Two More Ft. Meade Remote Viewers Go Public On The Jeff Rense Program

Transcript of the Jeff Rense Program, Sunday, October 1, 2000.
Guests are:  Paul H. Smith, Gabrielle Pettingell, and Bill Ray

(all former military remote viewers in the US Army's now legendary Ft. Meade Program)

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Transcript by Skye Turell
- mindtrekker@mindspring.com 10-04-2000
[Transcriber's note: Some text has been slightly edited for easier reading.]

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JEFF:   Welcome back, everybody. Tonight, a fascinating conversation with three of America's best remote viewers...all of whom were trained for and served in the Army's legendary Ft. Meade remote viewing project. It is always a mind-bending experience to talk to some of these talented people.

OK, let's get started and we're going to begin things with a return guest. It is always an honor and pleasure to have Paul Smith on the program. Paul served for 7 years in the government's remote viewing program at Ft. Meade, Maryland, from 1983-1990. During 1984 he became one of only a handful of government personnel to be personally trained as a Coordinate Remote Viewer by Ingo Swann, at SRI International located at Stanford out here on the West Coast.

We're going to have Ingo on the program for a return visit sometime soon, for you Ingo Swann fans. He is truly a legend in his own time. 

Paul Smith was the primary author of the government RV program's CRV Training Manual and served as theory instructor for the new CRV trainee personnel, as well as recruiting officer and unit security officer. He wore many hats. This is such an intriguing subject...you're going to be amazed. 

He's credited with over 1,000 training and operational remote viewing sessions during his time with the unit at Ft. Meade. He was raised in Nevada, enlisted in the Army in 1976 and is a Middle East expert. This has been his bailiwick of interest and professional expertise for a long time. And I do want to ask Paul how he views what is going on in the Middle East right now, which is not good. 

He's got a BA from BYU in Mideast affairs, art and English. A Masters from the Defense Intelligence College, Middle East concentration there, and is enrolled currently in a Ph.D. program in philosophy. A fitting capper... specializing in consciousness and philosophy of mind. 

Welcome back, Paul. How are you? 

PAUL:  I'm great and I'm glad to be here.

JEFF:  That's a nice picture of you on your website, by the way. 

PAUL: That's when I was younger and skinnier. 

JEFF:  Well, you can't tell with the camouflage gear, though. Do all former Ft. Meade viewers have weight problems? 

PAUL: No. 

JEFF:  They all complain about their weight, I'm telling you. Lyn grumbles about his weight. They all say they'd like to lose some weight. 

PAUL: Lyn and I have the biggest problems there, something about metabolism or something. 

JEFF:  I think there's a link (smile), I'm going to pursue this. Might be a good project for my Ph.D. The link between remote viewing and body weight. 

PAUL:  If you can find one and can solve the problem, I'd be happy to hear about that! 

JEFF:  In all these years dealing with the whole UFO issue, I think there are only a dozen Ph.D.'s in Ufology, or anything that relates to it, here in the United States, which to me is very interesting. That's an off-topic remark, but with such a profound interest in this most perplexing of all enigmas you'd think that the academic community would take a little more interest in it. 

PAUL:  Mainstream academia is a little leery of all these kinds of things. If someone were to get a Ph.D. in Ufology, it would probably be from one of the folk study programs or something like that. The whole UFO phenomena is kind of treated... 

JEFF:  They'd have to treat it as some kind of strange, off-beat subject. You have a business. You're out of the Ft. Meade program, you have been for 10 years. You started something very interesting, for short it's RVIS, Inc. There's a great website that's linked to your name at the top of my homepage at rense.com. Remote viewer.com, shortened up to very simple terms, rviewer.com 

Tell us about RVIS, why did you start it? 

PAUL:  I'd retired from the Army and started it in January of 1997. I'd retired from the Army about 3-4 months before. Was trying to sort out what I wanted to do and frankly remote viewing I felt was where my future lay. I wanted to change the paradigm and it seems like you need to have resources to do that. 

JEFF:  Is that a Capital "P," or a lowercase "p?" 

PAUL:  I like to put a capital "P" on it. The currently world view that there is nothing but that which you can measure, nothing exists except the physical universe. Maybe remote viewing is some strange version of physicality, but no, at least it's not accepted by the mainstream at the moment. 

JEFF:  If you're successful in changing it, Paul...how are we going to deal with the public in this country, at least, the part that has been truly "dumbed down" to the extent that most 12-year olds can't write a simple sentence anymore. How are we going to convey to this next generation of leaders in the country that there is so much more to our consciousness than we are led to believe or encouraged to believe by the Establishment. 

PAUL:  That is a challenge, but of course failures of education don't mean the people themselves don't have native abilities, both intellectual or in this case, so-called paranormal. It's something that people can exercise no matter how well educated they are. It would seem that there's a way to reach them even if they don't have a post-graduate degree in something academic. 

JEFF:  I've often said that college is an impediment to advancement, intellectually anyhow. I know a lot of people who say, "Gee whiz, I just spent 5 years in college and I don't know what I was doing there. I did spend a lot of money, however." 

PAUL: If it was a real impediment, I'd be in real trouble because I spent so many years there. 

JEFF:  Well, you're still at it. See, you're an addict. 

PAUL:  Part of the problem is that people go to college thinking it's a career school or vocational school. College is always intended to give somebody an education and prepare them to be a citizen in the society they're in, with the added benefit that maybe they learn something they can use as a career. 

JEFF:  So many of them view it as a postponement of responsibility. Let's keep maturity and adulthood at the door as long as we can. It's party time. Maybe it's better to retire when you're young than when you're old. 

PAUL:  The interesting thing about remote viewing, especially the way we teach it, people tend to find out more about themselves and I think they develop a more mature outlook on life when they actually learn how to do this. 

JEFF:  You're very kind in the way you understate that. People "tend" to find out more about themselves. I would say they discover an awful lot more about themselves, at least the people I know in the business. How can you not? 

PAUL:  That's true. It can be very revealing. You learn about things, not only that you can do that you never thought you could, but you learn about how your inner processes work that you never knew. 

JEFF:  That knowledge is an instant certifier or new confidence, is it not? 

PAUL:  It definitely is. Of course there can some real stress and hard work in between. People often times will start on a course in their life that requires a lot of hard work and some risk and they stop part way through and never realize the actual fulfillment that comes when you successfully accomplish something. 

Somebody takes one of our courses, they finish it whether they want to or not. Well, you can always opt out, but if somebody embarks on it, we work hard on them and by the time they're done, I think that they realize they're accomplished something worthwhile. 

JEFF:  Tell us about Remote Viewing Instructional Services, Inc -- RVIS. 

PAUL:  Our mission, of course, is to teach people how to remote view and it's a way of earning an income that helps promote our other agendas. I kind of feel like we have two missions in the company. One is to teach people how to remote view in this particular technology that we've learned and developed. The other mission is sort of a public outreach thing, educate people about remote viewing, even if they aren't going to be our clients down the road, we want to present remote viewing in a responsible way and help them understand what it's all about, just for the sake of them understanding it. 

JEFF:  That begs the next question: There are many people, not bus loads, but many people out there who have been teaching remote viewing for quite some time now, some with less sterling reviews from the RV community than others. How are you going to distance yourself from some of the flakes? 

PAUL: I don't think we'll even need to do that. I think the distancing will come in that direction. We'll just present remote viewing and teach it in as legitimate a way as we can, based on all the years of experience that the three of us together have. 

JEFF:  You mentioned 3, and we have three guests on tonight, not just Paul. We've got Gabrielle, who's coming up shortly. She is also a Ft. Meade veteran. And then a surprise guest later on. Someone who is literally making his public debut tonight, even though he has been known for some time on the Internet under a pseudonym or an alias. He is another Ft. Meade grad and he's terrific. So, he'll be on with us as well tonight. We've got a total of 3 from Remote Viewing Instructional Services. 

The aggregate number of years that RVIS has on-staff now, is more than impressive, Paul. Do you know how much altogether? 

PAUL: It's over 30. 

JEFF:  30 years of extraordinary remote viewing in service to this country, by and large at Ft. Meade, but certainly carrying on today with RVIS. It doesn't get any better than this. If you're interested in remote viewing, Remote Viewing Instructional Services and Paul Smith is the ticket. 

[break]

JEFF:  I'm back with Paul Smith and two other extraordinary guests standing in the wings. Gabrielle Pettingell...and then a surprise guest coming up a little bit later on, someone who have been well-known to all of you in the RV community. You're going to be pleased to at last put a real name on the alias that has been used. I guess we could call RVIS it a company, couldn't we, Paul? 

PAUL: We've been incorporated for three years. 

JEFF:  What do we call it? It's really an institute in a way, I guess. 

PAUL: Ultimately that's the goal -- to have a one-stop shop for remote viewing, where people can come and learn not just remote viewing but the other skills associated with it like tasking of remote viewers and analysis of remote viewing data and those kinds of things. 'Course that's down the road quite a ways. 

JEFF:  You can change it to RVI, you can drop the "S". 

PAUL: Remote Viewing Institute? 

JEFF:  That's it. 

PAUL: I think there is somebody out there with that name already. 

JEFF:  Maybe you can buy it from them. People sell strange things these days. 

Your ability is underscored by your classical training in Mideast politics, Mideast history. You are really an expert in the Middle East. We talked before the program for a few minutes about the state of affairs over there, which is not good by any measure. Dozens of Palestinians dead and close to 1000 wounded now in the last 4 days. It's not looking real promising at the moment. What are your views on this, and you have, again, a depth of perspective that few people enjoy. 

PAUL:  I want to be careful about the word "expert." That can have negative connotations. I like to consider myself a specialist in the Middle East, with a certain educational background and opinions. 

The situation is...it's unfortunate the way it's turning out right now. There looked like some real promise with this peace process they were going through. And then things fell apart a little bit. 

JEFF:  Did you really see promise in the peace process? I never saw much. I saw a lot of talk, a lot of hand-shaking. Even Arafat says that if he compromises, he's a dead man. Maybe I'm looking at it with a jaundiced eye. It didn't look good from the beginning. It's going where I thought it would. But I'm not an expert or a specialist. I'm just a pedestrian. 

PAUL:  The fact that they got as far as they did, I think, was historical -- of huge historical importance. That's the closest they've ever come on agreeing on the situation. But now it's fallen apart. I suppose that's not a surprise, there are a lot of people who don't want it to happen the way it is. And I lay the blame for that on both sides of the fence, I'm not a partisan of either the Israelis or the Palestinians. 

JEFF:  What about remote viewing the Middle East? Have you anything to offer? For those of you who are new to the concept of remote viewing, we might want to mention that remote viewing is not constrained by time or space and forward-viewing and backward-viewing are quite possible and achievable. 

Have you tasked anyone to check out the Middle East? 

PAUL:  No. For one thing, it hadn't occurred to me. 

The issue with trying to determine the future using remote viewing...of course, everyone wants you to be able to tell the future. They want to know what's going to happen with their lives; they want to know what's going to happen with their country, with their world. 

JEFF:  That's the most fun of all. 

PAUL:  It is. And in fact, it's possible to do it, it's not easy to do it and be successful at it. In fact, more frequently than not, you fail at it, just because of the nature of remote viewing the future. The interesting thing is that you can remote view the past just as well as you can remote view the present. But when you try to remote view the future, some other factors come into play that make it a bit more difficult to do. 

JEFF:  Such as? 

PAUL:  This has to do with my notion of time. The idea that I don't believe the future is fixed and my experience with remote viewing, and that of a number of other people, is that the future is not fixed, that it hasn't happened yet. But what we do have is extending out from the present moment, a number of possible alternative futures, if you will. Some of those are more likely than others and if you remote view into the future, you're taking kind of a gamble as to whether you'll pick the alternative future that ultimately occurs. Because there are a lot of variables that can happen. Every time another decision is reached -- a decision point in the stream of time is reached -- it can go one way or another, or another way. There are some random factors effecting that. One alternative future and not another one, and if you chose to remote view the one alternative future that doesn't get actualized, then your data turns out to be wrong. 

JEFF:  Some people would say that another non-actualized future may have become reality on another dimension. 

PAUL:  That's another theory about time and when we talk about this stuff it is mostly theorizing. We don't have any evidence for which one is right. All I can talk about is the timeline we seem to be in and sometimes you pick the right future, and sometimes you don't. 

JEFF:  Well said. For people listening who are intrigued about remote viewing and would like to know more, what do we tell them when they say, "OK, I take the course. Aside from learning more about myself and how I work and what consciousness is all about, what can I use it for?" 

PAUL:  That's always the $64,000 question. What good is it? And I'll start off with the simplest answer and that is you become more than you were before. And that's what many people are looking for. Here is something that our society says you can't do, here's something our society says doesn't exist. And yet a person comes, takes a course, actually succeeds in describing a target that they have no way of knowing what it is. Maybe on the other side of the world. They're cued by a set of numbers and they describe it and it's an amazing thing to them. It helps self-actualization, the thing that Maslow talked about years ago, the psychologist. 

JEFF:  That, in and of itself, would be such a consciousness-expanding and maturing event that I think you can get the drift, those folks out there who are interested, where remote viewing can take you. It can take you many places, all of them fascinating. Maybe the most fascinating of all is to learn more about yourself. 

[break]

JEFF:  A great pleasure to have back Paul Smith, one of America's most talented and able remote viewers. A graduate of the Ft. Meade group, the U.S. Army's long-standing program into remote viewing. Remote Viewing Instructional Services, Inc. -- RVIS -- is Paul's business. Two of his associates will be on tonight, as well. We have 3 folks who will be sharing ideas, concepts, experiences about remote viewing. 

Paul, for our listeners who say, "Remote viewing, what is that?" We don't want to leave anybody behind, so give us a couple of sentences or so on what remote viewing is and how long it has been recognized as an ability that can be improved upon. 

PAUL:  Remote viewing is a perceptual process. It's a perceptual channel in some respects, similar to the other senses, but coming in through a channel that we don't know where it comes from. Hopefully someday science will be able to discover that. 

What it is...the ability of a person to describe a target (a geographic site, a person, an event, something like that), that is shielded from that remote viewer by distance or some kind of intervening obstacle or time. And the remote viewer has no idea what the target is. They only have some kind of cuing thing, like a number or something, that tells them to describe a particular target. And they then proceed to describe it. 

JEFF:  Totally blind. You'd just be given a number '627.5836 West' or something like that, and that's it. 

PAUL:  Right. They started off using geographical coordinates, but we refined it to the point where you don't even need that. 

JEFF:  Really? 

PAUL:  Called "encrypted coordinates." It's just a number that stands for the mission that viewer's supposed to conduct. 

JEFF:  Give me an example. 

PAUL:  I'll take an example from the old military days, because that's easiest to see. Let's say that there is some kind of building on the far side of the Ural mountains, the Soviets are doing something, we don't know what it is. We want to know, but satellites only get a picture of the roof. They can't get any radio intercepts from it. They can't get a spy inside. So they turn to us as a last resort. 

They give the project manager the coordinate of the building and he turns that into an encrypted coordinate, just a random series of numbers that stands for that building. And then they'll take a remote viewer, not tell him anything about the target, not tell him what he's supposed to do -- I should say "him or her" because we had a lot of women doing this as well -- and the viewer would be in a room with a monitor, the monitor would not know what the target was either, in most cases. They'd provide the viewer with the number and the viewer would sit down and, using the process that we teach people, would go through and starting from very simple elements of perceptual type things, go all the way up through complex things and try to describe the inside of this building, not ever having had any kind of contact with it at all, other than their own mental abilities. That's basically the format of it. 

JEFF:  How long was the Ft. Meade project in existence? 

PAUL:  The Ft. Meade actually got officially started in 1979 and ended in 1995, what was that? ...17-18 years. But remote viewing was practiced longer than that. It began in roughly 1971-1972 when Ingo Swann was doing some experiments, in New York, with a number of people there, parapsychologists. They hit the rudiments of remote viewing, developed those. It became really supported in 1972 when Ingo Swann got together with a young physicist named Hal Puthoff, at SRI International, the think tank that got spun off from Stanford. Because of some of the preliminary projects they did there at SRI, Ingo and Hal, they got funding from the CIA. The CIA were worried about what the Soviets were up to, the Soviets were throwing literally millions and millions of dollars -- that's dollars, not rubles -- into parapsychology research. 

JEFF:  There was a gap. 

PAUL:  There really seemed to be. They were certainly outspending us to a great degree. 

JEFF:  And along comes Ingo, the grandfather of American remote viewing really, and sort of turned it around. 

PAUL:  That's exactly what happened. He, working with Hal -- you can't separate the two really -- Hal and Ingo working together and then soon with the assistance of Russell Targ, who came on. They created this program that both did research into remote viewing to develop it further and also to do operations. They did a number of operations, quite a few actually, before the program at Ft. Meade got started. That was the program for many years, up until '79. 

JEFF:  For all of you listening, keep in mind that this was a Top Secret, critically-important effort to keep up with the perceived advances that the Soviets had made in this field. We got into it officially in 1979 but as you just heard Paul tell us, there were some missions, some taskings done prior to that at the behest of the CIA and perhaps other government agencies as well. And then came the end of the Ft. Meade project, the alleged official end. We're going to talk about that, Paul, after our break. 

Why did our government drop something that was remarkably inexpensive? 

[break]

JEFF:  You were the Intelligence Director for the (Ft. Meade) unit and you had access to a lot of the data, if not all of it... 

PAUL:  Actually I was the Security Officer. 

JEFF:  Did I say Intelligence? I meant to say Security. 

PAUL:  Being Security Officer wasn't giving much access to the data. As a remote viewer, they tried to keep me dumb and stupid. 

JEFF:  Tell me how accurate you guys and gals were there. Just give me a thumbnail sketch of it and then you can give me your answer. 

PAUL:  That, of course, would depend on the project and how well we were hitting that day. But sometimes we were very accurate. Some of the stories of Joe McMoneagle, some of his projects now in the public domain, you can read about those, where he accurately described the Soviet submarine. We in the project, after Joe, on a number of occasions were just as accurate. 

JEFF:  That's amazing. And Joe has been on this program many times over the years. For those of you who don't know much about remote viewing, it is truly amazing. That's the best word I can come up with at the moment. 

So, you had a very high, or at least reasonably high accuracy rate. The question comes along, and I still remember Robert Gates giving that little news conference or testimonial in front of some committee, saying it just wasn't something they didn't think warranted the expenditure anymore. Why, what's going on? And I ask this question every time, Paul. Do we really think the government has dropped remote viewing? Now, I'm told that every branch and most, if not all, of the alphabet soup folks have their own interests in remote viewing, if not their own teams. 

PAUL:  I would like to think they're still doing it. I think it's important enough that I would hope that my country was still pursuing that in support of its own security. 

JEFF:  Even if you're only 50% right, what's the cost? Food and clothing for a dozen folks, a couple of administrators and compare that to the cost of one Abrams Tank. 

PAUL:  It's really an inexpensive thing. Of course, the average American would think, "That's way more than I make in a year." But if you look at the overall cost-benefit analysis it's really very inexpensive. Unfortunately, although I'd like to think that it's still being used, I think the odds are very against it's being used anymore. 

JEFF:  Why? 

PAUL:  The reason is because of the kind of people who run bureaucracies. They tend to be -- and there's a lot of research that backs this up -- they tend to be linear thinkers, or they tend to "seeing is believing." 

JEFF:  You're being so polite, Paul, it's amazing. There's another word...they're pinheads. I don't want to put them down, but they do think in bureaucratic harness, they just aren't free-wheelers. They just don't get it. And yet here's a program that's a winner. Even if you're 50% right, that's an awesome intelligence tool. 

PAUL:  I don't disagree with that. And you're right, we shouldn't put these folks down, because there are some very very smart people who just happen to have a bias against this whole notion of paranormal. 

JEFF:  I've heard a couple of the stories about what happened with the bureaucracy and allegedly why the RV program was cancelled. It is classically dumb, but we'll leave that go. 

We want to go back to what remote viewing can do for people. Certainly it can lead to quantum leaps in personal growth and understanding of, not only of ones own individual potential, but the potential of consciousness in general. Which is an awesome concept in and of itself. Harness all that power, we've got something. 

What is the practical application of someone taking a CRV course from Paul Smith? 

PAUL:  That's a very good question. There are a lot thing that people would like to do practically with remote viewing. There are the standard things: You want to find lost kids, you want to help solve crimes. 

JEFF:  Figure out who wins the 5th at Santa Anita? 

PAUL:  A lot of people want to try to do that, yeah. And, in fact, it's certainly plausible that remote viewing could be used that way. You have to have a certain skill level in order to do that. Just like with anything else. 

JEFF:  Are there people that you know of who have used remote viewing to prosper, shall we say, in the free-market economy we live in? 

PAUL:  Yes. 

JEFF:  He didn't even hesitate, folks! 

PAUL:  There are a number of people who are exploring it as an investment tool. It's a very specialized type of RV methodology that they use, that we call "Associative Remote Viewing." They are using it to predict the ups and downs of the commodities market. Some are trying to use it to predict some of the market indices and invest according to that. I know two cases, at least, who seem to be quite successful. One of which, money in the bank, made $70,000 during the last calendar year. I haven't seen the money, but I trust him that that's the case, just based on about 4 hours a day remote viewing during business hours. 

JEFF:  He's the guy...sitting at his desk in a trance for 4 hours. 

PAUL:  Sort of like that. 

JEFF:  Spaced out, but he's probing. 

PAUL:  That's basically what he's doing. His process is fairly complex. But $70,000 for a part time job, there aren't many jobs that will pay that way, certainly not McDonalds. 

JEFF:  Let's have you introduce the first of our other guests tonight. She is a veteran of the Ft. Meade team. 

PAUL:  I'm really pleased to introduce to you Gabrielle Pettingell. She and I worked closely together for a number of years at Ft. Meade. She started in 1987 and was there until 1991. She herself is very smart. She's got a degree in Psychology, almost finished a masters in Physics, has got an MBA from Wharton in business, which after she left the remote viewing program allowed her to work for Arthur Anderson, big holding company for a number of years. 

JEFF:  With her RV tools? We'll ask her. 

PAUL:  You can ask her that, it will be interesting to see what she says. She spent a couple of years over in Moscow Russia. Her husband worked for a bank over there. And, because of her MBA and her business experience, was asked to be an adjunct professor at a very prestigious business school there. So she's got great credentials, not just in remote viewing, but in the conventional world as well. I think you'll find her very interesting to talk to. 

JEFF:  Hello, Gabrielle. You sound like you're about 22, just getting ready to graduate this year. 

PAUL:  And she looks like it, too. 

GABRIELLE:  If you read Dave Morehouse's book, I'm also about 5 feet tall, petite, with brunette hair -- all of which is false! 

JEFF:  You mean there are holes in Morehouse's manuscript? How do we pronounce your last name, so we get it right? 

GABRIELLE:  Pettingell...it's a hard "g." 

JEFF:  You went to Moscow. This is interesting. They had to know who you were. 

GABRIELLE:  No, they didn't. That was the amazing thing. We think that everybody's system is so much better than ours. 

JEFF:  They didn't know that you had been at Ft. Meade? 

GABRIELLE:  They never stopped me crossing the border and I crossed the border a lot. They never questioned anything. It's amazing that we felt that they could do that kind of stuff. 

JEFF:  When were you there, what years? 

GABRIELLE:  I was there from '96, to just before '99. Two and a half years. 

JEFF:  You've got your merit badge from Moscow. 

GABRIELLE:  Oh, yeah. I kiss the ground here, pretty frequently, at the grocery store. 

JEFF:  All the people who gripe about this country, so many of them have never been anywhere. 

GABRIELLE:  I don't complain anymore. I don't complain about anything. There is not a thing in this country that you can complain about legitimately after living over there, you really can't. The people over there, it's a hard life. It's a rough life. 

JEFF:  I have some Russian friends from Kazakhstan. It's horrible, less than subsistence wages for most. 

GABRIELLE:  And Moscow compared with Kazakhstan is like the Emerald City. 

JEFF:  When did you first feel you might have something special in this field? As a child, or was it something that you grew into later on? 

GABRIELLE:  Oh, no-no. I was actually terrified coming to the project that I wouldn't be able to do it. As an Army Officer I had been working as an analyst, studying new technologies, and I'd bumped into the program. And I thought, "I want to go work there. That's neat." 

JEFF:  Just like that? 

GABRIELLE:  It didn't happen quite that easily. Later on I was notified that they had an civilian opening, so I applied for it. They accepted me and I realized that I was throwing away my career, having no clue whether I was psychic or not, to go be a civilian at this unit. I had a couple of terrifying weeks when I was using the last of my vacation time before I started work thinking, "What if I can't do it?" Impoverished, nothing to eat, I'd end up out on the street... 

JEFF:  Gabrielle, not a 5 foot tall, brunette hair and all that stuff. Somebody at the project recognized potential in you. Who figured out that you had talent. 

GABRIELLE:  I think it's more a willingness to learn, and to be open-minded to experiences. I think that's what they sensed. The training is rigorous, that I'd push through the training. I think they recognized that I was open-minded, that I was a creative-thinker, that I didn't have any kind of value system that would prevent me from being a good psychic -- I hate that word -- but a good remote viewer. They have a complete belief. I can train anybody to remote view, and I know that I can do that. It is a human capability, it's just a matter of whether the person is willing to put up with my training. They felt that I had the right attitude. 

JEFF:  You sound so humble about this. Paul, they certainly had criteria to pull people into the program. She had to pass some kind of profile. 

PAUL:  Yes, we give a battery of psychological tests. You had to fall within certain parameters and she did that. The general research shows that someone who is little bit smarter, and extroverted, and likes to think about things...she met all those criteria and so we thought she was a good risk. 

[break]

JEFF:  We were talking to Gabrielle just before the break about several things. She applied for Ft. Meade program, was accepted. What are your most enjoyable, most exciting memories of that? 

GABRIELLE:  Aside from learning to view, having successful operations, I guess my favorite moment was when I got to demonstrate it to Congress. They actually had me do a session, and Paul was the monitor for that session. 

JEFF:  Really! How many Congresspeople attended? 

GABRIELLE:  I don't want to go into too many details on that because I'm not sure if they would want that. At the time they were approving our funding and so they wanted us to demonstrate it. That was just a peak experience. 

JEFF:  You did, and you nailed the target. 

GABRIELLE:  I did nail the target. It was a very exciting moment. It was a hard environment to remote view in, obviously, with people watching you. But it was exciting and I nailed it and the program continued. 

JEFF:  But it didn't continue indefinitely. Were you surprised when it was abandoned. 

GABRIELLE:  No, I wasn't, because they never really used it to the degree they could have. We knew it, we knew a lot of the time we were doing operations, it was like test operations, as opposed to the information getting out to who in the community really needed it. 

JEFF:  How frustrating. 

GABRIELLE:  It was frustrating, but you can understand. In a bureaucracy you know who you're dealing with. You're grateful that you're alive at all. That's reality. You hope there's somebody out there still doing it. 

JEFF:  Well, you guys are. 

GABRIELLE:  We are and we're hoping to really start building on that. We want to really start exploring and building. What can we do with it in corporate America. That's one of the features that we want to start taking to companies. We're just starting to have those conversations and starting to think "what do we need to look at," how can we test it, what type of tasking do we need, and that type of thing. 

From that point of view, if you come back to us in a year and ask "what good is it?" we hope to have a better answer. 

JEFF:  As Director of Operations, you'd better have an answer. 

GABRIELLE:  I would like to comment that one other, besides the personal development angle is that it's fun. It is a peak experience. 

JEFF:  I can hear your voice, the first time you really drilled something on a test and got it right, you were excited, weren't you? 

GABRIELLE:  And not only that, but when I was just a novice viewer I remember being tasked and it turned out it was a crater on Mars. I had drawn a beautiful accurate rendition of that crater and it seemed that the colors, the reds... When I found out what the target was, there is nothing compared to saying, "My goodness, I saw Mars." It's a peak experience. 

So, what good is it? Well, we're still working on the utility in the non-intelligence world, we're trying to figure out ways to apply this, more simple ways of using this technology and expand on it. But still, as far as why you should spend your money to take a course, because there's nothing else like it. There really isn't. 

JEFF:  That's the bumper sticker: Remote Viewing -- There's nothing else like it! 

When you were looking at Mars and you were just given a series of numbers, no possibility of a connection, when you were looking at Mars in your mind and going through the process, how vivid in our world would you see it in your mind's eye. Give us a mental painting of how vivid that crater was to you. 

GABRIELLE:  It comes in bits and pieces. It's almost like somebody's taking quick little glimpses of textures and color and bit and pieces and throwing them into your brain. It's not like looking at a vista or something like that. You're getting it in bits and pieces. It's almost not pleasant. Sometimes you do go into what we call "bilocation," where you actually do have the sensation of being somewhere else, but in that case you become a rotten viewer because you can't report. Your just in an altered state and out of it. So you're trying not to go so deep that you have that sensation. 

You're getting these bits and pieces of data, you're drawing things, it's a fairly quick process so you're really not putting it altogether. If I start to say, "Oh, I'm on Mars!" I would blow the session because I would start thinking about Mars and start to read into it. I could be dead wrong, it could be in the Grand Canyon. 

JEFF:  So it comes in like a mosaic in pieces? 

GABRIELLE:  And there's an element of a sensation. You definitely are in some kind of different mental state. So you do have that sensation. It's not until you put it all together at the end that you get the rush of "Oh, I nailed it!" During the session, you might feel you are really on-target, but you don't know that until somebody tells you what the target was. 

JEFF:  Paul, an overview of the security aspects, classified aspects of the years at Ft. Meade. How much of what you did there can you talk about now openly? How much of it remains classified, national security and all that? 

PAUL:  The process is unclassified, but a lot of the operations aren't. They're still classified. And some of them will probably be declassified whenever the CIA gets around to doing that. But there are some operations that will probably never be declassified, because they still have certain security implications, what they call sources and methods. We may have had a tip-off of information from some very sensitive source and by revealing the project... 

JEFF:  You have to protect the source. 

PAUL:  Some of them will be declassified eventually, some of them probably won't. 

JEFF:  Gabrielle, if you are successful with Paul and our surprise guest coming up, at RVIS, in training the public and in indicating to people that this is not just a growth thing, but is a viable tool in our society and our world, are we running a risk here? The only analogy that comes to mind is teaching people how to be really good computer hackers, in a way. You're hacking consciousness, aren't you, in a way? Is that a fair way to look at it? Is it dangerous to give people these tools? Can it be used to corrupt our world by people of ill will? 

GABRIELLE:  Just about everything can be used to corrupt the world. Fire was a good thing; fire is also a bad thing. 

JEFF:  What about ethics in terms of candidates for the program. Is there a code of ethics at RVIS regarding a code of conduct for those trained in the field? 

GABRIELLE:  Our screening process, we want to find people who want to use it for the right reasons. 

JEFF:  There you go. 

GABRIELLE:  That's hard to do, too. You have people who may have come into the program that you think were applicable, and then you find out they aren't. We did have people at the unit who fell into that category. If you misuse something eventually it's going to come around and bite you. You just have to hope that that will happen. Some people will take it and try to engage in something like industrial espionage. But what's the saving grace? The saving grace is that it's not 100% effective. You always need corroborating data. They have to do conventional spying in order to get the corroborating data and hopefully they'll get nailed when they're doing that. 

JEFF:  Or wait til the competition released the product, "Oh, he was right!" I'm still trying to figure out how the Russians didn't know who you were. Talk about a bureaucracy that failed! 

GABRIELLE:  It did make it nerve-racking the first couple of times I went through the border. It was nerve-racking. 

[break]

JEFF:  Tell us, Gabrielle, about the differences as you perceived them, and as you experienced them, between men and women when it comes to being able to be a good remote viewer. Are there any? 

GABRIELLE:  I don't think so. I really didn't see a difference. I've trained both men and women and I really didn't see a difference in their ability. There really wasn't a difference in the type of data, though I know each individual viewer might have their own particular quirks, but I didn't see any tendencies that went along the male-female lines. 

You would think that women tend to be more intuitive, therefore they should be better viewers, or should be more "psychic." But then you think, men might tend to be more analytical so they'd tend to produce a cleaner product. But I didn't see any of those patterns. The numbers that we had, you can't make any claims anyway. When you're talking 10's of people, it's not fair to draw conclusions. I myself would have trouble viewing things that were particularly intense, like training sites like a prison or concentration camp or something like that. I'd probably do an excellent job of describing the facility, and the physical aspects of it, but I probably would not be able to get the emotional aspects of it. I would just shut down. 

JEFF:  Is that bilocation, or are you able to read the emotional aspects of it? 

GABRIELLE:  You do get emotional data. You do pick up any kind of information there is. If there's people there, you will pick up on what those people are, what they're doing or feeling. Some sites just have a feeling to them because they've been used the same way for so long that they have a certain sense to them. Like a religious site will definitely feel "religion." 

JEFF:  You'll sense the dogma. 

GABRIELLE:  Exactly. You'll feel that. When you do Controlled Remote Viewing, you use a sheet that has different columns for different kinds of information. One of them is emotional, others are for sizes, for dimensions, for colors. So for whatever category of information you have, there's a place to put it. 

JEFF:  Let me take you on a totally different tact here for couple of minutes. It is said that the Communist Chinese are into this heavily. And they're scouring their 1.1 or 1.8 billion -- whichever number you ascribe to -- population for people who have a tendency toward this talent and they're trying to go for...strength in numbers. That's what we're hearing anyway. They're putting together a massive program of young people who have psi ability. Any thoughts or comments on that? 

GABRIELLE:  I do think to some degree it's an advantage if you're a natural. But I also a liability, because you've already developed habits that might not be useful. If you have natural tendencies to being psychic and having these abilities, and then we try to put you to doing it a certain way, you're going to resist that because you've always done it another way. The way you've done it might be more likely to have what we call analytic overlay, where you have tainted data. Were your conscious processes are effecting the data you're getting. Or you're analyzing it before you report it. It twists the information. 

So many times you'll have naturals that when they're on, they're incredible, but when they're off, they're incredibly off. 

JEFF:  In the geopolitical sense, does it concern you that China is allegedly into this very heavily? 

GABRIELLE:  Yeah, any country that could potentially a threat, it does concern me. And it concerns me if we're not doing anything anymore. That's certainly a concern. And they do have a strength in numbers. But then, they have more of a bureaucracy than we did, so they're going to have the same forces on their program saying, "This is whole bunch of hogwash and we're wasting time." The types of people who run bureaucracies are not the kind of people who believe in human potentials. They're going to have that pressure even more than we do. Good evidence of that is that the Russians poured all this money into it, but they didn't seem to have as much success. I think that's because any successes they did have were probably squelched, similar to the way our successes were squelched. But more dramatically so, because they are even more bureaucratic than we were. 

JEFF:  Have you had any contact with the Russian equivalent of Ft. Meade? 

GABRIELLE:  I myself have not. There are some people who talk to Russian people. They just looked at naturals and what could naturals do. They did not try to say, "Can we train them better?" It doesn't seem they had a structured program to teach or train remote viewing, which is what we had. 

[break]

JEFF:  Now it's time to bring on our mystery guest, our surprise guest. Paul, I'll let you do a little background. This person is known with a pseudonym to many people in the remote viewing field, but he's obviously a man of great ability and has created a lot of mystery and intrigue during the time he's been using this alter ego name, as it were. So, tell us about him. 

PAUL:  The people in the online remote viewing community know him as "Liam." He's been going by this name because he still works for the government. Was in a sensitive position overseas for awhile. But he started getting involved in some of the email groups about remote viewing and now he's back in The States. 

So I'm going to introduce to you William G. Ray, known as Bill Ray. Bill is a good friend of mine. We trained together with Ingo Swann and not only were we friends, but he was my boss for awhile as well. 

JEFF:  Let me read Bill's brief bio for everyone. He's a former Commander -- this is the top guy -- of the Ft. Meade RV unit and one of the five military viewers trained by Ingo Swann. Bill spent over 3-1/2 years with the Ft. Meade unit and has spent approximately 11-1/2 years with remote viewing. He taught a CRV course in Europe for several years and that was the sensitive part of it. Right, Paul? 

PAUL:  It was a private effort on his own to try to keep his hand in and teach people who were there, who were very interested in it. Very low key, not officially connected. 

JEFF:  He's a retired U.S. Army Major, graduate with a masters in International Relations from USC; over 30 years in intelligence, including 20 years in Europe. 

Great to have you along, Bill! 

BILL:  Thank you, Jeff. 

JEFF:  You have remarkable patience. 

BILL:  I've learned that over the years. 

JEFF:  I would think you'd have to, to be a good remote viewer. You also have a great suntan. 

BILL:  That's one of the advantages of being in New Mexico. 

JEFF:  I don't suppose you got that in Europe. 

BILL:  I didn't get that in the Netherlands, no. 

JEFF:  What was it like to be trained by Ingo Swann. I was going to ask Paul this, and I yet may, but I wanted to save that question for you. Again, Ingo has graced this program several times and will be back again. He's a totally, utterly unique individual. 

BILL:  That he is. It was awesome. Ingo is a legend. Appears to be a dear sweet man, but he's a very strict taskmaster. 

JEFF:  Fierce competitor? 

BILL:  Oh, that definitely. That's probably an understatement. He demands perfection and hopefully he got it from us. 

JEFF:  The Ft. Meade unit in its heyday...what was Ingo's relationship to it? If any? 

BILL:  It varied from time to time. And a lot of his relationship was back-channeled. We would talk to each other about things going on. 

JEFF:  Was he a friendly guy to call, always accessible? Recognizing the importance of what was going on, even if the bureaucracy didn't? 

BILL:  In fact at times he would initiate the call because the bureaucracy was pulling things down or there were problems due to the bureaucracy. I received phone calls from Ingo saying, "There's a problem here, Bill, this is what we need to do." 

JEFF:  When you were Commander at Ft. Meade, how did that sit on you psychologically? Being a commander of such extraordinary people with a gift that was being polished, in 'process' all the time, just getting better and better. What was it like? 

BILL:  Once again it was awe inspiring. It's strange, the entire time I was with the Army, the only job I had that was possible to do, was the one at Ft. Meade, which was actually impossible. We did the impossible on a daily basis. The only job that was easy to do in the military. 

JEFF:  With your job, U.S. intelligence, and so on, so many years...30 years of intelligence work altogether...you were in probably in the most unusual position that anyone could be in, in terms of understanding the importance of the potential of remote viewing for this government's intelligence effort. How did you feel when Gates pulled the plug? 

BILL:  Like Gabi and Paul, I expected it. All decisions regarding the unit weren't military, they were all political decisions. A thing called the giggle factor. Politicians can't afford to be laughed at. If you recall, Mrs. Reagan when she was consulting the astrologer, what they made of that. 

JEFF:  We just found out that Charles DeGaulle was using one for decades. Probably most great world leaders in the last century have used psychic input. 

BILL:  Or at least opened themselves up to it. It's politically embarrassing. It didn't matter how successful we were, everybody wanted access to it, everybody wanted to use the unit, nobody wanted anyone else to know they were using the unit. 

JEFF:  Really? 

BILL:  Yes. 

JEFF:  I understand they didn't want to be mocked and derided over it. They knew it worked, but they were tentative. 

[break]

JEFF:  Did you have fun doing this, Bill? I'm sure you were very serious about things. 

BILL:  Yes, I did. 

JEFF:  There's humor in the remote viewing community. 

BILL:  There's a lot of it. I think one of the things that happens with remote viewers, we tend to take things less seriously. Once you've been back in time, once you've been all over the world, as Gabi was saying to Mars, all of a sudden that traffic jam doesn't seem that important. 

There were two reasons why I used the pseudonym. First of all, I was hoping the Department of Defense would, somewhere along the line, get back into the remote viewing business. 

JEFF:  You were playing a little head trip, were you? 

BILL:  Right. I was maintaining plausible denial. I figured as long as I was knowingly associated with RV out there, there was a chance it could come back. 

JEFF:  Alright, Bill, who was watching and reading the boards that you were targeting? You don't have to give any names, but what kinds of people were you pitching or playing this game with? Who were you trying to influence? 

BILL:  I was trying to avoid being linked with the publicization of RV. Once again, so in case the project did come up again... 

JEFF:  You were still available. You want to get back in the harness. 

BILL:  I'd like to. I think that we were very worthwhile, but I don't think it's going to happen, because of the giggle factor. 

JEFF:  OK, let me take you to another level in the government, let's talk about NSA, NRO, ONI and all the rest. Why couldn't these agencies, who certainly could scare up the funding necessary, have a couple of remote viewers they are working with? Isn't that certainly something that's viable and logical? 

BILL:  Viable, logical, I don't know. There are many restrictions placed on the RV community. RV is considered "human use." A human experimentation. So you need yearly approval to go ahead and do it. 

JEFF:  Now, hold on, a lot of us are saying, wait a minute, Bill. These black operations we hear so much about, certainly don't get yearly approval, they just go ahead and do what they need. They've got as much money as they want. 

BILL:  Yes, but they don't involve human experimentation. 

JEFF:  Well, they certainly experiment on the unknowing American public over the years, with biologicals. 

BILL:  Which is why the rules were developed. And the second problem with the super-secret RV unit that's rumored to be out there is, if you're so secret that no one knows about you, then how do we go get you to target you? 

JEFF:  Could you and your friends, Paul and Gabrielle -- well, you're not supposed to know, so I'd have to keep this simple -- couldn't one of the other of you task that as a target sometime? Check out and see if there is a group working? Could you do something like that? 

BILL:  As long as the other two didn't know. 

JEFF:  We wouldn't have validation of it, but it might be a fun thing to do anyway. Speaking of fun. 

BILL:  You have a devious mind, you know that. 

JEFF:  Let me bring up a subject that has always been of great importance, and I have only gotten occasionally, almost grudgingly, into it with people. People in the field don't like to talk too much about it, and that's remote influencing. Otherwise known as "RI." Let me ask you point blank, in Bill Ray's world, does remote influencing exist? 

BILL:  No. It does not. There are certain ways to influence people by being in contact with them, not using RV. As far as making contact... 

JEFF:  What I'm really alluding to are comments by other remote viewers in the past who say that they have put up, to use the parlance of the Internet now, "firewalls," to protect themselves from being probed by other remote viewers in other countries. Protection not only from being probed, but perhaps from being harmed, influenced, skewed, stressed, whatever. Does that make any sense to you? 

BILL:  I think it's a little paranoid. No. One of the things we did do, particularly in a hostage situation. We had a viewer who made contact with a person who was being held hostage. We would try to comfort him when we left, we would try to tell him we were looking for him, try to make contact with him that way. I'm not sure whether that works or not, but it definitely made the viewer feel better, when he came back, leaving this person in the predicament they were in when they found them. 

JEFF:  Let me go a little bit further down the road: so, the effort at remote influencing was made, at least in some cases. 

BILL:  In a positive view, yes. If it was successful, I don't know. 

JEFF:  We could call it telepathy, we could call it a lot of things. 

BILL:  Yes. 

JEFF:  This goes to the somewhat paranoid concept that other governments, the Soviets perhaps had been working on RI, and the Chinese would love to bring a couple of busloads of trained viewers and have them hone in on a target and destabilize or deconstruct somebody's psyche. Does this, again, make any sense to you? Do you think some people elsewhere might think that RI is viable, is possible as a potential. 

BILL:  I do believe the Soviets did experiment with it. I think they spent a lot of money and time, but I don't believe they had any positive results. There's speculation that the Korean airline that drifted off-course was influenced by Soviet RI folks, but I just don't think it's possible. I haven't seen it, I can't do it and I don't know anybody else who can. 

JEFF:  Let me take you to another level. If we have now just ventured ever so gingerly across the threshold of psi, into the world of remote viewing, could there be another whole level of power, of powers, that we might be able to access someday? That would be beyond remote viewing? 

BILL:  I would hope so, yes. But once again, we're speculating. We don't know how remote viewing works yet. And we may never know. But we know it works. 

PAUL:  Can I hop in here a sec? I wanted to comment on remote influencing. 

JEFF:  I was going to ask you to, and Gabrielle is next. 

PAUL:  You know there is some scientific evidence that we can effect things with thought at a distance. PEAR lab at Princeton has had some positive relations with the machine-mind interactions. 

JEFF:  Well, Ingo did it. He raised the temperature of something at a distance. 

PAUL:  The thermistor, yeah, and he had a interesting effect on a quark-detector at Stanford as well. 

JEFF:  Those are certainly limited demonstrations of what would appear to be RI. 

PAUL:  There's a much more interesting case, though. Larry Dossey talks a lot about the power of prayer, where you get a lot of people praying for someone and there seems to be a positive outcome in their health situation. 

JEFF:  I'm sure all of you have read Dean Radin's book. The old random number generator thing. With Diana's funeral and the OJ Simpson verdict and there was apparently some focusing, some harnessing of mass consciousness. 

PAUL:  Right. But now there's another side to the coin that people don't think about. First of all, to cause these effects you have to have a lot of people doing it. You know, they discovered the more people you have praying for you, the better if you wanted to recover from cancer or whatever. And few people seem to have a major effect. The same thing applied to the PEAR experiments and to Dean Radin's work. If we lived in a universe where anyone could influence someone else mentally at a distance and that person who was being influenced had no defenses against it, we'd all be in serious trouble. The guy in the car next to you, that you just cut off, is thinking pretty bad thoughts about you. 

JEFF:  You see that's why I asked Gabrielle about this earlier. Is this potentially a dangerous tool in the hands of some people? And as she pointed out so eloquently, you never know about someone's true colors. Are they at their core dark or light? You can't always see. 

PAUL:  I think we probably, assuming for the sake of argument that remote influencing is possible, I think we have built in defenses to make us less vulnerable to those things. 

JEFF:  'We,' as in remote viewers, or 'we' as in all of us? 

PAUL:  We, as in human beings, across the board, as a race. 

JEFF:  Kind of like a blood-brain barrier. 

PAUL:  Somewhat, yes. I think that's probably a good analogy. So, does it work? I dunno. We haven't seen any macro effects by it. There are a lot of claims made, but when you start tracking those claims down, they can't provide any serious evidence for it. It's anecdotal and it's non-repeatable. I kind of agree with Bill on this, but I don't rule out at least some possible effect there. 

JEFF:  Bill, you worked with Joe McMoneagle...he's been on the program many times, wonderful man. You guys I guess had some interesting experiences, we'll talk about those as we continue. He's doing consulting work, as a remote viewer, which is what you folks are going to work to, in time, under Paul's direction at RVIS. Does that appeal to you? Would the idea of industrial espionage being far more than an idea now, it's an obsession for many. I'd think the demand is going to be enormous. 

BILL:  Yes. We're looking at countering industrial espionage. Both domestically and I would think internationally. 

JEFF:  Very good. You know there's another issue to big industry and corporate hiring of people. There are many people who are given a full astrological appraisal before they're hired in key positions. Do you know anything about that, Bill? 

BILL:  No, that's interesting. 

JEFF:  I've heard of it from several people who have done consulting work for companies. Again, the giggle factor keeps it pretty much under wraps, but astrology is far from gone. 

[break]

JEFF:  How long has it been, Bill, that you've been doing the Liam impersonation? 

BILL:  Oh, I don't know, 3 years maybe. 

JEFF:  He's come clean tonight, William G. "Bill" Ray who is former commander of the Ft. Meade RV unit and one of 5 viewers trained by Ingo Swann. Paul Smith also trained by Ingo. 

It's now time for Gabrielle to talk about remote influencing and her take on that. Go ahead, Gabrielle. 

GABRIELLE:  Well, it would certainly explain the Monica Lewinsky affair. 

JEFF:  You're been just waiting...sitting on that one! 

GABRIELLE:  I don't think that you can remotely influence someone. I'm of Paul's mind. 

JEFF:  Somebody 'forced' Clinton. The latest word from, I forget who, Dick Morris, I think, says now there were hundreds of them. 

GABRIELLE:  Exactly. I do think now there is built-in human protection. I do think there are phenomena like PK and healing that can be developed. I really do think that we're in the total infancy of this technology. We really are. All of us, I know, when we were going through training would experience unusual things that hinted that other things could happen. 

For example, when I was going through training and it was very stressful thing, we could not keep a light bulb in my house for more than 3-4 weeks. My husband had an electrician in because we were burning out light bulbs like crazy. 

JEFF:  This brings up the issue of poltergeist phenomena. 

GABRIELLE:  Which a lot of people think is usually somebody who has some psychic capability, a lot of times it's linked to girls in their puberty, going through a lot of emotional turmoil. I think there's a lot left to be explored. For me the hardest part about the program dying was the potentials which were left laying on the table. 

JEFF:  You are now assembling together again, you and your colleagues to push those potentials to their logical conclusion. At least get further down the path, which is very exciting. 

GABRIELLE:  Exactly, and we don't have to deal with any more bureaucracies. 

PAUL:  Except the IRS. 

JEFF:  Well, let's hope there is remote influencing and you can get in there and straighten that mess out. What about...you mentioned light bulbs burning out...would sometimes you hear a pop, or they just wouldn't last long. Did you ever experience streetlights going off and on when you were driving down the street? 

GABRIELLE:  Nope, not streetlights. I did have a really strange thing happen. I had an old phone I didn't need anymore, I was taking to a friend. I was driving down the highway and it kept ringing. It was right after I'd finished work. This phone would just ring and ring and ring. I stopped the car and tried to get the phone to ring. 

JEFF:  Did it have batteries in it, Gabrielle? 

GABRIELLE:  No, it was an old-fashioned, ATT, no battery in it. I had a phone who was an engineer look at the phone, and of course I couldn't tell him anything about this. I said, "I thought I heard this phone ring, it was ringing when the phone wasn't plugged in." He said it was impossible. So, I reported this at work the next day. Paul said, "Well, why didn't you answer it?" 

JEFF:  Maybe it's better you didn't. Rod Serling would probably say, "hmm, I dunno." Was it ringing in normal cadence? 

GABRIELLE:  Yeah, it rang in normal cadence. It was the strangest thing. I was very lucky I didn't have an accident because this phone was just ringing in normal cadence. 

JEFF:  Oh, Paul, who do you think might have been on the other end? 

PAUL:  Oh, it was probably her own psyche. Talked to herself, but it was a long-distance call. 

JEFF:  Bill Ray, any strange events in your life that we would call paranormal? 

BILL:  I'm sure they happen. 

JEFF:  Being on this program is one of them. 

BILL:  A strange event, yeah. 

JEFF:  I got an email from someone asking if husbands and wives can take your course together and is there a discount? Half facetious with that. Do you have married couples do this? 

PAUL:  Certainly husbands and wives can take the course. My second set of students was a husband and wife team, I guess you could call them. Back in 1997. They did excellently. There's some interesting research, PEAR lab and elsewhere, that shows that bonded heterosexual couples actually do better in psychic sorts of tasks than do any other kind of pairing: same sex, unbonded heterosexual pairs. A married couple, at least in theory, should do better, if this research really is valid. 

[Transcriber's note: Please notice that Paul does **not** say that heterosexual viewers or psychics are better than homosexual ones, or that married psychics are better than single ones. 'Nuff said.]

JEFF:  Well, it makes sense, if they are synched up psychologically, emotionally; certainly psychically, and they would seem to be a logical partner in that little trio. 

PAUL:  I would think so. So far that's been my experience. In fact when I do an operational remote viewing, I have my wife monitor me. If I have a choice, I have her do it rather than anyone else. Just in case there really is that effect. And it seems to have worked so far fairly well. Many of my operational sessions have been fairly successful. And I don't know if at a greater rate than they would have been otherwise. 

JEFF:  Define that for us, "Operationally focused." 

PAUL:  Well, there are two kinds of remote viewing sessions you can do, maybe three. There is the training. Obviously you do sessions to do training so you are successful. There are research sessions one can do, if you're working for one of the laboratories. And then there are operational sessions. An operational remote viewing session is one that is conducted in support of someone who has a real world goal. They want to find out some information that is essential, some kind of essential element of intelligence. Any kind of thing that's a pact-liable case of remote viewing would be considered an operational remote viewing session. 

JEFF:  Bill, I mentioned Joe earlier. Certainly a legend in the field. As you will be in a few years, so you have to get out in the open and expose yourself to the folks. Keep Liam around, that's always fun. Keep posting under Liam. Maybe you can get into arguments with him, Bill Ray against Liam. That will really confuse them (smile). Tell us about some of your experiences with Joe in operational remote viewing. 

BILL:  I came into the unit towards the end of Joe's military career. At the time Skip Atwater was doing most of the monitoring. What we would do is, Skip would go in the room with Joe. Joe worked ERV as opposed to CRV. 

JEFF:  Define ERV real quick. 

BILL:  Extended Remote Viewing, basically going into almost a trance and then reporting back. Skip would go in and monitor him and Skip would have an earphone in. I would be listening outside. Skip would be concentrating on maintaining Joe's level and I would be concentrating on the intelligence problem. I would whisper into the phone in Skip's ear. We were doing a session one time, it referenced an embassy in another country and two of the people from another government agency who had been there about a month earlier, were in the booth with me monitoring. We had sent Joe back 30 days in time, back to the period of time these people had been in that embassy, trying to find something. They hadn't been able to find it. 

Joe started reporting back, and starting reporting what had been going on with these people who were there also. One room was very messy and he was basically talking about the two people who were in the booth with me. Talking about them 30 days earlier. They were both amazed. 

And then something came up, we were looking for a certain problem. Joe mentioned that there was a problem with the security guards at this place. They were letting unauthorized people in. And that did turn out to be the problem later on. Not only did we get the results for the problem the agency had, but we got the additional result of identifying a problem nobody knew existed. 

JEFF:  Interesting. All of you have at least one great book in you, if not 2-3 screenplays from all of this, I'm sure. 

BILL:  If they would unclassify it all. 

JEFF:  It's one of those things you have to live with. Boy, if they could only know the whole story. Maybe one day we will. 

Paul, you mentioned new developments in remote viewing at Remote Viewing Instructional Services. What do you have that makes your program even more cutting edge than it already is. You've got the greatest staff I could imagine. 

PAUL:  Having Bill and Gabi come on board is really beneficial because that expands our capability. We've developed what we're calling an enhanced remote viewing Basic Course. Taking the Basic course as I've been teaching it over the last 3 years and we've added some of those skills that Gabi offers. We going to do some personality profile testing and evaluation in terms of remote viewing. Taking that into consideration in helping the students learn then how they might approach it in their own individual way. 

[break]

JEFF:  I want to hear from you, Paul, about any paranormal experiences you may have had in your life. You've had a very unusual life. Anything odd there? I just got an email from our mutual friend Skye Turell, and speaking of Gabrielle's ringing phone, she said, "I have a friend who unplugged her phone in order to avoid a call that she knew would be coming in. The phone rang and she answered it and proceeded to have a conversation with the guy, all the time holding up the unplugged jack for her house guests to observe." 

PAUL:  Boy, he must've really wanted to talk to her. Y'know the really weird, the very paranormal thing about me is that I've not ever had any paranormal experiences, other than what I've experienced remote viewing. In fact, I was pretty well convinced that it didn't work. When I was in junior high, one of my classmates wanted to do an experiment. A parapsychology research experiment, a classic one with the Zener cards, all the different cards with the different shapes on them. I was a psychic brick. I was a total failure at that. As far as remember, the experiment itself was as well. So from that I concluded that there must be nothing to it, even though I wanted there to be. I loved science fiction that dealt with ESP kinds of things. But that was a total failure. Any attempt I'd seen, or tried to do myself, as being psychic was a total failure. So I'd given up the idea that it was a reality. It took me less than a second to change my mind about that when I was asked to become part of the program, the logical chain, I said, "If the government's doing it and they want to hire me to work at it, that must mean they are having some success at it and that must mean therefore that there's a reality to it, that it really does work. 

JEFF:  Again, you must have had to pass some kind of screening. Someone had to notice you somewhere. Or did you seek them out? 

PAUL:  No, it was a very interesting synchronicity. I moved in next to Skip Atwater. We had these government quarters. I was maybe 200 yards from the offices of the remote viewing unit. Of course I had no idea that that's what was going on there. I moved in next door to Skip Atwater, who was the operations and training officer, the guy who essentially founded the remote viewing unit at Ft. Meade. Across the street from the first Ingo trainee, a guy named Tom. And poof, there I was. I had some interests that were different from your average Army intelligence officer. They were actually looking for intelligence officers who were competent in the field, as normal intelligence officers, but who also had interests in things like maybe art, music or maybe languages, creative writing. Anything that was sort of a right-brain activity. Well, it so happened that I was interested in all of those. So they got to know me and say, "Well, this guy fits the profile we're looking for. We ought to give him the test and see if he comes out where we want him to on the test." And I did, I guess. They gave me the test, said, "how would you like to try this?" and I said sure, why not? 

JEFF:  OK, here's a question for all of you. Since Paul has opened the door to this next one. I'm going to make a statement and let me get a response. We'll take ladies first this time. Here's the statement: 'There are no coincidences.' Paul's juxtaposition with those people... 

GABRIELLE:  Wow. That really strikes at personal philosophy. And I'm not sure it's fair to link that to remote viewing. I myself believe that everybody can remote view. I think there's just some people who will find it more difficult than others. 

JEFF:  It's more of a consciousness question, I understand. 

GABRIELLE:  I'm a quite religious person, so I obviously believe that God is involved in the world. From my perspective, some things are not coincidences. As far as the program goes, how I ended up at the program, it was my sheer doggedness and persistence. I had bumped into the program when I was an analyst. In fact, I had figured out the program. Somebody else had asked me to look at some reports because they wanted to protect the source and they were in a technology I was studying. My immediate reaction was, "Oh great, we've recruited a Soviet scientist." I was trying to figure out "who is he" I wanted to see before they released them. They felt the information was important enough to go out to the community. But they didn't want to release them if it was going to reveal the source. And so I pondered over this for a month and then I told them -- there were a couple of different ones -- and all of a sudden it hit me one night that there was only one way they could get that information, even though I myself at that point really didn't believe in psi phenomena. I knew of that, I asked where it came from and they said this unit, but they wouldn't confirm or deny what I'd figured out. I found out they had a military spot opening and so I interviewed for it. It was an interview where they thought I didn't know -- it was Bill Ray who interviewed me... 

JEFF:  And he didn't know that you'd figured it out. 

GABRIELLE:  No, he didn't. It was an awkward situation, do I tell him or not? 

[break]

JEFF:  Go ahead, Gabrielle. 

GABRIELLE:  So Bill interviewed me and then they decided against me. I'm not entirely sure why, but I'm pretty sure...at the beginning of the radio show you said I sounded 21...I was carded until I was in my mid-30's. So I have a feeling they didn't want a teenager at the unit. I was only a Lieutenant at the time. So a couple of years later I heard through Ed Dames as a matter of fact, that another spot had opened, a civilian spot and I thought "I'm really suited for this." Not because I have any experience in it, but I do have a degree in psychology. I'm very familiar with the needs of the intelligence community and the tasking processes, what type of information is of value. 

JEFF:  Plus, you'd figured out the program's existence. They didn't know that. 

GABRIELLE:  He had witnessed that, he'd been somewhat involved when that had occurred. So they pulled me over again and I went through the whole round of interviews again. They decided I was worthy. And I had matured a lot. A couple more years of experience... 

JEFF:  You'd dyed your hair grey for the interview. 

GABRIELLE:  That's how I stumbled into it. I aggressively pursued it. 

JEFF:  Alright, Bill Ray, tell us about this. Rejected and then accepted? 

BILL:  There were three reasons why we didn't take Gabi the first time. 

JEFF:  Do you know these reasons, Gabi? Is this Bill or Liam talking? 

BILL:  This had better be Liam, I guess. 

JEFF:  Get me off the hook, Bill. 

BILL:  First reason, I think it's the one I gave her, we were looking for somebody more experienced. Somebody better known in the intelligence community. More background. The other two reasons, the second one, I wasn't quite sure when I talked to Gabi, several things had to come together. Her husband was going to do this and there was...I wasn't sure we could get longevity out of her. 

JEFF:  Domestic issues. 

BILL:  Right. And the third issue, Paul had recommended her. What I was worried about was factions developing in the unit. Looking back from my perspective now it wouldn't have happened in this case with Gabi, but I didn't know that at the time. 

JEFF:  A lesser person could have caused some turmoil within. 

BILL:  I didn't understand the relationship between her and the person who was recommending her. Worries that we would get a balance of power going in one way and not another. 

JEFF:  I understand. The bubble gum wasn't a problem though, Bill? 

BILL:  Not really. I would have preferred somebody older, but we would have gone ahead. She's a talented person. 

JEFF:  Paul, go ahead. 

PAUL:  Well, Bill explained it. I was going to mention the name of the person, but I think I'll skip that. 

JEFF:  That's alright, I think I know who it is. And I'm not a remote viewer. 

PAUL:  Well, maybe you're better than you think. 

JEFF:  This is all very interesting. It's not easy to interview. Here's a question for you, Bill. Did you ever task anyone to check out an applicant, without them knowing obviously. 

BILL:  No, I would think it's probably illegal. 'Cause we'd be going and spying on somebody. 

JEFF:  See the ethics here, friends? That's a couple of times tonight that you have brought the ethical side forward and it's very important. The remote viewers at Ft. Meade, and all of you listening. You can be very very proud of this sacrifices they made on your behalf. I think we can all lament, to one degree or another, the sad state of affairs that we have to deal with in bureaucracies, as has been made abundantly clear tonight. 

Here's another question, and I didn't get to you, Bill, about coincidences. How do you feel about coincidences and synchronicities? 

BILL:  For an intelligence officer there are no coincidences. It's been my experience that things happen for reasons. We can't always see when it's going on, but looking back, there aren't many coincidences in God's world, I don't think. 

JEFF:  Would Liam agree with you? 

BILL:  He's pretty smart in this area. You know the Irish, the way they are. 

JEFF:  Here's another question. I have always in my mind the fascinating stories that Ingo shared with us about his ET paradigm. Let me ask each one of you to comment a little bit on that because it is such a profoundly important question. Gabi, you first. How about ET, UFOs? Have you ever been tasked to look in that direction? 

GABRIELLE:  Yes, a lot. Definitely tasked, definitely got lots of data. I'm a fairly scientific person, I know I come off as being a little bit light and flip, but I've worked it a lot. And I've gotten a lot of information. It was a lot of real interesting, neat and fascinating and some of the most fantastic sessions I've ever done have been taskings against UFO type things. The reality is that there is no corroborating evidence and knowing as a person who trains, I could task someone against Jules Verne's book, "2,000 Leagues under the Sea." And they would come up with all this great data about this very unusual submarine, y'know. See what I mean? 

JEFF:  Yes. Answer me this question when we get back, who tasked you with all these UFO targets, ET targets? Very interesting. 

[break]

JEFF:  Gabi, who tasked you with the ET targets? 

GABRIELLE:  I'm not sure tasking is the right word to use. When I did all the ET sites, I was still in training. 

JEFF:  Give me an example of an ET site. 

GABRIELLE:  I didn't know exactly how they tasked it because the trainer would just give me the coordinates. One thing was that meteor in Russia. 

JEFF:  The Tunguska Blast...it was 1908. 

GABRIELLE:  I did that as a session. That was one I remember. 

JEFF:  And you got ET data from that? 

GABRIELLE:  I got data that could probably be analyzed that way. Unfortunately what makes it harder is that the person who is tasking it, 1) it was training so the monitor was witting and, 2) I was a trainee and, 3) the trainer's hobby was studying UFOs. So, from a scientific point of view it wasn't a clean session. But, I did get ET type results from it. The neat thing was that, but could you take it and run with it? I certainly wouldn't. Just because it was incredibly tainted. It was very interesting. 

JEFF:  Quick question. Personally you don't have a problem with ET? 

GABRIELLE:  Nope. 

JEFF:  None? Even your religion? 

GABRIELLE:  None whatsoever and I actually think it would be really cool. 

JEFF:  You know what the Pope said? If there are ETs, they're all God's children anyway. 

GABRIELLE:  That's right. 

JEFF:  Bill Ray, what about you and the ET issues as far as remote viewing goes? I know Ingo, he's had some amazing experiences. 

BILL:  Right, and I know Ingo's a little leery about viewing ETs. I've viewed ETs as training targets, both for Skip and for Ed Dames. I think it's probably a legitimate training target in that it'll get the viewer to report whatever comes into his mind. But as Gabi says, there's no way to verify, there's no way to validate what you view. I've had some strange data reported on some sites. 

JEFF:  You have no problem that we might be being visited? 

BILL:  No, none at all. 

JEFF:  OK, note that dear listeners! 

GABRIELLE:  We're all X-Files fans, too. 

JEFF:  The ringmaster, Paul Smith? 

PAUL:  I've talked about UFOs on here before. I actually kind of think that there are what we call UFOs, some extraterrestrial involvement, some sort of extraterrestrial civilizations as well. My religion supports that, as a matter of fact. The one thing to keep in mind when you're talking about doing UFO type remote viewing sessions, though, is the danger of what we call "telepathic overlay." 

If you do a session against a target that doesn't actually exist, then your subconscious is going to try to find some kind of psychic signal to give you an answer. And if the person who tasks you really believes that thing existed, even though it doesn't, then you're just as likely to latch onto that person's beliefs. So you produce this session, you produce this really great data that substantiates that your tasker actually thought about this target and all of a sudden this person is really convinced that the target really exists. Even though it really doesn't. You give some reality to a non-real thing. That's always a danger to be reckoned with. 

That said, I think remote viewing can well be a tool for discovering things about extraterrestrial involvement, perhaps. Understanding the caveats, that if you don't have corroborating data you can't take the information as anything more than tentative. 

JEFF:  Let's talk just briefly in our remaining couple of minutes, about the International Remote Viewing Association, and you've got a big conference in the planning stages right now, coming up for next year. 

PAUL:  Of course the International Remote Viewing Association was founded to try and bring some sanity to the remote viewing world and we're slowly doing that. We have a great webpage that is being put up by our webmaster, who I'd like to put in a plug for: Shelia Massey. I guess she's probably got a link at the bottom of the page. She's done that and the remote viewing conference page. 

JEFF:  The address for the IRVA? 

PAUL:  That would be www.irva.org. There's even an opportunity to do a remote viewing test from there. 

JEFF:  It's fun, I've been told about that and I did put a link up on my webpage. All of you go to irva.org and you can have a little fun with the remote viewing test. It's good. 

PAUL:  We're sponsoring a remote viewing conference next year. The one this last May was a great success and we're hoping for an even bigger and better one. 

JEFF:  In New Mexico again? 

PAUL:  No, the first one was in New Mexico, the most recent one was in Mesquite, Nevada. The next one, right now is not absolutely sure, but it's looking like Las Vegas, just because it's the most inexpensive and easiest to get to. 

JEFF:  I totally agree with you and I don' t know why they can't get that UFO conference switched over there. Nothing against Laughlin and Mesquite, but put it in Las Vegas. There's more access, more people. I think it's a good venue for you. 

PAUL:  We're shooting again for either Memorial Day or the first week in June. That seems to be the best time. We have a bunch of guests in mind, we haven't invited them yet until we get a concrete date, but I think we're likely to get some pretty interesting folks. We had interesting ones last year, and we're trying to do as well or better for this coming year. The RV conference is going to be great, I think. 

JEFF:  Let's get a final comment, first from Bill Ray. Bill, anything you want to leave us with here tonight? Liam, if you don't want to talk anymore. 

BILL:  The truth is out there and may the force be with you! Like Paul said, if we can get some sanity to this and get back to the scientific basis, we'll be a whole lot better off. 

JEFF:  Agreed, thanks so much for coming on and "coming out" tonight. Bill Ray's coming out party... 

Gabi, you're the one who's carrying the load there. You're the Director of Operations. You're going to have to make it happen. 

GABRIELLE:  We're definitely going to make it happen. The operational thing is a little bit in the future but training-wise all I can say is that if you have an interest in it, it's worth every penny and we definitely won't let you down. We've kept pretty much strictly to the Ingo methodology, from using our CRV method you can learn any other very quickly. As opposed to the other way around. If you go from ERV or something like that, to CRV, it's much harder. We guarantee you won't be disappointed. 

JEFF:  An expanding job market for trained remote viewers? There is a market for that? 

GABRIELLE:  There is a market for that. We definitely want to build on that. Right now there's not enough what I would call qualified operational viewers out there, to really run a commercial operation. So our first goal is to get more very well trained people out there and then start using them to test different concepts that we're developing. We want to do it in a way that's truly marketable. It's one thing to say that we've got this great hit when we did this op. But it's another to say we've got X probability on this type of scenario and that's what we want to provide to people. It's going to be a little bit slow in developing, because we're going to do it the right way. 

JEFF:  Remote Viewing Instructional Services, Inc., Paul H. Smith. It's your vision, Paul. You've got two fabulous people and a great staff and you're on the way. 

PAUL:  A quick blurb, we do have an Enhanced Basic Course scheduled for the 25th to the 28th of October. People can find out about that on the webpage. 

JEFF:  Where are you doing the training? 

PAUL:  I'm in Austin, TX. That's where we're going to have it this time and in fact we'll probably work out of Austin most of the time, but there are going to be opportunities in the future to do it elsewhere. Gabi's in Florida, so down the road a ways we may do something there. We're going to take it slow, for the time being Austin's the place, but we'll see how it works out. It depends on demand in a given region and our time schedule. 

JEFF:  Last question for you, Paul. Where do you expect to be in 5 years with remote viewing, as a talent, as a tool? Where are we going to be with it? 

PAUL:  Well, of course there are a lot of variables and it's tough to predict because of that. I think it's going to be close to a household word. It isn't yet, lots of people don't know about it, but given 5 years and the intensity that people are coming to it with, I think it'll be a pretty broadly known thing and it will be used for various kinds of projects. 

JEFF:  Well said. Thanks for bringing Gabi on and for pulling Bill out of the closet. It's been a lot of fun.