Yes, it’s true. I have just spent two weeks colluding with Russians.
Mind you, this was not the political-intrigue kind of collusion that has become so famous during President Trump’s administration. No, this was more like economic espionage–but perfectly legal, rest assured. We were trying to use remote viewing to win the California Daily 3 lottery. Shortly, I’ll tell you how we did. But first, here’s the rest of the story.
It began several months back when a Russian friend of mine and remote viewing enthusiast named Yury Pichugin gave me a call. Yury and I had first met when he and his son came to visit me while I still lived in Austin, Texas. In his charming Russian accent he asked, “Would you like to teach a class of Russians how to remote view?” “That depends,” I said. “What do you have in mind?”
What he had in mind was that he would bring a group of somewhere between 7 and 12 Russians to the Los Angeles area, and over a period of two weeks I would teach them everything I knew about remote viewing. “Two weeks?” I said. “Not going to happen!” I couldn’t tell them everything I knew about remote viewing in two months, much less two weeks.
So, unlike so many opposing parties these days, we compromised. We would work together for 15 days. I would teach the Russians a compressed version of my basic controlled remote viewing (CRV) course over five days, after which everyone would get a one-day break. Then for another four days, we would go through an even more compressed version of my intermediate and advanced CRV courses. Then there would be another one-day break. We would finish off with a slightly shortened version of my 3 1/2-day associative remote viewing course. At the close of my portion of the course, I would go home and the Russians would all go to Vegas for a few days to test out their new skills on games of chance. And so that’s what we did.
Class started at 9:00 AM Monday in a sprawling AirBnB house in Bradbury, California on January 8th, with nine unfamiliar Russians looking at me eagerly. And maybe a little suspiciously. That was the beginning of an intense, grueling, yet hugely rewarding experience of not only teaching, but living with a group of warm, friendly, generous–but demanding–people.
Every aspect of the compressed course took twice as long because of the need for translation of all verbal interactions, whether going from me to my students, or from them to me. Rendering heroic linguistic service was Natasha , a native Russian who has been in the US only 15 years, but was now, it seemed, even more American than I was. I couldn’t care less that the American football playoffs were going on during the class. She was obsessed with the latest scores, checking her phone on every break and listening to games during lunch time.
Rendering valuable assistance throughout the class was Shane Ivie, one of my dedicated intermediate level students who commuted as much as an hour each way to sit in and help with the course. By the time the first five days were done, so was I–and so were my students. We were all ready for a break from remote viewing. I went off with my son Christopher and his girlfriend Heather for my first-ever visit to Catalina Island, with its charming little village nestled between softly vegetated hills and sparkling water. The Russians went off to explore downtown LA.
Then it was back to remote viewing. First we engaged with intermediate-level CRV. That morphed into more advanced experiences, including making three dimensional models of a suitable remote viewing target. During the last day before our second break Christopher came back to film more footage for his documentary-in-progress, “American ESPionage,” and to give a short talk on the successful associative remote viewing experiment he led at the University of Colorado. Then he was off for the Sundance Film Festival, and we finished up the CRV part of the course, just in time for our next “day off.”
Of course, it wasn’t really a day off for me. I had been asked to give a talk at the LA Sheriff’s training facility to the local chapter of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. Shane and I left early enough to ensure that no matter how bad the notorious southern California traffic might be we would arrive in time for the talk. We were soon set up and ready to go, and I proceeded to give them a detailed overview of how remote viewing can be used in all sorts of applications in the intelligence and law enforcement worlds. There were lots of great questions and extensive interest. Better yet, three of my students were in attendance, including Shane, Paul Rivera, and Dr. Carl Totton. Afterwards, Shane and I had an early dinner with Paul at a nearby restaurant before heading back to Bradbury in the midst of rush hour traffic.
Back at the house, we learned that three of our female Russian students had headed off to Laguna Beach in a rental car about mid-morning, but had just kept n going until they hit San Diego. They were late getting home, but had quite the adventure–including inadvertently trying to drive onto an American military installation. And none of them could speak any serious English. No doubt someone at the CIA is reading a report at this very moment about three Russian women trying to crash a US base.
The next day began the final phase of the course, associative remote viewing, or ARV for short (if you don’t know what ARV is, here is a quick explanation). By now we had gotten to know each other well, and were becoming fast friends. That didn’t mean there weren’t moments of impatience and aggravation going in both directions sometimes. But we were all beyond taking anything personally other than warm feelings we otherwise had for each other, and knew it was just the natural friction of working intensely together. We had one or two failures but mostly good successes. One of our attempts, with the current Bitcoin price as the targeted event, yielded an especially excellent outcome. Here you can see the impressive results from that winnning session.
Finally it was time for the graduation event–the California “Daily 3″ lottery. To win, you have to guess the correct three digits in their proper order as selected by the official lottery machine. And we didn’t. Win, that is. The number we predicted was 768. But the actual number was 645. Yes, we missed! But it is not quite as simple as just that.
My primary goal in the class for attacking the lotto problem using ARV is not so much winning the lottery but giving my students an exciting “final exam.” Winning would be great, but more important is for them to see how their new-found skills can be applied to a real-world case requiring little investing know-how and preparation. (You can see what else the course entails by going here.) So I only try the Pick-3 (or Daily 3, in California) when I hold an ARV class. That said, after taking my ARV class several years ago, one of my students, Nancy Jeane, dedicated two full weeks to the Texas Pick-3. She got two numbers in the correct order eight times…and won it twice. But she said she was exhausted afterwards, and hasn’t tried it since!
There was also an interesting relationship between the winning number and our pick. Each digit of ours was one more number removed from the correct one than the one before. So we said 7, the real number was 6 (1 difference). The second we said 6, the actual 4 (2 difference). We said 8 for the third, and the actual was 5 (3 difference). So the differences were 1,2, & 3. I think the Universe was toying with us again! I say “again” because once we missed it by one number (in other words, first 2 correct, last one off by one). Another time we missed it by one in each column (so, for example, if our number was 836, the actual draw was 725). It’s like the Universe thinks toying with us is amusing. We did some talking about maybe trying the mid-day lottery on the final class day, but there was too much else to do so it never happened.
And, of course, there were diplomas to be presented, and fun to be had. The evening of our final day together, the group had an evening excursion to the famous Magic Castle in Hollywood. We enjoyed dinner together and various magic and comedy routines.
As the class concluded, there were farewells to be said. I packed up my gear–a whole van load of it–and after lots of hugs, headed home to Cedar City, Utah. My new Russian friends still had a few days left together, which as planned they spent in Las Vegas, using the skills I taught them and their own native abilities to play games of chance. I wasn’t there to observe, but one of my students, Nadja, later sent me a partial report. In the first series of seven trials they won money six times, and lost on the seventh. She later reported that, though she didn’t know the exact details, a smaller group of them won substantial sums three more times. So apparently something was working!
It’s way too soon to know whether we will be making plans for another Russian remote viewing course in the future. But this was certainly such a rewarding experience that I would look forward to doing it again soon.
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More class photos:
