"Meet the Former Pentagon Scientist Who Says Psychics Can Help American Spies"

Saw this on the cover of newsweek in a store.

The WOO is alive and well with this one:

http://ift.tt/1T06qt6

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Dr. Edwin May tests a participant for remote viewing. Two decades after the CIA denounced the government’s top-secret ESP program, May is trying to bring it back to life. Jim Popkin for Newsweek

Be warned, it's a VERY long article

Paragraph 23

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So what is his scientific evidence? In 1995, when the CIA began preparing its program review, May provided the review team with results of 10 experiments he felt provided “the strongest evidence” to support “the remote-viewing phenomenon.” The tests, with names like “AC lucid dream, pilot” and “ERD EEG investigation” detail the success rate of each experiment. One of the CIA reviewers, while clearly in the minority, was sold. “It is clear to this author that [ESP] is possible and has been demonstrated,” she wrote in the agency’s report. “This conclusion is not based on belief, but rather on commonly accepted scientific criteria.”

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Today, May says ESP has “already been proved,” and defends it like an impatient school teacher explaining gravity. He quickly offers a barrage of evidence and anecdotes to make his case. In a recent interview, May references an obscure presentation that the military’s own remote-viewing project manager wrote in 1984 for his Army superiors. According to the now-declassified “secret” briefing, available online, the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command had conducted “100 collection projects” using ESP since 1979 for a slew of government agencies including the CIA, NSA, FBI and Secret Service. Several of the projects involved the use of Army psychics to help locate Americans taken hostage by Iran in 1979. “Over 85% of our operational missions have produced accurate target information,” states the briefing. “Even more significant, approximately 50% of the 760 missions produced usable intelligence.” May sees the Army report as confirmation that Gates was protecting the CIA when he declared on Nightline that remote viewing had never “contributed in any significant way” to U.S. intelligence efforts. “Gates lied,” he tells Newsweek. “What more can I say?” Gates, now a partner in the RiceHadleyGates consulting firm, wouldn’t comment. But the author of the Army’s 1984 report did. Brian Buzby was an Army lieutenant colonel when he briefly ran the Pentagon’s ESP program in the 1980s. He’s retired in Alabama now and has never spoken to the media before. He stands by his remote-viewing report. “I believed in it then, and I believe in it now,” Buzby says. “It was a real thing, and it worked.” Buzby says the program was just one low-cost tool that provided an additional source of intel for military and civilian analysts to weigh. When he learned the CIA had shut down the program, “I was disappointed that somebody wouldn’t pick up the banner.” For May, further proof of the program’s many wonders is Star Gate’s legendary “Agent 001.” The first psychic to work directly for the Pentagon, then–Army Chief Warrant Officer Joseph McMoneagle began remote viewing for the government in 1978. As a child, McMoneagle recalls sharing thoughts telepathically with his twin sister, and says he honed his ESP abilities as a soldier avoiding deadly attacks in Vietnam. May says McMoneagle could correctly identify a target “just under 50 percent” of the time when presented with five possible options. Using chance alone, he says the best outcome would be just 20 percent. May cites one intriguing example. It was 1979, and the National Security Council wanted help in “seeing” inside an unidentified industrial building near the Arctic Circle in Russia. McMoneagle began imagining himself “drifting down into the building” and had “an overwhelming sense” that he could see a submarine, “a really big one, with twin hulls.” He made detailed drawings of the giant sub for the NSC. Only later, McMoneagle wrote in his 2002 memoir, did U.S. satellite photographs confirm the existence at the Soviet’s secret Severodvinsk shipyard of a massive double-hulled Typhoon submarine, which constituted a new threat to American national security. Upon retirement from the Army in 1984, McMoneagle was awarded the Legion of Merit. Given for exceptionally meritorious conduct, his award states that he served in a “unique intelligence project that is revolutionizing the intelligence community.” It adds that he produced “critical intelligence unavailable from any other source” for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, DIA, NSA, CIA and Secret Service. --------------------------------------------------------- An Interview With a Psychic Foot Soldier A few months ago at McMoneagle’s home near Charlottesville, Virginia, May volunteers to conduct a live remote-viewing test for me, with his ace psychic at his side. “Joe, please access and describe a photograph you will see in about one or two minutes from now,” May says. McMoneagle sits still for 30 seconds and then begins sketching on a pad. From the comfort of his brown recliner, McMoneagle describes his drawing. “These squares are representative of buildings,” he says. “And these buildings are kind of just scattered through here. So they’re like embedded in a hillside. The roads are not very good roads; they’re more like paths.” May asks for more. “Float up in the air a thousand feet—it’s safe—whirl around 360 degrees and tell me what the gestalt of the area is like,” he says. “OK, you’ve got a large body of water. This is probably an island of some kind. Mountains up in here because the river goes up into the mountains. You’ve got a couple of bridges. This is a small village,” McMoneagle adds. Then May’s laptop randomly selects two photographs and labels them Targets A and B. May flips a coin, and it comes up heads, which my teenage daughter had secretly decided beforehand would represent Target A. May pulls out the Target A photograph for the big reveal...and it’s a close-up of a giant waterfall. There isn’t a building, path, island, mountain, bridge or village in sight. Both men laugh. The test has been a failure. “I’ve never gotten a waterfall in my life,” McMoneagle explains. But May suggests some alternative theories. “There’s a concept in statistics called nonstationary. What that means is the phenomenon comes and goes in unpredictable ways,” he says. He adds that intention, attention and expectation always affect remote viewing, and “we violated virtually all three things in this particular trial.” Then Ed May pauses and offers his final explanation: “It was just a demo.”

Here's a comment on the news story:

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Debra Lynne Katz · Phelan, California I know these guys, Ed May, Joe McMoneagle. and they are the real deal. I've seen Joe do a session and nail it when he had no idea what the photo was and could not have. He sketched and described it perfectly. Joes said for years publically he always misses waterfalls! (I was worried I would but so far I've been pretty good at those, however, there are other thingsI tend to miss in my remote viewing sessions). So isn't it interesting that this is the target he'd get in this case? Im just so sick of the idea that any article about remote viewing or other psychic phenomonon has to include comments from skeptics with A HUGE AGENDA without showing the actual research. No one, except researchers like May, ever moves beyond is this real to how can we understand the phenomonon better, improve it and make use of it? That's what researchers are trying to do but how can they get very far when they have to go back where parapsychologists were 100 years ago? Why didn't the author of this article ask Ed May to explain more of why he is setting these small, benign explosions off at the site where the remote viewers are viewing? That's what people need to understand. There is a reason he's doing that. So why are the same two skeptics always mentioned in every single article? LIke two people in the whole world get the same attention saying, "sorry this isn't possible", meanwhie negating thousands of hours of work by researchers and remote viewers/psychics. Ed May gets frustrated with people who hasn't looked at the research, who hasn't read the literature, who has no experience in the subject matter except from heresay and yet they form their opinions. If you knew Ed you would know he's the biggest skeptic you can find. He doesn't believe in people's personal experiences. You could say your deceased grandmother came to you the night before and foretold of an acutal future event and he'd say well that could have happened by chance, you could have been deluded. It hasn't been tested. It hasn't been repeated. He is completely strict in his procedures and his science. That is actually rather annoying to those who do see and hear their dead grandmothers so I don't really think that level of skeptism is always that healthy, but my point is you can't get any more careful and strict as a scientist then Ed May is. But this doesn't come through in this article. Still I am thankful that the subject is getting attention.

via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/1X9EFiv