Jim Schnabel - Remote Viewers: The Secret History of Americas Psychic Spies

• A part-time Christmas-tree salesman remote-viewed his way into the heart of a super-secret National Security Agency installation buried in the West Virginia mountains.
• The same psychic described previously unknown details of a high-tech Soviet military research facilitydetails that were later confirmed by spy satellite.
• A bizarre wave of paranormal visions haunted a group of scientists doing psychic research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
• A woman in Ohio psychically found the location of a crashed Soviet bomber in the jungles of Zaire, helping a CIA team to recover the wreckage before the Soviets got thereand earning praise from President Jimmy Carter.
• An Army remote viewer was the first in the U.S. intelligence community to describe the Soviets new Typhoon-class submarinewhile it was still indoors, under construction.

[I]t seems to me that it would be a hell of a cheap radar system. And if the Russians have it and we dont, we are in serious trouble.

Representative Charlie Rose

(D-NC), House Select Committee
on Intelligence,
in a discussion
about remote viewing, 1979

T HE DREAM FADED, AND M EL R ILEY AWOKE . S IX OCLOCK; THE SUN was not yet up. Brigitte, his wife, still lay asleep beside him. But the birds outside were awake and chattering, and they were Rileys usual alarm clock. He rose, showered, shaved, and dressed.

Riley was a morning person. He liked the dark calm of the predawn hours, the unsleeping stillness, half in this world, half in that. Downstairs in the kitchen he sat quietly, drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette, listening to his thoughts, watching through the window as the light changed on the trees and in the sky.

Riley was five feet eight, slim and fit, with wavy blond hair and an Irish, vaguely leprechaunish face. He had a tattoo on each arman eagle, a rabbitand a large winged dragon across his chest. But it was Rileys eyes that people tended to notice. Sometimes with surprise, or merely concentration, they would open widely, intensely, as if Riley were about to hypnotize someoneor had already hypnotized himself and were staring inward at his own soul.

Thirty-three years old, Mel Riley was a staff sergeant in the U.S. Army. He and his wife and their two young daughters lived in a town house at Fort Meade, Maryland, about twenty-five miles northeast of Washington, D.C. Meade, as its inhabitants abbreviated it, was the sprawling, town-like base for, among other things, the National Security Agency, the U.S. First Army, and a part of the Armys Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM). Until recently, Riley had been a photo-interpreter at INSCOM, studying reconnaissance imagery from satellites and spy planes. But just now the Army was using him for something else.

Dressed in civilian clothes, which his new job required for security reasons, Riley drove the mile or so to work, past a golf course, parade grounds, a convenience store, and dozens of low buildings. Some of the buildings were brick, some were wood, some were named for dead generals, and some were simply numbered; many had obvious purposes, while others would always remain obscure. Rileys unit worked in two single-story wooden structures numbered 2560 and 2561. They were secluded beneath trees on a large open lot on the north side of Llewellyn Street, a quarter mile from Kimbrough Army Community Hospital. There beneath the trees, the buildings seemed strangely lonely and rural, almost forgotten. On the far end of 2560, the smaller building to the east, the land sloped down to an open field with a creek that ran south, under the road, into a park and a lake. To the north of the buildings was a field with sparse trees, photogenically bleak in winter. The two buildings were remnants of the great military construction boom of the Second World War, and had once housed a bakery school and mess hall. Here in September 1979, they looked like two cottages huddling together in the woods.

Riley parked in the driveway between the buildings. He walked up a set of wooden steps to a porchlike entrance near the right corner of 2561. He opened a heavy forest green metal door and went inside.

To a visitor, 2561 might have looked like a normal if somewhat makeshift military office. There was an entrance room, or foyer, with a secretarys desk, a refrigerator, a table with a coffeepot and mugs, and doors to two outer offices for the units commander and operations officer. Behind the secretarys desk, a narrow corridor led west, past half a dozen small cubicles with desks. The corridor terminated in a conference room.