Second Sight (17 page)

When all the initial remote viewings were complete, each of the respondents' maps was analyzed for areas of agreement. Independently and with no prompting from our interviewers—and avoiding even body-language cues—we had all individually chosen a number of identical sites. These six “consensus areas” provided us with the direction of where to begin the fieldwork.

That first interview I had with Stephan, for instance, I had identified, among other areas, Beak's Cay, an island, as a site where a ship would be located. As I later learned, six of the other psychics had also identified this site. Our descriptions were astonishingly similar: “It's like the top of this uninhabited mountain, a sand mountain, stands out and extends beyond the water,” I had said, giving Stephan as much detail as I could summon. “A set of low-lying inlets,” Andre had related “not proper islands though they are almost a mile long.” And Hella had told Stephan, “They're like low reefs that have rocks stuck up above their surfaces, uninhabited, with a little vegetation.”

Once these consensus sites were determined, we were ready to leave for Miami, to set sail. Incredibly enough, the expedition had come together. Not only was this the adventure of a lifetime, but the other psychics and I were having all expenses paid as well as a share of whatever treasure we found. My parents could hardly believe it. Their attitudes toward my involvement with Mobius were mixed. Whatever came of the voyage, my father still considered things like remote viewing to be “different.” Nonetheless, pleased by the success of my practice—I had more referrals than I could handle—and seeing that my beliefs weren't harming me, he kept an open mind. Above all, he had faith in my decisions. Even if my father didn't believe in the psychic, he did believe in me.

My mother was intrigued by Mobius, despite her reservations. She was openly supportive of the group, though still warning me not to get “too far out” with it. As always, she was concerned about what other doctors would think, about the risk of compromising my practice. But as I became more secure as a woman, doctor, and psychic, my mother's incessantly adamant opinions became less threatening. Over the years we had worked at being closer, talked through our difficulties. Both of us were strong women, and we had come to respect each others' needs. With my professional success, many of her fears were eased. My identity as a psychic, though still hard for her to accept, posed less of an obstacle. My mother wanted to be actively involved with my life, in which Mobius now played a large part. So cautiously, but with real interest, she followed my Mobius work, eager to know the details of each of our projects.

In Septembet 1987, having said good-bye to my parents and friends, I flew from Los Angeles to Miami to meet Stephan, Hella, Alan, and the rest of the crew at the
Seaview.
I had heard rave reviews about this 110-foot vessel: It slept twenty-two, was equipped with a state-of-the-art navigational system and full welding and diving shops.

Stephan picked me up at the airport and drove me straight to the shipyard where the
Seaview
was docked. My expectations had been completely off; this was no luxury liner. It was a bare-bones utility vessel originally designed to service oil rigs off the Gulf of Mexico. Now it had been converted for research purposes. I took one look and wanted to run, but I controlled myself and followed Stephan on board.

The top deck resembled a machinery salvage yard, strewn with tools and noisy equipment. Above the ship's twin propellers was a pair of huge metallic blowers that could dig holes in the sea floor in the event that we uncovered a wreck. The living quarters, just below, consisted of several rows of thin wooden bunk beds only a few feet apart. This meant that the crew, divers, and psychics all would be crammed right next to each other without so much as a single partition to separate the beds. There were only three showers for everyone, and limited hot water. We were instructed to flush the toilets only when they were completely full. If all this weren't enough, there was the incessant background drone of the ship's engine. I wondered how I'd ever get a moment's sleep.

There was a hurricane warning in Miami, and so with
Seaview
in dry dock I checked into the local Holiday Inn. I needed time to adjust to the idea of living on a ship. I have never been the type of person who enjoyed camping or rugged living conditions. I treasured my privacy and relished hot baths. But after a few days, when the weather improved, I warily moved onto
Seaview
with the others. We hung curtains around each bunk to ensure a small degree of privacy and set sail at 5
A.M.

Aimed for Bimini and the Great Bahama Bank, as I watched Miami Harbor become dwarfed in the distance a wave of exhilaration quelled my fears. Later that day, sitting up at the bow at dusk watching bolts of heat lightning streak across the sky, I reflected on how far I had come. Lying with my bare feet dangling over the rim of the boat, dressed in a pair of cotton shorts and a sleeveless white T-shirt, I felt free for the first time in years.

Seaview
was a miniature city, bursting with activity, driven by a special sense of collective mission. Those of us on board melded into what Stephan described as “a working unit of combined minds, bodies, and spirit united with Spirit.” We had a concrete goal, but the whole project was shaped by a spiritual, though not overtly religious, impulse. Each of us, hired by Stephan, had in common a belief in a divine intelligence and the interconnectedness of all things. The intent of
Seaview
was to form both a spiritual and a scientific community. Every day we began by meditating as a group, asking to be guided toward right action in accordance with a divine plan.

Our work started at eight in the morning and sometimes continued on long past dark. We were all in constant motion, planning our schedules, conducting remote viewings, and sharing our discoveries about science and the psychic working hand in hand. The excitement was contagious; one of us always had a new theory, hope, or dream. By the end of each day I was happily spent; despite the constant roar of the engine, which vibrated the sides of my bunk, I slept more soundly than I ever had in my life.

When we reached the first southern consensus zone, each of the psychics did a more exact remote viewing to narrow down the location of possible ships to an area small enough for the divers to search. We were taken out individually and asked to sense intuitively where the wreck was situated. Buoys would be dropped where we chose, and divers would then explore the terrain below. While some of us were doing this, the other respondents would be engaged in remote viewing at other locations.

Shortly past dawn one morning, the sea was a deep shade of turquoise, so transparent that schools of iridescent fish and turtles could be seen swimming beneath the surface. One of the divers and I boarded a small rubber boat equipped with a radar reflector. We sat in silence in the middle of the ocean, twenty miles from the southernmost coast of Bimini. With my eyes closed, listening to the solitary sound of small waves gently slapping against the bow, I focused on the work at hand. Within seconds, an image of a location came to me. It was so much easier to do the viewings while floating on these warm, amniotic waters; the images flowed more naturally than they ever had on land, taking on a certain rhythm, a seamlessness, that had been missing in the city. Just by listening to and watching the water I was being told things. As the pictures took form in my mind, I saw an underwater shelf adjacent to a warm current of bubbles, situated in an area marked, on the grid we were using, 41 degrees north by 47 degrees east, which happened to be nearby. I rarely picked up numbers, so the clarity of my perception surprised me.

Fifteen minutes later, we'd found the spot, threw out a Styrofoam marker buoy, and logged its location on a work chart. The diver then went underwater to check out the area, leaving me completely alone on the deck of out small boat.
Seaview
was now out of sight; in every direction I was surrounded by a great expanse of water. I sat with the warmth of the sun beating down on my shoulders, the sea glistening like a brilliant jewel. Then, seemingly from out of nowhere, a group of seven blue-gray dolphins appeared. They all surfaced at once and encircled my boat, flapping their fins in unison, singing in high-pitched chirping tones that reminded me of a haunting sound I once had heard long before in a dream. For a few precious moments I was certain I'd arrived in heaven, not wanting for a single thing.

Suddenly, the diver's head popped up out of the water and he yelled, “I found a ship!” I was jubilant, thrilled that my reading had been accurate. He climbed back on board, telling me that a forty-foot sailboat, which appeared to be about ten years old, was resting on an elevated sandy shelf. Although the sailboat was of no archaeological significance, it was a heartening sign that on the very first day of fieldwork, we were already on the right track. The only mistake I'd made was that my goal during the remote viewing had been too general. I had concentrated on finding a sunken ship but hadn't specified the type.

Throughout the voyage, our team of psychics would work for four hours, take a break, and then work another four hours, either studying and reading charts or going out with the divers. Always we were a collective. As Stephan described it, we had formed a macromind, an extraordinary energy circuit: the psychics as the intuitive part of the mind; the scientific researchers as the analytical mind; the crew as the physical mind; and Stephan functioning as coordinator. Together, we were invisibly but powerfully bound, united by our shared goal and intense physical proximity.

The psychics were all experienced at remote viewing, but each of us also had special abilities complementing the others. That is, the skills we had in our normal lives tended to carry over to and shape our psychic impressions. Hella, artist and photographer, had a gift for description, for seeing simple geometric forms, colors, shadows, and ornaments. Of one wreck site we later discovered, Hella described “cylindrical timbers extending upward into the light, comprising the mast of the ship. Below deck, enveloped in darkness are rectangular planks which make up the floor.” Jack, an engineer who was drawn to technical details, saw “metallic joints which connect portions of the ship's rigging at the tension points, forming a right angle, to allow for a full range of motion and maximum mechanical flexibility.” Michael, the writer-director I'd met at Brugh's conference, had a flair for visualizing spatial relationships and he saw this same wreck's “moth-eaten rectangular beams piled on top of one another like pick-up sticks, forming a pyramid.” Ben, a television director, was skilled at forming a general master shot, a description of the broader picture, as if looking through the lens of a camera at a complete scene: “I see a two-story ship. The sleeping quarters are below deck, there's a small cooking area above, with storage sections on the starboard side. The top deck is huge, maybe a hundred feet or more.” And I, as a trained listener, as a psychiatrist tuned to emotions, honed in on the remnants of a slaver, the intensity of the slaves' misery inexorably drawing me to pinpoint the site of the wreck. I could feel the torment of these captives, see them shackled, starved, ill, in nightmarish despair.

Toward the end of the week,
Seaview
headed due north to investigate the consensus zone extending 11.5 miles around Beak's Cay. On a rainy evening with threatening storm clouds looming above us, we threw out three orange buoys onto the ocean a few hundred yards from a small, uninhabited limestone island looking very much as out team of psychics had described it in Los Angeles. Stephan had been reluctant to investigate this location because it was a favorite spot for sports divers and one of the most heavily scavenged areas of the Bahama Bank for hundreds of years. In addition, the magnetometer readings hadn't been strong enough to indicate the underwater presence of a large ship. Nor were we sure the weather would cooperate. Logically, there was every reason to skip this location. But what made our expedition special was that it was not dictated solely by logic.

At dinner, Hella, Alan, and I urged Stephan to remain at this site. When he took us aside individually to get our independent impressions, each of us said we sensed that something of value might be found the next day. Despite the weather and lack of significant magnetometer readings, our instincts told us not to leave. Stephan listened to us. He considered the psychics to be his radar, his sensors, and agreed to stay at Beak's Cay another twenty-four hours.

According to the intuitive readings done both in Los Angeles and on site, a vessel of salvageable worth lay concealed nearby. The divers thoroughly scanned the sandy bottom but came up empty-handed. Just as they were about to give up and return to the
Seaview,
however, one of them noticed a line of fire coral that lay below some thick eel grass. Though there was no evidence of a ship, acting on intuition he broke apart the coral with a hammer, revealing a row of metal spikes, the kind once used to fasten a ship's ribs to its keel. Surfacing, the divers enthusiastically waved the small pieces of metal in the air. Thrilled, we all gathered on deck to greet them, the heroes returning from war. The atmosphere was truly explosive.

Unfortunately, it was hurricane season in the Bahamas. A big storm was approaching from off the coast of South America and was about to hit at any time. After twelve days at sea, Hella, Alan, and I were picked up by a private schooner to begin our journey home. With a very careful eye on the weather, the
Seaview
stayed out another week while Stephan and the other divers collected additional samples of metal, wood, and nails. Then the
Seaview
was returned to dry dock in Miami, where alterations and additions were made. Six weeks later, without the psychics, the crew revisited the Beak's Cay site and uncovered an intact ship, over 100 feet in length, beneath a dense blanket of eel grass and sand. It was later ascertained to be an armed American merchantman, the brig
Leander,
which had been lost at sea near Beak's Cay in 1834.