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 while they were still in Northern California if the Berkeley Police Department, the local sheriff’s department, and the FBI had worked together, instead of at cross purposes. (The SLA fiasco seems similar to the noncooperation of the FBI and CIA in the months before 9/11/01 tragedy, when there was essentially no information shared among the agencies. Everyone now agrees that there was plenty of information, but in both cases, it was poorly analyzed.)
The Berkeley Police Department did send a nice letter of commendation to SRI in the end, thanking us for our work on their behalf.
Diagnosis
Diagnosis of medical problems, mechanical problems, safety hazards, sources of human error, and health and environmental hazards are all possible applications for psychic and intuitive practitioners. Medical diagnosis, discussed at length in Chapter 5, is an intriguing example of diagnostic remote viewing. Edgar Cayce, Caroline Myss, and others have demonstrated and refined this practice, which is a much more analytical approach to remote viewing than the other, more intuitive applications we mention in this chapter. For reasons we don’t entirely understand, psychic diagnosis is much easier to do than ordinary remote viewing of an object in a box. This may be because it’s a more meaningful task, or perhaps the important psychic connection to another living being makes the difference.
I have been practicing remote diagnosis since 2002, and I find it much easier than other forms of remote viewing. Other experienced intuitives have similar experiences. Interestingly, people are beginning to leave me messages asking for diagnostic help.
One such message came from Dr. Jane Katra of Eugene, Oregon, my teaching partner for the past decade and coauthor with me of other books. “I seem to have a medical problem,” she said in a voicemail. “Do you have any ideas?” I closed my eyes, still sitting by the telephone, and saw red and blue lines going up her arm to her shoulder and into her brain. I left a peculiar message on her machine describing what I had seen. In her return call, I learned that she had been stuck in the thumb by a rose thorn, and that her face and lips were feeling numb as a result. Based on that information, I urged her to go to the emergency room because it now sounded to me like blood poisoning. In the emergency room, she was given a tetanus shot and antibiotics, and she quickly recovered. Of course, since my patient was Jane, this might have simply been a case of mental telepathy. The distinction is that, in mental telepathy, I could have picked up Jane’s mental impressions of her condition, which may or may not have been correct.
Forecasting
Jeffrey Mishlove and I both feel that the ability to forecast may be the most promising of all the applications of psychic faculties. Forecasting earthquakes, volcanic activity, political conditions, technological developments, weather conditions, interest rates, investment opportunities, and the prices of commodities and currencies constitutes an active and exciting area of study.
In 1982, I was part of a team of psychics and investors who wanted to see if it was possible to use psychic functioning to make money in the marketplace. We chose the silver market, and our highly successful efforts ended up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. You can read more about this, and many other forecasting adventures, in the Associative Remote-Viewing section of Chapter 4.
THE SKEPTICS
When I related the Hearst story to my publisher, he asked why we didn’t go after the $1,000,000 offered at that time by “The Amazing Randi” for any convincing demonstration of psychic abilities. Although I haven’t the slightest doubt about the existence of these abilities and their usefulness, I have serious doubts about the likelihood of a lifelong professional skeptic paying up, no matter what evidence he saw.
There is an active skeptical organization in America called the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP; pronounced “psi-cop”), of which Randi is a prominent member. Their desire is to subtly encourage you to deny your own experience of psi when it appears, with the goal of “saving” science from psychical researchers. They don’t do research, of course, and they don’t particularly want to know the truth. Rather, they actively interfere with researchers’ abilities to get money for their work. When given the opportunity, they waste the time of researchers and suck energy from the field. I give them as little attention as possible and, in spite of their efforts, I have had little trouble publishing my findings or getting research funds. I think it’s a serious error to empower these enemies of truth, but some researchers are happy to immolate themselves on the pens of the critics, as long as someone pays attention to them.
From his lifelong experience in the field, Ingo Swann understands this problem well, and perfectly