Military paranormal research: Cook excerpt #6

Nick COok writes: In laying the foundations of a modest research effort that would include subjective evidence I was able to tap a professional body that had attached great value to subjective data: the military-intelligence community. In particular, through some connections that had arisen out of my earlier writings⁶, I had been put in touch with – and subsequently came to know – Ingo Swann, who had been one of the original founders of the US military-intelligence community’s remote viewing programme. 

 

Ingo Swann

Remote viewing was a methodology that had permitted the US to conduct intelligence-gathering via the use of techniques that might perhaps be described as ‘clairvoyant’. I considered the experience of remote viewers to be timely and relevant, because, knowing the military, a strong case could be made to say that it would not have thrown good money year-on-year at a technique that didn’t work.

Remote viewing, in one guise or another, had been funded since the early 1970s and had patently worked, because it had remained in existence – fully funded by the US government – for the best part of two decades.

And lest an accusation were proffered that RV had been a particular whim or foible of the US intelligence community, it could be demonstrably proven that the Soviet Union had been engaged in remote viewing – and other paranormal activity deemed to have some kind of military purpose – for even longer. As part of anyone’s due diligence on this, a book called ‘ESP Wars: East and West’ ought to be required reading⁷. In it, several of the individuals who had, at one time or other, led these programmes in their respective countries were brought together during a narrow time window in geopolitical history – the 1990s - when thawed relations between the two sides had allowed for discussions on particular aspects of the Cold War standoff.

6 The Hunt for Zero Point, Nick Cook, published by Century, 2001.

7  ESP Wars East & West: An Account of the Military Use of Psychic Espionage as Narrated by the Key Russian and American Players by Edwin C. May, PhD; Victor Rubel, PhD; Joseph McMoneagle, PhD; and Loyd Auerbach, MS, Panta Rei, an imprint of Crossroad Press, 2015.

On the Russian side, parapsychological military activity culminated in the late 1980s with the formulation of a special unit – Military Unit 10003 led by Lt. Gen. Alexei Savin – tasked with exploiting the capabilities of what Savin described as ‘extraordinarily gifted psychic individuals’ for military purposes.

Under the direction of Army General Mikhail Moiseyev, the Chief of the General Staff (the Soviet equivalent of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), Savin was ordered to hone Military Unit 10003 into the Soviet military-intelligence community’s ‘centre of excellence’ for the development of ‘extraordinary human potential’, including what is known as ‘psi functioning’, the so-called psychic aspects of our nature. Unit 10003 employed an equivalent number of personnel as the US remote viewing programme had at its height.

A very high level of secrecy was established for Savin’s department from the outset. All of the information was reported only to the Chief of the General Staff and was compartmentalised amidst deep secrecy. “We were so successful at disappearing that almost a decade went by before the first vague rumours about our work filtered through to the press,” Savin told his US counterparts⁸.

Even after the dissolution of the USSR at the end of 1991, this led to remote viewers being forward deployed with Russian military units during the Second Chechen War of 1995. “In Chechnya, I would test the work of my most talented psychics and instructors,” Savin explained. “After the Chechen War, we can now boldly assert that on the whole ESP is a proven and effective tool in the arsenal, not only of strategic military means, but of tactical and operational ones.”⁹

8 Op.cit., p.264.
9 Op.cit., p.288.

As part of my continued due diligence in this area, I was led to a declassified 1983 US Department of the Army study entitled ‘Analysis and Assessment of (the) Gateway Process’¹⁰.

The report was written by US Army Lt. Col. Wayne McDonnell in an apparent bid to ‘sell’ the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command, INSCOM, on the ‘Gateway Experience’ developed by the Virginia-based Monroe Institute (along with a technique the institute had developed to bring the brain’s two hemispheres to a state of coherence allegedly permitting altered states of consciousness) – this as a tool to acquaint the service with the mechanics of what it paraphrased as ‘astral projection’.

As McDonnell explained, the 25 pages of the Gateway Report (although one page, to the chagrin of conspiracy theorists, had been missing from the copy held in the CIA’s files until recently) was designed, at a high level of overview, to provide a ‘lucid model’ of how consciousness functions so as to put out-of-body states into the ‘language of physical science’ – this to ‘remove the stigma of its occult connotations.’

10 https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00788R001700210016-5.pdf

Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.