Mishlove: Welcome back once again to Virtual U. I’m your host, Jeffrey Mishlove, and my guest Stephan Schwartz is a pioneer in the practical applications of psychic abilities. We’ve talked now quite a bit about the historical work but you yourself began to make some very important contributions to this field and I think it might be useful if we start with your own introduction to the field of remote viewing.

Schwartz: Well, maybe we ought to say a little bit about what remote viewing is. I think that’s a good place to start since the words may not be familiar. Remote viewing is a term that was coined in the early seventies and it’s basically a way of describing the ability that people have to describe persons, places, or events from which they are separated by time or space or blindness protocols; that is, something is done to keep them from being able to know the answer through the normal senses. Labs all over the world have now done research on this.

I got interested in it back in the late 60's/early 70's. I was working in the government at that point and everyone knew I had an interest in these subjects. It happened that there came across my desk a then-classified paper. It had been written by a man named Vasiliev, Academician Leonid Vasiliev. He was a Russian researcher of considerable renown – Academician in Russia is a former title, awarded only to the highest echelon on scientists. At any one time there were only a small number of Academicians in those days. He had argued that psychic functioning probably was a radio phenomenon. That is, it is part of the electromagnetic spectrum and the idea was that we were kind of radio receivers or radio senders. So to test that idea he had people put in mine shafts and in caverns, sometimes in structures that shield out all electromagnetic radiation, called Faraday cages.

Little by little he eliminated everything but what he called ELF, extreme low frequency electromagnetic radiation, radio waves. He said that the only way that you could really test that part of the spectrum would be to put somebody in a submarine, but unfortunately he didn’t have access to a submarine. So I read this and at that point I was the Special Assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations, and I went around to see Admiral Hyman Rickover, who was the father of the nuclear navy. I asked him if he would let me put a psychic and myself aboard one of the Polaris or Poseidon submarines. We knew each other slightly, and he thought about it for awhile and then said to me, "I don’t want to do this. The media will get hold of it and they’ll just have a heyday with this and I don’t want to do it. It’s a fascinating experiment but I don’t think so."

Several years go by and I was just finishing up The Secret Vaults of Time, and had gone to Los Angeles to do some other research, when two friends of mine who had taken over the Institute of Marine and Coastal Studies at the University of Southern California called me up and said, "You know that experiment you wanted to do? Well, we’ve got a submarine and we’ll let you do it. We’ll underwrite the cost of a submarine for three days." It was the first experiment I’d ever done.

We had two major things we were trying to accomplish. The first was to see whether we could do what Vasiliev had proposed: Put somebody in a submarine and let the submarine go down at least 200 feet so that they were completely surrounded by sea water and see whether they could still perform psychically just as they did on the surface. If they could, then the part of the electromagnetic spectrum, the ELF portion that Vasiliev had thought might be the explain psi would be eliminated as an explantion -- at least the electronic portion since it would be shielded out. If they could perform psi could not be a radio phenomena. The role of magnetism, of course, would still be and open question. The other thing we wanted to see was whether remote viewers could locate a previously unknown wreck on the sea floor.

Over the course of those three days we addressed the first question – about ELF -- by putting two psychics down, Hella Hammid and Ingo Swann, midway between the surface and the seafloor, at 270 feet, and conducted two experiments. Ingo is a painter who had been working up at SRI at the government laboratory and actually coined the term Remote Viewing, and Hella was an internationally known fine arts photographer.

We put them down one at a time and asked them to describe the location of two people who were up in Palo Alto and who had been told to go to a place that was selected from a pool of possible places by a computer. They were each able to do it with uncanny accuracy. In Hella’s case she said, "You know, they are climbing up in a big tree and it’s on the edge of a cliff and the photograph that was taken by the target people at the time that the experiment took place is of them up in a big tree at the edge of a cliff.

In Ingo’s case he said, "Well, they’re in like a shopping center and it’s got a red tile floor and a big wheel like an old fashioned water mill wheel, and they’re looking in store windows." And the picture that was taken at that time was exactly that. They were in the Red Mill Shopping Center and in the middle of the shopping center there was a big old wheel like you’d see at a corn grinding mill or someplace.

For me that pretty much settled the question as to psi being a radio effect. Whatever psi is, we are not little radios. In psi experiments you and I are not like little transistor radios sending and receiving signals.

The other thing we did locate a wreck on the sea floor. Along with the Deputy Director of the Institute for Marine and Coastal Studies, I sent out sea charts of the Santa Catalina Island waters to eleven remote viewers, asking them to locate a previously unknown wreck, and to describe what would be found at the site, including asking them to draw simple pictures of these objects. When the charts came back, they were turned over to Assistant Director and retired naval officer, Commander Brad Veek, and he made a master map. There was considerable correspondence at one spot, and this was selected for the dive.

Before we went down, we had a surface craft drop a radio homing device so that we could only go to the place that had been selected by the remote viewers previous to diving. We got into the submarine, including Ingo Swann, and Anne Keil(sp) a geophysicist and electronic remote sensing expert from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who was our objective observer, and who controlled all the paper work, and we homed in on the signal.

We had been told not only that we would find the wreck but we were given the descriptions of a large number of things, including a strange block of stone, which Hella had correctly described. Other Remote Viewers, along with Hella, had described why the ship sank, which turned out to be correct, how it had sunk, what kind of ship it was, all sorts of details all of which were evaluated by the Director of the Marine Sites Board of Department of Interior. The wreck was, indeed, unknown, and the descriptive details were validated as being correct.

Mishlove: Stephan, this is fascinating. This was about 1972?

Schwartz: 1977.

Mishlove: 1977. We’ll be back after these messages.

[break]

Mishlove: Welcome back to Virtual U. I’m talking with Stephan Schwartz, author of The Alexandria Project and The Secret Vaults of Time. We’re looking now at modern research and in particular your own research into the field of psychic archeology. This submarine experiment as I recall was written up in Omni Magazine, became the feature of a television episode in the In Search Of series, and attracted quite a lot of attention.

Schwartz: It did, yes. We were very lucky in that I actually filmed it because I wanted to make an unimpeachable record of the whole experiment. If it worked, I knew it would be considered very controversial and I wanted to be able to have a film record of it so there could be no argument about who said what and all the rest of it. The Alexandria one led me to go on and make films of other experiments we have done in archeology. But the Deep Quest experiment I think was significant not only because it was the first experiment we had done testing this idea of is psi a radio phenomena but, also, because we approached the whole idea of using the psychic from a somewhat different angle.

I have always taken a kind of engineering approach to this research and instead of using a single psychic, I’ve always worked with teams of people, interviewing them individually and then putting all of their collective observations together and looking particularly for where common patterns emerge. The Deep Quest experiment was really a test of that method. It worked actually better than I could possibly have hoped and I think it caused considerable consternation at USC because although the people who sponsored it were friends and wanted to be helpful, I think they also were expecting the whole thing to fall apart, and to turn into sort of a long dinner anecdote in the end.

Mishlove: So the methodology of using multiple psychics is now known as the multiple vote technique or the intuitive consensus technique.

Schwartz: Yes, I mean there are various techniques. We called it the Mobius methodology but there are a variety of ways it is employed. The Delphi voting technique which is used by a number of futurists is essentially another variant of that same theme. Basically, if you think about it, there are three things that you can do in an experiment: You can improve the signal. We don’t know what the signal is so there is not a lot we can do with that. We don’t know exactly what it is that people are picking up. But it’s not all bleak; we do know a few things that can improve the signal. Thanks to the work of Michael Persinger, and a few others, we know now that the geomagnetic field strength has an effect on it. Thanks to James Spottiswoode, we know that there are certain times of day based on sidereal time when you are more likely to get accurate data. If you take those factors into consideration you up your odds of success.

Second, you can improve the receiver. That is, you can make the person who is picking up the data a better receiver. We know a little bit about that, too. We know that people who are relaxed and who have an ability to focus do a little better. We know a little bit about personality stuff, not much. We know that there is an observer effect; if the researcher doesn’t believe in the experiment, has a negative expectation, a negative outcome is more likely. We also know the body language, tone of voice, are factors in conveying the researcher’s attitudes and expectations – even if the researcher isn’t consciously aware they have those attitudes or expectations. Getting the right ambiance for the experience is very important, but not too difficult to achieve once you think about it.

Third, you can have multiple receivers pick up the weak datalink, think of it as trying to pick up a radio signal in which you have multiple radio receivers, each of which is picking up some signal even if it is buried in noise. By averaging it out you can filter out some of the noise. My view of it has always been that we have a field of science that has a bad signal-to-noise ratio and what you want to do is eliminate the noise, which in this case is fantasy, imagination, or general information already known. There are two keys to this: shield the viewer from general information, and be careful how you ask the questions.

For instance, when you look at the field of psychic criminology, which is related to psychic archeology, in the sense that both are searching for something, your can see how things can be done badly. I’m frequently appalled because investigators will hand the remote viewer a photograph and say, "Can you tell me how this person was killed or murdered?" Right away that invokes every television detective story they’ve ever seen. So you’re not so much getting the psychic signal as you are getting their image bank on stored up perceptions from television programs, movies, books, and whatever. The proper question should be: "Can you describe the present circumstances and conditions surrounding this person?". There is no cuing answer that’s built into that question.

What I’ve tried to do is design a technique that would allow multiple people to try to pick up the same signal, and to do it in a way that did not cue them to produce any particular answer that I might be biased towards and, when that was done, to then figure out a way to analyze what they were actually telling me by doing linguistic analysis, looking for common word patterns, conceptual analysis, common geometric forms and the like. For instance, did a number of people mention a statue at the site? If they mentioned a statue, did they describe the statue as being of a particular material, or about a particular theme, or subject? By allowing the information itself to produce the pattern – as opposed to imposing a pattern -- I was able to develop a set of hypotheses which would guide the field work so that you would be able to go out and say, here is the site we want to go to, and here is what we think is going to be found there. Then have independent experts evaluate whether that information was correct or partially correct or incorrect or couldn’t be evaluated. In that way we were able to get a handle on the information in a way that made it useful for practical work. There is a tendency to think of a transaction with a psychic as being just another kind of conversation between two people, and we all know how to have a conversation, right. It’s not that simple. What you’re really dealing with as a researcher is you’re having a transaction with a remote sensing instrument.

Mishlove: And what you found is that by using several of these remote sensing instruments or psychically talented individuals, you were in effect able to amplify the signal.

Schwartz: That’s right, exactly.

Mishlove: We’ll be back with Stephan Schwartz, founder of the Mobius Group, after these messages from wisdom radio.

Mishlove: If you’ve been enjoying the conversation so far with Stephan Schwartz, author of The Secret Vaults of Time, let me encourage you to log on to my website, www.mishlove.com. It’s spelled just the way it sounds, m-i-s-h-l-o-v-e. On that website you will be able to link to the websites of all of our other guests, past, present and future. We post photographs of our guests on the website when we can and even publish transcripts of these interviews so if you miss one you can read about it later on. The website in effect serves as the multimedia accompaniment of this radio program so I encourage you to take advantage of it. I’ll be back with Stephan Schwartz at six and one-half minutes after the top of the hour. But Stephan, we have a little over a minute to go now and I wonder if you’d like to leave our listeners with a parting thought for our first hour of discussion.

Schwartz: Well, my parting thought is that although we’re talking about archeology and things that may seem distant from most people’s lives, what we’re really talking about is ordinary people doing extraordinary things. And you who are listening are just as capable of doing it as any of the people with whom I’ve worked.

Mishlove: We’ll talk more when we come back in the second hour about what it’s like to practice remote viewing. There are many expensive courses out there these days. You can pay thousands of dollars for remote viewing instruction but one of the things I’ve found and I think you’ll agree, Stephan, is that it really just takes practice and diligence and expensive training courses are not the key at all.

Schwartz: Yes, I agree. You can learn how to remote view in about five minutes.

Mishlove: And the results that you have seen are quite extraordinary and have enormous practical benefit. We’ll certainly focus more when we come back on those particular practical outcomes.

Schwartz: Okay.

Mishlove: It will be a pleasure. Join us at six and one-half minutes after the top of the hour when I’ll be back with my guest, Stephan Schwartz, author of The Secret Vaults of Time and The Alexandria Project, founder of the Mobius Group. I’m Jeffrey Mishlove, host of Virtual U.

[break]