The third eye is an esoteric concept said to allow for perception beyond ordinary sight. In eastern religions, it is described as an invisible eye located in the center of the forehead. In ancient statuary it is often represented as a circle or an eye symbol carved on the forehead of the statue. In qigong, third-eye training involves focusing one’s attention on the space between the eyebrows while moving through a series of physical exercises, postures, and poses. In literature, it is through the third eye that a soothsayer or seer commonly obtains supernatural insight, including prophecy. The concept of the third eye and the claim by a person that he or she has one is about as far from U.S. Army doctrine as a person can get—except for the brief period in the early 1980s when Albert Stubblebine, head of the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command, was embracing paranormal concepts as a possible means of intelligence collection and encouraging the organization’s staff to “approach new technology with an open mind.”
Angela Dellafiora defied Army protocol by asking around to see if anyone could help to arrange for her to meet with General Stubblebine. Word came back that this was impossible. Dellafiora was a civilian analyst and Stubblebine was INSCOM’s commander. Dellafiora recalls, “I kept pursuing this. I really wanted to meet Stubblebine. My management did not know I was psychic. I was working this on my own. Finally word got to Stubblebine and back to me. The general wanted to see my abilities. So I went in and channeled for him.”
Channeling was what Dellafiora did. She opened her third eye, and the words came, she says. “He wanted to know about his future. I can’t remember exactly what I told him. I wish I could,” says Dellafiora. “I was nervous. He was the commanding general at INSCOM. My focus was to show him I am psychic and to get myself into the program.”
Stubblebine thanked Dellafiora for coming and said he would see what he could do. In the meantime, Dellafiora applied to take the RAPT seminar at the Monroe Institute, and was put on the waiting list. After months of waiting, she was thrilled to learn she had finally been chosen to attend. Then a sudden change of plans: “I was told by my supervisor and his colleague, a fellow INSCOM employee, that they were going instead. So I’d lost my place for the [RAPT] seminar and was put back on the list.” Dellafiora was disappointed, until she learned what had happened during the seminar, what a disaster it had been. During one of the Hemi-Sync sessions the fellow INSCOM employee reportedly had some kind of breakdown. “Agitated and threatening [he] approached the Institute director Nancy Honeycutt, Bob Monroe’s daughter, who was running the office that day,” remembers Paul Smith. “Sweating profusely, [he] removed his shirt and began toying with a ball point pen suggesting that his martial arts training made it possible for him to kill her with it. Then he accused her of working for an enemy intelligence service.” Nancy Honeycutt called for a staff member and the two of them were able to defuse the bizarre situation. “I saw him when he was brought back to Arlington Hall,” John Alexander confirms. “He was raving. He did not make any sense.” Court documents indicate the man was sent to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington for psychiatric evaluation.
A classified investigation ensued. Army command was livid, recalls Dale Graff. “They wanted to know how did this happen?” General Stubblebine quietly retired. Dale Graff returned from Moscow in the middle of the fallout. “I was the person who had to write up the report,” he says. “It was a genuine mess. I had to make clear these were not our people from the remote-viewing unit; they were under General Stubblebine’s command. He had a lot of strange ideas.” An unforgiving light was shined on the program. Dellafiora says, “It made everybody paranoid at INSCOM.”
Dellafiora was called into her boss’s offices at Arlington Hall Station. How and why had she broken rank and gone to see General Stubblebine? she was asked. “Only then did I realize I’d made a terrible, terrible mistake,” says Dellafiora. “Here I was, a young civilian. A female. I had gone way over my chain of command to get myself in to see the general. When my management found out that I went to Stubblebine, and why I went to Stubblebine, real problems began to materialize.” She had not considered the consequences. “I was so focused on getting into the psychic program I had not seen the bigger picture,” she says. “I am a quiet person. All my bosses knew was, here’s this quiet person who gets up out of nowhere and goes to see the commanding general and tells him she has a third eye. My bosses decided, Well, she must crazy. I was told that they thought that the same thing that happened to [the INSCOM colleague] happened to me.”
Dellafiora received word that she’d been scheduled for a psychiatric evaluation at Walter Reed hospital. “I was worried I’d lose my job. What if I was locked up? I asked to see the staff psychologist, who made a few things clear. He said, ‘Angela, these people follow protocol. You skipped the chain of command. And you held a séance with General Stubblebine.’” The staff psychologist wrote a letter on Dellafiora’s behalf, she recalls. “He said [something like], ‘This is who Angela is. She has these abilities. This is a part of her. This is her belief system.’” Official documents reveal the psychologist to have been Colonel Dennis Kowal. Of Dellafiora he stated, “I find nothing psychiatrically wrong with her. She was referred to the command because she had been participating in behavior that was actually encouraged by the commander [Stubblebine] and they thought it was crazy. She was an automatic writer.” But orders were orders, and Dellafiora’s commanding officer insisted that she be evaluated at Walter Reed, so she went. “I met with a doctor and told them my version of events. The doctor said I wasn’t crazy and discharged me.”
Back at Arlington Hall, Dellafiora was effectively demoted—not officially, but it was obvious. “I used to do a briefing once a week. Now I did briefing maybe once every six weeks,” she recalls. She was moved to an office in the attic. She did her job. She analyzed military crises in hot spots across Central America, wrote reports, and wondered what the future might bring.
More than a year passed. Then one day the phone rang. It was an Army captain named Paul Smith calling from the 902nd Military Intelligence Group at Fort Meade. Smith said he wanted to interview Dellafiora about a Special Access Program. He couldn’t say much more over the phone. How soon could she come down? Dellafiora could barely contain her excitement. She knew enough about the program and the participants to know that Captain Smith was calling about the psychic program. After a year in the attic at Arlington Hall Station, she could hardly believe the good news.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Woman with the Third Eye
It had taken two years for the fallout from the fiasco at the Monroe Institute to clear. The battle had been a contentious one, full of hostility, bureaucratic maneuvering, and strife. In July 1984, just weeks after General Stubblebine was forced into early retirement, INSCOM’s new commander, Brigadier General Harry Soyster, canceled the remote-viewing program. Then it came to light that Soyster lacked the authority to cancel the program, because it had been authorized by the secretary of the Army, which meant that only the secretary of the Army could cancel it. In effect, the Army’s psychoenergetics program was now up for grabs. The CIA considered taking the reins, then passed. According to declassified documents, so did NSA. For several months the assistant surgeon general of the Army, Major General Garrison Rapmund, engaged in discussions to move the program under his command, within the Army Medical Research and Development Command at Fort Detrick, Maryland, where the emphasis would be on testing the physiology of the viewers. But after several rounds of negotiations the Office of the Surgeon General also declined.
During this time Dale Graff and Jack Vorona had been lobbying for the DIA to absorb the psychoenergetics program in its entirety. “RV has potential for U.S. intelligence application,” they wrote, and the “implications are revolutionary.” Finally, on August 24, 1984, Secretary of the Army John Marsh authorized negotiations for transfer to the DIA. But this was the Pentagon, and so the bureaucratic entanglements continued for another seventeen months.
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On January 31, 1986, the Special Access Program was finally given a new code name, Sun Streak. Jack Vorona, chief scientist for the Directorate of Science and Technology, was still officially in charge. The chairman of the oversight panel was Donald C. Latham, assistant secretary of defense. The unit’s offices remained at Fort Meade. Sun Streak’s new science panel included three of the nation’s top physicists, Donald M. Kerr, director of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico; Fred Zachariasen, professor of physics at Caltech (also a ranking member of the Defense Department’s elite JASON Committee); and W. Ross Adey, chief of staff of the Research Division at Veterans Hospital in Loma Linda, California. Three heavy hitters. And the official definition of Psychoenergetic Phenomena had been further refined: “Remote Viewing (RV): The ability to describe remote areas or concealed data via unknown mental processes,” and “Remote Action (RA): The ability to influence physical or biological systems via undefined physical means.”
During the first year and a half after the RAPT debacle, while the battle raged on, Joe McMoneagle, Remote Viewer 001, was the only person actually assigned to remote-viewing operations at Fort Meade, which were still functioning with funds left over from the Stubblebine era. Records indicate that he conducted thirty-three sessions on seven different operations for clients that included CIA, NSA, and SED, the Army’s Systems Exploitation Division. When McMoneagle retired in the fall of 1984, the assistant deputy chief of staff for human intelligence at INSCOM awarded him the Legion of Merit for exceptionally meritorious service. After a short respite, he went to work at SRI, where he participated in research studies. Multiple sources indicate that he was almost certainly working for the CIA. If these files exist they are still classified, unlike a majority of the Army INSCOM and DIA files, which have since been declassified. The same mystery attends the files on Pat Price, also still classified as of 2017.
By the time DIA took over the program, five viewers from INSCOM remained. They were Bill Ray, Paul H. Smith, Ed Dames, Tom McNear, and Charlene Cavanaugh Shufelt. They were all sent to New York City to be trained in the six stages of Coordinate Remote Viewing with Ingo Swann. When General Stubblebine was forced to resign, the Advanced Human Technology Office had been shut down and the High Performance Task Force was disbanded, but one concept had not disappeared with Stubblebine, and that was the idea that Army soldiers and civilians could be trained to be psychic.
The DIA had its reasons for insisting that this was the case. If remote viewing was a skill that could be taught, then ostensibly it could be unlinked from its magical, mystical, supernatural, and occult past. The expectation at DIA, says Dale Graff, was that “charges of pseudoscience” by defense officials, members of Congress, and eventually the public “would be put to rest.” But this logic was flawed, and it flew in the face of thousands of years of human history. The fact remains that until science can account for anomalous mental phenomena, prevailing opinion will keep it elemental to the belief system from which it sprung: the unknown.
A declassified six-page summary entitled “Coordinate Remote Viewing Theory and Dynamics” makes clear the uphill battle DIA was now facing. “Coordinate Remote Viewing (CRV) is a psychic technique which permits a ‘viewer’ to transcend time and space to ‘view’ or ‘perceive’ people, places or objects—without the ‘viewer’ being physically present,” reads the summary. But even a layman knows that transcending time and space defies the known laws of physics. How could remote-viewers-in-training believe that they could view or perceive information from a distant place unless they accepted that divination was in play? And divination by its very definition involves seeking knowledge of the unknown through supernatural means. So to declare that psychic functioning was science and not the supernatural (or at least scientifically unexplainable) was to ask remote viewers to live in a catch-22—a paradoxical situation from which they could not escape because the rules contradicted the rules.
The DIA issued memos of doublespeak. “DIA [has] refined the process of teaching CRV to the degree that individuals possessing no known ‘natural psychic abilities’ can be taught to remote view with extreme accuracy in a relatively short period of time,” one declassified memo read. Another predicted that training would take approximately six months to complete, depending on the individual. CRV was divided into six stages, with each stage promising, “to increase the scope and ability of the viewer.” And as per the training protocols, “the stages must be completed in sequence [because] movement to the next stage of training is entirely dependent upon successful completion of the preceding stage.” None of this proved to be accurate.
Some of the most intractable problems came from the remote-viewers-in-training. Invariably, students have questions, and questions require answers. Ultimately, the DIA would have to explain where the remotely viewed information came from. For this, DIA provided a cryptic, quasi-theoretical explanation for ESP, as hypothesized by Ingo Swann. “Somewhere, perhaps in the unconscious mind, there exists what we will label ‘The Matrix,’” Swann’s declassified summary states. “The Matrix knows no boundaries and has no limitations,” he wrote. “It contains all information about all things. It could be thought of as omnipotent or you could think of it as a data base, etc.” Here was Ingo Swann, a committed believer in the magical, the mystical, and the supernatural, attempting to give generally skeptical military personnel a metaphor to work with. The Matrix concept was to be interpreted as a figure of speech akin to Carl Jung’s archetypes of the unconscious. But some took it literally.
Paul Smith recalls what happened when viewer-in-training Ed Dames first heard about the Matrix and how excited he became. The viewers-in-training were sitting around the kitchen table at Ingo Swann’s home in New York City when Dames exclaimed, “Why, that sounds just like the Akashic Records,” a concept introduced by the famous spirit medium and occultist Madame Helena Blavatsky. Smith said he wasn’t familiar with the concept, so Dames took the opportunity to lecture to the group. The Akashic Records were located on the astral plane, where all of human history and its memories are stored, Dames said. And according to the Edgar Cayce Association for Research and Enlightenment, “the Akashic Records contain every deed, word, feeling, thought, and intent that has ever occurred at any time in the history of the world.”
The seeds of calamity were being sown. The original Army screening protocols were meant to identify individuals whose minds were not closed to the possibility of psychic functioning. Dames exemplified an individual who appears to have been at the other end of the spectrum. His belief system was such that he was already fully invested in UFOs, extraterrestrial visitations, and the so-called Akashic Records. To suggest to someone with this set of preexisting beliefs that he could become a psychic spy for a top-secret military program was in hindsight a recipe for fiasco.
After finishing their training with Ingo Swann, the viewers returned to Fort Meade, where Joe McMoneagle was preparing to retire. McMoneagle did not have a good feeling about the direction the program was headed, he says. Earlier in the year, when he’d been asked to help locate nonpsychic people who could be trained to become psychic, he declined. “There is no indication that training enhances remote viewing,” McMoneagle says. Perhaps “bright and intelligent officers” who were already prone to psychic functioning “could become proficient,” he wrote, but in the majority of cases, people with extrasensory perception are born, not made. Tom McNear was an exception. McNear, an intelligence officer, was one of the two original Swann trainees, starting in 1981. He immediately showed considerable talent, but his training moved slowly.
It took him two-and-a-half years to get to Stage Six, the level where viewers learn how to remote view a target, then create a three-dimensional model of that target out of clay. McNear’s clay models were so accurate in both concept and scale that photographs of them, alongside pictures of the target, were used in National Security Council briefings.
By the end of his training, which included all seven stages,
Tom McNear had become so good at identifying training targets that Ingo Swann confided in colleagues, “he is better than me.” But McNear didn’t want to be part of the viewer unit at Fort Meade anymore. “The program was a series of ups and downs. We had funding; we didn’t have funding. Two members of the unit died of cancer and Rob Cowart, my fellow trainee and friend, was medically retired due to cancer. My wife said I had become very withdrawn and introverted… I felt the time was right to move on. I requested a transfer,” McNear explained in 2015. The Army granted his request, and he went on to build a successful career in Army intelligence, where he still works as of 2017. In 1985 the Defense Department published a forty-one-page how-to manual, “Coordinate Remote Viewing, Stages I–VI and Beyond.” Declassified in 2000, the manual’s project officer, or author, remains redacted. The author was Tom McNear.
Why did Swann insist that military personnel with no predisposition to psychic functioning could be trained to acquire extrasensory perception? The answer remains a mystery, though Joe McMoneagle believes he knows why. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, says McMoneagle, “Ingo was forced into an impossible situation. The higher-ups wanted training methods, and they wanted it right then and there.” This flawed idea “eventually set the stage for tearing the unit apart.” The irony was that as soon as DIA took over the psychoenergetics program, it parted ways with Ingo Swann.