By Angelique van Engelen
globalpolitician.com
Officially, the US military does not make use of Remote Viewing activities, having closed down the departments that were involved in them in the 1990s. Private Remote Viewing experts however, are involved in drawing sketches of far off locations, some of which turn out remarkably precise. One US ex-army officer involved from Texas who’s involved in Remote Viewing, claims to have seen Iranian complexes which are used for creating nuclear bombs. An interview with UK artist Suzanne Treister, who created HEXEN2039, a project about the military’s historical use of the occult for psychological warfare.
The Hexen2039 exhibition was on show in different museums in London earlier this year and mesmerized the crowds. The project, which is also online, a film, and a book blend the fictitious with rigorously researched military (US and European) information.
The project is centered around a futuristic fictional character who is part of a 21st Century organization, the Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality. The character, called Rosalind Brodsky travels back in time regularly. The narrative, which accompanies paintings and drawings, is not all that implausible. Issues addressed include real life shifts in the balance of political power, both (factual) historical and futuristic, climate change and new models of psychological warfare.
Remote viewing is a small part of Hexen 2039. The project entails a wealth of other issues including information about Soviet brainwashing techniques, the Korean war, and US experiments like MK Ultra. “The reason Remote Viewing is in the project is that it confirms another case of the military ‘believing in’ the occult and paranormal powers of perception and this drives the narrative and the research rather than being the object of it”, says Treister.
She cites attributed and undisclosed historic records of past military organizations and events involving the use of the occult and hidden informational techniques. The narrative is compelling; in the year 2039, Brodsky travels to an assignment at West Point U.S. Military Academy, situated on the banks of the Hudson River, 50 miles north of Manhattan in New York State. She researches the US Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command (Psyop) based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina as part of an investigation into early forms of audio hypnosis or ‘silent sounds’ technologies, altering the brain’s EEG patterns. This is used for military purposes. In the storyBrodsky casually finds out a series of dramatic military secrets as well real life links with the film industry.
Asked how she gained access to most of the military information, Treister says “I read a lot of books about historical relationships between the military and the occult, and about brainwashing, but some of the information is online.” Treister also has family involved in one aspect of the military. During her London exhibition, informed viewers substantiated her findings and offered further information.Treister says that despite the secret nature of the military, there will always be individuals who manage to infiltrate.
At the moment, the most the US army will publicly admit to is its use of psychological operations. Soldiers in are trained to ‘expect the unexpected’ to the utmost extreme. Until 1995, the CIA sponsored research institutions with millions of dollars to experiment with psi phenomena for use of warfare. Remote viewing and psychic work took place at Stanford Research Institute at Menlo Park, California and in a rattly old building somewhere far from the civilized world at Fort Meade in Maryland. The CIA closed this down in 1995, after then President Bill Clinton ordered more openness in the army. The public was astonished to find out what had taken place without their knowing for two decades. The agents had been using their ‘special powers’ to trace missile silos, submarines, POWs, and MIAs.
What was even more stunning was the razor sharp likeness of the files and a film that was released a year earlier, Stargate. The film meticulously detailed some of the activities that were described in the previously classified CIA files; human consciousness was projected from one place to another and accurate information about remote and hidden locations was retrieved. The astonishing correlations between the film and the CIA documents were believed almost too coincidental yet the filmmakers insisted they had no clue about the army project, which was located not far from where they were shooting.
HEXEN2039 also traces other oddities between real life, the army and Hollywood, most notably Samuel Goldwyn’s strange involvement with MGM. The project originally began as an investigation into histories of witchcraft, Treister says. “This soon developed into an investigation into the occult and inevitably, since the [fictional] Institute has a military imperative and works in alliance with other organisations on a commission basis, it took up an offer from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to investigate and develop new forms of military-occult based technology for psychological warfare. i.e. the project organically developed through its own internal logic.”
Blending fiction and fact often invites ridicule but practically there is hardly a way around this. In the act of remote viewing itself, there is however little room for such excess bagage. It requires a total concentration of the mind. Others like Ed Dames, the ex army officer who was involved in taking the army’s Remote Viewing program’s technology to the private sector, confirm this too. Dames, who left the US army in 1989 to set up PsiTech, was asked questions in an online chat session published on Mindcontol forumssaid technical Remote Viewing is a “very rigorous, disciplined program that teaches the trainee to accurately download information from the collective unconscious, or the global mind”.
Treister experimented with remote viewing by studying the techniques of John Dee, the 16th Century controversial consultant to Queen Elizabeth. She uses a scrying stone. The term scrying comes from the English word descry, which means ‘to make out dimly’ or ‘to reveal.’ Incidentally, Treister actually used John Dee’s stone, a crystal ball with a value of ?50,000, which was stolen from the Science Museum in London in 2004. “The first remote viewing drawing I made was of the floor plan of Aleister Crowley’s house in Scotland before I could find an image. I verified later that in fact it had a similarly unusual structure”, Treister says.”I am not sure about the veracity of other later drawings, many were unverifiable, but also this is not necessarily the issue, it’s more about the idea that these phenomena are researched seriously by the military, and in that sense all this becomes a real part of the world.”
A reviewer of Treister’s London exhibition says that Treister’s military drawings using the scrying stone might be just as accurate as those made by the professionals. Ed Dames has been indirectly involved in the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He drew two locations at the request of Major Karen Jansen, head of the UN Chemical, Biological, and Nuclear inspection team in 1991. She told him the names of the locations and he jotted down maps Spokespeople at the International Atomic Energy Agency did not respond to an email inquiring if the technique is used in Iran or elsewhere in the world. Dames said that Jansen phoned him personally after work by the CIA and other agencies had failed to produce results.
Whether Dames also actually indicated to the UN inspectors if he saw weapons is not clear from the chat conversation and neither from an article that was written about this event by the Associated Press. It seems that the UN isn’t a standard client to Remote Viewing sub contractors. Emails inquiring after this to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s press office had not received a reply by presstime. This might change with time. Academics in the UK are complaining that in today’s critical times, the arms control and disarmament community is facing a generational gap. Established researchers are retiring and newer researchers enter the field for the first time, who have completely different backgrounds. They have started an initiativeto combat this.
One private Remote Viewer/Dream expert, publishes his viewings online and people can tell him whether he’s right or wrong. Brianspredictions.com is run by a 38 year old ex army professional who draws buildings, machines, motorcycles and aircraft. At first sight, it is difficult to take him seriously. The drawings are scraps of hastily drawn rectangles, squares and circles and scribbled notes and arrows. Yet Brian publishes articles that confirm (or deny) his findings, which indicate he often makesvery valuable contributions to public issues. He tends to dream virtually every night and during his waking hours draw sketches after remote viewing.
On 19 February 2006, Brian wrote “I had a dream several days about some sort of ram jet missile being built right now in a factory in Iran. This missile can travel some 10 times the speed of sound and cannot be shot down. Its going to be armed with several nuclear warheads and fired on 9.10.2006 at Washington DC, USA. Using remote viewing several days later, I now have more details on this event and they follow.” He published drawings including a complex showing 2 buildings, storage tanks and a water tower, and nuclear devices of about 100 feet long on some type of hydraulic lift system. Brian details “The nuclear warheads will be attached to the from of the missile, that when fired can reach mach 10 (10 times the speed of sound). It has 2 large air intake holes, drawn above. This is a drawing of an underground tunnel used to transport the missile to the launch site and to attach the nuclear warhead. On the left some sort of belt moves the missile to a connecting tunnel (right) where the warheads are attached, then the entire missile is lifted by hydraulics 100 feet to the surface to be fired. The launch site is a very small square surrounded by a chain link fence in the middle of a park, a school is nearby and trees are everywhere.”
The Reuters report that follows his drawings is dated on 31 March 2006. It confirms speculation which had been circulating in the media prior to Brian’s dream, that Iran had acquired Shahab-3 missiles, which experts believe have a maximum range of around 2,000 km (1,240 miles), with nuclear warheads. Very recently, an Iranian website claimed Iran has 600 of these bombs, which the US last February said should not be banned, but preserved as a military option. Western army experts deny this the case. Iran is believed to have no more than a few dozen such missiles which are connected to new warheads containing thousands of tiny cluster bombs.
The moral implications about military use of claims to the future are not to be underestimated. It is a balance between complicity and criticality. Ultimately, both become part of the content of the work and potential conflicts transcend. Which is akin to annexing territory. “If the results were taken seriously without any other intelligence information sources and people were injured or killed as a result then [it would be immoral]. But from what one can tell, remote viewing was/is never used as a stand-alone technology”, Treister says.
Controversy is part and parcel of the remote viewing trade, it appears. John Dee, who’sconsidered its founder, was swinging from highs to lows throughout his life. On several occasions he ended up in close trusted relationships with people who first accused him of immoral deeds. In 1555, he was arrested him and charged with treason, a capital offense. He had been involved in drawing up horoscopes of Queen Mary and Princess Elizabeth. He exonerated himself and ended up working closely with the people who first brought the charges. It took years for Dee to find a satisfactory method for the pursuit of the supernatural and he conducted “spiritual conferences” after lenghty periods of purification, prayer and fasting.
Dames also appears to have had his fair share of hardships. He’s thrown out of PSIcorp and is referred to in the US media as ‘Doctor Doom’. He says he has no feelings when he relays Remote Viewing information but that what he remote views from time to time is not very savory. He doesn’t do missing people cases because it is too gruesome, for instance. Despite this ex US army officer’s neutrality, things appear to get to him. Predicting what he calls “the Killshot”, a solar flare striking Earth in the near future, he relocated his family to a cave in the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) in 1999. Dames still believes the Killshot is bound to take place. He says on his website that it will happen in the next ten years. He also says Ukraine, any of these days, will be the scene of another nuclear disaster due to a Chernobyl like graphite-core nuclear reactor failure. When last June rumors of such a disaster were featured on Kavkaz Center in the Ukraine,Dames claimed this is what he’d seen. Appleseed Cast, the popgroup has recorded a song, Storm, on which Dames can be heard having a conversation with Art Bell, the broadcaster about paranormal issues at Coast to Coast AM.
HEXEN II, another movie, is currently in the making. Treister says it will be very different from HEXEN I and involve actual neurological scientists. She is also working on a book about NATO, which will contain reproductions of a series of watercolours that illustrate the NATO codification system.