i cannot express or even begin to express my irritation with the know-it-alls who just “know” that something can’t be done that in fact has been done for more than 30 years and has been well documented all the way. At The Monroe Institute they undertake to teach the rudiments of remote viewing in an intensive one-week course. THIS ISN’T NEW STUFF! I have a friend who got a government award for the quality and results of his remote viewing. But that doesn’t stop the ignorant from continuing their chant of “this obviously can’t be done.”
That said, however, if the British government really went about hiring remote viewers in the way that this article from the Daily Mail says it did, no wonder if got no good results. If this is accurate (and bear in mind, if could easily be disinformation from one or another source) it shows that somebody didn’t have the first idea how to go about finding the real thing rather than the charlatans. Fromhttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=438062&in_page_id=1811
Psychics ‘hired to find Bin Laden’
by BEN CLERKIN
Last updated at 11:54am on 23rd February 2007
Psychics were recruited by the Ministry of Defence to locate Osama Bin Laden’s secret lair, it was claimed yesterday.
Newly declassified documents revealed that the MoD conducted an experiment to see if volunteers could ’see’ objects hidden inside an envelope.
It is claimed the ministry hoped positive results would allow it to use psychics to ‘remotely view’ Bin Laden’s base and also to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
However, after running up a bill of £18,000 of taxpayers’ money, defence chiefs concluded there was ‘little value’ in using psychic powers in the defence of the nation and the research was taken no further.
The study, conducted in 2002, involved blindfolding test subjects and asking them to ’see’ the contents of sealed brown envelopes containing pictures of objects and public figures.
The MoD tried to recruit 12 ‘known’ psychics who advertised their abilities on the Internet, but when they all refused they were forced to use ‘novice’ volunteers.
The report, released under the Freedom of Information Act, shows 28 per cent of those tested managed to guess the contents of the envelopes, which included pictures of a knife, Mother Teresa and an ‘Asian individual’.
But most subjects, who were holed up in a secret location for the study, were hopelessly off the mark. One even fell asleep while he tried to focus on the envelope’s content.
A former MoD employee who received a copy of the report said the timing of the study must have been related to military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Nick Pope, who ran the MoD UFO research programme and worked at the ministry for 21 years, said: “It can only be speculation, but you don’t employ that kind of time and effort to find money down the back of the sofa.
“You go to this trouble for high-value assets. We must be talking about Bin Laden and weapons of mass destruction.”
The MoD last night defended its decision to fund the secret tests despite the questionable use of taxpayers’ money.
And Mr Pope said: “I don’t think this was a waste of public money. Many people will say so, but I think it is marvellous that the Government is prepared to think outside the box.
“And this is as outside the box as it gets.”
March 1st, 2007 at 3:48 am
Here is a thoughtful “must read” from Paul H. Smith, addressing Britain’s Ministry of Defense remote viewing research :
They Think They Know
A few days ago when I first read the newspaper reports revealing that Britain’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) had researched psychic skills, I started scribbling down a table-thumping rant about how wrong-headed the research had been – not because it had been done at all (which I otherwise applaud) but because of how poorly-conceived it had been, at least according to the newspapers. Before I published my rant far and wide, someone fortunately pointed me to the actual 168-page declassified report, where I could read a more detailed account of what the MoD had actually done. I discovered that the news stories were embarrassingly oversimplified and incomplete, and that the research was not as ill-advised as reporters had claimed. It was still flawed, which I discuss below – but the whole affair amounts to the latest example of society’s self-perpetuating ignorance of the nature of “psychic phenomena†in general and remote viewing in particular.
Click here to read the 6 page article [pdf format - 1.3 M]