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question. A tall, white-haired man with a chest full of medals pulled himself to his feet and boomed out, "How do you know that this remote-viewing stuff isn't simple mental telepathy, with your psychic just reading the mind of the guy who gave you the coordinates?" He then sat down, and folded his arms over his well-decorated chest. He had asked an astute and thoughtful question that implicitly accepted the validity of our data. Nothing could have pleased us more.
Later that day, the general related to us the event that had made him a believer in psychic phenomena: a frighteningly vivid dream his wife had had about him years before, on the very night his airplane was shot down in Korea. We got the contract to continue our remote-viewing research, and we spent more than a decade trying to answer some of the questions that were raised in that meeting. The following month we had a remarkably similar meeting at the CIA, in the very room where the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion was planned.
If you believe, as I do, that ESP exists, then you believe that everyone already knows, or at least can know, anything. Based on what I have seen in the laboratory, I believe that you can ask an experienced psychic any question at all, and if your question is well-posed and actually has an answer, then the psychic can help you to determine what it is. How, then, could you keep a classified ESP research program a secret? Our contractual ground rules were that we could tell people we had government support for our program, but we couldn't discuss whether it was classified, or which agencies were supporting us. If a reporter asked, "Is your program classified?" we would decline to answer, and let him draw his own conclusions.
One humorous example of the folly of trying to keep the existence of our program secret occurred when the well-known consciousness researcher Dr. Charles Tart joined our program during a year-long sabbatical from the University of California at Davis. He gave the names of six members of the Parapsychological Association as character references, so that he could obtain a security clearance from our sponsor. As a result, six American ESP researchers each received a visit from a friendly security inspector inquiring into Charlie's affairs. Of course, each one of the researchers had to tell at

 
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