Tracks in the Psychic Wilderness: An Exploration of ESP, Remote Viewing, Precognitive Dreaming and Synchronicity. - book reviews

Journal of Parapsychology, The, March, 1998 by Arthur Hastings

Tracks in the Psychic Wilderness: An Exploration of ESP, Remote Viewing, Precognitive Dreaming and Synchronicity by Dale E. Graff. Rockport, MA: Element Books, 1998. Pp. xiv 210. $19.95 (hardcover). ISBN 0-385-472072.

This is a personal account by the government project director for Stargate, the remote viewing and psi research conducted for over 20 years by the U.S. Department of Defense. Dale E. Graft, with a technical background in aerospace engineering and physics, was given responsibility for all DOD remote viewing activity in 1985. He coined the name Stargate, he writes, to invoke "the feeling of exploration, a sense of reaching beyond our ordinary capabilities, of expanding the boundaries of our human potential." This theme pervades the book. It is not an administrative autobiography, or technical review of the project, but, rather, personal observations of the author about his work with the project and his own experiences with remote viewing, psi in dreams, and synchronicities. It tells the story of his own unfolding awareness of the psychic interconnections within himself and with others.

Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ were the principals for most of the DOD remote viewing research at SRI International in Menlo Park, California. To explain to government monitors what they were doing, they would usually have the monitor be a viewer in an RV experiment. True to form, in 1976 when Graft became contract monitor, they asked him to do remote viewing. He protested that he could not do it, and should just study it and ponder its significance. Puthoff answered him, the book reports, by saying that it was a natural talent, and "I thought you were an adventurous individual." This challenged Graft, and he agreed. Graft reports his inner process on being a remote viewer: how he feared he could not calm himself enough, how he might fail, concern for the opinions of others who disbelieved, feeling foolish, and confronting his inner judge. He finally recognized that feeling foolish was natural and appropriate in a learning situation, which resolved his fear. During the viewing, he drew walkways surrounded by a sunken garden. When they traveled to the target, he saw a wetland nature area, with board walkways over reedy tidal flats. Graft felt this was too simple and inconclusive; he wanted to do it again. The next day he drew a courtyard with arches, stone walls, bicycles, and plants. The target for this was the inner court at Stanford University, and he recognized the complex objects and structures that had come to his awareness in the remote sensing. This was persuasive to him of the natural capability for remote viewing.

From his military intelligence perspective, he recognized the potential of this for locating persons lost or held captive; it could narrow down possibilities to a tidal basin, for example, or a plaza. Throughout the book, Graft points out these information potentials--locating individuals, describing secured facilities, sending messages via associative targets. The latter occurs, for example, when selected targets (e.g. sites, photographs) are used as signals for pre-arranged sets of messages. The SRI team explored this with a mini-sub in San Francisco Bay, with Graft as the viewer. The experimenter on board the submersible, Edwin C. May, selected three targets from the target pool, each of which indicated a message. Graft again fought with the fear of failure, and reminded himself it was all right to fail, but he also realized this was a scenario for a lost submarine, and he as the viewer had to identify the targets from the "desperate" crew. For the first target he saw a cylindrical object and, in vivid dreams the night before, images of glass breaking. He chose from the target pool a picture of large glass bottles, but the correct target was a B-52 bomber. In a second viewing, he saw a golden-haired woman and a face of a gorilla. It was a straightforward match, he reports--one photo from the target pool was of a blond woman standing next to a gorilla! Opening the message code revealed the message for that target: "We Are Back on Track: Moving to Deep Rift Checkpoint." For the third target, he matched a dream image he had had that morning of a thick fabric with complex patterns with a target of a tennis player and fabric net. This, too, was correct, and represented the message, "Trouble in Reactor Bay: Condition Serious Red." Graft notes that this is a psi technique from sending messages between remote locations, including deep ocean vessels (which cannot use ordinary radio frequencies because of the surrounding water). Two-way communication is also made possible, with messages or instructions returned. It should be recognized that, in actual practice, there would be no list of correct targets to confirm that the viewing was correct. Further analysis would be needed to evaluate the results, such as a majority vote from several viewers, using known targets for calibration, and, of course, well-trained participants. Another aspect of interest in Graft's account is drawing upon images from his dreams to identify remote viewing targets. The night before, he had been attempting to view the targets, and we can assume that this motivated their appearance in a dream state.