Whatever Happened to America's Psychic Spies?

Whatever happened to America's psychic spies? As a matter of fact, they're still around and still doing remote viewing.

On the last day of June 2009, a 23-year-old US Army private, Bowe Bergdahl, carrying only a compass and a bottle of water, disappeared from his unit’s forward operating base in eastern Afghanistan.

Why and how he had done this wasn’t clear. But the risk that he would fall into the hands of the Taliban was obvious. As soon as his absence was discovered, senior US military officials at Bagram Airbase in Kabul sprang into action. They scoured the airwaves and the nearby terrain with the latest surveillance technology, sent out patrols to try to find Bergdahl, and even distributed leaflets to Afghans in the area, warning them to inform the army if they saw him.

And eventually, they called John Alexander.

Alexander was a retired army colonel, living in Las Vegas. In the 1980s, as a staff officer at the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), he had been one of the insiders in the Pentagon’s remote viewing programme. The programme had been shut down in the mid 1990s – largely for political reasons, some said – and its trained psychics had gone on to conventional assignments or into retirement. Now the military, out of other options, wanted to see if remote viewers could help.

It was not an official project, just an informal request. “They were saying, we’ve tried everything else, why not this?” recalled Alexander.

He agreed to do what he could. And, with some difficulty, he did arrange, via a third party, for several trained remote viewers to target the missing soldier. In accordance with the usual procedure, each viewer was told merely that there was a target of interest, and that he or she should provide whatever impressions came to mind.

The result? Read more