italy, who's a crackerjack at this. No kidding. So I do the interview over, you know, and then she sends me the response by email. And I do the same thing I just did with you. So is this, is this some sort of a hobby for somebody like that? Or what do they do with it now? Well, what she does, uh, she works with some people and finding lost people, people who have disappeared. Okay.
Starting point is 00:28:58 I think Joe probably told you that that he worked with the Japanese on exactly that issue, but she does it for someone else, doing the same sort of thing. Interesting. Is this stuff still within government? I know that the project shut down. I would love it to be, and probably is a good time to dig into that a bit. A Navy SEAL, who will remain nameless,
Starting point is 00:29:23 invited us to try to restart Stargate. This was after Stargate was closed. And it never actually happened, but for technical reasons. But I think what's interesting is that... What do you mean technical reasons? The person in charge, I don't want to mention her name, it was an intelligence officer in Hawaii. And there were other reasons I wanted to put her out of business.
Starting point is 00:29:57 So it just, the money didn't come forward and we actually didn't do the experiment. But it turns out that the working class people, not the managers, like the intelligence officers, love this stuff. It works extremely well for them. That answers questions that couldn't get by normal intelligence means. The problem is we try to get it started again at the management level, flag officer level, kill it. They wouldn't take it. Interesting. Can I ask when that Navy SEAL invited you to give the presentation?
Starting point is 00:30:35 Was it recently? No, not recently. Probably 15 years ago. 15 years ago. Yeah. Okay. So people ask me, do you think the government's still doing it? My answer is, I hope so, but I don't believe they are.
Starting point is 00:30:49 Okay. And surprisingly enough, most of the money came under Republican administrations. No kidding. Yeah. Why do you think they aren't doing it anymore? For a number of reasons. First off, intelligence collection has drastically improved over the years compared to what was going on during the Cold War.
Starting point is 00:31:15 And so it's not needed as much. It's often used in law enforcement. There's a book written by a sociologist called The Blue Shield, and when he analyzed the workings of psychics with police departments, and sometimes that's quite valuable. But in terms of the intelligence collection world, it's not needed as much as it used to be. Okay. Literally.
Starting point is 00:31:42 I mean, it's noisy data. It should never be sole sourced And I don't mind saying this in public. I was on a television interview show with our nightline and opposite me was Robert Gates CIA director at the time and the the the Robert Gates, CIA director at the time. And Larry King, I think it was a fellow, interviewing me, in the green room they said, you should interrupt and make it really lively. And I caught the previous director of Robert Gates.
Starting point is 00:32:20 My own fear of a sitting there was I'm going to call him Bill Gates. So I called him Mr. Director all the time on TV. And it turns out that he said, there was no actionable single source, he used the term single source application that was correct, that was useful. And I said, excuse me, sir, you should never sole source information for actionable intelligence. We got into trouble that way, haven't we? So Larry King said, let's move on. And that's true.
Starting point is 00:32:56 And there were, I mean, it wasn't perfect, but it was good enough to keep people coming back. Very interesting, thank you. Well, we're gonna move into the beginning of your career. Before we do, I have a subscription account and it's Patreon. They are top supporters. They've been here since the beginning.
Starting point is 00:33:22 They're the reason that I get to have this awesome job and interview amazing people like yourself. And so one of the things I do for their extra support and love is I give them the opportunity to ask the guest a question. So this question comes from John Paul. Excuse me. In your research into psychics and remote viewing,
Starting point is 00:33:48 was there any indication of a spiritual or extra dimensional connection that may have suggested that viewers are being helped by or connecting with other entities, spirits, watchers, or other beings that then transmit information and visual perception of remote locations back to the viewer? No. No.
Starting point is 00:34:14 It deserves a better answer than that. It was a very interesting question. Those are important questions. Humans have been worrying about that ever since we scampered down from the trees. Those are really important questions. There's an idea in physics that says, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. So our approach has been just straight, hard-line physics, physiology, and psychology, and physiology. And these spiritual issues, however important they are, and it may influence people's reason to do this, but the question is, is that part of the mechanism by which it occurs?
Starting point is 00:34:55 I don't think so. And the reason for that is if it's pan-human, what it means is remote viewers can be found in Beijing, China. They can be found in Saudi Arabia. They can be found in India, even found here in Tennessee, for goodness sakes. Oh my goodness. In California, it goes across there's no cultural reason this does not work. And that is very good, I think more than substantial evidence that it's a genuine phenomenon, part of the homo sapiens species. And if that is true, and it's a big if, let's say, then it can't depend upon a particular spiritual worldview,
Starting point is 00:35:37 because there are so many different spiritual worldviews, including having none. Most of our people are non-religious at all. Fascinating. Now maybe meditation, which I don't think that Edward goes so far to call that religion, but a way to quiet your mind. There are many techniques. There was a conference arranged by our colleagues in Brazil.
Starting point is 00:36:02 It took place in Alexandria, Virginia, and there were five remote viewers and three managers. And what was fascinating to me, I went on for two days, we tape recorded the whole thing, that there was no two remote viewers that did the same technique. One person does it by dreaming. Another person does it like we just did business
Starting point is 00:36:24 like across the table. Other people have tried meditation. Other people have tried music, listening to that first. I mean, there are whole kinds of really bizarre ways. Doesn't matter. If you want to stand in the corner and spit nickels out of your mouth and do remote viewing that way, we're happy with that.
Starting point is 00:36:40 Whatever works, works. And our job is to try to figure out what is going on with that, what is going on. And we can talk a little bit about that later on in the interview, mechanisms. I would love to do that. So what you're basically, what you're saying is that you think that this is
Starting point is 00:36:59 species specific to humans. Yeah, now not exclusively, but what that means is there isn't a culture in Central Africa, let's say, or in Norway that can't do remote viewing. And anybody, any human can do it. Now, like any other skill that humans have, there's a spectrum. Some people really get on with it, some people can't do it at all, and most people are somewhere in between. So maybe we get into some history before we dive into your nuclear physics career.
Starting point is 00:37:30 Oh dear. Okay, go ahead. Since we're on the subject. But, you know, I had spoken about this with Joe on the show here, And it sounds like, if I remember correctly, it sounds like he thinks the same thing, that this was kind of maybe we've lost, maybe the majority of the species or maybe lost is the wrong word,
Starting point is 00:37:58 but we've lost the ability to do this, or at least we were having troubles accessing it. So if this is human specific, when, I mean, what's the evolution of this? And how did we, how did the majority of us, if I'm saying this correctly, lost the capability or at least don't know how to access? I think I disagree with Joe on that. I see no evidence that we've lost it. I could be, I don't want to misspoke, misspeak.
Starting point is 00:38:29 Now, I'll tell you why. As we'll talk later on in the interview, I've done a lot of work with the Russians now. And there's a cultural difference between Russia and the US. One of it is that it was kind of a misnomer in my view that the Russians are non-religious. They're very religious. There are like six or eight churches in the Kremlin alone. Stalin attended one church each week through entire years of the Stalinist era. They're very religious, but it's the Russian Orthodox Church.
Starting point is 00:39:12 And if you've ever attended a Russian Orthodox ceremony, there's nothing but mysticism. You go, there's no pews to sit there, you stand around, and the priest never even looks at you. He's mumbling something incoherent to an icon on the wall. So it's very kind of mystical. Whereas, after Luther and the rise of Vatican II, what's happened, unfortunately, is we've taken mysticism out of the practice of religious things. The Roman Catholic Church can give the mass in local languages instead of Latin.
Starting point is 00:39:52 My wife thought about this, and I'm digging into it with some colleagues, that one of the reasons ESP is so well accepted within the culture in Russia and not so here, is that they're used to mysticism. And people hear, well, what do you mean, take the mysticism out of it. And frankly, our work is not mystical at all. It's hard-known physics, physiology, and arithmetic. Fuzzy sets. I want to reiterate, maybe I've misspoken, but I remember talking to Joe about how communication was in early times, talking cavemen times,
Starting point is 00:40:32 that communication was a lot more efficient and deliberate than it is now, because in the conversation was basically saying as language came about, it took us longer. It takes longer for me to describe to you what I'm thinking and trying to convey to you at this moment in time when, but rewind, you know, thousands and thousands of years ago,
Starting point is 00:40:57 it was pointing, grunting expression and what he was saying as we started to travel more and more in groups and safety that we kind of, and language was kind of developed that our thoughts and the way we communicate it became less efficient. And so maybe what he was,
Starting point is 00:41:26 I should have listened to this before this interview, but maybe what he was saying is that because of the overcomplicated communication that we were developing, some of the other things may have slipped. Well, remote viewing isn't so much about conversation. It's about action. I mean, there was a fellow by the name of Rick Stanford,
Starting point is 00:41:47 no longer with us, a psychologist, who invented a procedure. And basically, the bottom line of it was, if this is true, that it's innate to human beings, some are better than others, that we probably use it at a level of unconsciousness. We don't know we're using it. And I can give you a firsthand experience like that. I was teaching at City College of San Francisco Physics, and a colleague of mine was coming from the East Coast
Starting point is 00:42:16 into San Francisco, and part of a convention in downtown San Francisco is before cell phones. And we had arranged that I'd pull up in front of the hotel at five o'clock in the evening, and we'd go out for dinner together. Okay, it's about a 25 minute drive from the school to that's, and I think, well, to get there at five, I've got to leave here at quarter,
Starting point is 00:42:38 quarter after four, to avoid traffic. I said, I'm not going to do that. It's a big, giant pain. And I gave myself all kinds of arguments why I don't want to do it. Not psychic at all. I'm sitting in my office, right? And finally I said, he's going to be really angry. So I eventually showed up an hour late, pulled up in front of the hotel.
Starting point is 00:42:59 He came running out of the hotel. How long have you been here? I just got here. Oh, thank God. I have no way of reaching you. I couldn't meet of the hotel. How long have you been here? I just got here. Oh, thank God, I have no way of reaching you. I couldn't meet you at five. So how did I do that? One explanation is I use my own unconscious psychic ability
Starting point is 00:43:13 that we all have to maneuver through life more efficiently than I would otherwise have. And there's a lot of data to support that other than just my own personal experience. Pretty interesting. Very interesting. Why do you think people like Joe are able to access this so much more efficiently and deliberately than others. Well, you could train me, get the best high jumping trainer
Starting point is 00:43:47 for the Olympics and train the tail off me. And man, I can clear six inches, not six feet, no matter what. So some people have innate natural skill. Joe is one of them. There are a group of people who think they can train to almost an unlimited skill level and you can't do that. You can only train to whatever the native skill level is.
Starting point is 00:44:09 Why Joe had that and Angela has it, other people do. About 1% of selective population have a native skill set for that. 1%. That's a huge number when you think about it. It's much larger than the number of people that can learn piano well enough to give a recital at Carnegie Hall. So our job is to figure out the answer to that question. I mean, right at the moment, I'm working with some neuroscientists in Brazil to try
Starting point is 00:44:36 to figure out what makes the difference between Joe's brain or somebody like him and someone who can't do remote viewing under lab conditions. If we figure that out, we make a giant step forward. What do they say it so far? Nothing yet. Nothing yet? It's a very difficult problem. They don't even understand much of standard neuroscience, so it's something as weird as
Starting point is 00:44:58 this. What do you think? My colleague and I wrote a paper together and published it in what's called Sage, which is a respected journal online, called Extrasensory Perception, a Multiphasic Model of Precognition. In other words, we have a testable hypothesis of how this might work. Now, it turns, I don't know if you've heard the term synesthesia. I have not. Synesthesia is well known about 4% of the population experience it. They, people who
Starting point is 00:45:38 have synesthesia called synesthetes, can, they see numbers in color. They experience music viscerally in their stomach rather than listening through their ears. It's sort of like crosstalk about various parts of the sensory systems in the brain, and that's been confirmed with a functional MRI and so on. So for all of our participants, including Joe and Angela, and they all have synesthesia, all of them.
Starting point is 00:46:05 And that is a huge clue about what's going on. And what that means is in the white matter of the brain, there's a lot of communication going back and forth across the brain, and we pause it, it needs to be shown if it's true or not, that someone who is really psychic like Joe will have much more hyperconductivity inside the white matter of his brain than the average person will. If that's true, we're home free. So we're working toward that end.
Starting point is 00:46:32 Wow, very interesting. How long have they been working on that down in Brazil? Two years. Two years? We're just barely getting started. In fact, Angela and I are going down to Brazil sometime later this summer as what's called a case study.
Starting point is 00:46:50 We're going to put her in a scanner and see how her brain is configured compared to baseline people. So we shall see. I can't wait to hear about that. Well, let's dive into you. OK. So nuclear physics. How did we get into nuclear physics?
Starting point is 00:47:11 What was the interest? Well, I went to a boys boarding school from seventh grade onward. So my sophomore year, I took biology, and I thought, I'm going to be a biologist. My junior year, I took chemistry. No, no, no, I'm going to be a biologist. My junior year I took chemistry. No, no, no, I'm going to be a chemist. Guess what my class, what was in my senior year was physics. And that's goofing around a little
Starting point is 00:47:33 bit. But the real serious issue, I've never had a good memory. And in physics, you don't have to remember as much stuff as you have need to in these other disciplines. There's no complicated Latin names for stuff and things of that nature. And you can remember just a few basic things and derive other things that you need because you're pretty good at arithmetic.
Starting point is 00:47:54 You don't have to remember it. And that's part of the reasons why I did it. I got interested because the toys were fun, accelerators and high speed electronics and things like that was lots of fun and I was darn good at it. How long were you involved in nuclear physics?
Starting point is 00:48:09 Where did you... Well, kind of graduate school, which I started in 1963, and I finally quit doing that in probably 1970. And I had a second post-doc. I was a post-doctoral researcher in nuclear physics at the University of California at Davis, California. And I thought, I was in academic world and I'm about ready to go to my second post-doc appointment at the University of Indiana.
Starting point is 00:48:41 And I flew to Indiana and I told my prospective new boss, I can't do this anymore. The toys are fun and I'm good at it, but I just don't care about the underlying issue, nuclear structure and nuclear reaction mechanisms, not nuclear power or bombs or any of that stuff. He said, okay, we'll leave the job open for a year. I said, okay, if you want to, but I'm done with it. And my father went ballistic. He said, we put all this money and all this education, you're tossing it aside.
Starting point is 00:49:11 Well, I didn't actually toss it aside. I'm still using it, the techniques. When did you work for the Rand Corporation? Oh, golly. I was 20 years old for the next five, six years as a summer student. I loved it. I was in the Earth and Planetary Sciences doing atmospheric physics work at that time. What is the Brand Corporation?
Starting point is 00:49:36 Can you explain that? Yeah, it's an organization. It's kind of a think tank based in Santa Monica, California, right on the beach. It's kind of a think tank based in Santa Monica, California, right on the beach. It's kind of a marvelous place to work. It's very theoretically oriented. If I were a better theorist, I'd probably still be working there because it was so much fun and interesting. They do everything from upper atmosphere physics, which was what I was involved in, to mutual
Starting point is 00:50:02 assured destruction during Cold War. That came out of the RAND Corporation, that whole idea. Or if all of a sudden Chicago left the map in a giant explosion, we would, according to the RAND Corporation, which was then accepted as policy, we would not immediately go to war. That might have been a mistake, a horrible mistake. But if it were a hell of a mistake, that's one thing.
Starting point is 00:50:26 But if other missiles were on the way, then we're on, we go to war. And I thought that was a wise decision at that time. I loved it, it was good fun. Were you involved in researching future weapons and things of this nature? Under Stargate, yes. We wanted to know the answer, not the development of the weapons, more importantly was remote
Starting point is 00:50:58 viewing capable of sensing exotic new weapons. The answer to that short answer was yes. Okay. So that goes into Stargate. Okay. There was a couple of loose ends I wanted to tie up there. But let's move into, so you gave up your career as a nuclear physicist. How did you get into, I mean, 49 years of research that has to do with the ESP?
Starting point is 00:51:23 Very good question. My boss at the University of California at Davis was a guy named John Youngerman. And I didn't know anything about psychic stuff, never heard about it at all. And he came to me and he said, Ed, would you like to help me do this really interesting experiment? So what are you talking about? Well, there's a pendulum going back and forth, back and forth. And the pendulum had at the bottom of, a really very carefully designed, very silver
Starting point is 00:51:48 good mirror. And the pendulum was designed, the young man did all this work, not me, I was just there, and it had a heartbeat period, boom, about one swing each second. And we could use laser interferometry to know the position of that pendulum down to a fraction of a wavelength of light, very accurately. So it's a really accurate thing.
Starting point is 00:52:14 And then we want to know whether people can concentrate on it and by magical psychokinesis, mind over matter, could they either increase or decrease that swinging pendulum? That was the whole idea. The problem is it was sensitive. That means it's sensitive to everything.
Starting point is 00:52:33 The end of the story was we had probably the most sensitive interstate 80 truck detector in history, which was two miles away. So we had to give it away. But I was like in my early 30s, 31 or so, and I saw an advertisement by a well-known psychologist, Dr. Charles Tart, Charlie Tart. He did the definitive work early on on altered states of consciousness. In fact, he was mentioned even in the movie called Altered States. And he said, well, there's a weekend seminar here by a guy named Bob Monroe who I'd never heard of, Monroe Institute. And, oh, nothing better to do. I'll go and
Starting point is 00:53:15 listen. They're talking about out-of-body experiences. Out of what, huh? Out-of-body? You're going to be nuts. What are you talking about? So here's this 50-year-old guy up there talking about the weirdest thing I've ever heard in my life, that he gets out of his body and while he was out of his body, pinched his girlfriend on the butt and raised a slight welt. I thought, oh really? And he wrote a book called Journeys Out of the Body, which I'd recommend. I have it on my shelf at home, read it. Read it in two sittings. I thought, well, he's a businessman. I'm a physicist. I can do this if he can. And so I gave it a good college try for a couple nights. Nothing happened and I put
Starting point is 00:53:51 away on the shelf saying, oh, so silliness. Well, I was down at UC Berkeley doing straight physics on the cyclotron lap there and I saw another flyer saying the science of extra sensory perception is a science of ESP. Are you kidding me? Oh, so I wanted to go hear that talk. And that talk was given by a guy named Mr. Charles Onerton, who's no longer with us, I'm sorry to say. And he was talking science. I mean, really, statistics and double-blind protocols and I learned about that from him, and he became my mentor, actually, and got me into this
Starting point is 00:54:27 field. Really? Yeah. Where did you go from there? He went to Edinburgh. We actually helped him financially to get to Edinburgh to do his PhD. He never finished college, but he was a very, very clever, smart fellow. And Edinburgh took him on as a PhD student, and he dropped dead on the scene there, unfortunately.
Starting point is 00:54:51 He had a congenital heart problem that took him away. Oh, man. Yeah. But it can, but I mean, your research, from what I understand, never ceased. So where did you go from, where did you go from there? Well, I met Ingo Swann. Ingo Swann is a well-known artist and psychic. And we did some work together with Chuck Connerton
Starting point is 00:55:16 at Piemonte's Medical Center in Brooklyn. In the Department of Psychiatry in the basement, they had a parapsychology lab doing dream telepathy experiments. And that's been written up by the chairman of the, by Yale University. What is dream telepathy? Somebody's in an isolated chamber going to sleep and they're monitoring movements of the eyes while the person's asleep so So you can tell when they're dreaming because when you're dreaming you get what's called REM sleep back
Starting point is 00:55:48 and forth and back and forth. And so an experimenter would see on the chart that he's sleeping, he'd press a button, somebody down the hall had view masters, those things would click three dimensional pictures of a scene and they were supposed to project somehow magically that information to the person's dream. Then in the morning when they woke up, they had the actual Viewmaster that was used for the stimulus plus three others, and the participant had to decide
Starting point is 00:56:22 which one was the right one. And that worked exceptionally well. So the View Master was a? It's a round thing like this little slide pictures in it, all of the same theme. It's three dimensions where you look through it, and you click on it to the next viewer of the same scene. So one of those scenes would have been in their dream? Yeah, not scenes, but one of the whole discs of,
Starting point is 00:56:52 the disc of a viewmaster was all on the same theme, but different views of the same thing. Okay. So there were different viewmasters with different scenes altogether, and the person had to pick out which one was the right one. What do you mean the right one? The right one that was-
Starting point is 00:57:08 The one that person was staring through while the person was dreaming all through the night. Oh, and that worked. You bet, big time. So you kind of came into this as a skeptic. It sounds like- I'm still a skeptic, actually, with regard to mind over matter,
Starting point is 00:57:26 so-called psychogonesis. But you came in as to the presentation to the Monroe Institute as a skeptic, then you got, you were really drawn to the science talk. Worked with them, then moved over to this. What, I mean, so what? Well, there was one amusing thing though, when we'd answer the phone in the basement
Starting point is 00:57:51 of Maimone's Medical Center, we'd say, hello, division of parapsychology, may we tell you who's calling? And if that cognitive dissonance on the phone, what are you talking about? But that was really good research there, actually. How long did that go on for? Oh, God.
Starting point is 00:58:11 It was run by Stanley Kripner, a well-known name in the field. He just turned 90. And Alan Vaughn. And Alan Vaughn introduced me to Ingo Swann. That's how I met Ingo, actually. And so what was, when you were doing the, sorry, what was it called, DREAM? I was not involved in the DREAM research. You were not involved in the DREAM research. What were they looking for?
Starting point is 00:58:35 Say they made the connection. Okay, the DREAMer is able to identify... Yeah, now the question is how and why and everybody we're still asking that question But what Chuck Arden said that no researcher wants to stay up all night It's a hard way to get one one one set of data all night because he multiple dreams Dreaming time over the night four or five times each And you don't get as a research. You don't get any sleep Yeah, so he said well, what is it about the nature of dreaming that makes us seem to work? So he guessed that it's what's called somatosensory reduction. In other words, you don't feel
Starting point is 00:59:18 cold or hot and your body is in a very comfortable, relaxed chair. So I said, well, there's other ways to do that besides being asleep. So he invented something from the researcher elsewhere in Germany called Gansfeld, meaning whole field. And what they do is they put you in, and it's an extremely interesting thing. They take a ping pong ball, cut it in half, and gently glue it over your eyes and shine
Starting point is 00:59:46 a soft red light in your face. So no matter where you look, you just see a patternless feature of the same kind of color, no gradients in it at all, and do the same thing with your ears with very quiet white noise. What you hear is shh, right. So there's no pattern. And what happens, it is bizarre as hell. I've been a participant in those kinds of studies. You know your eyes are open, you're told to keep your eyes open, and you know it's red, and all of a sudden it's dark. The red experience vanishes. Your brain says, well, there isn't any patterns here, we give up. So it's a kind of altered states of consciousness, except it happens at 20 minutes, not all night
Starting point is 01:00:31 long. And when that happens, then they do the same thing with the view masters or more sophisticated ways of picking a target. The participant still has to choose which of the four possible targets is the right one. So when the red goes away in the brain, sounds like the brain essentially shuts down. In that vision phase. Is the participant aware of what's going on
Starting point is 01:00:58 or are they completely? No, they know they're doing an aside experiment, but they don't know what's happening outside of their world. Do they, are they conscious enough to know that the red light is gone and react to it? Yeah, I've been there doing it. Not as a participant, you know, just to experience what the Gansfeld is like. It's bizarre. I know my eyes are open, but it's just black. What the hell's going on?
Starting point is 01:01:20 Now that gets to an interesting point for later on because all of our sensory systems, the big five that we know about, there's more these days than we have five, they're all more sensitive to things that are changing than things are not. So you're lying outside on a nice clear night, no streetlights, what have you, and you see the stars, it's really beautiful. What catches your attention is the satellite that goes over. And cops have blinking lights on purpose because steady lights are not as attractive as something that's changing.
Starting point is 01:01:55 So that gets us to something more interesting later on, how about a mechanism, how this works. Can we explore that right now, or would you rather? I'm sure, why not? Can we explore that right now or would you rather? I'm not sure why not. So we argued that if the S in extrasensory perception really is sensory, then the big five things we know is there must be some thing that works better when that thing, whatever it is, is changing compared to when that thing is not changing.
Starting point is 01:02:23 Because otherwise that's the way our other sensories work. Maybe the ESP sensory part works the same way. It does, and we found it. And that turns out to be something a little harder to describe, is the changing of the entropy of the target system. And that works extremely well. Can you elaborate? Sure. Best way to do that as an example, entropy is a measure of chaos.
Starting point is 01:02:57 And things that are, for example, if you put your water, which has molecules bouncing around it like mad, and put it in an ice tray and stick it in your freezer, it freezes them. What happens is that's a serious drop in entropy because it's less chaotic. Now there's a side issue here called the second law of thermodynamics, which I don't have to get into. If you reach behind your fridge, you know it's pretty warm behind a refrigerator. The heat that's taken out of the water to make ice is overly compensated by the hot behind the fridge.
Starting point is 01:03:32 But nonetheless, that change of entropy, that's called, is what correlates with the quality of remote viewing. And there's no doubt about it now. We have nine studies that all agree about that. So it says it is, in fact, a sensory system. Now we understand how if you're looking at the beach and the sun is sinking into the Pacific, it is well known those photons hit your eyes and how that carries the information into your eyelids.
Starting point is 01:04:00 It doesn't tell you anything about how you're going to respond to those photons hitting your eyes. You and I are sitting in the same beach. You start crying because you got engaged on that beach. I'm crying because my mother killed herself on that same beach. It's the same photons. So all that is generated internally with each human being. But still, in terms of the remote viewing stuff, the correlation with the entropy is
Starting point is 01:04:26 gorgeous now. It's really quite well established. Walter, you had mentioned five censories. You know, sight, smell, taste, touch, what am I missing? What are the other censories that you were... Oh, the new ones. Yes. Well, echo location.
Starting point is 01:04:50 People can talk and drive a complicated system on a bicycle and avoid all the accidents. I just saw a mini doc on this. Yeah, that's one. Magnetic field sensing for some people. What is that? To sense magnetic fields. In fact, they worry about, well, there's a power line over me.
Starting point is 01:05:15 My sensory system tells me, don't be near that because it's disturbing the magnetic field, and I can experience it. Some people have that ability. Not everybody. Not everybody can do echolocation people have that ability, not everybody. Not everybody can do echolocation. Not everybody can do remote viewing. It's like other human skills, there's a big spectrum.
Starting point is 01:05:33 Have you looked at mediumship? Interesting door. There's two kinds of mediumships. One is informational medium. A medium sits there and communicates for the dis-incarred entity, let's say, and you're finding out what that person has to say. Your old Uncle Harry passed away and you want to ask questions about it and so on. My way of thinking, if Uncle Harry was a moron during a life, what about the death experience wised him up in?
Starting point is 01:06:07 But the question always is, it's really interesting. I'm going to take a small break here on the talk. There is a worldwide organization founded by Margaret Mead, very famous woman. She was in charge of the American Society, no, AAAS, American Association for the Advancement of Science. And she inducted the Parapsychological Association as one of the affiliate members of that organization, and they still are a part of that. So it's a very serious thing.
Starting point is 01:06:43 Okay, so I was a member of the Parapsychological Association for years, and I went to the current president. I was president one year and on their board and all that. I went to this fellow. His name is Dean Raden. I said, Dean, I'm quitting the organization. He said, okay, what can I bribe you to do to stay for another year? And I sort of said, how much are you offering me?
Starting point is 01:07:04 And he said, okay, we'll give you, how about the career achievement award? I said, okay, fair enough. So the rules are that if you get the career achievement award, which I got, that you give an invited talk at the next year's convention about all your glorious contribution to sci research. Okay. So I'm there in my coat and tie and I'm behind the podium and I said, look, you guys have known me for 30 years and my contribution to this field is well established. Then I walked in front of the podium and put my hands on my hips and I'll say, now, let
Starting point is 01:07:37 me tell you what's wrong with you bastards. I ripped everybody apart, including me. I said, look, I'm a physicist. There is no way in hell I should be doing psychophysiology measurements. What do I know about that? I'll make all the mistakes that the people who started that made mistakes.
Starting point is 01:07:54 And we are all amateurs in that regard, including me. We're wasting our time. I would never involve and invite a student to get into this area until they get a serious degree in some other discipline and I bragged a little bit and then I said it's actually something I'm that's Sourful and that is I hold held a 20 year career job where I was paid industrial scale wages and
Starting point is 01:08:23 Benefits and vacation all that sort of thing, medical care. And I had no other job but parapsychology research. And as far as I know, and it's been confirmed, there's no one else in parapsychology history that can make that claim. And that's pathetic. You need to have a way to make a living that way, or why would you do it? So I don't know if I can say this on camera, but I'll say it and then you can edit it out.
Starting point is 01:08:52 I said, you know, I've been studying, I'm a physicist, I don't know anything about psychology, but I've been studying Freud a little bit. And, you know, dramatic way I did it, I said, you know, I've discovered why women are not as good remote viewers as men. Well, that turns out not true. I just said that. And I hesitated. And I said, penis envy. And the whole crowd started laughing hysterically.
Starting point is 01:09:25 I said, that is the right response to stupidity. What I said was made up and stupid. Now, I'd like to know how come you don't have the same response when you are pushing quantum mechanics as an explanation for this phenomenon. You could have heard a pin drop. That was the whole point of the thing. People came up to me, boy, we loved your talk. I thought they were dialing the tar and feather company to come and grab me.
Starting point is 01:09:53 Now paper's written up, it's been sanitized, so it isn't quite so grim. I can send a copy to you if you want. Thank you. Because it does raise an issue. There are three things that we don't know, no one knows. Number one, how long does, if you have a psychic experience, how long does it last? And that's really important to know. If it comes in bursts of milliseconds, there's no point putting in an MRI machine because
Starting point is 01:10:19 that takes 10 seconds to do anything, let alone milliseconds, forget about it. And second one is when most particular good remote viewers do not have control over their remote viewing. In fact, Joe and I talk a lot about what opens this. Look, if we have access as humans to all space and all time, and we were cognitively aware of it, to use a technical psychiatric term, we'd go bull goose loony and a heartbeat. You'd just overflow that information in your head. So the question proposes then, what opens that door to that vast array of information and what closes that door? We don't know the answer to either of those. One example of which, we did a study with Joe McMonagle at Stanford.
Starting point is 01:11:05 And we didn't get any result in the study. Part of the reason is everything that was happening to Joe psychically happened to him when he was pulling into the parking lot. He did not have control over that. So by the time we wired him up, the psychic stuff was over. And that's a serious problem. In fact, I sent back a $150,000 grant I had to study skin conductance in an MRI in Scotland with psychic stuff. And I decided I don't know who to put into the scanner or when.
Starting point is 01:11:38 That's a waste of money. And I sent the money back and we reprogrammed it. These are serious issues. And I've got some experiments on the drawing board now to test some of them. But it's a real tough problem. Back to mediumship. Okay. Oh, yeah.
Starting point is 01:11:55 Sorry. Got diverted there. The other form of mediumship is called physical mediumship. My colleague, Senali Badamaruwa, is the main person behind this with her colleague in Brazil, Everton Moraldi. She found 2,500 or so documents dating back to the 15th century on physical mediumship. Now, it's all fraud, all of it. And what that means, I mean, not our views, this is in the literature, people are top scientists of the day, including Michael Faraday, a well-known physicist. And the other problem with it is it's primarily contained into one culture. Remember I said earlier things are panhuman, it can't be in one culture.
Starting point is 01:12:51 This is in the spiritist community in Brazil mostly. And you know, they get pretty clever. Now my colleagues down in Brazil have spent a rather huge sum of money to redo the experiments. And I kept saying, all you're doing is making better measurements that have gone before, and we'll see. But I don't think it's real. So you don't think any mediumship is real? No, physical mediumship.
Starting point is 01:13:19 Physical mediumship. Yeah. But informational mediumship, of course, it's real. In fact, Julie Bachel from University of Arizona, she formulated what's called the Wind Bridge Institute. She actually wrote a chapter in one of her books. They now are doing grief counseling by using this method. You know, Uncle Henry passed away and the other survivors are grieving. So the medium gets in touch with that person, disencarded entity, if it's real. In a sense, it doesn't matter
Starting point is 01:13:54 whether it's real or not. I'm sorry. This is a little bit of information overload for me. So the two types of mediumship again are what? Informational medium. They give you information about what the disincartent that survival of bodily death that person is talking to the medium and that medium is telling you what the medium with the spirit told her. Physical mediumship means creating things out of thin air like ectoplasm this weirdly weird stuff or thin air, like ectoplasm, this really weird stuff, or physically meant, it was called table tipping in the early days.
Starting point is 01:14:30 The tables would rise up and it's all done in the dark. Tables would ride up and move, or table wrapping. You'd hear people banging on the table, spirits doing that. And physical mediumship is what you're saying is... That's what I'm just talking about. ...is all fraud. I think so according to your research
Starting point is 01:14:52 You had brought up the magnetic fields was actually caught my attention about people who maybe Don't want to walk under power lines because it interrupts a magnetic field. What do they? What do they say about that? It's a very controversial area. I Was a woman I know in Moscow, Natalia Dedeva. She did the definitive work on, if you hold your cell phone up to your ear, like a lot of people walk around all the time, is that radiation hurting you in some way? And the answer for her research, no. She got the Lenin Prize for her excellent work in science.
Starting point is 01:15:25 She's come to visit me in Palo Alto. Interesting woman, very smart. She worked for an organization called the Institute for Higher Nervous Activity. It was like that. I don't know whether that's what she meant, but very competent. Whether or not there's danger for living under a power line, I really don't know the answer. I don't think anybody does. But a lot of people think there must be
Starting point is 01:15:49 and they choose never to live under them. So what do you think about people that have this sensory? Magnetic sensory, that's a real phenomenon. I mean, for example, if you have hemoglobin in your blood, which we all do, hemoglobin has a magnetic aspect to it. So it's not at all surprising that, in fact, homing pigeons get to where they're going because they can see the Earth's magnetic field, feel the Earth's magnetic field in their own blood. And some humans can do that also that are better at it.
Starting point is 01:16:27 Fascinating stuff. Fascinating stuff. Well, Edwin, let's take a quick break. Okay. When we come back, we'll get into your time at SRI. Look around. War, inflation, recession. Did you know that many experts call gold the everything hedge?
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Starting point is 01:20:36 and in 1985, became the program's director. Can we dive into how you got involved with SRI? Well, it was late 75 as a consultant. That was arranged by Ingo Swann. Okay. Because Ingo and I had worked together at Mamadi's medical center and published some of our results. And he couldn't tell me that it was all classified.
Starting point is 01:21:04 But he said to me, you know, you're a physicist. And he couldn't tell me that it was all classified. But he said to me, you know, you're a physicist. Gee, I'm involved in some work at SRI that involves physics, and I'd like to know whether you'd be interested if I were to bring it up. And I said, well, I'd need to learn more about it. Well, let me go talk to the people in California about it first. So I found out later Ingo threw one of his infamous tantrums and screamed and yelled. To defend himself, I think Hal hired me as a consultant.
Starting point is 01:21:35 My job was, because being a physics manager in experimental work, not theory, there was a magnetometer that was being used at the laboratory. The idea was that Engel was supposed to use his psychic ability to distort the magnetic field around the magnetometer. I said, okay, fair enough. I'm good at debugging these things. Let's see what happened. So I went and I bought a few dollar bar magnet, little tiny bar magnet. And the magnetometer was in the lab and I was outside in the hall and I just walked
Starting point is 01:22:14 doing this with the bar magnet, flipping it back and forth. And the strip chart recorder followed my thing. In other words, it wasn't as well isolated as it should have been. So in a sense, I did my job as to show that, hey, don't put much faith in this. Fix it or quit. It was funded by the Navy, actually. So that was part of it, what started it. And I ended up being a consultant all the way up until 79.
Starting point is 01:22:45 And finally they decided to hire me as a senior research physicist. My consulting was not part-time, I was full-time consultant. Oh good. Yeah. So they hired me as a senior research physicist and went on from there.
Starting point is 01:23:02 What kind of stuff were you guys getting into there? well What well we the agency well first of all people think of our program as an S as CIA program They accounted for less than 2% of our entire funding Really? Yeah, they didn't fund us Well, let's talk about so you were on percent. Were you on there when the agency started funding? I was there while it was still funding it But not at the beginning. No, can you talk about do you do you have knowledge about what caught the? CIA's interest. Yes in this program. In fact, it's in one of my published books about it because the CIA released it
Starting point is 01:23:48 In fact, it's in one of my published books about it because the CIA released it. One of the things that's really fun in my briefing is to make fun of the CIA, which I do extensively, because the Congress ordered the CIA to release everything. So there are like five or six copies of the same paper with different redactions on each of these paper. So I've got a letter signed by William Casey, the director of CIA, where his name is not redacted. All the other versions of it, his name is redacted. And it says, you know, released by the CIA with this number, you know, so it's not, I'm
Starting point is 01:24:20 not breaking any laws, right? They did it. And the only thing they redacted and the whole damn thing was the author of the memo to Casey starting the program. And they didn't redact his name. They only redacted his signature. And you can see that because a little bit of the part of his signature sneaks out underneath the redaction. Wow.
Starting point is 01:24:45 Come on, guys. I mean, they didn't give a damn. They were just doing it all together. What caught their attention to give any funding whatsoever? Very good question. I think I know the answer to that. It was Ingo Swann, actually. Ingo was doing some work, first of all, to back up.
Starting point is 01:25:06 There's an organization in London called the Society for Psychical Research. And it was founded in 1882 by some of the top scientists of that era. And that spawned a number of sister organizations, one of which was called the American Society for Psychical Research, based on 73rd Street in New York, Manhattan. In fact, I was invited to give a talk there, so I went to my management at SRI. They did some background and said, oh my God, that's older than the American Physical Society, so go, which I did.
Starting point is 01:25:38 But the ASPR worked with Ingo Swann. And it turns out that Ingo could describe some randomly chosen target in the above the tiles in the roof over his head. And a guy named, I think it was Ken Kress in those days, an agency fellow, S&T shop guy. Science and technology. Yeah, right Said well if this is real we probably don't think it is but it has intelligence implications if it is real And long story short it was real
Starting point is 01:26:15 Who was the first well, I guess not who what was the first agency? I mean this went to Lots of lots of organizations got caught interest in this. I mean, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency. Yeah, I know exactly how it moved. Intelligence arms of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, US Secret Service, Department of State, the Department of Justice, and the FBI. All of these organizations caught wind of this and expressed interest.
Starting point is 01:26:47 Well, let's put it this way. Eventually. Eventually. Basically, the CIA was in deep trouble because of the Nixon administration, and they wanted to get out of the business themselves. They already had a big problem on their hands. And FTD, Foreign Technology Division of the Air Force, based out of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, took it up after that.
Starting point is 01:27:18 Our contract monitor was a guy named Dale Graff, and he's still around, delightful man, personal friend. And he was a guy named Dale Graff, and he's still around, delightful man, personal friend, and he was a contract monitor. We had funding from FTD, from the Air Force, for a while. Then a long, very complicated story, it doesn't matter how it happened, but Dale shifted over to the Defense Intelligence Agency. He left FTD as a civilian employee to the Air Force. And he went, he's a physicist and moved to actually a Boeing Air Force base, which is part of the DIAC, Defense Intelligence Agency Analysis Center is what that's called in Washington.
Starting point is 01:27:59 And then he became our contract where we got a lot of money from DIA. What were they wanting you to do? Unfortunately, not research. It's all intelligence collection. So they kept giving us tasking to do this. This was long before Fort Meade remote viewers were involved. No kidding. So this... Yeah, we did it for the most part until 1970, probably 1979. So was the funding to actually collect or was it...
Starting point is 01:28:33 The funding was to collect. It wasn't to research. No, absolutely. And we bitched and moaned about it. We did have... We could do some research because we heard, well, the Russians are doing so-and-so. Well, is that real? So we would do research to see whether that had any validity to it or not.
Starting point is 01:28:48 What was it the Russians were doing that caught their attention? Well, let's see, quite a number of things. One of the things were somebody down in Crimea had, I think there the rats running around and somebody in Moscow was Using their influence to change the behavior of the rats And we said, okay, we're not gonna do this with rats, but it's involved psychokinesis. So we did some psychokinesis research Can you talk about psychokinesis Yeah, it means mind over matter. It's a long, long thing.
Starting point is 01:29:28 And there are two ways of thinking about that. One is behavior of a physical system that you need statistics to understand whether something's really happening. And or what's called macro PK, that you don't need statistics like this. You just levitate to the ceiling. You don't need statistics. The guy's doing it right. So I argue with my colleague in India right now.
Starting point is 01:29:56 There's something called poltergeist. Have you ever heard of that term? No, I haven't. What that means is noisy ghost. And so there's a lot of work on poltergeist phenomena. Very strange things happen. And I leave the door open that maybe something interesting is actually happening there. A very respected guy taught for 50 years at the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology.
Starting point is 01:30:28 And he wrote a number of books on poltergeist. And he saw this one case where the classic case is it's a very religious family and with a brand new infant and a prepubescent teenager, didn't matter what gender. So Arthur Hastings was his name, he's passed away quite some time ago. Arthur writes a story that he was witnessing firsthand, there was this teenager, that classic case, this little baby boy was lying naked on the bed
Starting point is 01:30:58 and he watched a set of rosary beads fly off the dresser, wrap the beads around the genitals of this little baby boy, and Arthur had to reach in to pull them off. What is going on with that? That's hard to fake, it seems to me. That's an example of large-scale something or another. Was that real? I trust Arthur, yeah. Wow. Wow. Now, my colleague in India who's a neuropsychologist thinks, well, there can be what is called group hallucinations. And on this book, the last author here
Starting point is 01:31:38 is a guy named Lloyd Auerbach, because the first version was written like it was written by, designed by a committee and it read that way. And I said, Lloyd, can you fix this for us? So he rewrote the whole book. I'll tell you a side story, and it's his story. You'd be interested to have him come and talk to you. He's a ghost hunter and not a crazy one.
Starting point is 01:32:02 And there's a aircraft carrier, the Enterprise, permanently docked in Alameda, California as a museum. He was on the board to get it set up safe for humans. There are all kinds of funny stories that talks about that. A whole bunch of engineers were sitting in the below deck aircraft hangar, and not open to the public yet. They see three guys in World War II military uniform running along a gangway high up. He said, you could see them, but you couldn't hear them. And everybody in the room saw them, and they disappeared.
Starting point is 01:32:44 You're not supposed to be here. They didn them, and they disappeared. You're not supposed to be here. They didn't answer and just disappeared. Then poor Lloyd got the impression with all his buddies trying to make this place safe. They were joking with him all the time. Hey, talk to your ghost buddies. We need some more chain. We've run out of chains,
Starting point is 01:33:02 and ghosts are supposed to have a lot of chains. Oh yeah, right, right. Then came the next day, there were mounds of chains all over the deck. Where the hell that came from? The story of his, he talks about it like the best. One of the board members was really a grumpy old guy and just didn't want to prove anything and scream and yelling. So they said to Lloyd, is there anything you could do not to hurt this guy, but to make the idea real to him?
Starting point is 01:33:27 Well, it was a typical lightning storm like we had yesterday here, and a tree hit in the parking lot of this Alameda, and the tree fell over and crushed this poor guy's car. He wasn't in it, thank goodness, at the time. So what the hell's going on with that? And Lloyd's written a whole book about it. In fact, I'm having lunch with him Sunday. Oh, really? Yeah.
Starting point is 01:33:51 So Lloyd talks about basically he's a ghost hunter and not a crazy one, you say? Definitely not. This brings me, this interview is not going the way I had planned, but I'm just going to go with it. But I just want to say, in your introduction, we had said that you believed, it sounds like you believe consciousness dies with the body.
Starting point is 01:34:14 I do. And so if you believe your colleague, your former colleague and friend Lloyd, is hunting ghosts and he's not crazy. How do I square that round hole? Yes. Very good question. And Lloyd's agreed with us. We talk about this a lot that the assumption
Starting point is 01:34:40 that this is a distant cardent entity, a ghost, even though they call it, you know, they call it ghost, noisy ghost. But it may not be that way. There may be some other mechanism of the more normal type, not fraud, some other mechanism that might be involved in that psychokinesis. All psychokinesis, if it's real, and to me it's an open question, Not true on microcyclochinesis, but macrocyclo is still open for me. But it does not necessarily require a disincarticent entity. That's an
Starting point is 01:35:15 open question. I might be wrong. Hey, I've been wrong before. What do you think happens when we die? Nothing. You think we're just dead, lights out? Yep. How did you come to that conclusion? Well, I can't say by experience yet. Talk to me for 10 years from now, we'll figure it out. I've done a lot of reading and most neuroscientists believe that consciousness is an outgrowth
Starting point is 01:35:50 of the brain, an emergent property of the brain. And if that is true, consciousness cannot survive burning the brain in a crematorium after you're dead. You can't do it. Have you looked into near-death experiences at all? I haven't, but I've certainly looked into the research. There's an organization called the Templeton Foundation. They spent half a million, five million dollars, sorry,
Starting point is 01:36:19 on research labs all over the world to address the question of near-death experiences. And the Templeton is well known for spiritual things like that. And they publish it, you can go to their site and read it, that the idea was that they cannot find data to support that that is a real phenomenon. The experience is real, but whether that, you know, you see your dead grandmother and you go in the light, you see the light, all those things, trouble is, it's an interesting report because I say those are kind of expectations now, didn't start off that way. When you have a near-death experience, and Joe had two or three, I think, and he saw the rain going through his fingers.
Starting point is 01:37:06 I think even he saw the light as well, if I remember right. Did he tell you the details of his near-death experience in Austria? Was this when he was poisoned? He did. Good. I normally don't mention that. So those are interesting open questions, which gets to the point. People ask me, why the hell are you doing this research? Any kind.
Starting point is 01:37:33 And for me, the answer is, I'm just quoting Chuck Connerton, actually. He said, you know, we may not be able to solve these questions about do you survive your possibly death and what is the meaning of life and all of those important serious questions. It may be that we are adding tools to the toolkit that somebody 50 years from now will be able to answer those questions. Do you, with what you've come up with, the fact that you think that consciousness dies with the
Starting point is 01:38:05 body and there is no afterlife, I mean, does that? Yeah. Well, Jews don't believe in an afterlife to begin with, for starters, but that's not why I don't believe in it. Does that, do you fear death? Not that I know of. In fact, it seems to me, I guess I can use a Star Trek example, which I was really loved. And briefly, the Star Trek was going around some planet and they had a visitor from the planet there who was a brilliant
Starting point is 01:38:45 astrophysicist. They knew that the star for that planet was going to go supernova and he was working on the details to stop that from happening. And he has a romance on board the spaceship and he says to the woman, I have to go down for my exiting ceremony. What are you talking about? On our planet, when you reach 60 years old, you gather your friends and relatives around and at the end of the party, you're dead. And he said, we do that because we need fresh blood. We need new people, new thinking. But you're trying to solve, no, no, no, no.
Starting point is 01:39:20 And so she talks him out of going down to the planet for his exiting ceremony, and all the relatives come up and are ashamed of him. And finally says, I've got to go. And she says, I now understand. I'll have the pleasure of being there with you. So in some sense, I feel that way. In fact, let me ask you this way. I've got a magic pill here.
Starting point is 01:39:44 If you take this pill, you will live for the next 150 years with perfect health. Would you take that pill? Probably not. Why? Because I do believe in an afterlife. Okay. And I look forward to getting there.
Starting point is 01:40:07 Okay. Fair enough. That's a good answer. That's one of the best ones I've heard. I wouldn't take it. Because part of life is the renewal. Can you imagine working for the same boss for 150 years? Forget it. It's bad enough our Congress on both sides of the aisle, they're all too bloody old as far as I'm concerned. We need some young folks.
Starting point is 01:40:32 I can definitely agree with that. Yeah. So that's a serious critique. I mean, part of the problem is, here you are, World War II vet or maybe 50s, and you see a problem. And boy, you go through the process and you finally get elected to Congress. By the time you get there, the problem no longer is relevant, but you're stuck in that realm. And you see that all the time.
Starting point is 01:40:57 And I don't care what part of you're talking about, you see it all the time. That's a terrible way to run anything. Agreed. Agreed. Agreed. So let's not get into politics. Yeah, let's not do that. But, you know, the other answer to that is there's a lot of beautiful things about life, family, lots of stuff. Sure. You get to see them growing up and all that.
Starting point is 01:41:25 We're all just trying to get through it. Yeah. And everybody, I don't know any other way to put it, but everybody's got their shit. Everybody's got their ball and chain, they're dragging around with them as they go through life and it gets heavy, it gets real heavy at times. And I believe when we go,
Starting point is 01:41:48 we leave that ball and chain behind. But that's interesting. You don't fear nothingness. Now, I've never been confronted in a battlefield where I'm facing death straight on. We'll see when my time comes. But right at the moment, no. And I'll tell you what I'm doing.
Starting point is 01:42:12 I'm retiring from SIRESURGE at the end of this year because my, how would I refer to it, my step-not-stepdaughter would be a daughter-in-law. My daughter, Jamie, is married to a woman named Laura, as a matter of fact. And she is a grief counselor, she's Jewish, and a grief counselor at one of the big health organizations called Sutter Health. And we've become really close friends.
Starting point is 01:42:46 She is helping me transition. And she bought me a book about, oh, it's a centimeter thick, and it's entitled, You're Dead Now, Now What? And what that is is very, it's not about survival of bodily death. What it is is documents. It's a book of, not to read, but to fill in so that people left behind will know what your passwords are, what your bank account numbers are, and
Starting point is 01:43:14 all the details that people have to undo when you're gone. I loved it. I just absolutely loved it. And we could have an honest discussion about death and it was actually fun. Believe it or not. I'll take your word for it. Yeah. But, wow. Well, let's get back to SRI. So we're talking-
Starting point is 01:43:38 Speaking of death. Yeah. We were talking about, you know, the agency, what caught the agency's attention to get the funding. Who was the first intelligence organization to fund SRI? Was it CIA? Yeah.
Starting point is 01:43:54 And then everybody else followed? Was it shortly thereafter? Well, the CIA quit because they were in trouble already. So it was picked up then by FTD. And then Del Graff went to DIA and they were funding us. And then I landed a $10 million contract with the US Army Medical Research Development Command in Fort Detrick. And the commander there was a two-star general and MD. And I thought, oh man, he's
Starting point is 01:44:27 got two strikes against him. He's a doctor, oh no, and a general, goodness me. Turned out he was the most fascinating man I ever met. We became really close friends and Diane and I were at, when his son got married, at the head table with him. He spoke a number of languages, I don't know how many, including Mandarin, just a very clever guy. And what he wanted to spend, he took... You know the term MIPR? Have you heard of that in government funding? No.
Starting point is 01:44:57 The Congress cannot, in fact, fund anybody except a executive branch agency. They can't fund SRI or me or you. So they have to send the money called MIPRA, the money to some other organization. So that's how we got most of our money that way by a congress directly. But Garrison Ratman, Gary Ratman took $10 million out of his own department funding, not money coming from Congress, to figure out how does this stuff work. He was the first one to say, we are doing research here to figure out how this worked. Now it's not well known and it's not secret.
Starting point is 01:45:45 We had some remote viewers on board spacecraft, remote viewing our targets on the ground. We want to know whether the Earth was a shield or not. It was not. You put remote viewers in space? We didn't. Gary Ratman did. Our job was just to run the experiment on the ground. Let's talk about that.
Starting point is 01:46:13 No, let's not, because I don't know anymore about it than what I just told you. It's not written up at the CIA anywhere. Okay. All right. Not because it's secret. It's just one of those things you try and see what happened. How about daily life at SRI? Why were you guys, what were you guys doing on a daily basis?
Starting point is 01:46:33 Having lots of fun. Because we had special clearances that most of the other people at SRI did not have. And we had one whole wing of the building, second floor, and cipher locked doors at each end. That meant behind those doors we could do stuff that no one else could do at SRI. Like when we had birthday parties, we had wine and cake and all kinds of good stuff. Had parties and stuff. We worked hard and we played hard. good stuff. Had parties and stuff. We worked hard and we played hard.
Starting point is 01:47:08 We had Friday afternoon, Siam Media Emporium on the upstairs third floor of the building, a lab. We'd show movies and have popcorn and beer. Neither of which, well, we're supposed to have beer, but we did anyway. But that Play Hard was very, very important because it was a team organization. And when I took over the team, it was really a whole shift and a good one, I think.
Starting point is 01:47:39 And they enjoyed me as much as I enjoyed them. How were you guys doing your recruiting? That was hard. Because you can't legally in California, maybe in the whole country, ask your questions on a recruit to join the research group that you are not supposed to ask. Does this bother your religious sensitivities? Really important question.
Starting point is 01:48:09 I figured out a way to sort of tease that out of somebody because it's really important. We had an 06. Colonel Pete McNelis sat on my head for four years and drove me crazy. He was a devout, devout Roman Catholic, and what we were doing absolutely violated his whole principles about everything. And it just caused us just a huge amount of grief. How would you recruit your subjects such as people like Joe? That's a different story. The Army and Fort Meade, the big question is, how can we get more psychic intelligence
Starting point is 01:48:55 officers? And today, we still don't have, in fact, the folks down in Brazil asking that same question. We have psychologists looking at every sort of personality factors, doesn't matter. Health factors, yeah, it plays a role. Genetics factors, we don't know. But none of the normal tests of skill of any kind, external skill, the only thing we can do to find who's good at it is have a room full of people try it and do it two levels.
Starting point is 01:49:29 Pick the 10% best people in the room, have them come in one at a time for eight sessions, and then decide whether they're any good or not. And when we did that, there was as much as 600 people over time, 1% of them performed excellently under laboratory conditions. And that's frustrating. That's why we're hoping in Brazil, if we get a neurological signal in an MRI, that's much better to find people. So you went through 600 subjects. They were in groups.
Starting point is 01:50:09 For example, two alumni groups from Stanford, a group from Mensa, and they were pissed off that the Stanford group beat them, which I predicted would be the case. Mensa people too much in their heads. The US Geological Survey Group, which was right around the corner, and SRI itself. In fact, it was really interesting. SRI has its own internet system. And so I started asking, we're going to have a brown bag lunch, we're going to do some remote viewing. And one guy, forgotten his name now, just went, listen, we thought we got rid of those morons, this fraudulent nonsense bullshit. Why are we doing this blah, blah, blah? Well, we had 50 people from SRI sitting in the room, and this guy was in the front row
Starting point is 01:50:59 like this. Oh, boy. He did the best in the room. This can't be real, but okay, come on, we're gonna do our eight sessions on it. He scored beautifully and we're still good friends. He says, I think I can fake it. No, I'm sorry, you're screwed with it. You have this ability, my friend, own it.
Starting point is 01:51:19 Out of 600 people, we got six subjects. That's 1%. 1%, yeah. And so, you know, when you're trying to figure out if this is genetically passed on, what kind of experiments are you conducting to try to figure this out? None.
Starting point is 01:51:42 None. That's very difficult. Our group don't have, we don't have a skill set to do that. The folks down in Brazil do. You need to do familiar work. You have to familiar me, empathy and families. And we have a couple of data points that suggest like Angela Ford is an identical twin,
Starting point is 01:52:09 and I had the pleasure of working with her identical twin. And at least with one trial, she seemed equally as good as Angela. And Joe claims that his fraternal twin was equally as good as he, but I never met her. She had passed before that. So two data points don't make a model. That's where we are.
Starting point is 01:52:30 What type of experiments were you conducting on the surface? Just regular remote viewing like we just did. When did it? That's a bread and butter thing that I just did with you. Have Laptap will travel, like the movie Have Gun will travel. I mean, the experiments, did they not develop into anything else, or was it the same experiment over and over and over and over again for 10 plus years? We've gotten very sophisticated about it.
Starting point is 01:53:03 I brought in a whole new mathematical approach to it, which people have wondered, how do you know in advance whether a particular remote viewing is good, bad, or indifferent, particularly if you're doing intelligence collection? You don't want to invest a lot of money if it's bullshit. So how do you prevent that from happening? Until our group didn't know, but now we do know how to do that. Confidence calling, so to speak.
Starting point is 01:53:30 Was SRI experimentation strictly on, well, I know it wasn't strictly on remote viewing, but what else were you guys conducting studies on? We did a bacteriological study, a PK on salmonella bacteria. And the dependent variable is the mutation rate of the bacteria. And there's a whole group at SRI that studies that sort of thing. It was kind of funny because we were triple blind. The head of that department knew what we were doing, but the person making the samples of salmonella bacteria, we had nine test tubes and she'd pour them into nine test tubes from the same batch and label them one through nine, lock them in an empty fish tank.
Starting point is 01:54:20 One of our colleagues, Beverly Humphrey, would go and collect it. They'd put a tarp over it and she'd wheel it across the campus to our laboratory, right by the active ingredient of food poisoning right next to the cafeteria. We've got to be careful about that. The idea was two ways. Participants were asked to take the three test tubes on the left and decrease the mutation rate by psychokinesis. The three test tubes on the right, increase it, leave the three alone. That was one condition. Another one was randomly,
Starting point is 01:54:59 depending on which participant, you could pick any three test tubes you want to increase the mutation rate, pick any other three, any ones you want for the decrease, and then the ones left over you left alone. That worked extremely well. And we have a different reason why that might work. It had nothing to do with psychokinesis. What is the reason? Well, there's a variation,
Starting point is 01:55:28 there is a statistical variation in mutation rates anyway. So if you could use your psychic ability to find the ones that are faster mutating anyhow and say, I'm gonna increase it there, you're not doing anything, you're just picking out ones that are more likely to be increasing and ones that are more likely not to be decreasing using remote viewing, so to speak.
Starting point is 01:55:51 In fact, we developed a whole procedure and published it called decision augmentation theory. In other words, ESP is not good enough to make major decisions. You should never do that because it's unreliable, but it can augment your decision a little bit in the right direction. And that works. In 1985, I believe you were named Director of Stargate. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:56:19 Can we talk about how that happened? Sure. What those conversations were like? Well, I was standing on very tall shoulders. Hal put off on Russell Targ. Russell, they started Stargate, not named by that then. Russell left Greener Pastures in 1982, and Halell left in 1985. So I inherited the directorship.
Starting point is 01:56:46 I'm glad. I loved it. I was better at it. That's a big deal. I'll bet you were glad. What did you want to change about the program, if anything at all? Was that an interesting question? Better communication.
Starting point is 01:57:05 Hal was a very talented guy, still is. I like the guy a lot, but he just hardly communicated with anybody and anything. We used to joke behind his back, his right hand doesn't know what his left hand is doing. He used to work at NSA, and I think that as a Navy guy, and that might have influenced it, but it was hard to get how to communicate with you. And with me, I'm the other way around. I communicate too much. When NSA, CIA, FBI, Secret Service, one of these government organizations would approach,
Starting point is 01:57:43 who would they approach when they wanted somebody to remote view a target? Would they approach SRI? Would they approach Joe specifically? Were you a part of that? Well, before the Fort Meade group were involved, which means up to from 72 to all the way up to 79 about. SRI did it all, all the operational work. And so how would get a notice from, I don't know, Department of State? One of the things we worked with was the Korean tunnels under the DMZ zone. Where the hell that came from, I don't know.
Starting point is 01:58:32 But some of those things, they contacted either the people—well, they were the funders, so they would call the SRI, we would RFP, request for proposal. And we'd give it to them. What are... Were you present during these remote viewings? Which ones? Any of them. All of them? Well, from...
Starting point is 01:59:00 This director? From 85 onward, yeah. What are some of the most fascinating ones that just stick out in your mind? I'll bring one up. OK. That I want to ask you about. When I had Joe in here, he had talked about,
Starting point is 01:59:17 he remote viewed Mars, I believe, maybe it was 1 million BC, and saw, and there was a pyramid. Are you familiar with this? Yep. I'll let you pick it up from there. I don't believe a word of it. You don't believe a word of it?
Starting point is 01:59:39 No, because you can't get psychic functioning. It requires data feedback that it was correct or not. You cannot prove that statement. That's why I don't buy it. Well, I appreciate you saying that. What are some... Because that's a fantasy. In fact, do you know that there was a group called Heaven's Gate that had mass suicide
Starting point is 02:00:01 in California? Because one of the remote viewers from Fort Meade said, oh, the Cahotec comet is coming by and it's followed by a spacecraft full of lizard people. He remote viewed that. And they're going to come and invade the earth and eat all your youngsters or whatever the hell it was. And 40 people, I don't know what the number is, I made it up, but a large number of people literally killed themselves out of fear.
Starting point is 02:00:29 And I got called into it, what the hell's going on? I was asked by the cops about that. That's the danger of making remote viewing without feedback. He had no idea what the hell he was talking about. That's the danger. It makes a lot of sense. hell he was talking about. That's the danger. Makes a lot of sense. What are some remote viewings that you witnessed that did have feedback?
Starting point is 02:00:54 Sure. That were accurate. Yeah. One of the things that the Department of Energy was interested in, could we use remote viewing to sense directed beam energy systems? And we had two that they paid for, $50,000 for remote viewings for each,
Starting point is 02:01:18 for one viewing on that problem. And one of them was called Project Rose, it was very classified at that problem. And one of them was called Project Rose, it was very classified at that time. It was a microwave, high-powered microwave generator in Albuquerque, New Mexico at San Dio National Labs. And we didn't know that, of course, at the time. We were held blind and said, here's the geographical coordinates where this person is gonna be standing a week from today.
Starting point is 02:01:49 Tell us what you see. And Joe absolutely bloody nailed it. He said, it's a, whatever it is, I mean, I can show you the PowerPoint on it, but he drew a, in fact, it'll bring an interesting thing up here in a minute, a contained environment. He drew something that looks like a microwave generator horn and some other details detailed about it. And he said, this thing is a testing,
Starting point is 02:02:26 it's testing, destructive testing of something. He didn't know what it was. And it turned out that's exactly what this thing was doing. They were shining this high energy microwave thing on electronics to see what the effects were on the electronics. It was called Project Rose. And however, about a month later, we gave
Starting point is 02:02:47 Joe feedback by driving to that location. On the way there, Sandia had a solar collection farm, a huge maybe 100-meter field of mirrors focusing the sun's energy on the top of a tower. The tire was sparkling like crazy with all that. And we're stopped there, and I said to Beverly Humphrey with it, let's put a sack over Joe's head, he shouldn't be seeing this, because it's in his future.
Starting point is 02:03:13 And his whole responses were full of mirrors, and the target had nothing to do with mirrors, which raises a really interesting question. But he nailed it, we showed him the generator and it worked really fine. We did another one on a higher... What was the interesting question? Pardon me? You'd said that that rose an interesting question. Oh yeah, okay. In fact, I'm designing a study now to study this in very effect. Look, let's suppose you're doing a remote viewing.
Starting point is 02:03:48 Somebody randomly chose something and it was a gas station. And on the way to give you feedback, there's a building on fire. Oh my God, look at this. And that is far more interesting for you to remote view than the actual target system. Okay. Yeah. So the question then is, how do you prevent that?
Starting point is 02:04:09 I don't think you can actually. So, actually, Joe came up with this idea. We did an experiment to test whether this business of changing of entropy, does that help people remote view? And we did that by creating sort of an entropy bomb, as it were, that the experimenter would be out at the site and half the time she would pour liquid nitrogen into a bucket full of balls and that would evaporate in eight seconds. And that would be a huge change of entropy. And for that catch to be moving, it's like a flashlight in a dark room.
Starting point is 02:04:45 With some caveats, it worked beautifully. Now there's some funny odd things. Outside a Catholic church, the priest would come out, what are you guys doing? Oh, it's an experiment. Don't worry, there's a big cloud of stuffs coming out of this box. A lot of very funny stories about that. But Joe made the point, it was really, really interesting. He said, you know, to prevent the things I was just telling you, the tasking was this. Okay, Sean, please access and describe the first thing you see when we take off the blindfold.
Starting point is 02:05:22 In other words, instead of driving to the gas station and here's that building on fire, we'd have the blindfold. You wouldn't even see the building on fire and it would take it off looking at the... and that worked beautifully. In fact, much more precisely than I imagined because in the middle of the study, Angela Ford's twin sister passed away, and she couldn't come out to California. So I flew to do the finish up her trials at her house. Now that mean that can't take her to the site. But everything else worked just the way
Starting point is 02:05:54 it's supposed to work out in California, except when I found out what the site is to be, I said to Angela, wouldn't tell her, so please put on the blindfold, and we'd sit patiently on her couch as if I was driving to the site. And I'd say, OK, we're pulling into the parking lot now, Angela.
Starting point is 02:06:10 And I had unprofessional photographs of the site. It was predefined where you stand and where you're supposed to look at first. That was all predefined. So I would take Angela to a blank wall, hold that picture for that site right in front of her, take off the blindfold. It was statistically equivalent to doing it in real time at the site as opposed to the photograph. That worked beautifully, a piece of Joe's research.
Starting point is 02:06:37 Wow. Wow. What are some more, what are a couple of other ones that just blew you away? It had to do with the directed energy system again, a high energy electron accelerator at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. And actually I cheated in some sense, at least in my briefings, and I'll fess up to it every time. in my briefings and I'll fess up to it every time. Joe was to do remote viewing in eight hour segments, saying, track this guy that's going
Starting point is 02:07:14 to be on site somewhere in the Bay Area. After the whole thing was over, we had one of the women on our project was a right sitter for United Airlines, so she was a private pilot as well. We flew over at Lawrence Livermore lab at a high altitude, we wouldn't get into trouble. I took pictures that flattered the data. Didn't need to because the Air Force was funding this, and they did the analysis, not me. But in my briefing, it looks overwhelmingly delightful.
Starting point is 02:07:51 And I say, don't believe this as much as good as it looks, because it isn't, because I took pictures to make it look good. I fess up to that every time. But it's very, very stunning. I mean, Joe, for example, described the headquarters, the office building at Lawrence Livermore Lab, the shape of the building and the right number of floors, and he got that right. Because that's where the guy was planning for the execution later on. Wow.
Starting point is 02:08:19 Pretty impressive stuff. Yeah. Wow. Anything else that really sticks out. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Anything else that really sticks out? Anything in space that caught your attention? Yeah. Ingle Swan did a project going, quote, out of body to Jupiter.
Starting point is 02:08:41 And he did a, quote, flyby by Jupiter. I said, Ingle, how the how do you know where Jupiter is? You can't find Jupiter on a map. How did you know how to do that? So I have no idea. I just said, here Jupiter, here I come. And he was the first to describe in advance of NASA that Jupiter had rings like Saturn. Pretty impressive.
Starting point is 02:09:02 I mean, what's what's what is going through your head? Well, hold on. Let me. How long? I don't know what's going through your head right now. My mind is blown. So what was the time between when he had remote viewed Jupiter and found out that there were and saw brings to actual imagery of it.
Starting point is 02:09:26 I don't know what that's a check, but it was not immediate. It was months. It's only months. Yeah. And so what's going through your head after they came with that imagery? Oh, that's impressive. Are you kidding? Well, we did another one with the remote viewer.
Starting point is 02:09:46 It turns out that Jupiter has a whole bunch of moons. One of them is called Io, and it goes around Jupiter very rapidly. It's very close to the surface. It suffers an eclipse every orbit. So, I went to my boss at SRI because Bulletin Watch Company wanted to give an award for somebody with the greatest, the most interesting experiment on time. So, I said, hey, I want to go to get that. And so my boss said, are you interested in winning the Bulletin Watch Company or do you want to actually do the experiment?"
Starting point is 02:10:25 I said, I really want to do the experiment. So he said, I'll fund it for you. So with this participant, we'd be up at three in the morning. So I had to, the remote viewing was, tell us in time when you remote view the moon of Jupiter and it's half lit. That was the definition of the eclipse time. Half lit by the shadow of Jupiter. I forgot how many trials we did.
Starting point is 02:10:53 It was quite a number of them. And he was right within plus or minus 10 seconds. Now the question is, in what time frame did he get that? Did he get it before the... because we had hired a telescope at Chabot College to make the measurements for us? Because how do we know when it was? Which they did for us, we paid them for it. So the question is, did this participant named Gary get it in Jupiter's time, which was 40 minutes ahead of the telescope, because it was 40 light minutes away, or did he get it in... So the question is, what do you think?
Starting point is 02:11:34 In other words, is remote viewing faster than the speed of light? Jupiter time. That's when it appeared. But the question is, did he actually get the data at that time? I think what happened is he got the data. He had his experience at that time, but he was actually getting the data from precognition of the next day's photograph we showed him the answer. That's really hard to separate out. Wow.
Starting point is 02:12:14 Wow. Some of these things are pretty hard to do, actually. Yeah, I could imagine. Actually, I can't imagine. You know, wow. Yeah, I could imagine. Actually, I can't imagine. Wow. What? Come on, you're here. You see why I have so much fun with it.
Starting point is 02:12:34 And it's challenging and it angers me that we can't figure out how to do this better than we do. Yeah, you know, and I'm learning a lot. I wanna, so what's the Fort Meade piece? Are they an in-between? Well, so what I'm starting to understand is, is SRI's, Stanford Research Institute, this wasn't their sole focus. You were the director of a program within Stanford Research Institute, correct? Oh yeah, SRI does a whole lot of stuff, sure.
Starting point is 02:13:09 So that, I did not realize that. And so was Fort Meade the bridge between agencies and SRI? No. Russ Targa and I completely agreed on this, that started with Ingo Swan. Ingo was, he told me once that I should not be his friend because he's a bitch on wheels and that was an understatement. And he said, I hate flying out here to California to do your stupid experiments. There's an office in New York City for SRI.
Starting point is 02:13:51 Let me do the experiments there. And Hal said, sure. And Ed and Russ Targ said, no, no, no. He's not a scientist. You need supervision on this. Well, Hal said, no. And that started something we're paying deeply for even now, an Ingo Swann cult. That Ingo went there and trained.
Starting point is 02:14:15 He was a brilliant guy, but he's not a scientist. And that started the Fort, the Fort Meade people went up and were trained by all this guy and almost none of them produced actionable intelligence. So these are two totally separate entities? Yeah. Almost competitors? No. Our job, my job, was to do research to make their job better.
Starting point is 02:14:40 Okay. And they never opened any of my classified emails. Well, that's a shame. Yeah. Okay. And they never opened any of my classified emails. Well, that's a shame. It's definitely a shame. They could have had a much better product. When did the Hemi-Sync come into play? It never did.
Starting point is 02:14:54 It never did? Mm-mm. Do you believe in the Hemi-Sync? Not at all. The reason is it's bad neuroscience. It's just not right what they're doing. How so? Joe, and I've had a conversation with Joe about it because it was... Can you describe what hemisync is for the audience?
Starting point is 02:15:16 Yes. Hemisync is supposedly this, that based on radio technology, that if you get slightly different frequencies in your ears, that you get the sum and difference of those frequencies, like what's called heterodyning. And that supposedly is what's hemispheres synchronization, that's where hemisyn comes from. Except that was put up by Bob Monroe himself, and it has never yet to this day been put to a test. I've asked Joe that, have you had any neuroscientists check that out?
Starting point is 02:15:54 And the answer is no. And Bob Monroe was not a neuroscientist, but it's part of the milieu of this company. And Gordon, it, a wonderful experience. I don't mind people having experience about it. But in terms of whether it improves or doesn't or related to remote viewing, who knows?
Starting point is 02:16:18 So you don't consider anything to enhance this or you're looking strictly at factual information? Pardon? You're looking at strictly factual information that's been tested through science. Absolutely. It's weird enough as it is if I start putting goofy stuff in there.
Starting point is 02:16:36 Is there anything else that you, that is, that you're not buying off on that has to do with the remote viewing space, such as the Hemis. Yeah, remote viewing, flying saucers on Mars. In fact, Joe makes this big point in his book, his remote viewing secrets and all the stuff that he writes. And we've given joint talks together at Monroe actually. And I love the guy dearly and we were brothers. And the question then becomes, if it's a study, and I didn't invent what I'm about to tell
Starting point is 02:17:18 you, if it is a study, there has to be eventual answer to that study. Maybe it's not what you expect, it's some other answer, who knows? But there's some answer to that study. Maybe it's not what you expect, some other answer, who knows, but there's some result of that study. If you don't have a result of a study, it's fun to do, it's fantasy. You have no idea what you're doing. So if you have something, and a guy by the name of Stevenson,
Starting point is 02:17:39 Ian Stevenson is his name. He did the definitive work at the University of Virginia on survival after bodily death work. Very clever guy. And even he said that he cannot separate experimentally whether someone's having an experience of a former life, or they're using extra sense of perception to get the same data. That's a real tough question. I didn't invent that, he did. But we've taken that and put mathematics behind it to where he can actually test whether it's
Starting point is 02:18:21 decision making or something else is going on. If it's decision making, psychically decision making, or is else is going on. If it's decision-making, psychically decision-making, or is it a causal effect? And we can test that. You just mentioned previous life. What are your thoughts on that? Don't believe it. Because the evidence are self-reported, all of it.
Starting point is 02:18:42 If you want to know something that is really bad, we humans are horrible at describing our personal experiences accurately. We are. In fact, there are two jobs that people do. One is a magician, and the other is a therapist. I come to you as a therapist. Gee, Sean, I just met this fantastically beautiful woman today, she is funny and cute and brilliant and all of that.
Starting point is 02:19:16 And you said to me, Ed, when are you gonna understand you hate your mother? That's the point. That we, in fact, there's books written on it. That's the point. In fact, there's books written on it. In fact, there's even a short video online that you can look at called The Invisible Gorilla. I recommend the book written by these two people, and they outline all the ways in which
Starting point is 02:19:38 we are masterful at fooling ourselves. So I'm skeptical about that, because I get fooled equally well. In fact, Doug Henning was a really magnificent magician and Chuck Arnott and I went to a Broadway show of him doing this stuff and it's really amazing. So I told Chuck, I'm coming back here tomorrow and I'm going to figure out one bloody trick, how he does it. So I sat there in the center, seventh row center. I could not figure out any of it, or better yet.
Starting point is 02:20:10 There's a guy, Dale, I'm blocking on his name, he'll come to me in a minute. And he's a brilliant researcher, and Darrell Bim is his name. He'll come to me in a minute. He's a brilliant researcher. Darrell Bim is his name. He was at our house for dinner in Palo Alto. After dinner, a lot of fun. Diane was sitting at the head table. I was sitting to her left and he was sitting to her right and our daughter was next to him. He said, okay, I'm going to do a trick. This is a trick. Now, I'm going to push this quarter that I have through the solid oak table into a cup. So he goes, clink.
Starting point is 02:20:55 Yeah, that's a trick. Now, I'm going to break the rules and show you how it's done. So he said, it's sleight of hand. The coin is already in the cup before it goes under the table, and you think it's still in my hand. So when he did it again in slow motion, knowing armed A, that it's a trick, B, when and where and how it's happening, in slow motion you can see it happening, at full speed you couldn't see it. I don't trust my observation, first-hand observation, of anything.
Starting point is 02:21:29 Really. We're terrible at that. And so a lot of this BS online comes from that sort of stuff, unfortunately. I mean, I was blown away. Damn it, I know you're cheating, but I can't see it that it's happening. In fact, I was giving a talk at the SPR in the Society for Psychological Research in London, and they were bragging. I was the last on the docket, Teacher Day, they call it, and everybody was bragging their
Starting point is 02:22:03 field research. They see this, that, and the other thing. So I put in this 20-second video called The Invisible Gorilla. I'm going to blow it for you there. What it shows, and you can go online and see it, but now I'm ruining it for you. There is two teams, three people with black jerseys on and three people with white jerseys on, and each team has their own basketball.
Starting point is 02:22:28 And the idea is that they, the people with white jerseys can only throw their basketball to other white jersey people. And the black jersey people, the same thing. They don't match their balls, all right? And your job is to count up the number of times a white Jersey person tosses a ball to another white Jersey person. Now I set it up at the SPR.
Starting point is 02:22:56 I said, you know, we've been doing this research for some time and don't understand, we Americans are so much better at it than you Brits. So they're, oh yeah, I'm gonna counter-fire. And right in the middle of this 22nd video, a guy dressed in a gorilla suit stands right in front of the camera and goes, eee, nobody sees him. They do not see this gorilla.
Starting point is 02:23:21 It's called the invisible gorilla. And I think there are two people out of 70 in the room that saw the gorilla. It's called the invisible gorilla. And I think there are two people out of 70 in the room that saw the gorilla. And the point being is, and they said, you bias this. I said, yes indeed. And you guys bias yourself when you're out in the field. We're all susceptible to biases. And the book called Invisible Gorilla is very interesting
Starting point is 02:23:43 because there are all kinds of other examples of the same problem. How do you explain that? Oh, well, terms. You focus on what you are biased for and you tend to ignore the details. So you're so focused on who's passing the ball to who that you miss a gorilla front of the screen banging his chest.
Starting point is 02:24:10 In fact, what they do, it's really interesting. They've done eye tracking. You can put eye tracking on your eyes. The people are watching the gorilla, but it doesn't appear in their consciousness, which is really interesting. Say that again. Okay. They can see that they're counting the balls going back and forth, but their eyes are noticing the gorilla because they can follow the fact that the gorilla is moving and they eye track that that's happening.
Starting point is 02:24:45 At the same time, they're trying to look at the ball at the same time. So they are seeing it, they're not just registering it in their consciousness. Wow. What are some other examples of that? Well, one I like a lot, it's online as well. You can see this. I come to you, Total Stranger here in downtown Nashville. I'm trying to get to the Grand Ole Opera Theater. I got a map. Back in the day, some people had maps. And so I'm here and you start pointing all this stuff out to me on my map. In the middle of our conversation, two colleagues of mine carrying an opaque door
Starting point is 02:25:25 walk right between us, rudely so. And I changed places with somebody carrying the door who has a map. 80% of the time you don't realize you're talking to a totally different person. Even when the gender changes or the race changes. It's just amazing. It's just so, we are not tuned at looking at the total unexpected stuff. It's fun to watch that happen, it really is. Very interesting.
Starting point is 02:26:01 Edwin, let's take a break. When we come back, I want to get into some of the stuff we were talking about with the oversight committee. Okay, good. I'd love to. How many of you guys out there are worried about brain health? All we hear about is fitness. Everybody's getting ready for bikini season because spring's right around the corner.
Starting point is 02:26:21 I'm personally more concerned about my brain. You look around, you see all these brain diseases that are getting out of control. I'm gonna take everything I can to improve the health of my brain and I'm gonna tell you about my five favorite supplements from Laird's Superfoods that help with brain health. All right, the first thing I do every morning is I have Laird's Superfood Creamer. It's got adaptogens and functional mushrooms, which are great for brain health.
Starting point is 02:26:51 I put this in my tea, tastes amazing. Who likes vegetables? Cool, me neither. That's why I take Laird's Daily Greens. Just pour it in a cup, shoot it real quick, you got your daily vegetable intake. Plus, guess what? Yep, that's right, functional mushroom extract. There's six different kinds in here. Once again, great for brain health. After greens, we got daily reds. This one doesn't actually have any functional mushrooms in it, but
Starting point is 02:27:19 I can't stand beets. I think they taste like shit, and so I take one scoop of this, put it in my water, and I don't have to eat beets anymore. All right, we're winding down the day now. This is the next supplement I take every single night, Laird's Sleep and Recovery. Helps me sleep, helps me recover from my daily workout, and guess what?
Starting point is 02:27:37 Yep, you're right. It has mushroom extract. Guess what? It's good for your brain. And I saved the best for last. Most of you know this. My favorite supplement at Laird's is Performance Mushrooms. Has a ton of mushroom extract.
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Starting point is 02:28:48 Thank you. Let's get back to the show. All right, Eben, we're back from the break and we're getting ready to dive into some of the stuff we were speaking about at breakfast when it came to the oversight committee. Okay. So what can you tell us about what you're experiencing with the Oversight Committee?
Starting point is 02:29:10 Well when General Ratman with the Army Medical Research and Development Command funded us, he said he wants to have an oversight, people who can overview us. We actually had three committees. One was a scientific oversight committee. Another one was a policy oversight committee out of the Pentagon to make sure we were doing what we're being told to do. And then we had medical oversight. We had to prove, you know, that it turns out that the army has more strict rules on dealing with human subjects than does the National Institutes of Health. So we had to make sure that was the case. For example, we were forbidden to use women in psychokinesis experiments based on them
Starting point is 02:30:03 because we don't know about this. Maybe there's a field effect and if they're pregnant and we kill the fetus, you know, all that stuff. So we had all those masters. The Scientific Oversight Committee consisted of 12 individuals who were the who's who of science during that era. Two Nobel laureates, one of them in physics and one from the medical world, he was the doctors without borders kind of guy. Their job had threefold.
Starting point is 02:30:36 One is to review our protocols for each study before we actually collected any data to prove them. Well, it turns out we were pretty good at that, so that was a fairly fast turnaround time. The second job that they had, which they never actually used, was to have drop-in privileges unannounced to watch what was going on. They never did that. They never did that?
Starting point is 02:31:03 No. We paid them $750 a day for their work when they came to SRI. Third one is that we had to write up, I guess my first time running the show, I had something like 13 different tasks that I had to do this year, and each one had a final report and so on. We submitted the final reports before sending them to the client, the government agency, to the oversight committee. They had the rights to respond in writing. In volume two of the Starglade Archives book, their stuff is all there.
Starting point is 02:31:41 I published it critiquing us. And then they would come to SRI and meet in person with us. And that was for me a thrilling experience. We went about close to 80% of the arguments that we got into with these guys, but the best part of it was the 20% we lost, because we learned how to do the product much, much better. If you say, were they all convinced about the reality of ESP, absolutely none of them were, but they were all convinced we were doing the best science one can do in the topic. in the topic. It was amazing. And we had one guy on the oversight committee who was chief of statistics, head of the statistics
Starting point is 02:32:34 department at UC Riverside. He was all wrapped around the axle over our fuzzy set arithmetic. But I showed him one of the examples that had no data other than just the example, in fact, I'm going to show it to you later, of remote viewing of directed energy system. He saw that and says, now I get it. Well, I really went after him on that. I said, why are you accepting something that is unacceptable? It was only one trial and you're accepting it and you're rejecting years worth of work
Starting point is 02:33:10 on this because you don't like the arithmetic? He sort of truttled off with his tail between his legs. Was that the same directed energy thing that Joe had remote viewed with the mirrors? Yeah, Joe did all. We had actually three, but we only published two of them. There was an underground nuke which we nailed, but we didn't, never went anywhere. Can you tell me about that? Well, we just didn't do it. So, I don't know if he actually ended up doing remote viewing it or not, I don't recall.
Starting point is 02:33:51 The captain in the Air Force who was protecting, it was done by AFTAC. Air Force, what's it, AFTAC, Threat Assessment Center. That's AFTAC. Did the Oversight Committee present any challenges for you guys? Yeah. It was a good challenge. They said, you know what you should do? Design your experiments that everybody's cheating.
Starting point is 02:34:19 And make sure that they can't, even if they were cheating, it wouldn't affect the result. That was a challenge. How would somebody cheat on a remote viewing project? Well, that was before we did everything precognition. It's really hard to cheat when the target hasn't even been chosen yet. So how can it cheat? But there are sensory leakage, for example.
Starting point is 02:34:43 Somebody who knows the target comes through the room and signals to the remote viewer what the answer is. Why would they do that? Oh, God knows why people cheat, period. I mean, have you experienced that happening? No, we never saw that. Are there any other methods? Oh, sure.
Starting point is 02:35:02 On the Gansfeld, where everything has to go through electronics, so the person in the Gansfeld is listening to stuff, was there sensory leakage inadvertently because the crosstalk between the experimenter and the sender? So that is not really cheating, but it's a way that results get cloudy and you can't believe them. Would you find that the remote viewers are looking for some type of edge? Quite the opposite. You know, they had these experiences and they're meaningful to these people. They don't want to be accused of cheating themselves.
Starting point is 02:35:46 This is real to them. They're not cheating. How would the remote viewer experience a failure? Something, I mean, I think you had mentioned that Joe was correct 40% of the time. Oh, he was 44%. 44%. So how do they, because I could imagine there's gotta be some type
Starting point is 02:36:07 of a psychological component to this as well. I mean, athletes deal with this. A lot of people don't, you know, not everybody knows how to deal with failure. Failure can get in your head. You see it with athletes. They get into a slump. It takes something miraculous for them to get it back.
Starting point is 02:36:27 Maybe somebody's making bad grades, they get into a slump, somebody in, I mean, just from my own experience being an operator in the SEAL teams, I mean, people, if you have a bad house run and, you can get into slump with anything, right? And so I would imagine with a 44% success rate, which you're telling me is phenomenal. How do they take failure?
Starting point is 02:37:01 Well, it turns out that's wholly individually dependent. Joe's just fine of it. Hey, it doesn't work all that time. Who cares? Angela Ford, same thing. When we're doing associational remote viewing to make money on the stock market or something like that, she only gets hits 20% of the time. That's fine with her because it makes a lot of money.
Starting point is 02:37:30 But the other side of that, we've had people we've had to dismiss. And Ingo Swann was one of them. Ingo Swann would scream at Hal, you're five minutes late, you're ruining my rise time. He would scream at Hal. And then he starts blaming- What does that mean, you're ruining my rise time, he would scream at hell. And then he starts blaming... What does that mean? You're ruining my rise time. That's Ingo saying he's preparing for his study.
Starting point is 02:37:50 He's getting risen for it to do the study. I'm just quoting Ingo. I have no idea what that actually means. Ingo required us to change all the fluorescent light bulbs in the entire lab to solar spectrum because the regular ones are destroying his remote viewing. He was really to blame everything else on his failure except himself. That came later in his career, and that's why he himself quit. We had some other people.
Starting point is 02:38:18 In fact, I've been trying for years to get Joe McMonigle and Nevin Lance, a psychologist, to write the risks of remote viewing, which there are serious risks. One is, depending upon the personalities, you begin looking at your own persona in terms of your ability to do remote viewing, And that is a huge psychological mistake. We've had to let people go. People at Fort Meade have had to let people go who go, to use a technical term, crazy for doing this stuff. It's rare, but it happens.
Starting point is 02:38:57 So most people handle it just fine. I mean, hey, fine, no problem. I'll come back tomorrow. So you're saying that some people that have this ability and realize that they do have the capability wind up driving themselves crazy. How so? And why? I don't know why. I'm not a psychologist.
Starting point is 02:39:17 Does it bother them that they have the capability? No, it bothers them that they failed. It bothers them that they failed. Yeah, those few people. I asked Nevin Lance, the psychologist, I said, Nevin, how do you integrate what your remote viewing ability is with the rest of your life?
Starting point is 02:39:34 He said, I don't know, I wish I could integrate the rest of my life as well. Oh! What are some of the other risks? I don't know, I think that's the main one. That's the main risk? Yeah. Is just dealing with failure.
Starting point is 02:39:50 Yeah, if you start believing your stuff too much, it seems to me. I'm just overlaying my own thinking out loud rather than any serious stuff about it. So you're saying basically remote viewers Will get emotionally attached to their capability you bet and it's really disasters for them as well as to the unit. Okay Okay, well 1992. Mm-hmm. It sounds like you started Some type of a relationship with the Russian KGB I did I'm an honor remember not of Russian KGB? I did. I'm an honorary member, not of a KGB. Turns out, I first went, I think it was even before, no, 92 is the first year, an expat Russian named, her Christian name was Laura V. Faith. Her Russian name was Larisa Velanskaya. Very, very talented woman. She worked with Kogan in his classified research
Starting point is 02:40:55 laboratory on Psy. Why the hell the Russians let her out, I have no idea, but she immigrated first to Israel because she's Jewish. And then she came to the States and over a long period of time she ended up getting a citizenship, becoming a Christian, and then working teaching Russian at the Defense Language School in Monterey. And we hired her out of that, she got her clearance. And so I went to Moscow with her probably four times, one of which was all the way out to Novosibirsk. And she was very protective of me. So on one time we were, I guess one of the last times we were together on that trip, I was giving a talk at the Moscow State University. She was translating for
Starting point is 02:41:48 the students. And you know, I'm dressed like, I'm more dressed now the way I normally dress, I have a t-shirt on. And the students looking like students, and two guys in suits walk into the back of the room. Uh-oh, two guys in suits. This isn't a good deal. Turns out they were from the Ministry of Defense. And they wanted us to come with, Larissa and I, to come with them. And we went to, do you know what a SCIF is? Have you heard that term? S-C-I-F.
Starting point is 02:42:18 Spent a lot of time in a SCIF. Me too. So we went to a Russian version of a SCIF. And in there was Alexei Yuribets-Savin, this guy who I gave you pictures of, who ran the Russian remote viewing spying program. Don't slouch this guy. He has two PhDs, one in philosophy and one in mathematics. And he had a group of remote viewers, 120 remote viewers in his program. We probably never had more than 25 at any given time. And men and women and their remote viewing group was called 1003.
Starting point is 02:43:06 And Joe and I both have medals about this big that we're honorary members of the Russian remote viewing group. Wow. Yeah. I meant to bring my medal with me, but I have a picture of it. You can see it. And he was never, I've never met him in uniform, but he was reporting to the head of the general staff, which would mean in our world, that would be equivalent to reporting to the chairman of the
Starting point is 02:43:30 Joint Chiefs. That's how high up this was. Well monitored by the Russian hierarchy military. GRU loved it. When Jai was there once with Joe, we had a group meeting with a whole bunch of remote viewers. They're remote viewers, and I got to work with one of them, Elena Klimova, who was equally as good a remote viewer as Joe. He trained them in hand-to-hand combat, weapons training, that sort of thing. And I said, Alexei Yuryevich, what about remote and remote viewing you don't understand? He said, well, when the bullets are whizzing over their heads, they're highly motivated.
Starting point is 02:44:20 Because he took them into the Chechnya war. He retired, Savin did, and we became really good friends. And I've given talks to his students and what have you. But he—we were sitting around a table after a two-day conference, the first day of which we were all slugging down. I mean, that would be a Russian shot of vodka, not this, that. You had to swig it in one gulp. I had 11 straight of those.
Starting point is 02:44:58 I should have died. I mean, I was really miserable. I'll bet you were. Because I don't drink that much at all. The next day, I was filling my. I'll bet you were. Because I don't drink that much at all. The next day, I was filling my glass with water. No notice. Well, maybe no one said about it. But in the middle of that, the way you refer to senior Russians is not just Alexei or General
Starting point is 02:45:17 Savin. You use the middle name, which is really important. Yuravich means son of Yuri. It's a really important part of the Russian culture. So in the middle of all this, he had a staff, he was still working for the military. His staff was there at the table. Joe was with us. And I've got pictures of him and Sabin. In fact, I gave it to your colleague for you, showing they were completely blitzed on vodka. But I said, Alexei Yordovich, and he interrupted me and spoke to me the only time in the 20
Starting point is 02:45:59 years I've known this man in English. He said, Ed, we're our friends. Call me Alexei. And the, Ed, we're our friends. Call me Alexei in the staff and... Then he switched back into Russian and it was being translated by Victor, Victor Rubel. And he said, I know you've been trying to get my organization chart. Here it is. And I know you're going to report a contact report. You have to write it up. Yes, sir.
Starting point is 02:46:27 That's true. What you have to do is let the people at DIA know I want a joint program with you guys. And I said, on what? He said, well, you have the same problem we do, and that's terrorism, because people were blowing up subway stations in Moscow. And I said, I would be honored to join you on that. So I wrote up a 30-page relatively classified document and handed it to the three-star in charge of the DIA in the Pentagon.
Starting point is 02:46:57 And he was all excited, oh, this is really great because it's cheap, a bottle of scotch kit, everything you need, and you're not putting anybody in harm's way. It's ideal, and they want to do it, and we want to do it. And the three stars said, well, okay, I'm going to Moscow in a few weeks. I'll look him up, and we'll get moving on it. So I walked out of his office in the Pentagon, and you could practically hear him throwing the paper in the burn bag.
Starting point is 02:47:29 Never happened. So it never went anywhere. It's interesting because I was wondering, what does the oversight committee think? You're dealing with classified information, a lot of classified information at the time. I can't imagine a relationship with the Russian KGB going over well. And I mean, well, that wasn't it was FSB by then. The KGB was long since dissolved. But I had to get approval because I had SCI level clearances to do this.
Starting point is 02:48:03 And I got them. And they approved it. You bet. What did you, I mean, what are some of the, what did you think of the Russian Remote Viewing Project? Was it more advanced than us? Did they come farther along? I talked to Victor.
Starting point is 02:48:19 Victor Ruble was in the Red Army. He's now an American citizen and delightful man. After Larissa passed away he was my minder in Russia and Damn good at it. I mean he was protecting me no matter what But Victor said, you know, the Russians never declassify anything I Mean I I've got a 40-minute video from Russia Gazeta Company, which is probably the go-to newspaper for military issues. We were front page, full front just rather astounding that I gave a talk in English that was being
Starting point is 02:49:13 translated into Russian, and I showed the example of this, of Ingo's clay model of this radar site. That piece did not show up in the 40-minute video they published. Fortunately, I have a friend in the audience who sent me a video of that. So, they're a little nervous about that. I had the same-of-think problem. I was giving a talk. I was invited with four other Westerners to go to Hong Kong on extra-centric perception stuff, funded by a guy named Bingo Wu.
Starting point is 02:49:54 That's his name. He's a very wealthy character. The five Westerners were there, plus 100 young Chinese kids, kids, I mean really kids, who were trained by Qigong masters. Supposedly all kinds of psychic ability. Eventually I had to go up to Bingo Wu later and I said, don't ever do that again. This is child abuse for these kids. Because they had to conform to the Western standards of activity. For example, they would claim to be able to put a matchstick in a jar, seal the jar, and
Starting point is 02:50:34 then by psychokinesis break the matchstick. Because they sort of believed their own story, they said, Ed, you can make your own, here's a bottle. And you can put your own matchstick in there. So I wrote some stuff on my matchstick so I know it was my match. And I put it in there and we could use clear wrapping tape to keep making sure that it wasn't opened. I then put some symbols on the bottom of the can
Starting point is 02:51:01 to make sure it was my can. And this poor girl, she was probably 15 or 14, she had it in her forehead for 40 minutes and nothing happened. And she was distraught. And fortunately there was a guy there named Simon Kwan who speaks totally fluent Chinese, but he speaks English with a British accent, because he was on the British government liaison on matters of trade with China. And I said, you know, Simon, please comfort this girl for me, because I was not angry with her in the slightest.
Starting point is 02:51:45 And eventually she, and so I have a picture of the three of us hugging each other. It was really sweet. And I went up to bingo woo and complained bitterly about it, but she could not do it and she was distraught. Did any of the kids accomplish that? Nope. And one of the things that they had, a hundred kids, a hundred of them, and they divided them into two teams on a basketball court.
Starting point is 02:52:07 And all of the we Westerners were sitting and watching this happen outside. And the idea is these blindfolded kids were going to throw a ball through a hoop. It wasn't a game of basketball. They were just free throw through the hoop. Except I got pictures I could show you from my computer. The kids like this, looking through his blindfold. It's so completely, utterly obvious, but what the hell can we say?
Starting point is 02:52:32 Nothing. One example they had there, and it was a teleportation thing. There were two boxes, one labeled the English letter A and the other box labeled English letter B. Very clever, they had an object in box A with a small TV camera in box A and a small TV camera in box B. And the idea is one of these Chagong kids would arrange, God knows how, to have the item in box A appear magically in box B and be tape recorded by the video. Neat idea. Except the kid was left alone.
Starting point is 02:53:12 Not supervised while this was going on. And, oddly enough, the two video cameras both quit working. Isn't that odd? Yeah, right. So the guy who ran all that said, translated into English, we would like to offer you a job to come and direct our laboratory so we do this correctly. So one of those rare times that was my ethics were in good shape. I said, look, there are great scientists in China.
Starting point is 02:53:43 You don't need an old guy from the West. Tell you what, if you'd like, I would act, help you pick the right person from China if you want me to do that. Simon came up to me and whispered in my ear, he said, Ed, I'd never let you take that job. Why? Because you'd like to leave China one day. So it sounds like we were a lot more advanced, at least in their eyes.
Starting point is 02:54:07 Oh, in China for sure. What were some of the similarities that you saw that how the KGB or how the Russians were running their program versus Stargate? They were not very self-confident. They were not particularly open about it. They were pleasant. So they were there to collect from you, not share. What do you think about the number of remote viewers?
Starting point is 02:54:35 I believe you said there was 120-something remote viewers as compared to what, R6? Well, we had—SRI only had about five or six at a given moment and Fort Meade wasn't much better. So we'll double that number, 12. They have 120. You're talking about experiments that were done where the Kib was left unsupervised, the cameras cut out. Well, that's as in China, yeah.
Starting point is 02:55:03 I'm guessing miraculously. The kid broke, come on, that's as in China, yeah. I'm guessing miraculously, you know. The kid broke, you know, come on, it's obvious what happened. But I guess what I'm getting at is, were we pickier or have we just not found the amount that they have found yet? What do you mean? I mean, we're not being picky. You'd never leave a participant ever alone with the apparatus.
Starting point is 02:55:30 We never do. Yeah. I mean, that's not what I'm getting at. I guess what I'm getting at is at the time, let's just say, would 12 be a fairly accurate number of 12 remote viewers that the US had at the time? Never at the same time. Correct 1% Yeah, so 12 Less than 12 at one any given particular. Yeah, sure. Okay and
Starting point is 02:55:55 And I'm sure of them at Fort Meade Joe McMonica and Angela Ford. Maybe one other person Produced actionable intelligence the rest of them didn't. So we're talking three. Maybe, yeah. Joe would be better off telling, or Angela better yet. Less than 10. Yeah. They have 120. And they never show us results.
Starting point is 02:56:18 Not one result have I seen of their remote. So that could have been total bogus. Well, I did have a measure. Joe and I were there at the same time and we got to do a joint remote viewing with Elena Klimova and Joe. She was the top Russian remote viewer. She was damn good. And I had control of that, so I knew what was going on.
Starting point is 02:56:43 Same principles, same testing, same... Just what we did here. And they developed that on their own. Well, I don't know about that, what they do when I'm not there. That was what I ran. I had control of everything. I don't know what they do on their own. Oh, so they shared literally nothing.
Starting point is 02:57:03 They never share anything. And Victor said, it's part of the zeitgeist of Russian military. They never declassify anything. And I didn't show them any classified stuff at all, period. Very interesting. Going back to SRI, we're talking about, right now we're talking about remote viewing. Are there any other sensory, basically we're talking about non-lethal future type weapons, correct? So when it comes to remote viewing, were we researching anything else that maybe was similar
Starting point is 02:57:55 to remote viewing that I don't know about? Well, there's been a lot of efforts in the field at large, parapsychology field at large, to look at remote sensing of various kinds. Like can you separate different categories of music, for example? Joe did his first remote viewing ever on camera called Put to the Test, and I have that video, that the ABC people sent a person who's a location scout for movie industry out to me for two days worth of training about how to pick sites. Then I was hands off after that. And she chose six sites around the Houston area. And it was done, the lawyers had control of it so nobody could do anything and so on. Long story short, Joe Remote viewed it and nailed this site, which happened to have been
Starting point is 02:59:04 a Houston ocean channel for shipping. Right in the middle of the trial, a huge Russian vessel docked. Right in the middle of the trial, where there was an outbound experimenter there, and Joe was back in the studio. But he nailed it. He said, I hear loud noises from the scene. I have no idea what it is. There's something large there.
Starting point is 02:59:29 I don't know what it is. Blew the mind of the interviewer who didn't buy the story to begin with. But I called up Joe, and he called me rather when it was all over, and I said, boy, congratulations. You did this remote viewing your first time ever on national television. How the hell do you do that? He said, do you think I did remote viewing on national television? I wouldn't do that. I did it over breakfast before I went to the studio.
Starting point is 02:59:54 It doesn't matter when you do it. You give yourself the tasking. They're going to do something. I'll figure it out. And then he faked it on camera. Wow. Do you understand what I'm asking? Are we looking into anything that might be, I mean, remote viewing is, it's hard for people to believe.
Starting point is 03:00:18 It's something that we still don't understand. And so what I'm asking is, are there other types of ESP that we're looking into other than remote viewing that I don't know about? Well, I think other people, I mean, the fields, there are 300 members of the Parapsychological Association and I think almost none of them are doing remote viewing. What are some of the other things they're researching? Well, there's the Gansfeld, which is remote viewing-like, but they're all psychologists.
Starting point is 03:00:56 That's why it's called parapsychology. So they're interested in, you know, what are the personality variables that make this person do good or someone who is really creative? Does that affect the performance in the Gansfeld and so on and so on? Those kinds of questions. They're not looking at mechanism. We're the only group that I know of that is looking at trying to figure out the mechanism how this works. In fact, Ray Hyman, in fact, there's a joke, the two biggest critics, and this is their true names, Hyman and Alcock.
Starting point is 03:01:33 I swear to God they're the critics of this field. But Ray Hyman was, I think he's still alive, a psychologist from the University of Oregon. I know the guy pretty well. And they formed an organization called PSYCOPS, the Committee to Investigate the Scientific Claims of the Paranormal. It's no longer that name, it's just called Skeptical Inquirer. But psychops, Jessica, an amazing statistician, and she and I went to Buffalo at the 20th Congress of Psychops. And Ray Hyman was giving a talk at the beginning, and he said to the assembled skeptics, do
Starting point is 03:02:22 not underestimate parapsychologists. They are the best methodologists he's ever met. I went up to him after I said, pray. My God took a lot of courage to do that. Said, yeah, but it's true. So even Ray at that in front of those people said, there are classes of things we no longer need any further evidence for its existence. What we should be focusing on now is how the hell does it actually work? And he's right.
Starting point is 03:02:54 You know, I interviewed a gentleman, John Alexander, and he was talking about spoon bending. He was talking about plants having consciousness. I mean, were you a part of any of that type of research? None whatsoever. I would not be. Although there was a variation on it. Bev Humphrey and I went covertly undercover.
Starting point is 03:03:19 There was a course on spoon bending up at Lake Tahoe in California. So before going up there, I bought some really heavy-duty soup spoons that had the handles look like a Greek letter omega, which makes it damned hard to bend. Okay, so we get up there on a Friday night and it's Friday night, all day Saturday, all day Sunday, as food, sleep, and logic deprivation. It turns out to be a big deal, so you don't get your head in it. And God help me, I can tell you this. We're sitting with pyramids on our head, in front, underneath the big pyramid.
Starting point is 03:04:04 And I tell people, you know, if you put your bananas under your pyramid, it'll be sharp enough to shave with later on. And we got around to bending stuff at two in the morning, I mean, early in the morning on Monday. I don't remember what time. And I'm sitting on the floor cross-legged, My whole body is falling asleep from my hips down. And I'm weaving the tines of forks into little knots. So I have no idea what's going on there. I'm not in a shape to know what I'm doing or not. I was conscious enough that the guy running the show came by me and I reached
Starting point is 03:04:43 and grabbed one of our big spoons. And I said, can you bend this? He said, oh yeah. And he wrapped it around, not the bowl of the spoon, but this part of the spoon. So driving home, I said to Bev, Ben Humphrey was with me. I said, maybe we saw some genuine PK here. So got back to SRI and one of the people on our projects, Gary Langford, is a metallurgist himself. Said, do you have any of those spoons left over? I said, oh yeah, get me one. So he goes, does the same thing right in front of me.
Starting point is 03:05:15 Says, it's shock deformation. That if you do that and you hesitate, it'll freeze on you, but if you just keep going, you can do it. I learned how to do it then. I can't do it anymore, but I was able to do it myself. Thus went away my belief that we saw genuine PK. It's what was it? Shock what? Shock deformation.
Starting point is 03:05:38 And how does that work? Well, you start it like that. And if you start it and stop, nothing will happen. If you start and keep going, it's easy to bend. It will feel like rubber or something really smooth. And these are metal smelts? Yeah. Oh, you bet.
Starting point is 03:05:59 These are the ones with the omega shape. And he bent it. Yeah. And so, but there is a scientific explanation on how that happens. Yeah. Was there anything else you looked into that was, that was similar to any of this? No, that's the only weird stuff we ever looked into it. We didn't do healing because, you know, what defines healing?
Starting point is 03:06:24 Healing. Healing, helping sick people. And there are a lot of people doing that. For example, I was funded by an organization called used to be part of NIH, an alternative medical approach to medicine. And so he was looking at these odd new medical things, one of which was a guy, he funded a guy at Duke University, who, I think it was Duke, yeah, in North Carolina, that got the name of Mitch Krucoff, very clever, clever, audiologist, not audiologist, a heart specialist. And Mitch wanted to know, good question,
Starting point is 03:07:27 what other things could he do to improve his ability to help heart patients? So he had, I forget number, how many other things they looked at, vitamin, exercise, diet, and so on, one of which was intercessory prayer, people praying for their well-being. And they did a five-year study, they called it the MANTRA Project, and sure enough, after
Starting point is 03:07:51 all things said and done, they did what's called a factor analysis to figure out was there anything in this mishmash of a whole bunch of stuff that mattered. And the answer is yes, the only thing that mattered was intercessory prayer. And so, because Mitch is a well-known CHI, he got a $750,000 grant from NIH to study intercessory prayer in terms of does it actually help his patients. So it was pretty interesting because what I didn't know, if you get funded by NIH, you can't have randomization done by somebody in the project. So there's kind of satellite companies around medical schools who do nothing but randomize participants and control and effort groups.
Starting point is 03:08:43 They don't even care what the study is. Okay, so he did the study. One of the funniest damn things, there were solid Christians who wouldn't do this because there were non-Christians praying for help, praying for their help. Oh please, come on. Turned out it failed categorically. So, I talked to Mitch Krucoff about it, and I said that fits our model of decision augmentation, meaning that in the five years of you had your people with a bias in favor of this working, pressing the buttons to randomize your people.
Starting point is 03:09:19 Not cheating, nobody, I'm not accusing anybody of cheating, but using unconscious ESP to sort patients in such a way it looks like it was of a genuine effect, but it's not. And since this other group was doing the randomization, they didn't give a damn. No wonder it didn't work. And I think my bet is, 50 years from now, the only part of PSI, one major part of PSI that will survive is this decision augmentation ball that we put together. And you should look up, you should get Jessica Utz to come here. She, I've known her for a really long time.
Starting point is 03:10:01 Her name is Jessica Utz, U-T-T-S. She used to be head of the department in statistics department at UC Irvine. I can send you her contact for her and I'll do it. I'll reach out. Yeah, she is terrific. She has this ability to... She published a book called Seeing Through Statistics, and there's not one equation in the book.
Starting point is 03:10:29 She wanted to have a book that people who read newspaper articles, who mention statistics, can get some idea what the hell they're talking about. I said, hey, how come you have all these trees in the damn cover of your book? She says, think about it. Oh, seeing through the trees, of course, oh please. She became in 2016 the chief statistician in the whole damn country. She was head of the American Statistical Association, became chair of that. And I've got a, I'll send you the link on my YouTube channel.
Starting point is 03:11:10 She gave the presidential address of, which was 70 minutes long, seven minutes of it was her ability to say in front of this collective body, her belief in extrasensory perception and what she's done in that domain. I called her up and said, Jesus, you're brave. She says, no, I'm telling you the truth. And it's just a brilliant piece. And the introduction is longer than her talk in the seven minute section.
Starting point is 03:11:34 I thought I knew her really well. We were good friends and spent time at her house. And she and her longtime, not her husband, my common law husband husband if it were. And we, she said it has to happen. Very, very impressive. That's real stuff. Yeah.
Starting point is 03:11:56 Yeah, I'd love to- She'd be good for you to interview her. Have a chat with her. Yeah, that would be fascinating. So 1995, it sounds like Stargate came to an end. What was the decision that led to that? Why did they end it? Good question.
Starting point is 03:12:19 That's a really good question. First of all, there was what's called a CDA, a Congressional and Directorate Activity, that the Congress ordered the CIA to do a 20-year retrospective of this whole program. And if they felt that there was quality in this program, they were then to take over the program from DIA. Okay? And so they hired the American Institutes of Research to do the study. It's supposed to be a 20-year retrospective.
Starting point is 03:12:57 And they produced what's called the AIR part, American Institutes of Research reports, a big fixed document. They wouldn't give me a copy of it. Okay. They gave Jessica a copy. They had Jessica and Ray Hyman as counters to each other, skeptic and a believer. And I walked into Senator Cohen's office at the time,
Starting point is 03:13:25 he was still senator. I said, hey, I don't have a copy of the AI report. He said, oh, here's mine. Take it. He then said, do you think you can refute this? I said, well, yeah. He said, well, write an article and pull no punches, which I did and got it published in the Journal of Parapsychology.
Starting point is 03:13:48 Everything I said in that article was wrong. They only looked at one year over instead of 20, that was correct, but that's not why they closed the program down. It wasn't until we had released by the CIA all this stuff, they said why the program closed. What happened was, and we have the quotes and it's in volume four of the Stargate archives, that the Cold War was basically over and the Congress was saying, we've got all this money going to the intel community, we don't need to have that much money anymore.
Starting point is 03:14:22 So the Congress ordered CIA to slim down, get rid of all these small programs. And if you don't do that, they threatened to close the CIA actually. Not our view, that's released by the CIA themselves. And I think the reason it closed is that we just were on the chopping block along with a whole bunch of other programs. Negating everything I said in my original paper. Man, what do you think of that? Well, when a guy from the Pentagon and I spent with Joe 10 years trying to get it started again.
Starting point is 03:15:08 The working staffs and defense analysts and so on loved the product that we had, but upper management said no. I think that's too bad, especially with terrorism these days. Now, I'm convinced that no way in hell are they doing it secretly. You don't think so? I do not. My clearances have all dissolved, so I don't really know.
Starting point is 03:15:34 Why do you think they're not doing this? Under a different name, on a different program? I hope they are doing it, but I don't think so. Because there is so much pushback. The only reason our program survived is we had a bunch of heroes. John Glenn was a hero. Senator Cohen was a hero. Two other people, and I can't remember their names right now, they protected us from the
Starting point is 03:15:59 wolves who were trying to shut us down. Same thing happened with 407 in Russia. They tried to shut him down and their head of the general staff was supporting it so they couldn't close it down. People are terrified of this stuff. In fact, Charlie Tart wrote a whole book about, or article rather, not a book, about the fear of Psy. about the fear of psi. For example, if you really believed in telepathy, get out of my fucking head, man. I'm thinking about stuff that you have no business knowing what it should be.
Starting point is 03:16:33 And people really get scared of that. Do you believe in telepathy? I believe that it's impossible. The reason is this. You and I are going to do a telepathy experiment right now. I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 1,000. What is it? Come on, out with it.
Starting point is 03:16:51 703. I take my pistol, shoot myself in the head. I carry myself to the grave knowing you got the right answer. Oops. I just told you, you got the right answer. So the question is, where did you get the information? Did you get it out of my mind or the feedback? The only way I can prevent it, the only way you could possibly get it out of my mind is to kill myself. But
Starting point is 03:17:17 the minute you find the answer, if you have access, if there's an answer book, which there isn't when I'm dead, you, um, it's not an experiment anymore. Please help me understand what you're saying. Okay. Because I'm not, I'm not receiving it. Okay. You pick a number from one through a thousand. I say 703.
Starting point is 03:17:41 You kill yourself. Why do you kill yourself? Because if I say you got it, right Then the question is from where did you get the information out of my mind or from the feedback you got later? What feedback I told you the answer you got it, right? That's feedback Yeah If you were pretty cognitive enough, you'd look into the future, you're getting a pad on the top of your head because you got the answer right.
Starting point is 03:18:12 The way to think about this, if you were in college and a scuzz ball and you were having an important exam that was going to affect the rest of your life, so you sneak into the professor's office and there's an answer book in there from the questionnaire and you study it really carefully or maybe even photograph it. Boy, you're gonna do really well on the exam. Suppose you could do that precognitively. You're gonna do really well on the psychic exam, so to speak.
Starting point is 03:18:38 In fact, we use that terminology in our writing, peeking into the answer book. If a study does not have an answer, it's not a study. Now the answer may not be what you want, it may be different than what you want, but there is some result, and the result we consider as the answer book, and you have access to that by precognition.
Starting point is 03:19:01 In fact, Sonali and I wrote a paper together collapsing the problem space of informational side, people getting information by psychic means. So are you saying I looked into the future to get 703, saw you tell me good job, came back, said the number? Yeah. Now if I'd kill myself, you never get that. Now we didn't invent this kind of stuff. I mean, we concretized it by doing the arithmetic and all the stuff that you
Starting point is 03:19:34 need to do to make sure that it's real. It simplifies things. Precognition simplifies the whole game. And we don't know how to stop looking into the future. You could say, well, I'm getting it from direct. Well, how do you know? You don't know that. The big mystery is how the hell the information gets there in the first place. For example, Sonali in India is going to generate from a collection of photographs one photograph tomorrow, but you're going to generate from a collection of photographs one photograph tomorrow, but
Starting point is 03:20:05 you're going to remove you it today. How the hell does that work? And it turns out we figured out to divide the problem space into two, two and a half actually. Problem space number one, how does that information get from India tomorrow to right here today? That is 100% a physics problem. It doesn't depend upon my nose or me or you or anybody. It's a physics problem and they worry about it. In fact, there's even a whole discipline supported by the American Institute of Physics called quantum retrocausation.
Starting point is 03:20:40 It is possible for information to go backward in time from the future to the present, but the present cannot go backward in time to the past. Don't worry about why that's the case, but it's true. I want to know why that's the case. Because the past is quantum mechanics. The system has already been measured. It's collapsed. The state vector has collapsed.
Starting point is 03:21:04 You can't undo what's been done. What's been done. But until it's been done, it can influence the present. Now that doesn't mean the way it works, but at least it's a plausibility argument, how the physics domain. There's a guy in physics department of Amsterdam in university there called Eric Fairlinda, and he said we should throw away gravity as a force. It's not a force, which it isn't. It's geometry.
Starting point is 03:21:39 And there's a real problem with gravity. There's no quantum base to it. So of the four basic forces, that's the only one that doesn't have a quantum mechanical base. So let's get rid of that and talk about entropy. That any derived Einstein field equations, Newton's equations, and all the stuff of physics based on entropy. And I want to go talk to this guy because if it's an entropic force, then there's a carrier.
Starting point is 03:22:09 The problem is, every, excuse me, everything that we know about and getting information that can be used has a carrier associated with it. You are listening to me and getting information because the carrier is the sound waves going to your eardrums. If you have an alarm clock going off in a vacuum chamber, you can't hear it. So we need some carrier right now
Starting point is 03:22:41 and we have no idea what it might be of information coming backward in time. But Farrellinda has an idea that might be worthy of thought. So that's half the problem, let alone how it gets into your brain. But once it's in the brain, by the way, the physics people can worry about and not care about extra sensory perception. That's a physics problem. All right, once it's in the brain, leave aside how it got there for a moment, then it's a neuroscience problem. They don't give a damn how it got there.
Starting point is 03:23:10 And the article we wrote, working with the Brazilian folks, this is testable about hyperconductivity in the brain and the white matter and so on, blah, blah, blah, all this technical stuff. It's testable. Might be wrong, but at least it's testable. The problem is what transfers whatever this is coming in
Starting point is 03:23:32 into something the brain can recognize. We know about retinas in our eyes. We know about the sensory systems in our nose and so on. But we don't know a psychic retina, so to speak, for remote viewing. What do you think it is? No idea. I really have no idea.
Starting point is 03:23:48 I mean, you don't lose sleep at night thinking about this? Oh, I think about it all the time. You don't have theories? I'm not smart enough. I'm not a theorist. That's the problem. You figure it out. I'll test it.
Starting point is 03:24:03 It's a very difficult, well, what we're hoping for, and that's why we're taking Angela to do what's called a case study, just her, mushing her hand to an MRI machine. If we are lucky, I mean really lucky, her brain will be different, quantitatively different than large number of brains that they look at. Highly unlikely that it will be. But if it is different, then we can say, well, it's different because of this, this, this, that, and the other thing. That gives us a clue of how to see whether we can find psychics that way.
Starting point is 03:24:37 Wow. Yeah. Wow. Big time. We're not counting on it by any stretch. A better approach to find subjects is to get involved in the sin or seizure community. Because since I mentioned over breakfast
Starting point is 03:24:55 that all of our participants have sin or seizure. What is that? That's where you get crosstalk in your sensory systems. You see black and white things of color and so on. It's crosstalk of your sensory systems. Oh, we spoke about this at the beginning. We spoke about that when you hear music and you feel it in your... Okay.
Starting point is 03:25:18 Okay. Man, I can't just... I mean, it's almost like there's some type of unknown organ that's at work that's receiving that information, just like your nose, ears, eyes, mouth, you know, touch. Well, probably it's going to be more distributed than that. In fact, the only thing that I'm aware of, and I could be wrong on this one, that the only, the Russians are big on identifying each part of the brain is associated with some behavior, and that's simply not true, with one exception. That is, there's a very small part of our brain
Starting point is 03:25:52 which is dedicated to face recognition. Russell Targ, for example, that part is not functioning for him. He can go to a party with his wife and not recognize her from other tall, similar women, because he cannot recognize her face. The same with me. So if we're meeting for lunch, he'll hear my voice. I'll say, hey, Russ, good to see you again. At least he knows it's me. That's a very standard problem.
Starting point is 03:26:24 Some people have this, that for reasons unknown, that part of their brain is not functioning properly. So I don't expect a little chunk over here for consciousness and a little chunk over here for liking salt. You know, seriously, this conversation with you has inspired me to maybe not resign and quit. It's too much fun. Keep going, keep going.
Starting point is 03:26:52 With everything that you've studied and are there any key, are there any key things that make you believe everything that you've studied, you know, over the course of 49 years? It's not an event. It's collectiveness, the whole thing. I mean, for me, it's self-evident of this, the number of successes in the operational
Starting point is 03:27:22 work. We're not cheating with that. And, you know, there are skeptical people in your business looking at this and, hey, we want to come back with more study. I mean, even the CIA came back with us 41 times with new missions. They wouldn't do that if it weren't useful to them.
Starting point is 03:27:39 After it was shut down? No, before it was shut down. Before. Yeah. So, no, it's more the collective thing. For me, probably the most convincing evidence is that 17 of the 19 end users came back with more wanting more stuff. Now we can go to statistics and Jessica will bore you to tear on the statistics, but nobody buys statistics Why bother
Starting point is 03:28:10 Good question I've thought a lot about that Because you know, I've put a lot of effort in so a lot of colleagues around I mean, I don't want to give the impression. I'm the only guy doing this. I'm not by any stretch. I guess I'm relying on Chuck Honerton's view of that, and I tend to agree with it, that we humans are faced with really interesting questions about do we survive our deaths, for example.
Starting point is 03:28:44 Everybody's interested in deaths, for example. Everybody's interested in that, including me. Can I have a brief comment on that before I go a little further? I was invited to be a participant at the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture in Kolkata, India. I was the resident materialist of the bunch. And long story short, one of their monks was beating up on me and saying that there's something called promissory materialism. I don't know if you've ever heard that term. You're right, I can't give right time and equation for love, but I promise you by next Thursday at two in the afternoon, well, maybe a thousand years from next Tuesday, we'll have an answer, right?
Starting point is 03:29:25 So he started defending me on that, Palmisaurian materialism. And he was a bright guy, totally fluent in English, and in PowerPoint useful. So I went up to him afterwards. I said, Swamiji, your whole philosophy, I love much better than mine, that you survive your death and you get to do all this other stuff. I wish that were true. Mine is last breath and that's it. I said, but you have to modernize.
Starting point is 03:29:52 You're basically getting on philosophy with 3,000 years old. That was before we knew about brains and about genetics and all that good stuff. He said, you have to modernize that. And we worked for about five years together, he and I, over the net, over, it wasn't Zoom in those days, email, to try to figure out ways in which to modernize this. And we figured out he couldn't do it. So it remains in the realm of philosophy. At least he was interested in it and so was I. So that was a side step. But you asked me why do it.
Starting point is 03:30:36 Because I think humans, including me, want to know the answers to these more spiritually oriented questions. Do we actually survive our death? Or better yet, how do we communicate with one another? We need to do a hell of a lot better job than we're doing now for sure. And things of that nature. What is consciousness?
Starting point is 03:30:56 Is Tononi right about consciousness? And all of those questions, maybe sci research as it current exists, may not answer those questions. But at least it's new tools in the toolbox that someone later on will be able to use them and help them answer those questions. What do you think consciousness is? I think it's an emergent property of our brain. Straightforward. And I buy Tononi's story tremendously. It's straightforward.
Starting point is 03:31:25 And I buy Tononi's story tremendously. I will send you a link to that book, by the way. You should get it. It's fabulous. Thank you. Thank you. Edwin, we're wrapping up the interview. And with all the stuff that you've been involved with and all your studies outside of
Starting point is 03:31:48 remote viewing, what do you think we should be looking into? As humans, you mean? Is there anything that's come across your radar that you think that has to do with the subject? Oh, okay. It could be totally random, but what I'm asking, when it comes to ESP, human sensory, what haven't we touched? What do people not know about? What should we be looking into? That's a good question.
Starting point is 03:32:18 I mean, if I knew what we haven't touched, I'd go touch it. I'm more concerned politically, where we're at as a culture, not only our country, but similar countries around the world. That's a big threat to everybody. This stuff's not going to help that at all, I don't think. That to me is a bigger worry for me at the moment. I think that's a worry for a lot of us. No kidding.
Starting point is 03:32:50 Well, Ed, I just want to say thank you so much for coming on. My pleasure. It was far more interesting than I thought it would be, to tell you the truth. Oh, man. I could go on here. How long have we been at this? You tell you the truth. Oh man, I could go on here, but... How long have we been at this? We've been going for about five hours now.
Starting point is 03:33:10 Oh, geez. So, in between four and five hours. Doesn't feel that way at all, actually. Goes by quick, doesn't it? But is there anything that I should be asking you that I haven't asked so far? What do I do for fun? What do I do for fun? That's important. What do you do for fun?
Starting point is 03:33:28 Well, I used to play a lot of golf. I'm horrible at it, but I still like to play it. My wife tricked me into it, damn it, because I said, I'm not a Republican. I don't own one pair of checkered pants. Buzz off. So she conned me into it, carrying her clubs one day and I said, oh geez, and you're a physicist. Trouble is being a physicist and knowing about golf, those are incompatible. You should not worry about in your head what's happening to the ball
Starting point is 03:33:57 and how it's going to go. No. The other thing is I do a lot of walking in San Francisco Bay area, long distances, 11 miles out of crack. That's pretty amazing for... Can I say your age? Yeah, of course. An 83-year-old man. You look...
Starting point is 03:34:16 No, you screwed it. 84. 84? Yeah. Oh, man. We are an amazing health. No, I'm on my 84th trip around the sun. I've been there, it's boring.
Starting point is 03:34:28 Same old sun. One last question. Yes, sir. With all of the remote viewing and I've listened to, I researched Joe for a long time before he finally came out here. And there was a lot of stuff when it comes to outer space, are we alone, that kind of stuff.
Starting point is 03:34:52 What do you think about that? Are we alone? Well, who is it? I forget. Long since dead philosopher, semi-philosopher, he said his view was we're serially alone, which is pretty interesting. And the way he worded that was, we've been only to announce ourselves as a species to outer space since the invention of radio.
Starting point is 03:35:22 So if there are other critters out there, and the probability of critters being there is virtually unity, if you look at the total number of galaxies, the number of stars in each galaxy, and the number of planets that are M-class planets like Earth, the probability that there's life elsewhere is, in my view, down near unity, for sure. Now whether we'll be able to meet it is another question. Carl Sagan, and what he said, we're serially alone because in the years that it's been 150 years since we had radio, and intelligent species like we are, we're going to put ourselves out of business very quickly with global warming.
Starting point is 03:36:03 We're going to kill ourselves off. Give us 1,000 years from the invention of a radio, the next 1,000 years, we'll all be gone. He says that's inherent to other species as well. What's the probability of two 1,000 year chunks in 5 billion years? It's very small that they're over that. Pretty interesting argument, whether it's true or not, who the hell knows. That is an interesting argument. I've never thought of it like that. Because we are, I mean, no one's paying, I mean, we are very sick. I
Starting point is 03:36:35 wrote my first paper, scientific paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research in 1962, on upper atmosphere heating by high-altitude water vapor. And we even knew then that we are in a climate shift. We had no idea then, back then, that as humans were involved in it, now there's no question. Well, thank you. I won't be around long enough to know
Starting point is 03:36:59 whether we're burning ourselves up. Well, Edwin, I just want to say, it was an honor to interview you and sit here and have this conversation and... For the honor is returned to you, sir. Thank you. I am, thank you. Very happy that we met and I just wish you the best. When I'm doing research for the show, booking travel, or communicating with guests, I always
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