I've just finished reading "The Stargate Conundrum", and the PC gamer in me had a small revelation at this:
The strange link between physics and ESP came to the forefront in the character of Jack Sarfatti, whom we already introduced. Sarfatti was, in 1952, part of an after-school group of gifted children, being tutored by Walter Breen of the Sandia Corporation, an organisation famous for atomic weapons research and development.
So that's where the name of the evil Administrator, Wallace Breen, came from in Valve's Half-Life 2 (2004). The writer, Mark Laidlaw, must have been reading quite widely in the weird scene. Well, that was the 1990s of course, this stuff was everywhere in pop culture.
"Conundrum" is a reasonable piece of writing, though there are plenty of errors, and this is one of the ones that annoys me the most:
This observation of precognition or paranormal foreknowledge has puzzled thinkers since the time of the Oracle at Delphi.” 89 I would rephrase it as “since the beginning of Mankind”. Targ added that mystics had known this “fact” since the earliest Hindu Vedas of 2000 BC, the known but untested
knowledge that our consciousness is not bound by time and space. It is a reality that with the advent of Christianity and its reductionist doctrine on life and death, possibly 50,000 years of acquired thinking onto how to access the “Matrix” were swept aside and ridiculed.
I don't think it was Christianity, as such, that introduced a reductionist doctrine separating the physical and immaterial world. In fact the history of Christianity, as with Judaism and Islam, is filled with visionary and prophetic experiences - what else is "The Kingdom of Heaven" that Jesus himself taught? But the loss of its soul - as with all religious movements - came with Christianity becoming the ideology of a giant Empire, and adapting itself to serve the needs of Caesars. Inconvenient teachings for the politics of the day were forgotten or reinterpreted.
And I think the same thing happened (and is still happening) with the 20th century attempts to "weaponise" ESP. It's a hard thing to do because it requires denying, at a fundamental level, how ESP *works*, which is by everything being connected. Militaries (whenever they notice it) keep trying to "fix" ESP so that it can be treated like any other standardised technology: compartmentalised, safe for secret-keeping, with one blunt end that you hold and one sharp end that you point toward the enemy. But this really can't be done. The sword of Wisdom has no hilt and it cuts the hand that wields it.
Coppens seems to have written an update to "Stargate Conundrum", but I don't know the date:
https://www.urigeller.com/stargate/
“The Stargate Conundrum” was meant to be a history about the people involved with and history of remote viewing, largely originating from research done in 1998 and 1999. For several years, I kept the material to one side, leaving open the possibility that it might develop into a book. In 2005, I decided against that idea, as I preferred to keep the material concise if not condensed and decided to publish it as such on the webpage.
The material began to be uploaded on the webpage just after Christmas 2005. Waking up on the first dawn of 2006, I found my inbox contained just two messages, both from Uri Geller. This was followed by a telephone conversation around 15h00 that same day, in which he congratulated me for a job well-done (at this time, only part one of three was available on the website), stating that I, amongst the various accounts written and published, had probably come closest to the truth. He did stipulate how at the end of part 1, I wrote about how “even” Uri had not been present at Puharich’s funeral. It was written to underline that a man like Puharich, who had known so many people, at the end of his life had died in almost total isolation. It could indeed be read the other way and Uri underlined that he seldom goes to a funeral, as for him, death is not “real”.
In the course of our conversation, he also provided some additional input, insights and ideas that I churned over in my mind and which allowed me to go one step further – I would qualify it as the “ultimate truth” about what some people tried to do with Uri and the project in the early 1970s. I spoke about this to a few researchers, one of whom considered it to be “stunning” and another who wanted me to write it down as a film script – as it was the only way it could ever be told. Another researcher stated that he had complementary evidence that my conclusion was actually something that was indeed happening at that moment in time.
That Uri really liked the article seems evident, as he has it listed on his webpage’s front page and is available in a copied format there too.
So this must be that copy. The original is here, but still with no date on it (must be between 2005 and 2012):
https://web.archive.org/web/20170616172 ... react.html , linked from his "Memes" section:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180128190 ... ojects.php
The other thing I notice about Philip Coppens' articles on Stargate is that - while homing in on the military sponsors and the connections with alchemy/shamanism - he completely misses all traces of spiritual/religious/esoteric organizations. For example, the Scientology backgrounds of the high-performing 1970s Remote Viewers, or the Rosicrucian, Gnostic, and Hermetic connections to many other people on the ESP circuit. (Well, he notices Jung's Gnostic roots at least.) There's just a big old world of private-sector, secrecy-heavy, command-and-control organizations that seem to overlap with the military and specifically *this* sector of the military. Being secret, of course it's hard to document these links, but it's a bit of an oversight to not notice them.
Scientology particularly feels very Navy flavoured, since Hubbard always claimed to be Naval Intelligence, and many otherwise strange things about that organization (and Hubbard himself) seem to make a little more sense if we imagine that it was acting as a private-sector "cutout" for MKULTRA research on both ESP and interrogation resistance as early as the 1950s. The secrecy, the Navy cargo cult, the paranoia, the constant biometric auditing drills, the pride in having "atomic level secrets", the distrust of "psychiatry", the "exteriorization" protocols - all of these have ready explanations in a military context. To what extent the links were real between Hubbard's toy Navy and the actual Navy's actual research in ESP... that's the question. At some point I'm sure the strings were cut, but it seems like there was a comfortable (if tense) working relationship right up through the SRI experiments, until things went sour in the later 1970s. (Operation Snow White and beyond). And Hubbard wasn't alone. The US science-fiction magazine subculture of the 1930s-1950s had strong military links and a deep belief in ESP, through editors like John W Campbell.
Nate