Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred by Jeffrey J. Kripal

Author:Jeffrey J. Kripal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2010-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

The Present Technology of Folklore: Computer Technology and Remote Viewing in the Psychic Underground

Vallee had very good reasons to end his book on a note suggestive of both government intelligence and the primacy of human consciousness, as the lived context in which he wrote The Invisible College was deeply informed by a small group of elite government-sponsored scientists interested in artificial intelligence, information theory, quantum biology, the mind-matter interface, and the physics of consciousness. Vallee interacted with these scientists at SRI, an independent research institute in Menlo Park that contracted with the U.S. military for various secret research programs. Vallee in fact worked for one SRI program, which was not secret at all, and became indirectly involved in another, which definitely was.

The first program was something called the Augmentation of the Human Intellect, for which Vallee worked for a little over one year, from February of 1972 to April of 1973. This project was erratically managed and frustrated him, but in its more interesting moments it also involved him in cutting-edge technology and government conferences that were a part of the early development of a global communication network sponsored by the Pentagon called the Arpanet.56 The Arpanet would eventually morph into the Internet in the early 1990s, effectively changing the world of communications, and just about everything else, in the process.

The same project also put him in touch with individuals who worked for the intelligence community, including the NSA (National Security Agency), whose initials were jokingly said to stand for “Never Say Anything” or “No Such Agency” (FS 2:160). Vallee quickly grew disillusioned with such people once he realized how little they actually knew about paranormal subjects and how impossible it was to ever really know who was telling the truth. It all struck him as a very silly and childish game. Hence the negative conclusion of The Invisible College concerning those “secret files in Washington.” He had had quite enough of all that.

The second SRI program, housed one floor down from the first in the Electronics and Bioengineering Laboratory, was a research project that was initially conceived as a series of quantum biology experiments designed to answer the question of whether the human mind can affect very small-scale quantum processes. If such a thing were possible, a kind of mind-matter interface could in turn be imagined that might allow for the mental control of quantum machines and supersmall circuits. Through a series of truly remarkable events, this initial research project quickly morphed into a very different sort of animal, this one dedicated to exploring the intelligence potentials of using gifted psychics to accomplish what came to be known as “remote viewing.”

Historically speaking, this program was originally set up by Stanford alumn Harold Puthoff in the spring of 1972. Puthoff is a laser physicist who had written a textbook on quantum physics and had worked as a naval officer for the Defense Department laboratory before he arrived at SRI. After hearing Puthoff lecture at Stanford, Russell Targ, another accomplished laser

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