If you like a mix of fic­tion and the para­nor­mal in your films, maybe you should con­sider watch­ing Indi­ana Jones…Read more from Cres­cent Blues.

Remote View­ing Novel Links Star Wars Actor, Indi­ana Jones Writer

Actors, like lit­tle kids, often play the game “Who do I want to be?” And like chil­dren, they don’t always get their wish.

Billy Dee Williams, Star Wars’ Lando Cal­riss­ian and a major star power in Lady Sings the Blues and Brian’s Song, wanted to be a psy­chic in an action/adventure movie or tele­vi­sion series. But despite the pop­u­lar­ity of shows like The X-Files, roles for multi-faceted, male psy­chics weren’t exactly leap­ing off Hol­ly­wood storyboards.

Williams saw no rea­son why that should stop him from play­ing his dream role. An award-winning artist who moves eas­ily from painted pic­tures to the mov­ing kind, he wel­comed the prospect to move into yet another medium. Given enough time, he felt sure he could write the role he wanted. “But I wanted to do it quickly. So I thought it would be a good idea to col­lab­o­rate with some­one,” Williams said.

A lit­er­ary agent intro­duced him to Rob Mac­Gre­gor, 1996 Edgar Award-winning author of Prophecy Rock and numer­ous Indi­ana Jones nov­els. It proved to be, in Williams’ words, “One of those meet­ings that was meant to happen.”

Mac­Gre­gor shares Williams’ inter­est in the para­nor­mal. In addi­tion, MacGregor’s long-term inter­est in gov­ern­ment “remote view­ing” research pro­vided direc­tion for the char­ac­ters and sit­u­a­tions Williams developed.

Over a 20-year period from the 1970s to the mid-1990s, the Defense Depart­ment and C.I.A. con­ducted a num­ber of exper­i­ments in var­i­ous psy­chic phe­nom­ena. “The pro­gram really devel­oped out of Russ­ian inter­est in this area,” Mac­Gre­gor said. “The Rus­sians put mil­lions of dol­lars into psy­chic research. What hap­pened in the United States came as a reac­tion to what the Rus­sians were doing.”

Accord­ing to Defense Intel­li­gence Agency doc­u­ments released under the Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act, the Sovi­ets explored every­thing from telepa­thy (mind read­ing) to psy­choki­ne­sis (mov­ing or alter­ing objects through mind power). U. S. research, how­ever, con­cen­trated on find­ing a psy­chic phe­nom­e­non that could pro­duce con­sis­tent, repro­ducible results.

Stan­ford Research Insti­tute (SRI) sci­en­tists found that most peo­ple could catch men­tal glimpses of images viewed by a sec­ond per­son, even if that sec­ond per­son was miles away. The sci­en­tists called this phe­nom­e­non “remote viewing.”

“The sci­en­tists would send some­one to a par­tic­u­lar loca­tion at a par­tic­u­lar time. Back at the lab­o­ra­tory, the psy­chic would try to get an impres­sion of where the other per­son was at that par­tic­u­lar time, write about it and sketch it,” Mac­Gre­gor explained to reporters at Drag­onCon, the Atlanta-based sci­ence fic­tion and fan­tasy con­ven­tion, which attracts over 18,000 fans annu­ally. “After a while, the sci­en­tists would just take the coor­di­nates of a par­tic­u­lar place, which could be any­where in the world, and let the psy­chic work with the coordinates.”

And work they did. By the end of the exper­i­ments, researchers shifted from using geo­graphic coor­di­nates to using ran­dom, six-digit num­bers assigned to dif­fer­ent loca­tions. To their amaze­ment, researchers found that once a psy­chic made a con­nec­tion between even a ran­dom num­ber and a given loca­tion, other psy­chics made the same con­nec­tion. It didn’t mat­ter if the psy­chics knew about the results of pre­vi­ous exper­i­ments or not. “Once those num­bers were assigned — how­ever it worked, I don’t know — they stuck,” Mac­Gre­gor said.

Unlike ear­lier sci­en­tific for­ays into the para­nor­mal, the Defense and C.I.A. exper­i­ments always pro­duced results, some of them quite spec­tac­u­lar. “One of the expe­ri­ences in the C.I.A. pro­gram involved a remote viewer who saw a huge crane at an atomic plant at a secret Soviet site. He described it, drew it, and then this crane was ver­i­fied by satel­lite pic­tures,” Mac­Gre­gor said.

But, skep­tics in Con­gress and the C.I.A. asked, why do you need psy­chics if you can see the same Soviet site via satel­lite? “The dif­fer­ence is that satel­lites can pic­ture a build­ing,” Mac­Gre­gor said. “The psy­chics can see what’s inside that build­ing, which the satel­lite cam­eras cannot.”

Still not good enough for the Depart­ment of Defense and C.I.A, which ended their remote view­ing pro­grams in the 1980s and 1990s, respec­tively. The C.I.A., in par­tic­u­lar, wanted results that could com­pete with tra­di­tional tech­nolo­gies — con­sis­tent, top-quality results the exper­i­men­tal tech­niques of remote view­ing could not provide.

But a writer or pro­ducer need not worry about sta­tis­ti­cal norms and exper­i­men­tal con­sis­ten­cies. Story con­cepts need only plau­si­bil­ity and poten­tial. Remote view­ing pro­vided both.