[This is the headline over a short item posted on the Hotspotsz.com website on this date in 2003. The source is given as an article in the Sunday Herald. I cannot find the article on the heraldscotland website (which is not surprising since the new website is so appalling that it is a miracle if anything can ever be found on it). However, Yahoo Groups on 20 July 2003 has a post which bears to be the full text of the article. It reads as follows:]
Psychic link to Lockerbie bomb probe
The CIA used psychics to investigate the Lockerbie bombing and reconstruct images of the baggage container said to have held the bomb that caused PanAm Flight 103 to explode.Declassified documents obtained by the Sunday Herald reveal the extraordinary attempts that were made to glean vital clues relating to Britain’s worst terrorist atrocity – 270 people died when PanAm Flight 103 was blown up over Lockerbie in December 1988.
The 26-page report is an insight into the now decommissioned Star Gate programme, a $20m CIA initiative which ran from 1972 to the mid-1990s.
It was launched with the aim of training individuals to gather intelligence information by “transcending the boundaries of space and time” through their minds.
Using a process known as “remote viewing”, investigators attempted to provide information that could be useful to the intelligence sources about international tensions and major investigations.
The files on Lockerbie are included in the declassified Star Gate files held at the US National Archives in College Park, Maryland. They relate to the pivotal moment in the aircraft’s flight path when the bomb exploded, causing the aircraft to split apart and descend from an altitude of 36,000ft at roughly 1000ft per second.
According to the report of June 7, 1990, an unnamed remote viewer was commissioned by the CIA’s Star Gate programme based at Fort Meade, Maryland, for an eight-hour remote viewing session.
The viewer’s mission was to give CIA agents a clearer picture of the doomed baggage container as well as the co-ordinates of the airplane when it began its nightmare descent through the night sky.
The findings are recorded, along with scrawled sketches, crude child-like diagrams, letters and figures. According to the report summary, the agents said of the doomed plane: “The target is an activity or event. There is a cylindrical shape that is clear and see-through. There is something inside it that seems to be moving through it and out on one end.
“The stuff inside it is light, smooth, stringy, air, and it is moving down, making a ‘whoosh’ sound. It is speeding up as it goes down and out. It makes me want to throw up.”
It is not known whether the CIA was able to make any use of the efforts of the remote viewer, who goes on to describe their perceptions of the container which may have held the bomb: “The cylindrical shape seems to be in the bottom of something, in a horizontal position. It could be in the bottom of a square box. There is a bomb in the box and it explodes.”
Such agents were charged with describing “tangibles and intangibles of more than one word” which might help with an investigation.
The Lockerbie bomb assessment went on: “It makes me think of a bomb blowing up a person. I can see red, fire, and jagged flames. The outside of the box seems to have diagonal lines going from left to right and right to left.
“Something about the target makes my nose burn, my eyes water, choke, and makes me feel queasy enough to vomit. It makes me think of gas. It also makes me think of a car and a car crash.
“Something is political, dizzy, confused, stuffy, lunatic, nervous and colourful. I keep seeing a small blue spot of light and three shapes. One of the three shapes seems to be more important than the others.”
Remote viewing was also used on hundreds of defence missions up to the final days of the Gulf war, according to a 1991 CIA report also obtained by the Sunday Herald from the National Archives.
Star Gate’s main plan was to “develop a long-range systematic and comprehensive approach to the investigation of anomalous mental phenomena”. The US Congress disbanded the programme in 1995 after negative media publicity as well as public outcry over ethical concerns of mind warfare.
Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, a Libyan, was convicted in 2001 of killing 270 people in the Lockerbie bombing. He is serving a life sentence in Barlinnie Prison, Glasgow, but is preparing to appeal to the European Court.
It's the The men who stare at goats thing. (Google that if you've never heard of it.)
ReplyDeleteIt would be funny if it wasn't so tragic. If they'd got somebody half-way competent to meditate on the pictures of the demeged luggage, rather than Allen Feraday, they could have saved an eyepopping amount of time and money. And probably caught the terrorist who put the bomb in the container at Heathrow.
But no, don't invest in competent forensics, call in a bloody psychic.
"damaged" luggage, even.
DeleteSurprise. There is, though, only a tiny difference between psychics and judges who believe they somehow can know when a hopeless witness is this rare exception. Conclusions out of the blue.
ReplyDelete"Men who stare at goats" - didn't know about that one (great videos on YouTube), but I have heard about Technical Remote Viewing, as I sold my domain name trv.com to a man for this use. My opinion: nonsense and self-deception, but with some entertainment value.
But it is exiting stuff and as always: if one psychic is lucky to get it right, this is what will be remembered.
Here we have "GT200". That is a vertical antenna on a horizontal pin in a handle, so the slightest turning of the hand will have the antenna moving.
There is no electronics in it, not even a power supply, "it is driven by static electricity".
You can then buy cards to have the device detecting Drugs, Money, Gold, Explosives... on huge distances, even through water. Test have failed laughingly, of course. The seller, Bolton, is in jail for fraud. Randi had a good go at the guys.
About 30 million USD was spent by our local military - and of course the device is still in use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GT200
Interestingly, the explosives consultant who caused so much trouble for Lockerbie pundits by falsely claiming that the test explosions featured in the BBC2 Newsnight item on the timer fragment in January 2010 had resulted in no fragments of the timer PCBs surviving the detonation, was himself later investigated by Newsnight due to his involvement in selling a similar device, the ADE651. The programme is still available.
ReplyDeletehttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/9377875.stm
This item was broadcast just over a year after the one in which Wyatt made the false claims in relation to Lockerbie. It was quite amusing to see the same man on the opposite side of the investigative journalism divide, squirming like a homoeopath when asked to explain how his content-free product actually worked, and confronted with the evidence that the whole thing was nothing but lack of blinding and confirmation bias.
A group of us had been very puzzled by Wyatt's PCB claim, believing that it simply couldn't be correct, but of course some eithusiastic people grabbed it and ran with it, declaring that an "explosives expert" had proved that PT/35b must have been a fabrication. It was instructive to see the real calibre of the man revealed in the second investigation (which made no mention of the first). Of course, in a footnote in his 2012 book, John Ashton revealed that Wyatt hadn't been privy to the results of the tests he was commenting on, and had simply made up his story for the Newsnight cameras.
The trouble with charlatans like that is that when they provide apparently supportive evidence to the side you're trying to promote, it does nothing but give nay-sayers like Magnus Linklater a convenient target to shoot down, allowing them to ignore and side-step genunely supportive evidence.
Great link! A scary story of what goes.
ReplyDeleteOf course another side of the story is why they sell so well. With production costs being 0.1% of the sales price there is ample room for solid kickbacks.
And Wyatt dropped his guards - if he has any.
There is unlikely to be one single person on the planet (short of our friend Dave, of course) able to evaluate whether there could be a fragment or not. There is an insane amount of parameters.
I recall you writing that fragments were found, and I also recall MEBO once writing that the timer itself in one case survived being in the middle of the explosion, hardly being scratched!
The world is such a strange place.
I hadn't thought about the kick-back aspect. Illuminating.
DeleteAnother intersting point is that in 1988 the Maltese authorities were using some sort of mechanical bomb detection device to screen luggage going on to aircraft. It was operated by the Maltese military, and was describes as a "sniffer device" - leading to the erroneous statement in one or two articles that sniffer dogs were in use.
DeleteI have no idea what that was, although it seems to be too early to have been an ADE651. I rather suspect it didn't work, whatever it was. In any case, Semtex is extremely difficult for even dogs to smell, which is why terrorists use it of course. Nevertheless, the Lockerbie investigation's pet theory would have required that device, whatever it was, to have been circumvented (as well as Maier's x-ray at Frankfurt).
I note a security expert from Air Malta was featued on the Newsnight programme that debunked Wyatt. He easily demonstrated that the ADE651 was a dowsing device. These things respond so sensitively to tiny alterations in the way they're held that people often come to believe they're moving of their own accord and communicating information to them. I wonder if the expert's knowledge was of the "once bitten twice shy" variety?
As regards what could or couldn't have survived that explosion, I don't think it's possible to declare that any particular thing couldn't have survived. While the temperatures reached are very high, it's literally over in a flash. Anything might be blown away so that it wasn't exposed to the high temperature for long enough to be incinerated.
ReplyDeleteI think what raises particular suspicions about PT/35b is the nature of the recovered fragment. It seems to be the only 1 cm square fragment anywhere on either of the two PCBs in the MST-13 device that was amenabe to visual matching identification. The improbability of its being precisely that fragment that was found is difficult to swallow.
Nevertheless it is perfectly possible that it really did fall from the sky inside that shirt collar, and I think we have to consider that scenario seriously in all deliberations about the topic.