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.”