It seems that the UK mil­i­tary estab­lish­ment has decided to exper­i­ment with Remote View­ing to locate high-value tar­gets. Read on…

How UK attempted bizarre X-Files tests on soldiers

by RUSSELL JACKSON, on News.TheScotsman.com

The Min­istry of Defence funded a secret study to ascer­tain whether­peo­ple with psy­chic pow­ers could help pro­tect the nation, it emerged­last night.

The MoD arranged the tests to dis­cover whether vol­un­teers were ableto use psy­chic pow­ers to “remotely view” hid­den objects. Thes­tudy­in­volved blind­fold­ing test sub­jects and ask­ing them to “see” the­con­tents of sealed brown envelopes con­tain­ing pic­tures of ran­do­mob­jects and pub­lic figures.

Defence­ex­perts tried to recruit 12 “known” psy­chics who adver­tised theirabil­i­ties on the inter­net, but when they all refused they were forcedto use “novice” volunteers.

The MoD last night defended the cost of the exper­i­ment, car­ried outin 2002, in which com­mer­cial researchers were con­tracted at a cost of£18,000 to test them to see if psy­chic abil­ity existed in case it couldbe used in defence, accord­ing to pre­vi­ously clas­si­fied report release­dun­der the Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act.

Sur­pris­ingly 28 per cent of those tested man­aged a close guess atthe con­tents of the envelopes, which included pic­tures of a knife,Mother Teresa and an “Asian individual”.

But most sub­jects, who were holed up in a secret loca­tion for thes­tudy, were hope­lessly off the mark in their guesses. One even fel­lasleep while he tried to focus on the envelope’s content.

A for­mer Min­istry of Defence employee who received a copy of there­port has claimed that the tim­ing of the study sug­gests secu­ri­ty­ser­vices wanted to “remotely view” hid­den weapons caches in Iraq andfind Osama bin Laden.

Nick Pope, who ran the MoD UFO research pro­gramme and worked at them­i­nistry for 21 years, said: “It can only be spec­u­la­tion, but you don’temploy that kind of time and effort to find money down the back of thesofa.

“You go to this trou­ble for high-value assets. We must be talk­ing about bin Laden and weapons of mass destruction.”

The MoD last night refused to dis­cuss the pos­si­ble appli­ca­tions ofsuch a tech­nique, but said that the study had con­cluded there was“little value” in using “remote view­ing” in the defence of the nation.

A spokes­woman said: “The remote view­ing study was con­ducted toassess claims made in some aca­d­e­mic cir­cles and to val­i­date research­car­ried out by other nations on psy­chic ability.

“The study con­cluded that remote view­ing the­o­ries had lit­tle value to the MoD and was taken no further.”

Mr Pope said he had sus­pected that the MoD were con­sid­er­ing such astudy dur­ing his time there, but it was only when friend and author­Ti­mothy Good requested doc­u­ments on the sub­ject that he dis­cov­ered they­had actu­ally com­mis­sioned it.

The doc­u­ments refer to sim­i­lar study con­ducted by the CIA but, saidMr Pope, “there has never been a whis­per of a British programmebefore.”

“This is what I call a low prob­a­bil­ity high-impact study. They musthave thought that the chances were it wouldn’t work, but if it had thein­tel­li­gence appli­ca­tions would have been endless.”

“I don’t think this was a waste of pub­lic money. Many peo­ple will­say so, but I think it is mar­vel­lous that the Gov­ern­ment is pre­pared tothink out­side the box. And this is as out­side the box as it gets.“