But the crux of the matter was that the program’s longevity depended on the quality of intelligence the Army psychics could provide. If the results were authoritative, the program would thrive—that’s the way the U.S. military operates. During the Vietnam War, for example, a majority of generals opposed cutting-edge technology—namely, electronic warfare—being developed for combat applications. In their nascent stages, the sensor systems, computers, and overhead satellite technologies being pushed onto battlefields left many generals asking how electronic systems could possibly benefit their soldiers on the ground. Despite intense criticism, these technology concepts were pursued by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and other military laboratories, and they eventually led to a revolution in military affairs.
Extrasensory perception was hardly a new technology—it was an ancient discipline linked to magical, mystical, supernatural, and occult ideas. But how to uncouple ESP and psychokinesis from their primitive, pre-science past? The Army had a plan. The U.S. military is built on principles and protocols. It loves manuals, directives, and codes. The Army decided it would develop a manual and train soldiers to become remote viewers. It would jettison the idea that people were born psychic; remote viewing would henceforth be regarded as classified Army tradecraft. The job of creating the manual was assigned to Hal Puthoff and Ingo Swann at SRI. The two began developing a system to train soldiers and civilians with the U.S. Army in a six-stage process called Coordinate Remote Viewing, or CRV.
While Puthoff and Swann wrote the CRV manual, Fred Atwater, now serving as branch chief, traveled to Fort Huachuca, in Arizona, to locate two military intelligence officers who would be trained personally by Swann in CRV techniques. The men he chose were Captain Rob Cowart and Captain Tom McNear. In 1982, both men were read onto the classified Grill Flame program. The plan was that after Cowart and McNear had been trained they would become the program’s CRV trainers.
The timing was fortuitous. In 1982 there was a new commanding general at INSCOM, Major General Albert Stubblebine, a powerful figure who welcomed unconventional beliefs. His purview was vast. Stubblebine was in charge of all the Army’s strategic intelligence forces around the world, including signals, photographic, and human intelligence, along with counterintelligence. “They all belonged to me,” Stubblebine said in an interview in 2009. “I was supposed to find out what the enemy was doing before the enemy did it, so that we could take action against the enemy. That’s intelligence. Before the fact,” he said. General Stubblebine had a long-standing interest in anomalous mental phenomena. He had studied altered states, out-of-body experiences, extrasensory perception, and precognition. These, he said, were “not hocus pocus, not superstitious and not occult.” They were mechanisms that consciously tapped into “human potential.” This was human technology, Stubblebine insisted, and like all technology it needed to be researched, developed, and advanced.
Under a Psychoenergetic Phenomena program banner, with access highly restricted, a series of new programs related to extrasensory perception and psychokinesis emerged. Some of these efforts sought to use the mind to affect biological systems, including one’s own. This new work at INSCOM would resemble programs going on in China under the leadership of H. S. Tsien in which the mastery of qigong was seen as a pathway to such Extraordinary Human Body Functions as skin reading, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis.
General Stubblebine set up an entity called the Advanced Human Technology Office. The man he chose to run it was Lieutenant Colonel John B. Alexander, a former Green Beret and Special Forces commander in Vietnam with a PhD in thanatology, the study of death.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Consciousness
The first time extrasensory perception and psychokinesis were written about in an official U.S. Army publication was on December 12, 1980. The article, titled “The New Mental Battlefield: Beam Me Up, Spock,” was published in Military Review, the bimonthly magazine of the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The author was Lieutenant Colonel John B. Alexander.
“While the concepts may stretch the imagination of many readers,” wrote Alexander, “the possibility for employment as weaponry has been explored. To be more specific, there are weapons systems that operate on the power of the mind whose lethal capacity has already been demonstrated.” Alexander was not yet part of the Grill Flame program, nor did he have access to information about any of the CIA, DIA, or Army projects involving ESP and PK, now also being called remote action (RA) and remote perturbation (RP). Alexander’s article was based on personal experience and open-source information, material found in books and articles in the public domain, which in 1980 meant in the library.
The military establishment’s initial response to Alexander’s article was relatively subdued. Then Washington Post columnist Jack Anderson read the article and wrote about it in his column under the heading “Voodoo Warriors of the Pentagon.” Anderson surmised that the generals at the Pentagon were “dabbling in the dark arts,” using Ouija boards and the evil eye, and studying programs “a Haitian witch doctor might try.” The wire services picked up the story and it went national.
“That’s when the shit hit the fan,” John Alexander recalled in 2016.
Back in January 1981, Alexander recalls, he was sitting at his desk at the Pentagon, where he worked for the inspector general, when an Army officer came in unannounced and highly agitated, and began asking questions about the “New Mental Battlefield” article. This was one in a series of “synchronicitous events,” he says.
Hardly prone to magical thinking, Alexander is a former Green Beret. From 1966 through 1969 he commanded Special Forces A-Teams in Vietnam and Thailand, earning the moniker Assassin Six. After the war he engaged in a variety of pursuits that kept his brain and body challenged. He climbed mountains in Nepal and swam with whales in Tonga. In an effort to understand human belief systems he studied superstition, sorcery, and witchcraft around the world, interviewing witch doctors in Zimbabwe, shamans in Siberia, and tribesmen in New Guinea who still practiced cannibalism. What interested him most was how people faced fear, and how people feared death. For his PhD in near-death studies, working under the celebrated physician Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Alexander was a founding board member of the nation’s first Children’s Hospice International, where he facilitated the development of protocols to help terminally ill children face death without fear.
“No hospital wanted to touch this [concept] at the time,” Alexander says, as if the idea of children dying of cancer was somehow taboo. Alexander embraced a topic that had been ignored by the mainstream, and for his pioneering work with terminally ill children he received the President’s Volunteer Service Award from Ronald Reagan.
The angry fellow on the other side of Alexander’s desk was from the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, U.S. Army. He wanted to confirm that Alexander was the author of the article Jack Anderson had recently written about in the Washington Post, and if he was, then surely he was aware of clearance procedures for military employees with regard to publishing. When Alexander showed him the appropriate paperwork, the officer reviewed the documents and left.
By January 1981, John Alexander’s esoteric interests had caught the attention of a high-level Army organization called Task Force Delta (not to be confused with Delta Force), led by Lieutenant Colonel Frank Burns and supported by several generals. Delta was “an Army version of a think tank,” Alexander explains, whose purpose was to address the myriad post–Vietnam War problems the Army was grappling with, including its own image. Task Force Delta believed that perception was a key component of everything, Alexander explains. With the right formula in place, the Army could change the way its soldiers thought.
One such case was the Army’s new recruitment strategy campaign. This huge success arrived on the heels of a decade of abysmal failures. In 1971, the Army’s recruiting slogan was “Today’s Army Wants to Join You.” Not only awkwardly phrased, i
t made little sense, and it turned out to be one of the least successful advertising campaigns in Army history. Two years later, at the end of the Vietnam War, the slogan changed. Now it was “Join the People Who’ve Joined the Army,” which was almost as feeble.
General Maxwell R. Thurman, a Task Force Delta participant, understood the power of messaging. In 1979 he helped create a new slogan: “Army. Be All You Can Be.” This crafty and empowering message would become one of the most memorable Army recruiting mottoes of all times, and it remained in use until the War on Terror. Its success underscores the power of words to influence perception.
Language, perception, and communicating the message were key components of Task Force Delta, but so were other more extreme, out-of-the-box ideas. “Nothing was too unorthodox to consider,” recalls Alexander. “Task Force Delta was an organization that thought so far outside the box that its members didn’t know whether or not a box existed.” In 1981, there were five people permanently assigned to Task Force Delta. Lieutenant Colonel John Alexander was a part-time participant. He’d been invited to join the group before he’d written the controversial article.
The day after the awkward meeting about publication clearances, Alexander received word that the deputy undersecretary of defense, a retired Army four-star general named Richard G. Stilwell, wanted to see him. A lieutenant colonel being asked to meet with a four-star general was an uncommon occurrence, since it bypassed the chain of command. Alexander was unsure what to expect. Stilwell was an Army legend. He’d participated in the Normandy invasion in World War II, served as head of the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Thailand, during the Vietnam War, served in the CIA and as commander in chief of the United Nations Command in Korea. What did Stilwell want to see John Alexander for? he wondered.
At 12:30 p.m., that same day, Alexander made his way to the general’s office, located in the elite E-ring of the Pentagon, for the meeting. “It was oddly informal,” he recalls. “The general wanted to discuss various forms of phenomenology I’d written about in my paper.” The conference ended without a specific request, which also struck Alexander as unusual. Walking back to his desk in the Pentagon’s C-ring, Alexander wondered what the real purpose of the meeting might have been.
That afternoon, at a little after 4:00 p.m., an executive officer approached Alexander and told him this was his last day in the Office of the Inspector General. General Stilwell had arranged for his transfer to INSCOM, at Arlington Hall, Virginia. His new commanding officer would be Major General Albert Stubblebine. “I’d been moved formally into the psychic realm,” says Alexander.
In the early 1980s a panel of scientists working for the Army Science Board had identified “a major challenge” facing the military institution. Machines were getting smarter, but humans were not. “Sophisticated high technology systems [are] changing faster than the human beings required to operate and maintain them,” the panel found. The Army needed new ways to improve human productivity in order to offset what had officially been identified as “the growing human technology gap.” The operational definition of human technology, wrote the board, includes “strategies and actions which improve human capability and/or performance.” The Army did not want soldiers to be all they could be, they wanted them to be better than that.
At INSCOM, General Bert Stubblebine was the man in charge of developing human technologies that would be useful to the Army. John Alexander had been transferred to help him realize this vision. As part of a program called INSCOM Beyond Excellence, Alexander was now in charge of the Advanced Human Technology Office, and would interact with Stubblebine’s High Performance Task Force.
General Stubblebine was a commanding figure. He was six foot three, with a shock of white hair, enormous ears, and a broad forehead. Colleagues described him as a dead ringer for the actor Lee Marvin. A West Point graduate, Class of 1952, Stubblebine had a master’s degree in engineering. He had spent the first decade of his military career in armored units and as an instructor at the U.S. Military Academy, where he taught chemistry. During the Vietnam War he worked as an imagery analyst and became the third military intelligence officer to serve as a primary staff officer in a combat division. After the war Stubblebine worked his way up through the leadership ranks, distinguishing himself with pioneering ideas in the new, so-called electronic, battlefield. By 1982, as head of INSCOM, he had 16,000 soldiers under his command. Protected by his broad authority, Stubblebine had no qualms about expressing his interest in all forms of anomalous mental phenomena, extrasensory perception and psychokinesis among them. He once told a group of officers that his goal in meditation was to learn how to levitate.
Members of the Advanced Human Technology Office traveled across the country on a quest to learn what factors motivated people to strive for greatness in performance, and why. The team visited organizations as diverse as the Dallas Cowboys, the Menninger Foundation, Ford Motor Company, and Frito-Lay. They examined courses centered on New Age Thinking, Structured Writing, the Larazov Learning Method, the Cortex Program, Cohesion Technology, and SALTT (Suggested Accelerated Learning Teaching Techniques). The team examined a multitude of new age and self-help programs across America, including sleep discipline, neurolinguistic programming, and Silva Mind Control—a self-help practice in which students are taught to “rewire” their subconscious using guided imagery. The goal was to sift through volumes of data, pare down the results, and identify the five best human technology programs that Army INSCOM could get behind. Five programs to narrow the human technology gap and create soldiers who were better than they thought they could be.
In the remote-viewing unit at Fort Meade, Joe McMoneagle was exhausted. Between 1981 and 1982, he’d worked on more than one hundred intelligence missions targeted directly on terrorism, including ones in Africa, Europe, South America, the Middle East, and the United States. Ken Bell had left the unit, and just about everyone else was away training at SRI. That left McMoneagle and Hartleigh Trent with a heavy caseload. Army personnel don’t get overtime pay for longer hours or more work. Salaries are finite, set by rank and years of experience. There were requests coming in from NSA, CIA, FBI, even the Joint Chiefs of Staff. While this was good news for the longevity of the program, it also placed considerable strain on McMoneagle and Trent. Remote viewing was grueling, intense work, the strain of which was exacerbated by the fact that someone working in a classified, Special Access Program couldn’t tell anyone what he or she did all day. Even if he could tell, McMoneagle was practical enough to know that most people doubted the legitimacy of psychic functioning and might even laugh at it. The pressure was taking its toll.
To reduce the stress, McMoneagle and Fred Atwater played racquetball at the Fort Meade gym during lunch hour. Normally a gentle game, it became what the two men called combat racquetball. Full-body blocking was allowed, and so were body checks against the walls. Sometimes an audience gathered in the gallery upstairs. On one particularly intense day the two men were on a roll, with one recovery after the next and the ball moving at what seemed like lightning speed. As one of Atwater’s returns came at him hard, McMoneagle twisted around to put a downward spin on the ball when wham!, his racket caught Atwater in the face, just over the eye. There was blood everywhere. “Fred just sort of stood there a few seconds; his eyes looked very strange,” recalls McMoneagle. Then he fell down. “I thought I had killed him.”
He hadn’t, though the cut was serious enough that the two decided to stop playing racquetball. Atwater was fine, but without this regular exercise, McMoneagle put on weight. Health problems kicked in, he says, then snowballed. The disc injury from the helicopter crash in Vietnam resurfaced, with cold or wet days feeling particularly hellish. In the office, he struggled to meet demands. Kidnappings. Weapons assessments. The Iran–Iraq War. Special Access Programs were lonely. At least Hartleigh Trent could relate to what he was going through.
But Trent was also feeling physically ill, from a sharp pain in his left hip. “We would
sometimes sit and talk with each other about how bad it felt,” McMoneagle recalls. The Army threatened McMoneagle with probation for his weight problem; the military does not tolerate soldiers who are physically unfit. McMoneagle started having steroid shots at Kimbrough Army Hospital across the street. The pain got so bad, he says, he took up meditation, then started seeing a Chinese doctor who performed acupuncture. “I started to get better,” McMoneagle recalls, but Hartleigh Trent got worse. When tests revealed Trent had Hodgkin’s disease, McMoneagle felt devastated. A black cloud descended. Trent endured radiation and chemotherapy treatments, but modern medicine could not stop the cancer from invading his body.
McMoneagle struggled with ominous feelings. His second marriage was moving toward separation and divorce. On the way to work one morning he was involved in a multicar pileup on I-95 and narrowly missed dying. The Army and the CIA believed—or at least wanted him to believe—that he had extraordinary human powers, a sixth sense, or ability to see things other people could not physically see, and that it was his job—his duty—to develop these abilities. But on the human front he was as frail as the guy in the next cubicle. He couldn’t make a marriage work, believe he was a good father, or live free of physical pain. Now his friend was dying right in front of him, and there was nothing he or anyone else could do.
When Hartleigh Trent was taking his last breaths, McMoneagle was standing beside his bed along with Hartleigh’s wife. “His end was near,” McMoneagle recalls. “His eyes suddenly popped open and he smiled at us.” Then, after a moment, he spoke. “It’s really quite beautiful where I’m going,” he said. He closed his eyes and died.
“No more pain,” McMoneagle remembers. “For me there was a very large hole.” McMoneagle could not stop thinking about the nature of grief, and how soldiers deal with sorrow. “What happens to all this grief?” he wondered. “You put it away somewhere in the back of your mind, bury it under layers of calloused scarring from years of accumulated experiences.” Soldiers are told to be tough, not to be crushed by experience, however painful those experiences may be. “A soldier learns to use his or her grief as a motivator,” he says. But from McMoneagle’s perspective, there was one thing soldiers rarely do. “They never take the time to process the loss. They suck it up and move on, putting one foot in front of the other,” he says. “Over time, the grief they’ve accumulated and buried becomes so great it can never be processed. Opening the door to those feelings would be like splitting the face of a dam. Once the water started to flow, there would be no way to stop it.”