The Field (25 page)

A Stanford physics student named Arthur Hebard had seen the superconducting differential magnetometer as a fitting post-doctoral occupation, applying for grant money to devise an instrument impervious to all but the flux in the electromagnetic field caused by any quarks which happened to be passing by. Nevertheless, to anyone who understood about measuring quarks, it was a delicate business. It necessitated blocking out virtually all the endless electromagnetic chatter of the universe in order to hear the infinitesimal language of a subatomic particle. To accomplish this, the magnetometer’s innards needed to be encased in layer upon layer of shielding – copper shielding, aluminium casing, a superconducting niobium shield, even μ-metal shielding, a metal which specifically limits magnetic field. The device was then buried in a concrete well in the floor of the lab. The SQUID (superconducting quantum interference device) was a bit of a mystery at Stanford – seen but not understood. No one had ever published its complex inner construction.

To Hal Puthoff, the magnetometer was a quackbuster. He looked upon it as the perfect test of whether there was such a thing as psychic power. He was open-minded enough to test whether psychokinesis worked, but not really convinced. Hal had grown up in Ohio and Florida, but liked to say he was from Missouri – the Show Me state, the ultimate state of the skeptic. Show me, prove it to me, let me see how it works. Scientific principles were a comforting refuge for him, the best way he could get a handle on reality. The multiple layers of shielding erected around the magnetometer would present the ultimate challenge for Ingo Swann, the psychic, whose plane was arriving from New York that afternoon. He would spring the thing on Swann. Just let him see if he could alter the pattern of a machine impervious to anything short of an atomic explosion.

It was 1972, the year before he’d begun working on his Zero Point Field theories, when Hal was still at SRI. Even at that time, before he’d thought about the implications of quantum zero-point fluctuations, Hal was interested in the possibility of interconnection between living things. But at this stage, he didn’t really have a focus, much less a theory. He’d been dabbling in tachyons, or particles that travel faster than the speed of light. He’d wondered whether tachyons could explain some studies he’d come across showing that animals and plants had the ability to engage in some sort of instantaneous communication, even when separated by hundreds of miles or shielded by a variety of means. Hal had really wanted to find out whether you could use quantum theory to describe life processes. Like Mitchell and Popp, he’d long suspected that everything in the universe on its most basic level had quantum properties, which would mean that there ought to be nonlocal effects between living things. He’d been kicking around an idea that if electrons had nonlocal effects, this might mean something extraordinary on a large scale in the world, particularly in living things – some means of acquiring or receiving information instantaneously. At the time, all he had in mind to test this assumption was a modest study, mainly involving a bit of algae, which Bill Church was eventually persuaded to invest $10,000 in.

Hal had sent the proposal to Cleve Backster, a New York polygraph expert who’d been carrying out studies, just for fun, to see if plants register any ‘emotion’ – in the form of electrical signaling – on standard lie detector equipment, the same way humans do in response to stress. These were the studies that had so fascinated Hal. Backster tried burning the leaf of a plant and then measured its galvanic response, much as he would register the skin response of a person being tested for lying. Interestingly enough, the plant registered the same increased-stress polygraph response as a human would if his hand had been burned. Even more fascinating, as far as Hal was concerned, was that Backster had burned the leaf of a neighboring plant not connected to the equipment. The original plant, still hooked up to the polygraph, again registered the ‘pain’ response that it had when its own leaves had been burned. This suggested to Hal that the first plant had received this information via some extrasensory mechanism and was demonstrating empathy. It seemed to point to some sort of interconnectedness between living things.
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The ‘Backster effect’ had also been seen between plants and animals. When brine shrimp in one location died suddenly, this fact seemed to instantly register with plants in another location, as recorded on a standard psychogalvanic response (PGR) instrument. Backster had carried out this type of experiment over several hundred miles and among paramecium, mold cultures and blood samples, and in each instance, some mysterious communication occurred between living things and plants.
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As in
Star Wars
, each death was registered as a disturbance in The Field.

Hal’s proposal for the algae experiments happened to be sitting on Backster’s desk the day that he’d been visited by Ingo Swann. Swann, an artist, was mainly known as a gifted psychic, who’d been working on ESP experiments with Gertrude Schmeidler, a professor in psychology at City College in New York.
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Swann had rifled through Hal’s proposal and was intrigued enough to write to him, suggesting that if he were interested in looking at some common ground between the inanimate and the biological that he start doing some experiments in psychic phenomena. Swann himself had done some work on out-of-body experiments and had got good results. Hal was deeply skeptical, but gamely took him up on his suggestion. He contacted Bill Church to see if he could change his study and use some of his grant money to fly Swann out to California for a week.

A short, chubby man with amiable features, Swann arrived dressed absurdly in a white cowboy hat with white jacket and Levis, like some visiting rock star. Hal grew convinced that he was wasting Bill Church’s money. Two days after Swann arrived, Hal took him down to the basement of the Varian Hall physics building.

Hal pointed to the magnetometer. He asked Ingo to attempt to alter its magnetic field. Hal explained that any alteration would show up in the output tape.

Ingo initially was disturbed by the prospect, as he’d never done anything like this before. He said he was first going to psychically peer into the innards of the machinery to get a better sense of how to affect it. As he did, the S-curve suddenly doubled its frequency for about 45 seconds – the length of Ingo’s time of concentration.

Could he stop the field change on the machine, which is indicated by the S-curve? Hal asked him.

Ingo closed his eyes and concentrated for 45 seconds. For the same length of time the machine’s output device stopped creating equidistant hills and valleys: the graph traced one long plateau. Ingo said he was letting go; the machine returned to its normal S-curve. He explained that by looking into the machine and concentrating on various parts, he was able to alter what the machine did. As he spoke, the machine again recorded a double frequency and then a double dip – which Ingo said had something to do with his concentrating on the niobium ball inside the machine.

Hal asked him to stop thinking about it and chatted with him about other subjects for several minutes. The normal S-curve resumed. Now concentrate on the magnetometer, Hal said. The tracing started furiously scribbling. Hal told him to stop thinking about it, and the slow S resumed. Ingo did a quick sketch of what he said he ‘saw’ as the design of the inside of the machine and then asked if they could stop as he was tired. For the next three hours, the machine’s output went back to its regular curves, monotonous and steady.

A group of graduate students who’d gathered around put the changes down to some strange and coincidental electromagnetic noise creeping into the system. As far as they were concerned, a readily explained blip had occurred. But then Hal had the drawing checked out by Hebard, the post-doctoral student who’d created the machine, and he said it was dead-on accurate.

Hal didn’t know what to make of it. It appeared that some nonlocal effect had occurred between Ingo Swann and the magnetometer. He went home and wrote a guarded paper on the subject and circulated it to his colleagues, asking them to comment on it. What he’d seen usually went by the name of astral projection or out-of-body experiences, or even clairvoyance, but he would eventually settle on a nice, neutral, non-emotive phrase for it: ‘remote viewing’.

Hal’s modest experiment launched him on a 13-year project, carried out in parallel with his Zero Point Field work, which sought to determine whether people could see things beyond any known sensory mechanism. Hal realized he’d stumbled on some property of human beings that was not a million miles from what Backster observed – some instant connection with the unseen. Remote viewing seemed of a piece with the notion he’d been toying with about some sort of interconnection between living things. Much later, he would privately speculate about whether remote viewing had anything to do with the Zero Point Field. For the moment, all he was interested in was whether what he’d seen was real and how well it worked. If Swann could see inside magnetometers, was it possible for him to see anywhere else in the world?

Inadvertently, Hal also launched America on the largest spy program ever attempted using clairvoyance. A few weeks after he’d circulated his paper, two blue-suited members of the Central Intelligence Agency arrived at his door, waving the report in hand. The agency, they told him, was getting increasingly concerned about the amount of experiments the Russians were conducting into parapsychology funded by the Soviet security forces.
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From the resources they were pouring into it, it seemed as though the Russians were convinced that ESP could unlock all of the West’s secrets. A person who could see and hear things and events separated by time and space represented the perfect spy. The Defense Intelligence Agency had just circulated a report, ‘Controlled offensive behavior – USSR’, which predicted that the Soviets, through their psychic research, would be able to discover the contents of top secret documents, the movements of troops and ships, the location of military installations, the thoughts of generals and colonels. They might even be able to kill or shoot down aircraft from a distance.
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Many senior staff at the CIA thought it was high time that the US looked into it as well; the problem was that they were getting laughed out of most labs. Nobody in the American scientific community would take ESP or clairvoyance seriously. It was the CIA’s view that if they didn’t, the Russians would probably gain an advantage that the US would never be able to overcome. The agency had been scouring around for a small research lab outside academia that might be willing to carry out a small, low-key investigation. SRI – and Hal’s current interest – seemed perfect for the job. Hal even checked out as a good security risk since he’d had experience in intelligence in the Navy and had worked for the National Security Agency.

The men asked Hal to carry out a few simple experiments – nothing elaborate, perhaps just guessing objects hidden in a box. If they were successful, the CIA would agree to fund a pilot program. The two men from Washington later watched Swann correctly describe a moth hidden in the box. The CIA was impressed enough to throw nearly $50,000 at a pilot project, which was to last for eight months.

Hal agreed to continue with the box-guessing exercise and for several months he carried out trials with Ingo Swann, who managed to describe objects hidden in boxes with great precision – far more successfully than could have been achieved by simple guessing.

By that time, Hal had been joined by a colleague in laser physics called Russell Targ, who’d also pioneered development of the laser for Sylvania. It was probably no accident that another physicist interested in the effect of light through space would also be intrigued by the possibility that the mind could also breach vast distances. Like Hal, Targ also checked out as a good security risk for the classified operation because he’d been involved in security studies for Sylvania. Tall and lanky at 6 foot 5, Russ had a shock of curly hair, which sat back on his forehead – a dark-haired Art Garfunkel to Hal’s sturdier Paul Simon. There the resemblance ended; anchored to Russ’s face was a pair of black Coke-bottle glasses. Targ had terrible vision and was considered legally blind. Even his glasses only corrected his sight to a fraction of normal. His poor outward vision may have been one reason why he saw pictures in his mind’s eye so clearly.

Targ had become interested in the nature of human consciousness from his hobby as an amateur magician. Many times up on the stage, he’d be performing some conjuring trick about his subject, taken from the audience, and although he’d have rigged the actual trick, he’d suddenly realize in the midst of it that he knew more information than he’d been told. He might be pretending to guess a question about a location and suddenly a clear mental image of it would pop into his head. Invariably, his own internal picture would turn out to be accurate, which only enhanced his reputation as a magician, but left him with many questions about how this could possibly be happening.

It had been Ingo’s idea to try his hand at a real test of his powers – one that would more closely resemble how the CIA figured remote viewing ought to be used. He had the idea of using geographical coordinates as a quick, clean, non-emotive way to get to the spot. Both Puthoff and Targ were skeptical of such an idea. If they gave him coordinates and Swann guessed correctly, it might simply mean that he’d remembered a site on a map – he might have a photographic memory.

They made a few desultory attempts, and Swann was way off target. But then, after fifty attempts, Swann began to improve. By Swann’s 100th coordinate, Hal was impressed enough to get on the phone to Christopher Green, an analyst in the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence, urging him to allow them to try a real test for the agency. Although Green was highly dubious, he agreed to give them a set of map coordinates of a place not even he knew anything about.