The Shadow Project (25 page)

The book you've just read is, of course, fiction. But some of the most incredible aspects of the story are based on fact.

The CIA really did have an official remote-viewing (RV) program. By the end of the 1960s, the CIA discovered that both the Soviet Union and China had given high priority to ESP (extrasensory perception) research, and in 1972 CIA agents paid a visit to an American laser physicist named Hal Puthoff, who was conducting remote-viewing experiments with the help of a psychic named Ingo Swann. The meeting resulted in the establishment of the CIA's own program to train operatives in espionage using RV. The agency now insists that it has been closed down since 1996.

Since 1886 there have been hundreds of cases of out-of-body-experience (OOBE) documented by distinguished scientists and academics all over the world.
Various studies have attempted to establish how widespread the phenomenon might be. In 1954 Professor Hornell Hart discovered that out of 155 Duke University sociology students, 27.1 percent claimed to have had out-of-body-experiences. In 1967 Celia Green circulated questionnaires among undergraduates in two British universities. One yielded 19 percent who had had OOBEs, the other 34 percent. In a random survey carried out among one thousand residents and students from Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1975, 14 percent of the residents and 25 percent of the students reported OOBEs. If you average out the statistics collected above, nearly one in four readers of this book might expect to have an OOBE at some stage of their lives.

I also managed to leave my body on a few occasions, for what it's worth, and you can listen to an account of my experience at www.herbiebrennan.com.

Using sound to stimulate out-of-body-experience has been the subject of considerable experimentation. The Hemi-Sync was devised by the late Robert Monroe, an American businessman. It works to synchronize the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

What Sir Roland told Danny about psychotronics was true. There actually was an International Scientific Conference held in Moscow in 1968 during which Czech scientists announced their discovery of psychotronic
energy, a carrier for telepathy, healing, and other odd phenomena.

The
Lancea Longini,
or Spear of Destiny, has been extensively researched, and several artifacts are claimed to be the spear that pierced the side of Christ while he was dying on the cross. Since 1424 one of these was held in the collection of Imperial Regalia at Nuremberg in Germany, but was moved to Austria for safekeeping when Napoleon threatened the city in 1796. It was subsequently sold to the Hapsburg Dynasty and held as part of their imperial regalia in the
Schatzkammer
(Treasury) collection in Vienna. Hitler took the lance back to Germany after his annexation of Austria, apparently convinced that it had magical powers, but it was returned to Austria by American General George S. Patton at the end of the Second World War. It is currently in the
Kunsthistorisches Museum
.

The
sohanti
exist too. They are a caste of the Songhai people, a group of three million who live along the great bend of the River Niger in border areas of Mali and two of its neighboring countries. The
sohanti
are witch doctors and enjoy a fearsome reputation as natural-born magicians.