Psi Spies: The True Story of America’s Psychic Warfare Program
by Jim Marrs
New Page Books, 2007, $15.99
318pp, Appendix, Notes, Index
ISBN-13: 978-1-56414-960-2
ISBN-10: 1-56414-960-9
A Review by Gene Stewart
This book was suppressed from the summer of 1995 until publication in 2007. In the interim, other books covering this topic came out, based on or rooted in magazine articles leaked by insiders or those with inside contacts. Reasons for its suppression are many but boil down to military and government policy, politics, and procrastination.
Stupidity makes most conspiracy unnecessary.
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In the interests of full disclosure, this: In the 1980s, my wife was in the US Air Force and stationed at Ft. Meade, MD. We had one car, so I’d drive her to and from work if I’d be needing it. That day, after dropping her off, I drove through base and spotted a road leading off at an angle toward a clump of pine trees. Thinking perhaps it was a camp, I turned onto the road to investigate.
It led to a dirt parking area beside two dilapidated Army barracks. There were two or three cars parked under the trees. As I pulled up, still thinking it might be a camp administered from one of the old buildings, three men in civilian garb, two lounging by a car in the trees, the other coming from the screen door in one of the barracks, waved to me and wandered over. They asked what I was looking for.
When I said camp, they exchanged looks, then told me I’d have to go back to the main road because they knew of no camp grounds. They told me to go ahead and turn around and just follow the same dirt path to the road, and I did. Thought nothing much about it.
Turns out I’d met the Star Gate guys, who were at that time on Ft. Meade in those barracks doing remote viewing. Maybe they’d thought I was a new recruit. That none wore uniforms should have struck me more forcibly, perhaps, but I figured they were clearing out or refurbishing the old barracks. Renovation was always happening on Army bases, most being from the WW II era or older.
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Jim Marrs does a thorough, systematic job of explaining both how the military came to have its own psychic spies and the roots of what they labeled remove viewing, or RV. (There’s that echo of camping again, on the edge of a definite wilderness, too.) In nine concise chapters he introduces many of the key personnel who comprised the very small, elite cadre who developed working methods still used to this day. Marrs also explains the method and recounts many of their successes, along with, at the end of the book, glimpses from what the RV’ers themselves called The Enigma Files. Those are far-flung, wildly surreal experiences they’ve all had, opening eschatological, epistemological, and other philosophical and cosmological vistas.
That millions of dollars were spent on GRILL FLAME, STAR GATE, and other such programs featuring ESP is confirmed even in the federal records. That these small programs, often fewer than a dozen people, moved from one host unit to another, finally going entirely dark, demonstrates how strong the reaction for and against such information-gathering techniques could be. None could argue whether it worked, few could agree how to account for it.
It was ambiguity and indifference, along with the occasional religious hysteria, that drove the Remote Viewing programs that continue into the deniable realm. As one officer put it, “If you have information from Remote Viewers, you have to act on it to confirm it, and that can require a lot more faith than many field commanders can muster. Do you put people at risk on the say-so of people who saw it from an armchair or in a dream?”
Consistently demonstrated, and proven reliable, Remote Viewing refined itself as methods developed by trial-and-error. Experience helped, too, along with adding coordinates from maps or using multiple RV sessions and people on a single target, say, a missing, kidnaped officer or a sunken sub or downed plane.
RV has since moved from military-only to the business world. As the first generation of Remote Viewers retired or matriculated, some founded companies to teach RV, or to offer its revelations to any corporations that might pay for such insight, such as oil companies, mineral companies, and even law enforcement agencies.
Psi Spies is the best book I know for a solid, well-grounded overview of Remote Viewing. Another book featuring a year-long well-funded free-descent deep dive into what the American government bubbles know, or think they know, or don’t know they know, is Out There by Howard Blum, 1990, which covers Remote Viewing among other outré topics. For a more in-depth delving into Remote Viewing, go for Jim Schnabel’s 1997 book Remote Viewers, which rounds out what ends up being, among these three books, a thorough look at what is known about the attempt, which seems on-going, to put the ESP into espionage.
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