CIA put psychics to the test to ‘replicate the Lockerbie bomb’

[This is the headline over a report published today on the website of The Scotsman. It reads as follows:]

Newly available declassified documents appear to reveal US Central Intelligence Agency tests to see if a psychic could replicate key aspects of the Lockerbie bombing.

The Scotsman reported last week how some 13 million pages of files were released online for the first time – including CIA interest in Edinburgh paranormal research.

Now it has emerged the 930,000 files also include asking a subject to describe a photo of the reconstructed baggage carrier which held the plane’s bomb.

Filed under “special access required”, the notes are headed: “Warning notice: Intelligence sources and methods involved.”

Pan Am Flight 103 was brought down by the device on 21 December, 1988, killing all 259 passengers and crew on board and a further 11 on the ground. The CIA’s psychic tests relating to Lockerbie were carried out on 7 June, 1990 at an unknown location and filed under Project Sun Streak, successor to the controversial Stargate project.

Another released CIA document outlines Sun Streak’s mission as “dealing with the use of psychoenergetics in the collection of intelligence information”.

It describes “Psychoenergetics” as psychokinesis – physical actions performed by mental powers – and perceptions which cannot be explained by non-sensory means, such as telepathy. Parameters of the Lockerbie test outline using “tangibles and intangibles of more than one word”, as well as “probing sketches”.

What follows is 22 pages of photocopied scrawled notes and drawings together with a typed account of the session.

The subject first describes the “target” as a “cylindrical shape that is clear and see-through” with “something inside it that seems to be moving through it and out the other end”.

Included in the test papers is a newspaper article with a photo of the reconstructed baggage container. The article refers to the cassette player in which Semtex explosive was hidden. “The stuff inside it is light, smooth, stringy, air, and it is moving down, making a ‘whoosh’ sound,” continue the typed notes from the session kept by the CIA. “It is speeding up as it goes down and out. It makes me want to throw up.” Describing the cylindrical shape in a box, the account goes on: “There is a bomb in the box and it explodes. It makes me think of a bomb blowing up a person. I can see red, fire and jagged flames. “Something about the target makes my eyes burn.”

[RB: This is not a new story: the documents have been in the public domain since 2003 and were referred to on this blog in  July 2015.]

Well, now we know

[The following are excerpts from a post on the David Morehouse website.]

Is there precognition, is it possible to travel forward in time and see what’s going to happen? Or can you, as the pre-cogs do, too, go backwards and see what actually did happen? Can you harness these skills for policing? (...)

Yes, you can. The CIA is already there. There are pre-cogs already working and they are called psychic spies. Operating in blacked out, secret warehouses nestled in bucolic Virginia industrial parkland, they work for the Department of Defense, the National Security Council and a half dozen other intelligence agencies.

Meet one of them: Dr David Morehouse, former Army Ranger officer, CIA operative and remote viewer.

“In 1972,” he says, “Stanford Research Institute pulled together all the major psychics that they could get temporary security clearances for and could pay, to come in and explore this. And the job of these laser physicists was to take these greatest natural abilities and synthesize these abilities into a protocol under clinical conditions, scientific test conditions and establish a protocol that could be trained, reliable, measurable, credible.

“It took them $50-million and six years of trial and error to develop that protocol. And this is what they came up with: Stages One through Six of co-ordinate remote viewing. The protocol was turned over to the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1982. (...)

“I was training Jordanian Rangers in the desert and a Jordanian machine gun, a bullet traveling 2,832 feet per second hits me 2 1/2 inches above the eye, knocks me unconscious, and I have a vision.” The vision shifted and changed, but kept returning. He told no one, was brought home and tested, but there was no damage. After a few months, he left the Rangers. (...) he was recruited into a Special Access program that was codenamed Royal Cape.

“Royal Cape was to support logistically and develop an infrastructure to support clandestine and covert operations in Tier One and Two countries. When I finally told one of our counselors what had happened to me in the desert, I was recruited, very rapidly, into a top secret clan of psychic spies called remote viewers.”

According to Morehouse, one of this unit’s most distinct successes was the discovery of what and who brought down Pan Am flight 103, which crashed in Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1989 [sic]. Information produced by remote viewers just hours after the crash said that a bomb placed in a music box was the source.

“There was a backup on Pan Am 103: an Iranian woman who had lost her family as a result of the US shooting down an Iranian airliner from a missile frigate. She was seated on the left-hand side of the leading edge of the wing, which was exactly where the explosives in the cargo hold were, just below her. She had explosives strapped around her waist."

Psychic link to Lockerbie bomb probe

[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

By Magin McKenna

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.

CIA resort to psychics during Lockerbie investigation

[What follows is excerpted from a report in today's edition of The Sun:]

Incredible evidence has emerged of the extent that American CIA agents have kept tabs on Scotland.

Declassified documents range from paranormal research to political intrigue (...)

An offshoot of the Stargate programme was project Sun Streak - which tried to tackle the Lockerbie bombing in unorthodox fashion.

Pan Am Flight 103 was brought down over the Scottish village by the device on December 21, 1988, killing all 259 passengers and crew on board and a further 11 people on the ground.

By 1990, the investigation was still ongoing and it would be another year until Libyans Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah were indicted.

On June 7 of that year at an unknown location, a psychic was tasked with describing a photo of the reconstructed baggage carrier which held the plane’s bomb.

Filed under “special access required”, the notes are headed: “Warning notice: Intelligence sources and methods involved.”

Sun Streak’s mission was to collect intelligence information through ‘psychoenergetics’ - including telepathy.

The Lockerbie test produced 22 pages of scrawled notes and sketches and a typed up account of the session.

Notes state: “There is a bomb in the box and it explodes.

“It makes me think of a bomb blowing up a person. I can see red, fire and jagged flames. Something about the target makes my eyes burn.”

[RB: Exactly the same article also appears today on the Daily Record website. The story has featured several times over the years on this blog.]

CIA had no information that could have given advance warning

[What follows is excerpted from an article in today’s edition of The National headlined Uncovering the shocking secrets of the CIA files:]

Two nuclear submarines were involved in a collision off the west coast of Scotland at the height of the Cold War, according to a document from 1974, which is in a batch of around 13 million published online by America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

They shine some light on decades of spooks’ thinking in the US and were put on the CIA Records Search Tool (Crest) following a lengthy challenge from Muckrock, a freedom of information pressure group.

The papers were in the public domain, but could only be inspected on a personal visit to the National Archives in Maryland, where only four computers gave office-hours access to Crest. This, said Muckrock, “presented an obstacle to many researchers”.

The documents cover a vast range of topics including briefings on the Lockerbie bombing, UFO sightings, psychic experiments from the Stargate programme and include a collection of papers from Henry Kissinger, the former US diplomat, secretary of state and national security adviser, who served under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. (...)

TO examine them properly you would need to set aside a month or so. Apart from the sheer volume, the CIA search engine is not the best and an innocuous search can turn up 50,000 or more documents.

One previously secret set of papers is a briefing from December 1989 for then Director of Central Intelligence William H Webster, for a meeting with Ann McLaughlin, chairman of the president’s commission on aviation security and terrorism, a year after the Lockerbie bombing.

It describes allegations – later discredited – that the CIA allowed terrorists to place a bomb on Pan Am Flight 103. Other claims centre on a bigger drugs-for-hostages operation used as cover by leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) to plant a bomb on board; and a bomb threat warning from the Israelis to Germany and the CIA which the agency failed to act on.

However Webster dismissed the claims and said the CIA had no information that could have given advance warning of the tragedy.