At the Inn, Chuck Clark talked about interdimensionals, too. Far out as it sounded, the idea struck me as one of the most provocative areas of UFO-related thinking. What we had once taken for aliens from another star system, this theory went, might instead be time travelers or visitors from parallel universes. These concepts, it seemed to me, were more worthy of consideration, at least on intellectual terms, than the saucers themselves.
Increasingly physicists, both popular and academic, were writing and talking about such ideas, born of the paradoxes of quantum theory. Aspects of quantum theory seemed to require the postulation of parallel or multiple universes. Space-time “wormholes” made time travel a theoretical possibility. String theory projected scenarios wherein an original universe of twenty-one or thirty-four dimensions might have collapsed into the present four.
According to quantum theory, subatomic particles could apparently be in several places at once. From those bits of quantum doubt, theories of parallel, alternate universes had arisen, like conspiracy theories from Eisenhower’s toothache. An alternate universe might be identical to this one, except that I have brown instead of blue eyes. Or, more to the point, a subatomic particle that is here in one universe might be there in its neighbor.
Quite respectable efforts to solve the quantum uncertainty principle had resulted in scientific experiments postulating a theory of parallel universes. In the late fifties, the respected physicist Bryce DeWitt proposed such a solution. It wouldn’t take so many universes, he had calculated, only about ten to the hundredth power. Soon physicists were using the term “multiverse” for the totality of possibilities.
All the little bits of quantum uncertainty, all that black matter, made the universe a kind of sponge of uncertainty. Just as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Schrödinger’s cat helped translate hard-core science into vaguely understood popular lore ratifying wider feelings about how uncertain knowledge had become, the physics of the multiverse became attached to popular ideas of parallel modes of existence—“other dimensions,” in the crudest vocabulary of Hollywood, or interdimensionals.
The youfers were always talking about how the recognition of other intelligences in the universe would produce a change in thinking, such as the one brought about by the discovery that the sun was at the center of the solar system and not the earth, or the European discovery of America. I could understand this: Nobody wants to be part of the crowd jeering Galileo, nobody wants to be the last flat-earther. This was, after all, the Greatest Story in Human History.
But spacecraft bearing almond-eyed aliens from Zeta Reticuli was far less convincing as a scientific revolution than parallel universe theory. With roots in mainstream physics, its ideas seemed both wondrous and possible. In his modestly titled book The Fabric of Reality, the brilliant physicist David Deutsch discussed how all of twentieth-century physics pointed to parallel universes. The facts were there, he argued, only bold imagination was lacking for their acceptance. For me, photographs like Ford’s came to suggest this element of imagination: I was as seduced by the images as by the ideas. The odd hovering shapes, the soft spray of flash on desert plants and pavement edges, the mere hint of landscape beyond, were like diagrams of the darker, sketchier implications of the new physics.
Another physicist, Fred Alan Wolf, in The Dreaming Universe, believed that parallel universes might be the source of schizophrenia, visions, even dreams. UFO sightings, he noted, seemed to many viewers to possess a dreamlike quality. Could UFOs have an existence that was half in, half out of this universe? This was taking Jung’s idea of manifesting archetypes into a more literal plane. It was awfully close to the Borderlands folk or the contactees and their “ether.” The things that were seen in the sky, this new way of thinking went, might inhabit some realm halfway between the state of being a thought and the state of its material existence. The key question, Wolf said, was how matter gave rise to thought, “How does meat dream?”
Are these visions created by psychic disturbances? How literally are we to take the idea of objects in the sky being manifestations of cultural unease? The idea of one universe as the dream of another gave Dreamland a whole new meaning.
“Now, this one I took on the border,” Ford told me.
It showed one of the familiar round metal sensors, those strange mirrored spheres, that mark the perimeter of Dreamland. But there was something else in one corner. “See this?” she said, pointing to what looked like a boulder or a blob. “I think this is a remote viewing blob.” The camou dudes, she suspected, could carry out remote viewing of the border from their guardhouses. I did not ask why they bothered to head out in Jeeps and Blackhawks if they could do this.
But remote viewing at “the remote location” seemed eminently appropriate. Hadn’t the Army taken the technique seriously enough to spend tax dollars on it?
Remote viewing — the ability to see at a distance — is a paranormal technique on which the CIA and the Pentagon had spent about $20 million and twenty years. Also known by the wonderful phrase “anomalous cognition,” the idea was developed by Dr. Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ at the Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s. Their first and prime viewer was an artist named Ingo Swann (Hollywood could never come up with names like these), who directed the effort to turn remote viewing into a useful military intelligence tool. Fearing an emerging “psi spy” gap with the Soviets, the CIA began funding remote viewing and, later, handed the research off to the Army.
It began with some degree of scientific rigor, with the finding that some people did a better job of, say, picking cards facedown on a table several rooms away than they should have by chance alone. “Psi-hitting,” it was called. Then in Project Grille Flame, later Scannate and Stargate, it was applied to such tasks as discovering the locations of Soviet submarines or finding hostages in the Middle East. But results kept turning up that embarrassed the Army. When the viewers were directed to search for secret Soviet aircraft, they came back with reports of UFOs.
Viewers were sometimes led through brainwave feedback and other techniques in order to become more sensitive receptors. Two of the early remote viewers were Ed Dames and Joseph McMoneagle. Dames claimed that “we employed people who used altered states to take a look at the radio station in Tehran, Iran, prior to our aborted rescue attempt.” Strategic locations in Iraq were another target. The lack of success of those efforts makes one skeptical about remote viewing.
I tried to think of remote viewing, perhaps charitably, as equivalent to frustrated police turning to a medium to locate a body. The program was operated in a series of shedlike buildings at Fort Meade, in Maryland. After the military program ended, remote viewing moved into the private sector. Ed Dames established a firm called Psi-Tech that did “business research,” or, less politely, industrial espionage. For an auto company client, for instance, his viewers “go into this library in the sky, if you will, what we call the matrix, the collective unconscious, [and] pull out designs that were Japanese and German.”
Other alumni of the program were less positive. Joseph McMoneagle disparaged Dames. Another veteran, David Morehouse, wrote a book titled Psychic Warrior (1996), in which he declared that the feds had recruited him as a remote viewer and then made his life miserable.