This is the full transcript.

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Ghostwoods: Hi Lyn. Good to talk to you again. This time, you’re going to guide me through a Remote Viewing session, is that right?

Lyn: Right. Let me run over to the closet. I have a stack of targets for teaching class today. I’ll just grab one of those.

GW: OK, great. I haven’t done any preparation but I guess it’s not really necessary for this sort of thing.

Lyn: Let me see. I have one here.

GW: Ok, great, what do I need to do?

Lyn: Ok, first of all you need to write down your information — name, location, starting time, and so on. You can do that later for this. You do need to write down the starting time now though.

GW: OK, right.

Lyn: I can give you some coordinates. Have you worked with ideograms?

GW: I have done some ideogram things so I know what you mean by that, yeah.

Lyn: Ok, sometimes we tell a viewer what their work is. We don’t tell them anything about the targets, but just what the intentions of the brief were. Do you want that, or do you want to go into it cold?

GW: No, I might as well go in cold, I’m game.

Lyn: OK, sounds good, that’s the best way, that’s nice. OK, let’s see, let me give you some numbers to write down. Are you ready? OK. 060221000011.

GW: 060221000011.

Lyn: Right, OK. Part of the reason of those numbers is to get your pen moving so you don’t have to start with it cold to get the ideogram, so let me give those to you again and as soon as you write the last one, just go ahead and make the ideogram, your pen will be moving already.

GW: Ah, OK.

Lyn: OK. 060221000011.

GW: OK.

Lyn: OK, um, look at the ideogram, feel your way along it, see if there’s a change in the feel of it anywhere. If there is, register that point with a little tick mark.

GW: Whoa, yeah! There is!

Lyn: Are there any more? Is there Only one tick mark / only one change, or is there more?

GW: Uh, there’s a second change right towards the end as well. I can’t define what the changes are, but if you… well, something feels a bit different.

Lyn: That’s it. That’s all you’re looking for. So we have an ideogram that has compacted into it three different gestalts. Now take each one in turn, over to the right, look at each one, and trace the shape of only the first one.

GW: Right. Do I tell you what the shape is?

Lyn: Yeah.

GW: Okay. Umm.

Lyn: It only has the three dimensions — like it goes across, it goes up, it goes down…

GW: Oh, Ok. It starts off slanting upwards, then goes straight down.

Lyn: OK good. Touch that part of the ideogram, see how the pen feels under the paper. Is it hard, soft, rough, smooth, slicky, sticky…

GW: It feels soft.

Lyn: OK good. So you have one that goes up-down, soft.

GW: OK.

Lyn: So now you make a WAG – A Wild-Ass Guess!

GW: OK! Well, if I was going to guess wildly, I’d say this was something like mud or quicksand or some surface that feels fluid, but not necessarily quite as fluid as normal water.

Lyn: OK let’s just call it land then, mud becomes just the generic thing for land. Or do you want to make it water?

GW: Ah… Um. No, I’m going to stick with land.

Lyn: OK, go to the next one and do the same.

GW: Ok that feels a lot firmer. Can I say hard?

Lyn: Yeah, uh-huh, but would that… you start out with 7 basic gestalts: Land, Water, Motion (activity, movement), Space, Biological, Man-made and Natural. Would it be any one of those?

GW: Uh, well…

Lyn: One of the reasons I ask is because all of these images are selected for having one or more of those as the content. This feels hard?

GW: I don’t get a feel of artificial, so I guess I’m going to have to go with land again?

Lyn: OK, sure.

GW:… But harder land, like stone versus mud.

Lyn: So, basically you have harder land and softer, muddy land. So go with the third, see what you get there.

GW: The third gives me an immediate impression of sharpness, spikiness. I think maybe its metal or something, so I’m going to go with man-made for that.

Lyn: OK, sounds good. So we have two types of land and some man-made. The monitor at this point always says “there may be other gestalts. Do you want to take the coordinates again?” It’s totally up to you. It doesn’t mean there are more gestalts, it doesn’t mean anything, it’s just the only patter that the monitor can use at this point.

GW: Uh, no, I’ll stick with this one ideogram, thanks.

Lyn: OK, then let’s, say, describe the man-made. What you do now is try to focus on the man-made and try to get sensory descriptors such as colours, sounds, textures, tastes, smells, and senses like that. Now I need to tell you, in this early part your mind is still winking about the site so you might get descriptors of something that’s not man-made at all but we’ll sort that out later. Right now you’re just going to get descriptors from the entire site, don’t worry about whether it applies to the man-made. Any colours, any sounds, smells, tastes, textures, the ambience?

GW: I’m, um, getting, um… bright.

Lyn: Good. You’d write that down.

GW: Yep. Um. I think it’s kinda like a sheer or flat surface. I’m going to go back to the comment about sharp, that’s still there.

Lyn: Sure. Good descriptor, write it down.

GW: Um, the only colour impression I’m getting is metallic, but I’m not sure whether it’s my mind getting in the way.

Lyn: Don’t worry about that. Your mind will take care of itself. Don’t analyse things.

GW: Can I use a word like row? I get a sensation of a repeating set of shapes, if you see, like a row of things?

Lyn: OK. When you wrote down metallic, did you write down metallic colour?

GW: Yeah. Maybe a sound, a bit like a high-pitched whine, a mosquito noise, not loud but quite faint, cool temperature. That’s all I’m getting from that really.

Lyn: OK. In parentheses — anything I say to you should go in parentheses, to show I wasn’t giving information, and to separate what I give from what you perceive — so let me, say, describe the metallic colour, to pick one at random here.

GW: Something… bronzey sort of colour, yeah, bronzey I guess.

Lyn: OK. Mentally tap on the colour. How does it sound?

GW: Dull! Which is quite a surprise… I was…

Lyn: Put your hand on. Temperature?

GW: That’s… the cool I was picking up, it’s cool to the touch.

Lyn: Feel to either side of it, of the metallic. Do you get any textures, temperatures, sounds, smells?

GW: I’m getting a rough feel, like brick. It’s warmer as well.

Lyn: Warm, you say?

GW: Warmer than the metallic.

Lyn: Mentally stop and listen for sounds, do you hear anything?

GW: Uh, I don’t have much confidence in the perception, but the first noise that hit sounded like a car rushing past quickly.

Lyn: OK.

GW: But I’m not sure, it didn’t feel in quite the same part of my mind, so I’m not sure if its imagination or not.

Lyn: Oh, don’t analyse. Every time you analyze a perception, it tells your subconscious, “I don’t trust you”. And so, whatever you get, put it down on paper. We have a way of doing the summary, once you get really in touch with the site, then you use these adjectives and you go back and then you can evaluate each one of these… because then you’ll have stronger contact with the site. So while you’re doing the session it doesn’t matter what you put down, because if its garbage, it’ll get thrown out later.

GW: OK, cool, thank you.

Lyn: So, mentally…

GW: I’m getting quite a lot of sensation of wind generally.

Lyn: Ok, good, good, write it down. You may be subliminally picking up the window I’m sitting beside, it’s blowing thru here like crazy. Do you get any perceptions of colours, sounds, tastes, textures? No matter how slight.

GW: OK, I’m getting cloth.

Lyn: Is that a cloth texture?

GW: Yeah.

Lyn: Ok, write down cloth texture. We keep nouns out of remote viewing, because as soon as you say a noun you lock yourself into an idea. You said cloth texture, a while ago you said brick, you wouldn’t write down brick, you’d write down brick texture. Look down, do you get a colour?

GW: Dark. Darker, dark.

Lyn: Ok, darker colour looking down?

GW: Yeah. Uh. Something of a yielding, crunchy…

Lyn: OK, You’re talking about the dark now?

GW: Uhh… Yeah.

Lyn: OK, in parentheses, put down that it applies to whatever it is that’s dark, that lets us know you’re talking about the dark.

GW: OK, I see. The obvious mental conjecture there is that I want to say gravel, but I know I probably shouldn’t.

Lyn: OK. Put Gravelly, and then put I know I shouldn’t say gravel. You want to record everything that goes through your mind.

GW: OK.

Lyn: Then mentally reach with your hand and touch that darker part, move your hand across it or through it. see how it feels.

GW: Uh, it feels unpleasant actually. Sticky and cold.

Lyn: OK, good. Put your nose to it and smell, how does it smell?

GW: Uh, it’s a smell that reminds me of resin — pine or something, not quite like that. I could say resiny, but I can’t put my finger on it. Almost but not quite chemical. I don’t think it is chemical.

Lyn: OK. Listen for sounds, tastes, textures. Any shapes or sizes you might have perceived.

GW: Tall. Tall is an immediate response.

Lyn: Ok good.

GW: With that tall is an impression of straightness, and a fair amount of thinness. So it’s not like a mountain, which would be sprawly, but more like a ram-rod sort of tall.

Lyn: OK, good. Make sure you get all that down, and keep describing it all.

GW: Uh. Piercing. Hmm. Resonant is a word I’m getting from somewhere.

Lyn: Alright, good, make sure you write it down.

GW: And, uh, cool temperature again.

Lyn: OK, good. Move to the cold temperature and describe it. You see, in RV we can only cue you with things you’ve given to us, sort of messing around on your own words, so describe that which is cold temperature.

GW: Is that in with the tallness still?

Lyn: Oh, it is?

GW: Well, with the darker stuff underfoot I got a feeling of coldness, and then with this tall straight thing, I get a coolness with that too. So do you have a preference to which you want?

Lyn: Uh, whichever one you think you need to, and make sure you make a note of which. If you’re with the tall thing now you may want to stay with that.

GW: Yeah, I’m pulled to the tall thing. Uh. It feels smooth. Part of me wants to say flat, part wants to say round. So, I don’t know, some hybrid shape going on there. Or something. Um. There feels quite a lot of it. I guess I mean that… I’m not sure what I mean.

Lyn: It’s hard, isn’t it!

GW: Yeah, it _is_ hard! Um, right. It’s like maybe there’s more than one?

Lyn: OK, that’s a perception.

GW: Um. It’s quite heavy, in mass terms. Quite massive. I feel I should be able to shake it around but I can’t really.

Lyn: Make sure you write that down. This massive, can you describe more of it? It’s colour, texture? Slap it, see what sound it makes. Kick it, see if it reacts. Put your nose to it, see if it smells.

GW: It feels… pretty solid. Like if I slapped it, I’d hurt my hand.

Lyn: Good, write that down.

GW: I’m not getting any sense of smell. But I’ve noticed in the past that smell is a perception I don’t often get.

Lyn: That’s my case too. I have to remember there’s a difference between me not getting a smell and the perception that there is no smell.

GW: Yeah, it’s a subtle distinction. All I can say at this time is I’m not getting a smell.

Lyn: Ok, good.

GW: Um, let’s see if I can hit something more specific. Uh… _That’s_ interesting. I feel it _could_ move, as if it is something that has the potential to shift position.

Lyn: Good, write that down.

GW: Just not to my hand, y’know? I couldn’t push it. Just for example like a truck — I couldn’t push a truck, but a truck could move. I’m getting an impression of black and red. Uh. Together I think, close together. Maybe like some kind of badge or sign or something.

Lyn: A badge or sign? OK. Those are nouns. Go ahead and write them down, but remember they’re nouns, so don’t put too much faith in them.

GW: I’m getting, it’s almost like I’m being pulled a short distance. I’m getting a more natural feel underfoot, which implies that before, underfoot was more artificial.

Lyn: Oh, no. No, Don’t make implications. You’ll get your logical mind in there and it’ll just muck around and mess you up all over the place. SO if you’re now getting natural underfoot, that’s what you put down.

GW: OK. I’ll go with a green colour, rather than a brown or a sandy.

Lyn: OK, at this point let me ask you a question, do you have an idea in your mind of what the target is? Even vaguely?

GW: Vaguely, yeah.

Lyn: You need to just write that down over to the side and get rid of it, ‘cos that’s your logical mind trying to make sense of all this. It doesn’t mean it’s wrong or right, just that it’s logical.

GW: What I’m pulling down here to get rid of is radio telescope array.

Lyn: Oh. Heh. Very good.

GW: That’s a fair old logical construct there.

Lyn: I’ll cheat a little bit here and tell you that’s not what it is. Dump that imagination and get it out of your mind.

GW: The broader scale impressions I’m getting are… involve repeated artificial elements in a more natural setting. But I don’t know how to really characterise that as a…

Lyn: You just did!

GW: Oh, I guess so. OK. So we’ve ditched that stuff, off to one side.

Lyn: Well we’ve ditched the radio telescope. The descriptors, I can’t give you feedback about those, but you dump the nouns, you keep the descriptors.

GW: Right. So at this point do I continue probing for impressions?

Lyn: Yeah, at this point we continue getting impressions until there comes a moment when it seems one of those impressions is in front of you or beside you or overhead or whatever and at that moment you say to yourself, you know, it was overhead or beside me or something, and then you write down how it made you feel, and when that happens you’re in what’s called phase three — and in phase three you try to start sketching.

GW: Ok, because that sensation of natural underfoot did come with an impression that I had shifted position.

Lyn: Oh, OK. You shifted in relation to it?

GW: In relation to the target in general, yeah. It felt like I came forward and across, to use directional terms.

Lyn: Very good. That would be what’s called an AI. And you had an emotional reaction to the movement. Can you describe that reaction?

GW: Mild relief.

Lyn: Uh good, very good. Your emotional reaction you have is your reaction and it is NOT a descriptor of the site, and in order to get rid of that emotional you have to declare it as a noun. At this point, it would be a good thing if you could start sketching any of these shapes you get, or anything — sketch the underfoot or the tall thing and see what you get.

GW: OK. I’m a horrible artist, but I’m aware that’s not really the point to it. Um. <sketches> As I’m starting to sketch, I’m starting to get conscious impressions, the sort of stuff I should probably be trying to put aside as static.

Lyn: How do you mean?

GW: Well, like, sketching the tall, I’m getting something which my mind is saying looks like a fence, a bit tall chain-link fence.

Lyn: Yeah, you put the nouns to the side, but what are the descriptors you’re getting? How would you describe a chain link fence? This particular chain link fence?

GW: Tall, massive, flexible I suppose, cold, metallic colour, dark underfoot as well. That’s the stuff I’m sketching there. Um. An emotional impression of oppressiveness. Trying to see if I can sketch… more freely, more generally.

Lyn: Uh, the tall, you said it looks like a fence, move to the top of that, see what you get.

GW: Um, partly I’m getting… I think my mind wants me to be picking up sharpness. I’m picking up sharpness. But I’m also at the same time getting the impression also of a ball on top, but the two are fairly contradictory so I’m not happy about that.

Lyn: Oh don’t worry about that, it doesn’t have to make sense to your logical mind!

GW: OK. Well, those are the impressions I’m getting.

Lyn: OK. Whatever is up there, can you touch it, try to get its texture, colour, shapes and sizes?

GW: Texture is prickly.

Lyn: OK

GW: Almost… compound.

Lyn: Ok, good.

GW: Artificial.

Lyn: Ok, good. OK, um, do you want to find more, or… Do you want to do a summary, or continue probing?

GW: Well…

Lyn: I know at this point if you’re like every remote viewer in the world, you’re thinking you haven’t got anything.

GW: Sort of. I don’t know entirely where I’m going with this. It would be tempting to push the session as long and far as possible, just for the experience if nothing else, however at the same time, for what we need for the magazine and for your time… I don’t want to be, y’know, a hog or a freeloader or whatever.

Lyn: Oh, no problem, in fact if you want to go longer if we run out of time, we can go longer. It’s always up to the viewer to say “I think I have enough” or whatever. You’ve been describing the target so you’re doing well.

GW: Wow, thank you. I think for the moment I’d be interested to go through the summary process and see how things wrap up.

Lyn: OK, good. What you want to do at this point is to say the target has elements of land and then what was it another type of land, and then what was the third one, man-made? So once you have that, that’s the first paragraph of your summary. So then we take the first land, and we’re going to write a paragraph about it, and we say “The first land is:” and we go back through the session. Now, at this point you are going to have to evaluate each thing you said as to whether it describes the first land or whether it describes something else. You know, you’re winking around the site. If it describes the first bit of land, then you have to decide whether or not you still feel its true. If it describes the first bit of land and its true, then you write it into your summary. This is where all the garbage falls out. So what can you tell me about the first type of land that is there, in terms of texture, shape, size.

GW: I think the land I was picking up first… that’s this natural, green, natural background setting. I haven’t gotten very many adjectives from it as I can tell.

Lyn: Well, you got soft, you at one point you said muddy, and I think you said almost liquid but you couldn’t tell, and the temperature?

GW: Neutral to coolish.

Lyn: OK, and did it have a smell?

GW: Not that I’m perceiving. Fresh, my mind wants to tell.

Lyn: Fresh. And any colour?

GW: The green was the only colour I picked up.

Lyn: Ok, start a new paragraph and say the second type of land was…

GW: OK The second land was dark. The texture was rough and particulate to a certain extent — smooth from a distance but rough close up, if you see.

Lyn: Make sure you write that in. And is it hard or soft?

GW: It’s quite hard.

Lyn: Quite hard, OK.

GW: And, um, it was the cold, sticky and unpleasant.

Lyn: OK, good.

GW: I have that resin smell with that as well.

Lyn: Oh, OK, good. Did you have anything else for that?

GW: No.

Lyn: Ok, then you start a new paragraph, and say the man-made was…

GW: OK, the man-made is definitely hard, massive and tall. I’m going to stick with flexible, cold and metallic as well.

Lyn: OK, good.

GW: And the sensation of wind moving.

Lyn: OK. How would you describe the wind, texture or sound?

GW: It sounds thin, if wind can sound thin. It feels quite cold. I don’t think it would be nice to be out in.

Lyn: Good, make sure you write all this in. And you had heard a whine?

GW: Yes, I’d got a whine, and a dull thud from thumping it.

Lyn: OK good, and there were repeated…

GW: Repeated artificial elements, yeah. And then, this prickly artificial compound sharp ball sensation for the top of the elements.

Lyn: Ok good.

GW: And this sense of movability.

Lyn: Good, ok.

GW: I had a cloth texture, but I can’t place that.

Lyn: OK, we have an ‘other’ paragraph for stuff you can’t place.

GW: Ok. That would include the cloth texture, the sound of a passing car, the black & red composite patch…

Lyn: Ok. Oh, ok, I see what that is.

GW:…and a general sensation of brightness, which I hadn’t tied to anything. OK, that’s everything one way or another.

Lyn: OK, do you want to know what you were viewing?

GW: Hell yeah, absolutely.

Lyn: It’s the world fair from 1931, the man who invented air conditioning. It’s a display stand, and there are 10 girls in very very short skirts holding snow shovels and ice picks and, uh, the snow shovels are all vertical ‘cos these girls are lined up in two rows and right in the middle, between the two rows, is Louis Carrier, who invented aircon and there is a sign over to the side which says “Air Conditioning”, and um the picture itself is in black and white and the article heading is in red and black, so what you were seeing as the fence is this long row of snow shovels and ice picks — not like you’d use in a refrigerator but like you’d use… — and uh, the sharp is definitely there and the top is round and made of a wooden handle that spills onto a metal bone-like thing that goes down the shaft. I think you did pretty well. The entire scene is just cold.

Remote Viwing target image

GW: That’s interesting. Nothing like any concrete image or visualisation I had in my mind at all!

Lyn: This is one of the things people learn they don’t like about remove viewing — all these nouns they come up with, and you come up with pictures, you know, of telescope dishes and everything… But there is a an archway over this thing that is slanted and it is the thing he’s walking out of, and it forms an arch over these women that were standing there. You come up with these nouns and you think you have a picture of the target, but your subconscious mind says “Go ahead, have your imagination, but I’m going to give you the descriptors of the real target.” You get in your mind one thing and then you describe something else, the real target! In classes, they look at the picture and say “Oh, that’s not what I was scanning”, and you go back and have a look at the target and the descriptors and it’s 90% accurate.

GW: Looking back over the descriptors, I can see where it’s coming from. I would certainly associate whine with air conditioning units, yeah! Fascinating.

Lyn: Well, while the session wasn’t what we Texan’s call a “real barn burner”, it was VERY impressive for a viewer of your level of training and experience.
You got the dark flooring underneath the ice.
You got the ice itself, saying in the beginning that it was wet and almost liquid.
You described the snow shovels and ice picks very well (I would have focused on the legs, myself!)
You very accurately described the sounds of the air conditioners and the “fresh” smell of the shaved ice.
There were several other minor things about the target which you accurately “nailed”, as well.
All in all, a very impressive session, and it helps me get my point across. I don’t want to show people that I can do it… I want to show them that they can do it.

GW: Well, that’s very generous feedback. Thank you very much.

Lyn: Thank you! It’s been a good session, you did very well.

Incredibly, STARGATE is a complete success.

The project team perfect and deploy a rigorously scientific technique named Remote Viewing that allows trained ‘viewers’ to literally perceive distant places as if they are there. The project runs for years, providing information that would otherwise be impossible to obtain, until Congressional uneasiness at the idea of psychic spies sees funding withdrawn, and the project is closed.

You might be forgiven for thinking that I was describing a new Hollywood thriller, but the STARGATE Project is documented fact, rather than fiction. It all began when a Russian defector passed document to the US detailing his scientific research with the USSR’s own Remote Viewing unit, and a man named Skip Atwater realized the potential of a technique for accessing intelligence remotely. It quickly became obvious that America would have to explore the possibilities itself. Some years later, a young Texan Sergeant named Lyn Buchanan got into a fierce argument in his base’s computer lab…

The story of the STARGATE project is well-documented – most of the original core team have now written about their experiences and subsequent work. Buchanan’s own book, “The Seventh Sense”, is published by Simon & Schuster (his novel, “Gravity Can Be Your Friend,” is available from lulu.com).

After leaving the military, Buchanan kept up his interest in training new Remote Viewers. As well as training interested members of the public – coordinated through his website, crviewer.com – he also works directly with large corporations and with police departments, on a strict basis of total confidentiality. For companies, that generally involves setting up and training an entire Remote Viewing department, putting reporting and checking procedures in place, teaching people how to manage both the talent and the data, and so on. Applications include technical & medical diagnostics, scouting (for just about anything), R&D, archaeology, finance – anywhere you can ask questions like ‘where’, ‘which’ or ‘whom’.

Setting up and training a corporate department is a lot of work, parallel to hiring consultants to set up a major in-house telephone call centre. Even so, Buchanan says, more and more corporations are finding that this sort of operation really pays for itself. Interestingly, police work is often a far smaller-scale affair. His viewers help by providing extra information or targeting locations rather than trying to ‘solve’ cases.

Lyn Buchanan (image (c) Lyn Buchanan)

In February 2006, I was fortunate enough to get the chance to interview Buchanan in person. He is a softly-spoken Southern Gentleman with a quiet, self-effacing charm and the understated rock-solid confidence that must come with being one of the world’s top Remote Viewers. What he says would sound like wild boasting from most people, but he just sounded mildly embarrassed:

Ghostwoods: Hi Lyn. Thanks for agreeing to talk to me. It’s a pleasure and privilege to get to talk to you.

Lyn: Well thank you.

GW: Let’s start with the basics. How would you personally define remote viewing? How would you describe it?

Lyn: The term Remote Viewing, for most people, is just the new-age term for psychic perception. True remote viewing, which is what we were taught in the military, is a science that was developed in the laboratory using non-psychics — that was actually the goal, because the military didn’t want to deal with psychics, and all they wanted to do was to grab a soldier off the battlefield, teach him to do this, and then send him back to the unit so that he can tell his commander what’s over the hill. And it worked. And so it’s actually a science that allows a non-psychic to use their subconscious mind in a way that a psychic normally does.

GW: Right. Is that by… is that a passive thing, where you’re tapping into an information pool of some sort, or is it a more active thing, like casting your senses out?

Lyn: It’s both, sort of a dance, you know, in the sense that it’s a thing you have control over. That’s why they call it Controlled Remote Viewing. What we’ve found is that if you take a psychic that has natural talent and teach them the controls, they become phenomenally super-psychic, because they already have the ability. Most psychics don’t have any control over it, so we have special classes just for psychics, we don’t teach them remote viewing, we teach them the controls, and they go on to produce some phenomenal work, just amazing work.

GW: Wow. How interesting. Fascinating stuff.

Lyn: Yeah, it is. I’ve always found it amazing. I’m not surprised by things I see any more, but if I ever stop being fascinated, I’ll go back to programming computers! I remain fascinated by the whole field.

GW: Yes, I’ve been interested in the whole field of the paranormal for a long time. I’ve tried a bit of co-ordinate remote viewing with certain limited success. I think I need to put in a lot more practice though!

Lyn: Yeah, it’s a lot of practice, and, y’know the field itself… the controlled remote viewing has its limits.

GW: Yes, I understand that it is more effective if you have a partner to help you.

Lyn: A lot of people run into the limits, and think its their own limitations when really it’s the limitations of the procedure itself.

GW: That’s interesting. So the different procedures have different scope for producing results?

Lyn: They have different strengths and weaknesses, yeah.

GW: That’s interesting. I haven’t had much chance to get exposed to material that’s not on the web. I hope the day will come.

Lyn: I don’t know if you’ve visited my website or not, it’s at http://www.crviewer.com.

GW: Yeah, I’ve had a look at CRViewer. A lot of interesting stuff there. I’m very interested in the assigned witness program, particularly.

Lyn: Thank you!

GW: So… I saw from a brief bio about you on a different website that you were originally flagged up for the Stargate project because of some telekinetic abilities. Can you tell me a bit about that?

Lyn: Well I’ve had that ever since I was a child. You’ve heard of the poltergeist children, well, I was one of those, and uh, the ones who get the notoriety of course are the ones who are emotionally disturbed.

GW: Yeah.

Lyn: That’s only one part of the whole telekinetic children though. The ones who are not emotionally disturbed, who just run across this talent, they start playing with it and get control, and so I started to roll with it. Well, that talent came out at one point in the military, and uh, sort of resulted in the destruction of a room full of computers. To my surprise one of the officers that was there had been trained to spot these things and report them and so the general was over a few months later and he was prepared, and he dragged me into his office and scowled into my face and said “did you destroy my computers with your mind?” And I thought “I can lie about this, or tell the truth and my great-grandchildren will still be paying for those computers.” Well, I said “Yes sir, I did,” and the scowl just vanished and turned into a big grin, and forgive the language, he said “Far fucking out! Have I ever got a job for you!”

GW: Fantastic!

Lyn: He called me back to Washington DC, and they wanted me to be the beginning of a unit that would destroy enemy computers, and later would learn how to control the information within the computers. Back in the 60s though, Congress had been caught doing mind-control experiments, and so when the General said he wanted funding to start this unit, Congress turned round and said “No, no way.” They’d been caught once doing this mind control… They said no active mental work. We had to make sure what we were doing was passive mental work, which was the remote viewing, where remote viewers sit down and passively receive information. I was already in Washington DC, so they just stuck me into the remote viewing unit, which was Stargate.

GW: I see. Fascinating.

Lyn: Actually, I think we could have made a really good unit, but I have always wondered, if it had happened, how it would have been used.

GW: Yeah. I notice from what you say on your site about remote influencing… The whole thing about what goes around comes around — I guess that kind of work can get quite self-destructive if you’re not careful.

Lyn: Well. Not only self-destructive but, used incorrectly… it can be harmful.

GW: Yeah. I guess we should be grateful that it hasn’t come to pass, at least as far as we know.

Lyn: Yeah.

GW: So what do you think in the end the military hoped for from Stargate? Do you think they hoped it would become more offensive, or did they just want great Intel, or…?

Lyn: They achieved what they hoped for — intelligence information that nobody ever would have found, that intelligence agencies could never produce. A spy-in-the-sky satellite can see a secret facility, but it can’t see what is inside. We could. They could track cars around a city, but they couldn’t tell which one had the political hostage inside. And so forth. We were always used as the last resort, to produce information they couldn’t get any other way.

Sometimes, the information I was receiving was literally unbelievable.  It seemed that Saddam Hussein had acquired a black-market American missile and had it aimed at the Holy Mosque at Mecca. His plan was to feign illness during the main Ramadan ceremony, and use the  American missile to wipe out all the other Muslim leaders. As the last Muslim leader, he would be able to take over and unite the Muslim world in a holy war, first against the evil Americans, and eventually the whole non-Muslim world.

My results were passed up the chain of command, and all along the way, each person refused to believe that any Muslim would do such a thing – myself included – but they kept passing it on, just in case. Well, the missile was found, and sure enough, it had been bought on the black market, and was aimed in the direction of Mecca. If it hadn’t been for that session, we would be in a humongous world war right now. At one time or another, almost every remote viewer in the unit turned in some information which, to one extent or another, changed history. Believe it or not, it became almost second nature to go to work every day, do a few miracles, and go home in the evening to a good night’s sleep.

GW: It’s my understanding that the American interest in the field — at least military — has dropped to a halt now.

Lyn: It’s my understanding too… You know, when you retire they stop telling you secrets. But I have watched or been in intelligence most of my career, and I can look for indicators that would suggest remote viewers at work. The indicators were there in Gulf War 2 that we didn’t have a remote viewing unit — and that Saddam Hussein did.

GW: Right!

Lyn: I was very surprised at those indicators. It is my suspicion — but I have no proof — it is my suspicion that after the first attack on Iraq, after that he got a remote viewing unit. The man was crazy, but he wasn’t stupid.

GW: Yeah… I guess. I mean, I was going to ask if you thought there were other countries using this sort of technology, but I guess it can’t be that tricky in terms of resources for a country to set up.

Lyn: Well actually, if you read between the lines in open source literature — and of course we had access to literature that wasn’t available to the public — most other countries have units of their own. Great Britain has a large one. Libya has one. The Israelis have a very large psychic spy network, and so forth, but I was very surprised to find one of the largest is Bulgaria.

GW: That’s interesting. I spent some time in the Czech Republic and I knew there was a large team in Prague at one point…

Lyn: Yes… Uh, yeah.

GW:… But I didn’t know there was anything in Bulgaria.

Lyn: Yeah, one wonders, what _is_ Bulgaria doing with all this psychic spy technology?

GW: Yeah, it’s interesting. Now, I noticed that you said on one of the pages that you feel it was almost as if the pace at which Remote Viewing could be learned has accelerated. I think you mentioned Sheldrake’s Morphic Field Theory. You must train a lot of people. Can you see if is this a trend of general spiritual development, or something coming, or is it purely in the remote viewing area, or… how do you see this?

Lyn: I think that you cannot learn this contact — learn to contact your subconscious mind on a real basis — without there being some spiritual impact. However most of the students I have are learning for specific applications, such as police work, or archeology, medical diagnostics, and so on. Everything we do is on a hard, firm, realistic basis. No looking at UFOs or anything like that.

GW: Yeah, I noticed that is a feature of your site, that you’re very interested in keeping it real.

Lyn: Very real, yeah. The thing is that it doesn’t earn its way in life, then what good is it? Another thing is that as we teach people, if we keep it on the basis of things where we can go and get feedback, then the people learn. If we give them, y’know, the Galactic Council Headquarters on some distant planet as a co-ordinate and then they do a session, then they don’t learn anything because they are not able to see what they got right, what they got wrong.

GW: Yeah, understood. I think it is almost certainly a very important attitude to have. I don’t want to denigrate anyone else, but I have a lot of respect for that position. If you can’t verify information on some level, then I think you have to assume it’s incorrect really.

Lyn: Yeah, well, it may be correct, but there’s no way to prove it.

GW: Yeah, exactly.

Lyn: And, you know, when it comes to getting out of the course and then going back to your real daily life, if you haven’t taught people to use it in real life, then actually I think you’ve cheated them out of their money.

GW: Yeah, I understand. Do you think it will ever get to the point where these talents are strong enough — in the mass unconscious if you like — that people start developing these talents spontaneously?

Lyn: I don’t think it will. Um, I have looked into the future of remote viewing and what I keep finding is that we will improve it and improve it  and improve it and then one day the politicians will realize that they don’t have any secrets, the mafia will realise that it doesn’t have any secrets, and all of a sudden it will start getting all kinds of bad press, it will start getting horror stories, and all these people will ensure it’ll fall out of popularity, and then of course the government & military will be very quick to go round pick the cream of the crop to take them away to use them and once again what goes around will come around with psychics running units which are very secret and also much more advanced than what they have now.

GW: Right. Now that’s… quite a scary prospect for anyone involved in the field.

Lyn: That it is. Its kinda scary prospect for me.

GW: Yeah. For me as well, to be honest. And even just in terms of the lessons you can see in history, I can see a lot of self-evident truth in that analysis, unfortunately.

Lyn: The point is that history repeats itself.

GW: Absolutely. Moving to a more positive note, I couldn’t find any real details about the work you’re doing with the assigned witness program. I mean, I saw the content of what you do, I just wondered if you could give me any figures, how much you’re able to help, what number of cases you’ve been able to help with, that sort of thing.

Lyn: That was the right question, by the way, the cases we’ve been able to help with. If you asked me how many cases have you solved, I’d say none. Because we provide information, and the police solve the case. And we’re there to help, not to come round and save the day, take over their jobs, and all that. Once police departments realise that, they use us. So many times, psychics have come round and helped police departments, and then they call the newspaper and the magazines, and say “I did this, I solved this case for the police,” and behave horribly, say anything about it. And so the assigned witness program works FOR the police departments. We promise them anonymity, we promise them we will not use their name or _anything_ until they give us written permission, and we keep that promise. We do a lot of missing children cases. Lately we’re doing a lot more missing evidence cases — helping look for evidence that just can’t be found any other way. Lately we’re doing more of that than missing children cases.

GW: That’s interesting. I’d love to think that means there’s less cases of missing children. I don’t know if it does or not?

Lyn: I’m afraid it doesn’t, no.

GW: Do you have any figures, off-hand, on the number of cases you might help in a year? I mean, you talking tens, hundreds, thousands?

Lyn: I don’t have my detailed figures here, but I think you could say around… a good year would be around fifty cases right now. One a week.

GW: OK. That’s still a pretty major contribution, however you cut it.

Lyn: Well, it doesn’t scratch the surface.

GW: I imagine that whole battalions of remote viewers still wouldn’t manage to scratch the surface, with the kind of crime figures we’re seeing in the world.

Lyn: That’s right. One of the problems is that if we’re going to use a long term remote viewer, they don’t know how to speak police language, or what the policeman looks for in the world. The most success we’ve found is where police departments send some of their detectives to us and we teach them to do the remote viewing.

GW: Right. And then you might not necessarily get figures back as to how much difference that has made because…

Lyn: We get some verbal feedback from the detectives using this. Generally they’ll use it on every case.

GW: Of course, of course, once you’ve gained faith in your abilities in this skill, you’d have to be insane not to.

Lyn: Along the same lines, we’ve started teaching large corporations to develop entire remote viewing units within a corporation, and so… There again, I don’t know exactly what uses or how much use it goes to, because y’know… but we teach management, analysts, remote viewers, the monitors, reporting… and large corporations are finding out that this technique really pays for itself.

GW: That makes sense. Moving a bit more spiritually for a moment, I noticed on some of the web stuff you’ve talked about reincarnation, even reincarnation to past time zones. Can you tell us anything about that?

Lyn: Well, in the training in the military, I was told to access people as they went through the process of death, and to go through the process of death with them. I think I had 64 targets along that way. What I found on those targets was that some seemed to reincarnate, some seemed to go to hell, some seemed to go to heaven, and others, they just stopped existing. I never found any ghosts, which was surprising, but one of the things I found is that the group that seemed to reincarnate, well, they appeared to reincarnate into future times, or into present times, or into past times. For some, it was like the next lesson they had to learn on their spiritual journey was in the times of King Arthur or something, others would be jumped forward to future times.

GW: So do you think that might imply we have so many people here on earth because this is a good training time at the moment?

Lyn: Well, could be! I don’t know if I would make that association, but I certainly wouldn’t say no to it. I think spiritually this is one of the most harsh training times, yeah. Lots to learn.

GW: Yeah. With you on that one. Now, I know that looking at the future is a very difficult and uncertain thing… but do you have any sense of how things are likely to shape up in the next few years?

Lyn: Oh, yes. I think in spite of all efforts and everything, the next ten to twenty years is going to see just a phenomenally large war — it will of course will not be a war that ends all wars because they’ll just keep on coming — but it’s going to destroy a horrendous number of people, I mean, just huge numbers of people.

GW: Looking at the way that the world is going at the moment, that seems all too plausible. That’s a very subjective perception, it could just be pessimism…

Lyn: Yeah, or reading the newspaper!

GW: Your most recent book is “Gravity can be your Friend”, right?

Lyn: Yeah, ah, you’ve heard of it, I think it’s on Amazon now, but on lulu.com, you can buy it printed or download it to your computer for only half the price. It’s a scientific fiction book, although everything in it is scientifically possible right now. It’s not one of those far-distant future earth things. It’s a story about police work in space, and all the special training that they have to go through, and it weaves around the story of a police cadet whose father is a notorious criminal, and it becomes her job to catch her father, and all the old motivations they have to go through with the different remedies and the different processes… probably more science than fiction.

GW: That sounds great, and I look forward to grabbing it. So what do you do when you’re not writing?

Lyn: I teach classes of course, and I do charity work for police departments, and then we do work for hire, which we do for our students. We train them to professional and then we turn round and then, when someone in business or something comes in who wants something done, we pay our students for doing it. When we teach our students, we don’t just say “Good, you’ve done the course and now you’re a remote viewer.” There is a place for their work, and the way we do that is we give them a target which has definitely got… like a police case or something which is already solved, and everything is already known, and then we have them do a session, and we go through their viewing one perception at a time, and evaluate every perception as to being correct or incorrect. Then we database all of this, so any of the students, when they become professional, they have sessions in the database and we know exactly what their strengths and weaknesses are, we know exactly how dependable they are, all different types of information. This is definitely a science, were doing applications research whose role is training.

GW: Yeah, I understand, and backing up good students with potential work in the future as well.

Lyn: Yeah.

GW: Yeah, that’s a great benefit of taking the training, I’d think.

Lyn: Yeah, every student has their own strengths and weaknesses, and so if we get a customer who wants something to do with the shape of some micro-component or something, we can look at the database, see who is best at shapes, and use them.

GW: Right, I understand.

Lyn: If Police want the colour of the getaway car, we don’t just task it to anyone, we look in the database and find out who has the highest accuracy with colours. By doing it that way we can take an average of people, use them with their best talents, and get the best results for the customer.

GW: Yeah, that’s really smart actually. Plus you have all the backup information to show results, where you’re coming from.

Lyn: Yeah, we can turn around and say to a customer this person here has a proven track record & dependability rating of, say, 87%. We can say you can depend on them to be right to 80% dependable, or 90% dependable, or whatever.

GW: Yeah, certainly I can see that being a very valuable service, both for the viewers and for the clients.

Lyn: That’s right.

GW: Alright Lyn, I’ve taken up enough of your time so I think I should let you get back to work. Thanks very much for talking to me.

Lyn: Great, thank you.

Note: To read the transcript of Lyn guiding me through an attempt at Remote Viewing, click here.

Sunset in Criação Velha, Pico Island Azores by Ulrich Thumult

In “A Pattern of Islands” by Arthur Grimble, a British colonial officer wrote about his early career stationed in the Gilbert & Ellis Islands of the South Pacific at the start of the 20th century. In one fascinating chapter, he tells how the natives of one island decide to throw a huge feast, at which the food is going to be large fish. Rather than let the fishermen actually go out and actively hunt the fish, the village shaman went to sleep, and entered a lucid dream. He then located a school of fish from within his dream. Once he had found them, he moved himself to them in the dream, and politely asked them to come to the beach which his hut was upon, so that the villagers could eat them. In return for their selfless generosity, he promised the fish that they would be honoured guests at the feast at which they were served.

The shaman then woke up, and told Grimble about the dream. A few hours later, Grimble was shocked to see a number of large fish swim straight into the bay and as far up into the shallow waters as they could get. They then remained passively in the water while the fishermen of the village went amongst them, slaughtering them and dragging the carcasses up onto the beach to prepare them for the feast at which they would be both honoured guests and main course.

But it gets stranger than that. There are stories of a small Indonesian tribe in which all the people shared a common dream. Every night, all the people would dream of the same city, a wondrous place of islands covered with tall, thin spires and connected by airy walkways. The astounding fact is that during these dreams, all the people were fully aware of all the other dreamers, and could interact with them normally. When they awoke the following morning, they would all remember exactly what had happened, and what they had said to whom, as would those people they had talked to. In effect, life continued as if they were awake, but just in a different location.

Just imagine what might be achieved if we could harness our dream-time on an everyday basis…

The subconscious mind is powerful, stubborn and conservative. Its job is to keep you alive, and it attempts to do so on the basis that if you made it through yesterday, chances are you’ll make it through today. It will go out of its way to ensure that its core beliefs are upheld, because it views them as the programming that has kept you alive so far. There is no filter of critical thought or analysis; that’s the conscious mind’s job. If it worked before, then it becomes part of the unconscious programming; the more it worked, the stronger that circuit becomes.

You stick your hand towards fire, and it gets uncomfortably hot, maybe even burnt. This causes pain, which is bad, and you pull your hand back, which is better. The subconscious notes that grabbing fire = bad, and not grabbing fire = good, so it sets up circuitry intended to stop you grabbing fire. If, consciously, you choose to do so, the subconscious will try to stop you with fear, common sense, memories of old pain, and so on; and it will do this whether or not your reasons for wanting to pick up something burning are good or bad.

Every aspect of your life gets sifted in like this. Most of the unconscious programming is set up by the age of seven or eight, but the subconscious keeps on running those circuits all of your life. If you fight it consciously, it fights back, and as it controls body and brain chemistry, it generally wins. Spend your first years hungry, and you’ll grow up with weight issues that no diet or exercise regime can shift, because the subconscious is fighting tooth and nail to keep you alive as best it knows how.

Hypnotic affirmation is the tool that allows you to tinker with the programming in the unconscious. Good affirmations speak in language that the unconscious understands. It doesn’t know whether the things you experience are real or imagined, if there’s no physical feedback. It doesn’t understand timescales, or good intentions, or lies, or what you meant to say. It understands how things make you feel. It knows that pleasant experiences are to be repeated, even if your conscious knows they’re fattening, or immoral. It will cheat, cajole and bully your mind into making sure that its vision of the ‘correct’ world is the one that you live in.

Subconscious by Burcindrummer

To speak to the subconscious, you need to speak in the present tense, and you need to do so clearly, positively and emotionally. Wherever possible, you need to back it up with imagined pictures, and pertinent details. The hypnosis makes it receptive, so that it will pay attention to what you want to tell it. You need to make sure that what you want to say makes sense.

So to start with, remember that the unconscious doesn’t really understand past and future. That’s too analytical. Affirmations should always be in the present tense, and should present your desired outcome as current truth. If you say “I want to lose weight”, the subconscious does a quick audit, finds that yes, you do indeed want to lose weight, adds a bit of extra emphasis to that circuit, and congratulates itself on a job well done. All you’ve done is make yourself more desperate to lose weight. If, instead, you say “I am slim”, although you know you may be lying, the subconscious doesn’t. Instead, it checks around, discovers that for “I am slim” to be true the body has to lose some weight, and sets about making you lose weight.

For similar reasons, you can’t use negation in an affirmation. If you say “I am not hungry”, the subconscious doesn’t really understand the ‘not’, and just fixates on the ‘hungry’. Mmm, hungry. Hungry, coming right up. Positive phraseology can help you round this — “I am pleasantly full” — but in some areas, you’ll need to think outside the box.

Don’t be scared to throw some duration in for emphasis. The subconscious might not understand time, but it can deal with absolutes. “I am always pleasantly full” can’t be made true with an instantaneous flicker of sensation.

Finally, do what you can to engage the subconscious with nice, shiny things like detail and emotion. It doesn’t play well with abstracts. “I am a size six” is much more specific than “I am slim”, and gives the subconscious something to really get behind. Add some feeling, and it’ll really take notice. “I love being a gorgeous size six” is a statement that comes with a bundle of good feelings attached. That means its worth running as a program. Add in a mental image where you waltz into a room looking fabulous in your brand new size six dress, because the subconscious can’t tell if it’s real or not, only that you’re experiencing it, and it makes you feel great. That makes it a high priority. Then, when the subconscious checks current reality and discovers you’re not a six at all, it assumes you’ve just slipped a couple of sizes in the last instant, and will start working hard to reverse whatever calamity just befell you.

The subconscious is your tireless champion, forever fighting to keep you alive. It’s just that sometimes, you have to gently pick it up and point it in the right direction.

Disclaimer: I don’t understand US female clothing sizes all that well, so my apologies if size six is anything other than healthy.

I’ve done quite a lot of work with self-hypnosis in the past. In all seriousness, I have found it to be both useful and powerful. Getting good results depends on three simple factors: well-worded affirmations, repetition, and patience. It can work with just about any mental or emotional issue, and has also been known to help gain influence over utterly unconscious physical processes, from stuttering to fighting disease.

What would you like to change about yourself?

Forget the rumours; anyone can be hypnotised. The idea of people being immune comes from stage-hypnotists, and what they do is not really hypnosis. Anyone can resist being hypnotised if they don’t want to be, and anyone can be hypnotised if they are prepared to let it happen.

The technique for getting yourself into a useful level of trance is really pretty simple. Basically, you methodically tense and relax your body, and after that, relax your mind. Once you’re there, you repeat prepared affirmations to yourself, and then bring your mind back up to normal consciousness. You can do all of this just by thinking to yourself, but personally I like to plan and record a script that I can listen to, because then I can let go completely, and don’t have to worry about staying conscious enough to remember my affirmations.

Hypnosis by Mastrobiggo

Whether you do it ad-hoc or record a script, self-hypnosis requires daily practice. If you’re new to it, it will take about a month for your subconscious to get with the program, and start seeing effects. You probably won’t know whether you’re hypnotised or not either, because being in a hypnotic trance really doesn’t feel much different to just being a bit relaxed. Keep at it though, and it can revolutionise your life. There’s no danger, by the way; the absolute worst that can happen — say you go ‘too deep’, or forget to tell yourself to come out of it — is that you doze off and have a little nap, then wake up feeling perky.

I’ll go over how to craft a good affirmation in the next day or two, but the cliff-notes version is to phrase it in the present tense, using positive phrasing with emotionally engaging content, as if the result you wish were already true: “I love being a non-smoker”, rather than “I want to stop smoking”.

The technique for actually getting intro trance is straight-forward. Sit down or lie down, and get comfortable. Make sure you won’t be distracted or disturbed for the duration — if you are, you’ll need to put yourself back into trance again.

Close your eyes, and take three slow, deep breaths, as slow as you comfortably can, one after another. Then slowly tense the muscles in your left foot and hold for a moment. Then gently allow them to relax again, and say to yourself “My left foot is relaxed.” In your mind’s eye, picture your left foot bathed in a soft white light.

Au Revoir Aura by Boca Blaise

Now repeat this up your body as follows: right foot, lower left leg (include ankle), lower right leg, left knee, right knee, left thigh, right thigh, hips and groin, stomach, chest, left shoulder, right shoulder, left upper arm, right upper arm, left elbow, right elbow, left forearm, right forearm, left hand, right hand, lower back, upper back, neck and finally head.

It can be helpful to add a couple of extra reminder stops part-way through. After your hips, don’t tense anything, but say to yourself “My whole lower body is totally relaxed and at peace”, and visualise it all bathed in the soft glow. Do the same after your upper back, making it “my whole body”, and again finally at the end, simply as “I am”.

Then you move on to your mind. Say to yourself, “I am going to count from 20 down to 1. With each number that I count, I will sink deeper and deeper into a lovely, warm, safe, relaxing hypnotic trance. Once I’m there, I will change myself and my world for the better.”

Then just count, slowly, from 20 to 1. You may find it helpful to add little boosters every five numbers: after 16, say “I am already sinking into a beautiful hypnotic trance”; after 11, say “I am now half-way to entering a deep, powerful trance”; after six, say “I am warm and safe, almost into a really deep trance”; and after 2, say “I am now slipping into a lovely deep trance, so that I can change myself for the better.”

After 1, give yourself a moment, and the repeat your affirmations. Generally you should repeat an affirmation at least three times — far more, if you’re only using one affirmation — and while you’re doing so, picture yourself as vividly as possible with the affirmation being true. If you can, try to really feel this truth: physically feel that you are this slightly different person.

When you’ve done your affirmations, and allowed yourself a bit of time to just enjoy feeling peaceful, bring yourself back out. Say to yourself, “I am going to count from 1 to 3. When I reach three, I will awaken feeling really refreshed, positive, cheerful and energetic, ready to get on with my day. 1. 2. 3!” Then open your eyes, stretch to get your circulation back up to its usual levels, and you’re done.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, you can also use this technique on other people in order to hypnotise them, if they are prepared to be hypnotised by you. All you need to do is speak softly and calmly to your subject, rather than to yourself. You can’t get someone to do something they wouldn’t normally wish to do, no matter how deeply hypnotised they are.

At the risk of sounding even loonier than I usually do, a couple of days ago I was thinking about asking higher forces for some advice on getting rid of a few extra pounds. To head off any questions: I didn’t get round to it; I’ve never pondered doing so before; and the forces in question were strictly non-religious. I spent a few minutes wondering what would be the best way to try to transmit the question, what sort of potential reply I might possibly hope to receive, and whether I was at any risk of accidentally giving myself a nasty wasting disease — necrotizing fascitis, for example. I then fired up Neverwinter Nights 2, and forgot the whole thing entirely.

Yesterday I was at a crowded bus stop, not one of the ones I regularly use. A fairly full bus pulled up, but the electronic display claimed that there was another one just a minute behind, so I decided to wait. So did an Indian guy. Everyone else heaved forward and jammed onto the bus, grunting and moaning at each other. I shared a smiled ‘people, huh’ look with the Indian guy.

He then smiled, pointed at my stomach, and said “So, what are you going to do about that, then?”

He wasn’t being unpleasant in the least — he sounded curious and sympathetic — so I told him that I was doing some low-carb stuff, and trying to get as much exercise as my arthritic bits permit.

“You should do the breathing exercise,” he told me. “It’s amazing. Works like magic. My brother in law lost twenty pounds.”

The Chakra Wheel by Artwerk

The next bus rolled up, and we got on. The chap then proceeded to give me instructions on how to perform this exercise, and said that it worked through a combination of strengthening stomach muscles, stimulating blood flow in the area, and — to paraphrase — activating the stomach chakra. Then he wished me luck, and got off the bus at the next stop.

If you’re interested by the way, the trick apparently is to stand up straight and force out your belly, without allowing your back or chest to move. Hold it for a moment, and then pull it back in again, still keeping your back and chest still. Allow the motion to pull breath down into your lungs, and expel it as you contract again. Do this twice a day, doing as many repetitions as you can without pausing, until you’re out of strength. It sounds a bit like it might derive from Hindu techniques of pranic breathing — I’ll look into that and report back if I discover anything interesting.

I’ve never seen this guy before. I’ve never had strangers start totally spontaneous conversations with me about my weight before. I’m not impressively obese or anything. He didn’t have any sort of product to push, axe to grind, or even website to pimp. And it was less than 24 hours after I’d imagined — just imagined — how I might set about asking for help with my weight.

I’ve had a few suspicious coincidences in my time, but that really is just taking the piss.

During a lunch-break at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Fermi and some colleagues – Teller, Konopinsky and York – got into a light discussion about extra-terrestrials. A few minutes later, Fermi suddenly asked “Where are they?” He did some basic estimates regarding life in the universe, and arrived at the conclusion that Earth should already have been visited many times by aliens throughout history and pre-history, and that they — or at least the evidence of their civilisations — should be clearly visible.

Enrico Fermi -- one of science's genuine heroes.

There are some 250 billion stars in our galaxy, and hundreds of billions times that many visible to us. With so many planets out there, there must be a large number of civilisations in our galaxy alone. The Sun is a reasonably young star, so there could very easily be civilisations billions of years old in our galaxy. Why haven’t they colonized it? At least, why can’t we see the evidence of their passage?

The bottom line is that Fermi’s paradox relies on a large set of assumptions, some or all of which might be false:

(a) That we will recognise aliens or their activities when we see them.
(b) That access to the Earth and its surrounding environment is unrestricted – we may be a ‘zoo’, in effect.
(c) That aliens are not already here unofficially, or that governments would tell us if evidence was discovered.
(d) That the Earth is sufficiently interesting to merit even the slightest alien attention.
(e) That interested aliens could and would locate us in the vast gulfs of space if they actually wanted to in the first place.
(f) That we have been looking for long enough – they may have come 500 years ago, for example.
(g) That an alien civilisation is going to want to expand and explore in the first place.

In other words, the unknowns are just too great. Fermi’s paradox is a base for conjecture, but too narrow to provide any evidence for the non-existence of alien life. Besides, you can’t ever really prove a negative anyway. Occam’s Razor suggests that other intelligent life probably is out there somewhere, but unless it actually drops by openly, or we stumble across it whilst exploring some day, we’ll never be able to say either way for sure.

(Note to keep my publisher happy: bits of this post were taken from my book “The Greatest Puzzles Ever Solved”. The related question was whether people were right to take Fermi’s paradox as proof of the non-existence of intelligent alien life in the universe.)

On several occasions up at the pond in the late 80s and early 90s, I saw light sources moving very anomalously through the sky. Typically, there were three of them, and the way they moved reminded me a bit of flies — lots of instant changes of direction, often through really radical angles; tending to move in straight lines, some slower and lazier ones but also some very fast darting ones; the occasional curving line; sometimes interacting with each other or moving synchronously, other times totally independent. It was like they were playing, or dancing, or something. They certainly must either have been inertialess or completely inorganic — I literally never saw them make a turn, they just switched direction, sometimes even to the point of doubling back, and at what looked like very high speeds indeed.

My approximate location, overlooking Vernham Dean valley in Hants

Obviously I couldn’t tell how distant they were, but they were moving through an arc of sky of about 90 degrees width, and from about 10 degrees above the horizon to 70 or 80 degrees — and they could cross this space diagonally in about a second. There was no sound. One or two nights they seemingly got bored and effectively just vanished, but most nights I ran out of time while they were still there.

On one occasion, I used the car headlights to flash a repeating square number sequence — 1, 4, 9, 16 — on the grounds that it seemed a reasonable demonstration of sentience (I was like 19 or something *grin*), and one of them did seem to come down for a look-see, but with no visible craft body or locational context other than a starfield, it is impossible to know for certain. The light definately got a bit bigger, and I thought I saw the curve of a globular craft body shape, but I don’t really know. It certainly didn’t fly overhead or anything.

I must have seen them eight or ten times, and I had one or two friends with me on at least three occasions. I didn’t have a camera at the time, so I didn’t get any photos, but they wouldn’t have been particularly interesting anyway. I’m still not entirely sure what to think about it — I’m keeping an open mind.

As an aside, a friend of mine worked in Air Traffic Control for the navy for a year or two around the same period — not in that location sadly, but down on the coast. I asked him about any odd stuff, and he said that at least once a month, he’d find a trace which didn’t conform to any lodged flight plans, and which was often moving anomalously, although he wouldn’t give me any details. He said that those traces weren’t logged in the regular book, but there was a separate book they were recorded in, and every six months or so, someone would come from the Ministry of Defence to take the book and leave them a new one.

(Obviously, if you have any questions about this, ask in the comments and I’ll reply as best I can!)

I’d love to know how you score…

How weird are you?

Many occultists, pagans, new-agers, geeks, physicists and little old men like to claim that they are weird, at least when faced with blantantly normal company. But how true is it? After all, there’s a lot more to being weird than just knowing some funky stuff.

To see if you actually capture the unhinged feeling of tentative lunacy that makes up geniune weirdness, just go through the following quiz question by question, keeping score. The more points you get, the stranger you are. Simple. If you don’t understand any of the questions, then you can assume that you scored a 0 for that question.

Please do comment to let me know how you you scored. One random commenter will receive a prize… :)

In the following quiz, select the lettered answer a) – f) that most closely corresponds with your actual feelings/attitude/life. You may occasionally be asked to make a choice in advance – do so before reading the answers for maximum effect. Each answer will score from 0 to 5 points, with a) being 0, f) being 5, and b) - e) being 1 – 4 points respectively. This is very intuitively obvious, if you think about it.

You know. c) is 3, yeah? Yeah.
You got it.
Trust me.

1.  MAKE A CHOICE – Select a number between 1 and 100 NOW!

You chose:

a) 2-4, 6, 9-16, 19-22, 24-41, 43-56 or  58-99
b) 1, 7, 69 or 100
c) 42
d) 23, 5, 17 or 18
e) 8
f) 57

2. I’m going to say “The Illuminatus! Trilogy” to you.

a) What is the Illuminatus! Trilogy?
b) Oh, that old Yarn by Wilson, right?
c) I read the Illuminatus! once. It was funny.
d) I’ve read the Illuminatus! many, many times. It contains the secrets of the universe, if you look hard enough.
e) I own a printed & bound copy of the Principia.
f) Say, have you heard the new Scooter album?

3. You’re walking down the street, dressed in your favourite clothes…

a) Businessmen look upon you as an equal
b) No-one pays much attention. Trendy young people snigger slightly.
c) Little children look slightly nervous at you.
d) Builders and labourers cross the road to avoid passing you.
e) A concerned citizen ‘phones the police, who send in a SWAT team to take you out. Ha! It does no better than the last three.
f) No-one pays much attention, until they try to seduce you. When they see your underwear, those who survive run away very, very fast, and do not talk to anyone about sex ever again. You *do* try not to sit down too much, though.

4. What do you think of Cthulhu?

a) Ummm… its a random string of unintelligble letters?
b) A monster from Lovecraft’s horror fiction.
c) It’s a tentacled blasphemy that sleeps imprisoned in a sunken island in the south pacific, waiting to rise again.
d) Ah yeah, he’s a fascinating magickal egregore, very useful for dream-based rituals.
e) Hng! Hng! Ia! Ia Cthulhu f’thagn! f-f-f-father! YOG SOTHOTH!!
f) Who? Look, do you want to buy this book or not?

5. How do you derive your regular income?

a) I work in an office. Why?
b) I get a grant.
c) I’m on welfare hand-outs.
d) I deal drugs in Times Square.
e) My father, who died some years ago, left me an inheritance that produces a modest monthly stipend. It isn’t fantastic, but it’s more than enough to keep my work going without ‘dipping into the capital’.
f) Money comes to me as and when I need it. The means varies from day to day – yesterday, I found N$3000 (Three Thousand Nigerian Dollars) hidden inside a cat.

6. Bob?

a) Jim?
b) Oh yeah, what do you call a disabled guy in a swimming pool, haha.
c) Haha! Slack! The Anti-Bob! Kill me! Frop! Hahaha!
d) … Yeah Baby! Watch me go! I’m the cosmic neutron gun! Throw my switch and watch me blast you into space! I ate the earth for breakfast, but it tasted crap so I spewed it back up again! Nothing can come close to me, because _I_COME_CLOSE_TO_IT_!! I…
e) That’ll be $5, please.
f) No.

7. MAKE A CHOICE! Select a number between 1 and 10 NOW!

You chose:

a) 1, 5, 7, 8, 10.
b) 3
c) 2
d) 9
e) 6
f) 4

8. Where, to your mind, do ‘Strange Phenomena’ start being strange?

a) Anything that science can’t explain easily.
b) Telepathy. That really wierds me.
c) A Rain of Live Frogs.
d) Crop Circles appearing in concrete.
e) Large demons appearing on live TV and ripping up a politician.
f) From the womb onwards.

9. What is Magick?

a) A pointless form of entertainment practiced by very gay men pretending very hard to be straight, and using tricks to suggest that they can lift up cars or make elephants vanish up their copious rectums.
b) Strange people in silly clothes doing pointless things to chickens.
c) Frazer’s Law of Sympathy and Law of Contagion.
d) The art of causing change in conformity with will.
e) All life is Magick.
f) Laughter.

10. Do you possess any psychic powers?

a) Loser!  St. Dawkins and the Ultra-Randi have proven that they are IMPOSSIBLE!
b) No, but I wish I did.
c) Well, I am very intuitive and in touch with my feminine nature…
d) I know who’s on the phone before I answer it.
e) Yes, I often get visions which later come true. Bookies hate me.
f) Yeehaw! I’ve nearly got the full set! All I need now is Full-contact Psychometry! Say.. you wouldn’t swap me for 2 Telepathys and a Clairvoyance, would you? I could throw in a Green Fingers, too…

11. Do you play Role-Playing Games?

a) Dungeons and Dragons leads to Satanism and suicide. I *way* too smart for that.
b) Oh boy, yes! I only stop playing Warcraft to go to the toilet once a week!
c) Yeah, sure, I’ve played some role-playing games. They’re an interesting exercise.
d) I read White Wolf(tm) Rulebooks, but I don’t actually play.
e) I write role-playing games professionally, as a matter of fact.
f) Play? Look friend, all my best magick was learnt from RPGs! Don’t believe me? Watch, then as I fireball your cat! ***WHOOOOOSSSSSSHH*** **WHUMP**  *MEEeeoooww……* MWAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA!

12. A typical thing that your parents would say to you is:

a) “Hello, dear, it’s your mother. When are you bringing the kids round to see us again? I hope you’re eating properly… I’ve been so tired recently.”
b) “TURN THAT DAMN NOISE DOWN!”
c) “Mph. Snrph. Wassup? Uh? Its 2am, forgodsake!”
d) told to you only by mediums, ‘cos they’re no longer alive.
e) “Its who??”
f) Zalgo. HEEEEEEEE COOOOOOOOOOOOMMMESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS.

13. Do you see auras?

a) See what?
b) No.
c) I tried once or twice, but no luck.
d) After 30 minutes naked, alone in a dark room…
e) Yes.
f) That depends. I had a real mean aura in hear once, it chewed up half the place, and I had to replace the sofa too. How much is it offering? Is it house-trained?

14. If you are going to program a computer, what language do you use?

a) Oh, I don’t program computers. I use Microsoft / own an iPhone.
b) Java
c) Python
d) Object-extended C++, with the help of some home-defined libraries.
e) I program in binary, actually.
f) COBOL.

15. Let us suppose that you have a long-lost great-aunt, who dies and leaves you something in her will. What would it be?

a) Ten Million Dollars.
b) A nice house, say 30-40K, some furniture.
c) A cat.
d) A crumbling old gothic mansion, miles from anywhere, served by a single elderly retainer, just as crumbly. As you drive through the obligatory little village to take possession, all the locals stare at you with a mixture of fear, hope and pity, but all you can think of is the wonderful party you’re going to have there at the next full moon with all your Sorority sisters from the Campus.
e) A mysterious old envelope, containing three sheets that look suspiciously like an ancient map…
f) A peculiar brass casket, sealed with wax and covered with odd heiroglyphs and symbols. Despite repeated urgings, you put it in the attic, unopened, and never touch it again. The matter is never mentioned again, save for a strange new addition to your will that your lawyer receives a short time later.

16. What did you last eat?

a) A nice pork chop, with some boiled potato and cabbage.
b) Lentil stew with wok-fried beansprouts and a glass of holistic carrot extract.
c) A portion of chips.
d) A pizza that was delivered to your door by a jumpy delivery guy.
e) Some wafers made of a mixture of your own blood, your dog’s  sexual fluids, burnt parchment and oatmeal bran.
f) Somalia.

17. Which work of Aleistair Crowley’s did you find most illuminating?

a) Who?
b) Oh, well, actually, I never read any of his stuff yet, but I will real soon.
c) Magick in Theory and in Practice
d) Diary of a Drug Fiend
e) The Book of The Law
f) The Book of Lies

18. What is your normal sexual position?

a) Ohh. Uhh. Um. My. Um. The missionary, I suppose.
b) On top.
c) In a train toilet.
d) In the middle.
e) Spread out on the altar with a candle up my ass.
f) Hanging by our feet from a street lamp, with our ears welded together and a pair of moroccan Baboons for light relief.

19. Do you have any pets?

a) Yes, a dog.
b) No.
c) Yes, a cat.
d) Yes, six japanese fighting fish, carefully segregated.
e) Weellll, sort of – I breed rabbits, goats and black cockerels. I do try not to get too attached to them, though.
f) Oh yes, yes indeed. He’d like to see my pets, Ras! Come, come, let me show you. Its much easier that way.

20. Which of the following phrases do you use most often?

a) “K3w1!”
b) “No thanks.”
c) “A beer, Charlie. Make it a cold one.”
d) “It must be the ACPI screwing your interrupts. Fire up Device Manager and you can kill it from there.”
e) “Ateh! Malkuth! Ve Gevurah! Ve Gedulah! Le Olahm!!”
f) “Oh, I’m sorry, was that _your_ child? Please, have her back. Good day. I beg your…? Well. Fuck you too, Madam.”

Now, add up your scores…

How did you do?

0 : Mmm. You’re normal. You’re so straight, you even think in lines. In fact, anyone this normal would have never bothered reading this post, so if you’re reading this, you’re either curious, stupid, or very, very silly. People this normal are usually axe-murderers, stamp collectors and tiger-rapists. Sometimes all at the same time.

1-20 : Well, you’ve heard the call of the strange out there, roaming the plains of life. You haven’t answered, but at least you didn’t assume it was indigestion. Be very careful – its all downhill from here!

21-40 : You’re fairly odd. Your normal friends describe you as weird, and you take it as a compliment. You probably wear black, so as to make a point and slightly worry the people who still remember World War I. You are likely to be interested in strange things, but you never seem to manage to get to grips with them.

41-60 : Definately a bit on the wild side. You are probably a student of paranormal matters. People who get to know you are often surprised that you aren’t as straight as they first thought. Your last girl/boyfriend was scared for 3 weeks after splitting with you, just in case. You intimidate petty authority figures, such as interviewers, bus conductors and moral rights campaigners.

61-80 : You are undoubtedly odd. You worry your family, and you no longer have any normal friends. When you go on holiday, you chose places like Transylvania, the Sonora desert, McMurdo Sound and the Amazonian rain-forest. You mutter and mumble to yourself in times of stress, and you try not to open your wardrobe too often, in case something comes through…

81-95 : You, my friend, are either several bats short of a belfry, or a dedicated, trained occultist. If there is a difference. Plants wither in your presence, children run away yelping, dogs run away yelping, even chicken run away yelping, for god’s sake. You live in a different world to the rest of the planet, and you like it there. Definately, unashamedly weird.

96-100 : You are so bizarre that I’m surprised you managed to read this quiz, let alone complete it. Talking to you is rather like trying to carry a basket of live turkies up the side of the Empire States Building in a gale – very hard, extremely dangerous, full of ‘gobble-gobble-gobble’ noises, and covered in feathers. The last time you stopped long enough to observe the rest of humanity,  someone slapped a parking fine on you. You wouldn’t know a tax  return unless it came up to you and introduced itself to you by clan. Most of them do.

Final note: I made the macros a few years ago, and I’ve lost track of where the original pics came from — ditto the illustrative images. Let me know if they’re yours and I’ll attribute/&c.

Jeff spent a fair chunk of August 1988 working on his car in the family garage, getting it ready to take to university in September. One Friday lunchtime, he was out in the garage again. He had the whole place to himself, with the rest of his family variously out at work, high school and the shops, so he took the opportunity of some peace and quiet to work on his distributor cap.

He was in the middle of switching the old cap for a new one when he heard footsteps crunching up the gravel path, unusual because he hadn’t heard a car, and there weren’t any other houses in the near vicinity. He glanced round, and saw a little boy walking up the driveway towards the garage door. The boy was maybe 10 or 11, wearing normal stuff, jeans, shirt, a light jacket. Jeff was just trying to fight the cap into place — it was quite tough, because of the engine design — so he tried to concentrate on not screwing up his progress, and didn’t pay much attention. He just assumed the boy was collecting for some cause or other.

Green and pleasant land, by Les Laurens

The footsteps stopped, and then the boy called out, saying “Hello?” in a perfectly normal voice.

Jeff didn’t turn round, but just yelled back “Yeah, what is it?”

“It’s time,” said the boy. “Are you coming?”

Jeff was still absorbed with the engine, and for some reason assumed that the boy was asking if he’d finished the work he was doing. He said “No, I’ll be a while yet.”

There was no reply, and then the total strangeness of the question hit him, and all the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. He let the cap ping off again, and turned around.

The drive was empty.

Jeff’s family home is set in a big open grass yard, which ran right up to the road. There were some small decorative rocks to mark the boundary, but no trees in the immediate vicinity, no convenient shed to scurry behind, nowhere to hide, nowhere the boy could have gone at all. He’d just vanished.

Ever since, we’ve wondered: what if Jeff had been just as distracted, but had felt like a break, and answered “Okay”… What would he be now?