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.