2. Russell Targ (left) and Hal Puthoff outside the Stanford Research Institute, 1977. Photo by Hella Hammid.
Since the beginning of 1973, we also worked with Pat Price, a retired police commissioner from Burbank, California. Pat had telephoned Hal and asked if we’d be interested in working with him. He said that he had used his psychic ability all his life, in particular to catch criminals in his work as a police officer. Of course, we accepted his offer. Until 1979, when we met Joe McMoneagle, Pat was the most remarkable psychic we’d ever encountered — and he remains the only one able to read printed words at a distance. Pat was a cheerful, even-tempered man. A young secretary who was typing Pat’s descriptions of distant sites once asked him if he could psychically follow her into the ladies’ room. His reply was, “If I can focus my mind on any place on the planet, why would I follow you into the ladies’ room?” That was Pat! Figure 3 shows Pat Price on the job.
Figure 3. Retired police commissioner and psychic Pat Price, the only person we know who can psychically read words. Photo by Hella Hammid.
FOUR AREAS OF REMOTE VIEWING APPLICATIONS
Once we learn how to perform remote viewing techniques (which you can do in Chapter 3), how might this process be applied? Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove, in his capacity as Director of the Intuition Network,5 proposed four broad areas of remote viewing applications: evaluation, location, diagnosis, and forecasting.
Evaluation
Evaluation might include weighing various alternatives, such as an investment or choices of technology or building sites. Evaluation often includes a mixture of psychic ability and nonpsychic intuition. I believe that intuition comprises the sum total of everything one has learned or experienced in the course of one’s life and stored in one’s subconscious mind; this background then works together with information that comes to one psychically. For example, when I was leaving SRI in 1982, I wondered where I would work next; the employment agency told me that I had destroyed a promising career in lasers by spending ten years doing ESP research. I sat in my office and visualized what my new place of employment would look like. An image of the nearby foothills led me to make inquiries of my friends who worked in the Lock-heed Missiles & Space research laboratory. (They were happy to have me return to my laser roots — if I promised not to get them into ESP research.) I believe that a combination of my psychic ability (the information that a job would open up for me at Lockheed) and my intuition (recognition of the foothills and knowing people at Lockheed) helped this image of my possibilities come together.
Location
Remote viewing has been used to find many things of value, including oil or mineral deposits, hidden treasure, and missing people — all of which have been objects of fascination for as long as people have tried to span space with their thoughts. The following story illustrates our experience with this application.
The Kidnapping of Patricia Hearst
On the night of Monday, February 4, 1974, a group of American terrorists kidnapped nineteen-year-old newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst from her apartment near the University of California at Berkeley, where she was a student. The kidnappers identified themselves as the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). They were radical anarchists whose slogan was “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.” The conservative, wealthy Hearst family was a perfect target for them. While the press was trying to find “Symbia” on the map, the Berkeley Police Department was trying to locate the daughter of one of the most prominent celebrities in San Francisco — namely the publisher of the San Francisco Examiner, and president of the nationwide Hearst newspaper syndicate.
The day after the kidnapping, the police remained clueless. It was such a desperate situation that the Berkeley Police Department was moved to think about asking for psychic guidance. They called the president of SRI on Tuesday afternoon, and our laboratory director asked us if we thought remote viewing could help. Pat Price said that he had often worked on this kind of problem. So we all piled into Hal’s car and drove to Berkeley to meet with the detectives on the case and visit the scene of the crime, where pistol shells were still scattered on the floor under the bed.
The kidnappers were known to be violent; two people had been badly beaten, and several neighbors had been shot at during the abduction. It was all quite strange and confusing for Hal and me, but Pat felt very much at home in the Berkeley police station. The detectives had a lot of questions they were planning to ask us. However, Pat stepped forward first and asked the detective who was working with us if he had a “mug book” of local people who were recently out of prison. Yes, they had just such a book. Pat took the book and laid it flat on a wooden table so that we could all see the pages. There were four mug shots on each page. Pat turned the pages after looking carefully at each picture. Then, about ten pages (forty people) into the book, he put his index finger on one of the pictures and said, “He’s the leader.”
The man Pat singled out from the mug book was Donald “Cinque” DeFreeze, who had managed to escape from California’s Soledad Prison a year earlier. Within a week, the detectives were able to verify Pat’s remarkable hit.
The police, of course, had no idea where to find DeFreeze. So they asked Pat if he could determine where he might be. Pat sat back in the old oak swivel chair, polished his glasses, and closed his eyes. After a moment of silence, he said, pointing, “They went that way. Is that north?” It was. Pat continued, “I see a white station wagon parked by the side of the road. But they’re not in it anymore.” The detective asked, “Where can we find the car?” Pat replied, “It’s just past a highway overpass, near a restaurant and two large white gas or oil storage tanks.” One of the detectives said he knew where that might be. Half an hour later, they found the abandoned car just where Pat said it would be. By that time it was midnight, and Hal and I were happy to go home to more peaceful surroundings. I think Pat could have stayed all night.
After that night, we had several additional opportunities to interact with the Berkeley detectives. As a side note, the most memorable of these for me was a trip to a potential SLA hideout. A detective and I were parked on a tree-covered hillside in the Santa Cruz mountains. The detective asked me if I knew how to handle a gun. I thought this was a surprising request, but I told him that I owned an automatic and knew how to use it. He then handed me his service weapon and said, “Cover my back.” He walked around the apparently abandoned house, and I covered him with the gun as he cased the building. I am sure he had no idea that my corrected vision is 20/200, making me legally blind! After that incident, I realized that I was way beyond my psychicalresearcher’s job description; I retired from the field, feeling that my graduate studies at Columbia had never prepared me for this.
Even during her brutal confinement by the kidnappers, Patricia Hearst had some knowledge of our activities. In her riveting autobiography, she writes:6
Paranoia must be contagious, for everyone in the house had caught it. When Cin [Cinque] came to me one day and said that the newspapers were reporting that my father had hired psychics to fathom out where I was being kept by the SLA I was paralyzed with fear. “Don’t think about any psychics now. Don’t communicate with them,” he told me. “Focus your mind on something else all the time.” I did as I was told. I did not want psychics or anyone else to point the FBI in my direction.
Though Patricia Hearst’s concern may seem puzzling, she was wise to be concerned about being killed by her captors if the police showed up at the door.
We continued to work with the Berkeley detectives, and I believe that the kidnappers could have been caught
