Just Science Fiction, National Post, Elizabeth Nickson interviews David Morehouse
Like everyone else in North America — present and hypothetical future — I am fascinated by those pre-cogs in Minority Report.
Golly, I thought, when the camera first laid eyes on them. Wow. The three ectomorphs floating in the saline-filled tank, hooked up to life support, seeing the future, are a kick-in-the-pants, the money shot in the Spielberg/Cruise thinking person’s action film of the summer of 2002.
So how likely is it? Is there precognition, is it possible to travel forward in time and see what’s going to happen? Or can you, as the pre-cogs do, too, go backwards and see what actually did happen? Can you harness these skills for policing?
Yes, you can. The CIA is already there. There are pre-cogs already working and they are called psychic spies. Operating in blacked out, secret warehouses nestled in bucolic Virginia industrial parkland, they work for the Department of Defense, the National Security Council and a half dozen other intelligence agencies.
Meet one of them: Dr. David Morehouse, former Army Ranger officer, CIA operative and remote viewer.
“In 1972,” he says, “Stanford Research Institute pulled together all the major psychics that they could get temporary security clearances for and could pay, to come in and explore this. And the job of these laser physicists was to take these greatest natural abilities and synthesize these abilities into a protocol under clinical conditions, scientific test conditions and establish a protocol that could be trained, reliable, measurable, credible.
“It took them $50-million and six years of trial and error to develop that protocol. And this is what they came up with: Stages One through Six of co-ordinate remote viewing. The protocol was turned over to the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1982. It was born in a bed of science, managed and governed and washed in a bed of science, and it was used as an intelligence collection technology, with the understanding that it was not 100% accurate, recognizing that it never will be 100% accurate, recognizing that no other intelligence collecting methodologies are 100% accurate, and if any of them were accurate, the others would not exist.
“So remote viewing was developed as one more providing of a picture or pieces of a puzzle. The official Department of Defense definition of remote viewing is ‘the learned ability to transcend space and time to view persons, places or things and gather and report intelligence on the same.’ ”
As Jonathan Marks made clear in his award-winning 1979 book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, after the Korean War, the CIA went full bore into research and experimentation in mind control, using LSD on unsuspecting civilians, poisoning blacks, prisoners, the mentally disabled and soldiers with various compounds.
In the 1960s, they spiked drinks with LSD at San Francisco parties and whorehouses and hung around to watch the results. One of their long-time operatives, Jim Olson, was given LSD surreptitiously. Not knowing what was happening to him, he threw himself to his death from a hotel window in New York. The first President Bush personally apologized to his widow and children 25 years after the fact.
David Morehouse is another of the men formerly involved in espionage and warfare who travel along the seams of the culture, telling fantastic tales. Fifty years old, with a second wife and assistants in tow, this month he pitched up in the University of British Columbia’s graduate student basement ballroom to spend a week teaching a handful of people how to do remote viewing.
It would all be easily dismissable — were Morehouse himself not so completely plausible. Salesmen and sellers of soothing dreams of immortality have been around since the founding of America. Read Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans from 1820, and there they are, pricey tonic in hand, and a snappy patter designed to part you from your money.
But David Morehouse has a sterling past. Grandson and son of decorated army officers, he was the top cadet commissioned into the regular army in 1979, and served as aide-de-camp for two commanding generals. He was an Airborne Ranger, one of those who are generally thought of as the “Great White Sharks” of the U.S. army. He commanded the army’s only separate Airborne Rifle Company, as well as an elite Airborne Ranger Company.
Second in command of the 2nd Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, Morehouse is, like his forebears, highly and variously decorated. He has a military bearing, blonded spikes on his hair, is stocky, well-built and cool-mannered. He also speaks very, very rapidly, as if he is still trying to absorb and explain what happened to him 15 years ago.
“I was training Jordanian Rangers in the desert and a Jordanian machine gun, a bullet traveling 2,832 feet per second hits me 2 1/2 inches above the eye, knocks me unconscious, and I have a vision.” The vision shifted and changed, but kept returning. He told no one, was brought home and tested, but there was no damage. After a few months, he left the Rangers. Just missing a job as an aide to a general in Italy, he was recruited into a Special Access program that was codenamed Royal Cape.
“Royal Cape was to support logistically and develop an infrastructure to support clandestine and covert operations in Tier One and Two countries. When I finally told one of our counselors what had happened to me in the desert, I was recruited, very rapidly, into a top secret clan of psychic spies called remote viewers.”
According to Morehouse, one of this unit’s most distinct successes was the discovery of what and who brought down Pan Am flight 103, which crashed in Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1989. Information produced by remote viewers just hours after the crash said that a bomb placed in a music box was the source.
“There was a backup on Pan Am 103: an Iranian woman who had lost her family as a result of the U.S. shooting down an Iranian airliner from a missile frigate. She was seated on the left-hand side of the leading edge of the wing, which was exactly where the explosives in the cargo hold were, just below her. She had explosives strapped around her waist.
“There are remote viewers in the counter-drug world,” says Morehouse. “And I am absolutely convinced that they’re being used to access Osama bin Laden’s mind and describe his current condition. Is he feeling good? Secure? How about those close to him? Are they emotionally unstable? Are they frightened? Are they confused, are they plotting, are they deciding to turn? Does he feel weak? Is he convinced even more that he’s right?
“But one cave, to a remote viewer, is much the same as any other. If I flew you close in over Vancouver or Seattle or any other city, how would you tell which is which, given that your sight is imperfect? However, that’s how you tell the difference between a fraud and a real viewer. The fraud will tell you he can see anything, find anything. The real viewer will be incredibly cautious and qualified about what can and cannot be done.”
Frauds, in remote viewing, are many. All those psychics hired by Stanford Research Center claim to be the various fathers of remote viewing. Morehouse dismisses them. “All of them put their two cents in, and a part of what they developed was in there, but the protocol was created in a collective environment, brought into the Intel community and has evolved further with new techniques, strategies and methods of use.”
How does it work?
“I don’t consider myself a psychic,” says Morehouse. “I have no clairvoyant bone in my body. I was taught a protocol, which is designed to take an individual with the psychic ability of a bag of hammers and teach them to transcend space and time. We start by reaching an alpha wave state, which is induced with a simple meditative process. You descend into alpha, you find the subject, you detect data, you return and decode data. You’re porpoising in alpha, down into deep alpha, up into shallow alpha.
“Since, as we know from quantum physics, everything is energy, and everything can be expressed as frequency. If you’re asked to see something distant in space time, all you’re seeing is the frequency of that in the collective unconscious, and what that means, then, is that when you go into the decoding process, you are breaking that down into all its subcomponents: tastes, smells, colours, sounds, and textures, and energetic and dimension and aesthetics, emotionals, tangibles and intangibles.
“You categorize data as kinesthetic, verbal, auditory. Which modalities of perception will you use? Some have good verbals, others have great visuals, with great sketches, some have tremendous emotional data.”
Training is key. “In a training target, there would be one hundred known attributes. The viewer explores this in the blind, with a monitor who is blind as well, so it’s a double-blind scenario. The control extracts information and that information is then compared against the known attributes and, over training time, statistical numerical scores are established for the viewer. Thirty-six-percent accuracy is normal.
“Which is why viewers are sent out in teams. Stansfield Turner, former director of the CIA, said, ‘I don’t care whether all those remote viewers can deliver is 6% accurate information, if anytime they do it, they bring back 6% accurate information that I cannot glean by any other intelligence means, that is intelligence money well spent.’”
Who needs Paranoids Anonymous when we have the CIA?
Saturday, July 13, 2002
Page: B5
Section: Review
Byline: Elizabeth Nickson
Source: National Post