TRANSCRIPT Oh No, Ross and Carrie! Ep. 410: Ross and Carrie View Remotely: UFO Panel Edition

[00:00:00]

Music: “Oh No, Ross and Carrie! Theme Song” by Brian Keith Dalton. A jaunty, upbeat instrumental.

Carrie Poppy: Hello! Welcome to Oh No, Ross and Carrie!, the show where we don’t just report on fringe science, spirituality, claims of the paranormal. No way! We take part ourselves.

Ross Blocher: Yep, when they make the claims, we show up, so you do not have to. I am Ross Blocher.

Carrie Poppy: And I am Carrie Poppy.

Ross Blocher: And we are remote viewing!

Carrie Poppy: Yes! Well, some people are.

Ross Blocher: Well, some people claim they are.

Carrie Poppy: Touché.

(They chuckle.)

Well.

Ross Blocher: We can make this seem more and more remote, the more we describe it more accurately.

Carrie Poppy: Well, some people claimed they were last year at Contact in the Desert. (Laughs.)

Ross Blocher: This topic has been on our interest list for a long time, and we’ll be talking about a panel we attended. But this does not preclude us taking remote viewing courses. So, that’s somewhere in the future—remote, or maybe not so remote.

Carrie Poppy: Ohhh, very nice! So, remote viewing, what is it?

Ross Blocher: Well, you might say—if you are the website for Contact in the Desert accessed through the Wayback Machine.

Carrie Poppy: I am.

Ross Blocher: “Remote viewing is a technique that allows individuals to access information about a remote or hidden target through nonlocal means.”

“Nonlocal means” means you’re not there. You’re not using your five senses that we’re very sure of. You’re using some additional ability to nonlocally access this information. And the idea, Carrie, “may seem out of this world, but it is just as grounded as any other skill.”

Carrie Poppy: (Chuckles.) That’s a really weak definition. Usually they at least say that it’s a visual. That one didn’t even hearken to visual details. It sounded like I could say, “Oh, I’m remote viewing when I’m thinking about the botanical garden down the street.”

Ross Blocher: Yeah, maybe they’re just trying to be inclusive of a lot of different techniques and modifications to remote viewing over time. But you’re reminding me by mentioning the visual spectrum specifically that in this documentary we’ll talk about, there was one remote viewer who said (chuckles) he needed to put on his glasses, because he sees better as a remote viewer if he’s wearing his glasses locally.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) Relatable. As someone who just went to the optometrist, I too find that I need to wear my glasses in order to see.

Ross Blocher: I just love that idea that somehow it helps that—I mean, because that really means that somehow the image would have to be reconstituted outside of the glasses and pass through them to his eyes for the glasses to be of help. And any theoretical view I had of how remote viewing might be working does not include that as an option. Well, the Contact in the Desert website goes on to say, “The approach has been used for a range of purposes, including military intelligence and scientific research.”

Carrie Poppy: Well, I know a little about the military intelligence, because our friend Jon Ronson wrote a book about that.

Ross Blocher: He sure did!

Carrie Poppy: The Men Who Stare at Goats.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, which is also related to this. This is also a related phenomenon to astral travel, which we’ve talked about. The idea being that you can remove yourself, whatever dualist part of yourself that is separate from your physical body, and you can have it go other places and receive veridical information about the world and then bring it back. Report back.

Carrie Poppy: And then report back such that scientists can even write down your observations and go and confirm that, yes, Carrie sent her mind to Descanso Gardens down the street and figured out what we had laid on the floor in this one particular spot. And she could say the color, she could say the shape, she could say how many wheels it had!

Ross Blocher: Amazing if true and testable if true. My favorite combination.

Carrie Poppy: Heeey! Love those things! (Laughs.)

Ross Blocher: Right! We could actually see if this works.

Carrie Poppy: Yup. And the fact that the military was investigating it is always interesting. It always means, okay, there was at least smoke there. Now, I’d like to bring this to a screeching halt to point out how much I hate the saying “where there’s smoke, there’s fire”.

Ross Blocher: Okay, because not always true. Carrie hates counterexamples.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, exactly! Where there is smoke, there is often not fire! (Laughs.) Have these people seen fire alarms? Have you lived in a house? They go off all the time when there isn’t even—well, in that case, sometimes there isn’t even smoke, so now I’m just complaining about whether smoke alarms work.

Ross Blocher: I suppose you could say, “Where there’s smoke, it’s reasonable to be concerned about fire.”

Carrie Poppy: Thank you. That’s what we should all garble out of our mouths every time! (Laughs.)

Ross Blocher: Not as bumper sticker-able, but okay. More accurate. I mean, fair.

Carrie Poppy: So, why am I talking about this?

Ross Blocher: You know, a phrase that my wife used on me recently that’s one of my bad jokes is when we’re looking for the remote. I’ll say, “Well, it’s in a remote location.”

(Carrie giggles.)

And then Cara used that on me the other day, and I realized just how unhelpful it is, but I still enjoyed it.

[00:05:00]

I still enjoyed the moment.

Carrie Poppy: That’s a funny interruption.

Ross Blocher: Alright. Well, this was at Contact in the Desert. It’s a conference specifically about UFOs. Whereas something like Conscious Life Expo, I think covers more topics. This is a little more narrowly focused on aliens. But this also includes like a bit of mind over matter stuff, extra sensory perception. And thus we had enough to people there to participate as panelists on a remote viewing panel.

Carrie Poppy: Yes. This is a very latter-day UFO conference. The earlier UFO conferences, 10/20 years ago, you probably had a bunch of tech. You had a bunch of hard science, or at least a bunch of people claiming to do hard science, trying to do hard science. Once you have your subject matter in place and your fan base for it, you have to get more and more loosey goosey about your definitions, and you get way further away from them, and you invite in all of this like metaphysical stuff.

So, we are in the UFO conference days where we’re like, “Sure, yeah, the aliens, they travel through portals, and they got here from Portugal, 100%! Oh, this person over here, she believes she can talk directly to aliens? Okay, we believe that now, too!”

Ross Blocher: I’m very excited about this portal that leads to Portugal.

(Carrie laughs.)

Portal-gal. Well, and that reminds me that like later in this panel, you’ll have one of the panelists kind of go off on how, “And this is very similar to how it works in communication with aliens and also angels.” And I’m thinking, oh, she’s kind of set aside from the rest of this panel. You know, the ex-CIA guy or whatever is probably really uncomfortable. Maybe.

Carrie Poppy: Maybe! Or maybe he’s 10 years in and he’s like, “Sure.”

Ross Blocher: You never know until you ask him. So, this was in the big room, the big panel room called the Crystal Amphitheater. Hundreds of people there. And of course, our man Alan Steinfeld was overseeing the proceedings.

Carrie Poppy: Alan!

Ross Blocher: That’s what he does!

Carrie Poppy: He’s such a curious person. I really kind of respect him. Whenever he’s doing his intros and his panel moderations, he’s like—he’s really in it! He’s really trying to figure something out from these people.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, that’s a good point. He does come at it with curiosity, and he’s a hype man. He’s trying to build everybody up and put them in their best light. So, he’s very good for that purpose.

Carrie Poppy: He’s really earnest,

Ross Blocher: His bio says, “An explorer of consciousness. Alan has been the host and producer of the New Realities television series for the past three decades. He has a YouTube channel, and is author of the recent UFO compilation called Making Contact, which calls on the need to wake up to the new realities of extraterrestrial existence.”

And that’s how we introduced the event, by mentioning his Making Contact book and saying that this is all connected to transforming the nature of consciousness, and we’re in this really special time where everything’s about to change about consciousness. And I don’t know—

Carrie Poppy: Isn’t it always about to?

Ross Blocher: I was gonna say, correct me if I’m wrong, Carrie, it feels like every single year things are just about to change!

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) Yep, yeah. The Age of Aquarius.

(Ross sings a bar of the song.)

Yeah. There’s a bunch of different versions of this, but that’s always the one I go back to is that the Age of Aquarius is just about to get here.

Ross Blocher: And right away he mentions one of the main figures in this world of remote viewing, which is Russell Targ. Saying that he learned the practical aspect of remote viewing from Russell Targ, and Russell Targ is actually listed as a speaker! I guess they had a virtual conversation with him, like he was zooming in from somewhere, but he’ll come up.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. And Tracey Dolan, who’s also on this panel—and I’ll talk about her later—in her talk, she mentions admiring Russell Targ as well and says, “Everybody, you got to go to his talk. You know, he’s—oh, he’s a luminary who’s actually here.”

Ross Blocher: Yeah. I think this is kind of like a second-generation panel. And they’ll keep talking about the first generation of remote viewers.

So, you had this first generation of remote viewers. I guess it really came about in the ’70s. Before that, maybe you would have things analogous to sensing stuff from far away that you could possibly categorize as that, but the term and sort of what we know of as remote viewing is not that old.

Carrie Poppy: Right. And again, I think of it as being specifically visual. The definition you gave from the pamphlet almost sounded more like ESP or something broader.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, just accessing information. But yeah, usually the idea is you go somewhere, you see something visual, you report back on that. And like you said, it’s a target. You’re being asked to go to where someone is or where something has been left for you. And that’s always, to me, just the most bizarre thing—like, homing in on the place that’s being broadcast, like you need to go here. And they never seem to complain about that. Like, “Oh, wait, where am I supposed to go?” It could be anywhere. It just seems like immediately they’re able to be like, “Oh yes. Okay. Alright. I’m laser focusing in on what it is that you’re giving me as a target.” I feel like that would be the hardest part. And we’ll talk about this a little later, but one of the innovations by Ingo Swann, this other guy who was this first-generation remote viewer—

[00:10:00]

—was being able to work from coordinates. You give me the exact latitude and longitude, and that’s where I’ll go in my mind.

Carrie Poppy: Okay, yeah, that makes more sense to me.

Ross Blocher: Somehow my astral body knows the coordinates and can go straight there.

Carrie Poppy: (Chuckles.) But at least it gives the mind something to work with. You know?

Ross Blocher: To latch onto something real, physical, tangible.

Carrie Poppy: Some buy in, yeah.

Ross Blocher: And again, yeah, amazing if true.

Carrie Poppy: Agree. And you know, Ross, human beings are a lot more than we’ve been told via education, media, religion, and politics! One thing that Alan’s going to come back to over and over in this panel is he really thinks we all can do this. He seems to think there should be very straightforward instructions about how to do it. And he keeps pulling it back to this one question, which is basically just, “How do you do it? How do you remote view?” He kind of asks that for almost two hours, like versions of that.

Ross Blocher: But how do you actually do it?

Carrie Poppy: But Tracey—but what are the steps? And then that person will just sort of give their own kind of philosophical—

Ross Blocher: It’ll always go right to philosophical. Yeah! And he’ll be like, “Well, give me the practical.” Which is funny, because he teaches remote viewing classes for LightNet.

Carrie Poppy: Does he?! Well, we should take his!

Ross Blocher: I’m all for it. There’s multiple people I would like to learn remote viewing from, but he’s one. So, yeah, we could learn to remote view with Alan. Though, I don’t know—after this panel, will I feel that’s the best place to learn it?

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) ‘Cause he seems to not know the basic steps.

Ross Blocher: Or he wants people to talk about it. But yeah, they’re really not biting. You’re right. He asked that many times.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, yeah. Maybe he has them in his back pocket. Maybe he’s quizzing them. If so, good on him.

Ross Blocher: So, he got a panel of people who either claim a lot of experience and success with remote viewing and even other instructors who teach remote viewing. Just remember that. They teach this. You can pay them money, and they will teach you how to do it.

Carrie Poppy: So, there’s JJ, her talk.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, JJ and his wife, Desiree. They’re folks that I’ve been following for a while. And I don’t think we’ve talked about them much on the podcast.

Carrie Poppy: He thinks there are pyramids on Mars, and he called NASA and said, “Are there pyramids on Mars?” And NASA said, yes, and then he hung up. Is that right?

Ross Blocher: Well, he claimed that “I called this in advance, and then NASA confirmed it”. Here’s from their shared bio. And they’ve both got PhDs after their names. “Doctors JJ and Desiree Hurtak are social scientists, futurists, and founders of the Academy for Future Science. They were scientific consultants for Sidney Sheldon’s The Doomsday Conspiracy.”

(Chuckles.) Okay. I don’t know if I’d brag about that.

“They have been researchers in the field of UFO study for over 40 years and have written numerous books, including Mind Dynamics with Elizabeth Rauscher, Ph. D. and The Over Self Awakening. Dr. JJ Hurtak is the author of over 20 books in 12 languages, including his most famous, The Keys of Enoch. And they are recognized for their provocative information that leads to the development of a new cosmology.”

Carrie Poppy: Did you say this, that their book is called Mind Dynamics?

Ross Blocher: Yes. They wrote that with Elizabeth Rauscher.

Carrie Poppy: It’s such an L. Ron Hubbard title. Mind Dynamics.

Ross Blocher: It is, absolutely. Well, and a friend of ours, Mark Edward, goes way back with JJ. Knew him at—

Carrie Poppy: Oh! You told me this! That’s right!

Ross Blocher: Knew him at CalArts when he was young, and kind of saw him sort of fall into this spiritualist world and UFO contact-y world, and has just sort of watched from afar with interest as it’s become more and more cultlike over time.

Carrie Poppy: Okay, so Mark is a magician. What was he studying at CalArts and what was JJ Hurtak studying at CalArts?

Ross Blocher: I don’t recall. I don’t want to get it wrong, but you know. I think it was something more like art and performance, perhaps.

Carrie Poppy: Okay! But that’s interesting.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Mark has some good stories. Like, apparently JJ always wears this beret hat of his, because there’s a hole in his head that he’s covering.

Carrie Poppy: What?! Woah! Okay?

Ross Blocher: That’s what Mark said. I have not asked him to take off his hat. But they seem like very interesting figures. Yeah. Mark has a story about like going to visit a site with them where they claim to have encountered a UFO, something like that. I don’t know. I don’t want to get all the stories wrong.

Carrie Poppy: (Chuckles.) Okay! Alright. Okay. So, then also on this panel was Tracey Garbutt.

Ross Blocher: And then her last name is Dolan because she’s married to another frequent panelist and UFO historian, Richard Dolan.

Carrie Poppy: And according to Alan, she has been quite a force in the remote viewing world. She studied for a long time, going back to the Monroe Institute. And the Monroe Institute comes up a fair amount in these circles. They love to do this kind of remote viewing, out of body experience, near death experience, research around these kinds of topics.

Ross Blocher: I feel like there’s so much resume padding in these little bios. Because her talks were accentuating things like “the books have been released in 12 languages”. Okay. Well, you got them translated. Good for you. But then you’ve got for Tracey Garbutt Dolan in her bio, it’s telling us that she graduated magna cum laude.

[00:15:00]

Would you need to include that in your profile?

Carrie Poppy: You mean it just seems braggy?

Ross Blocher: Well, it just seems like you’re filling space. Like, why would you even mention that?

Carrie Poppy: I don’t even—I don’t know anything about the Latin… I don’t know what it means. I did well in school?

Ross Blocher: Yeah, well, you know it just means that you did well in your classes. You get a little extra bonus. “She has also explored theories of right/left brain dominance as they relate to experiencers and other individuals who have had UFO sightings.”

Carrie Poppy: Oh, hell yeah! Good. We’ll get into that more when we get into her talk, but yeah, this notion that the right brain handles all of the art and all of the philosophical thought and the deep knowing. (With cartoonish disdain.) And then the leeeft braaaain, which is—UGH, it’s the one that’s in charge in society, and it likes science and math and reason.

Ross Blocher: Carrie’s face is all scrunched up.

(Carrie “YUCK”s loudly.)

And then Anthony Peake. I feel like he spoke the least out of the panelists, but he gave a lecture the previous day on the imaginal realm!

Carrie Poppy: I love this term! This is fun.

Ross Blocher: It’s a good term.

Carrie Poppy: You can’t say imaginary. That gives away too much.

Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) But can we emphasize the role of the imagination?

Carrie Poppy: You can’t say visual. Too left brain, too rational, too material!

So, instead, what about imaginal? Make no commitment in either direction. Form a new word. And if someone challenges you on it, well, they’re not open minded enough.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, fair.

Carrie Poppy: Anyway, “the imaginal realm is the capacity of the mind to see something that’s not here, but is here in another realm.”

Ross Blocher: Takes a certain type of person to make sense of that phrase, but okay.

Carrie Poppy: And then Paul Smith.

Ross Blocher: Paul Smith I would say is probably the most—I don’t know, qualified on the panel? Or just kind of like the star guest if you’re talking about remote viewing. Because—

Carrie Poppy: Star guest, because he’s from Stargate. (Claps.)

Ross Blocher: Oh, well done. Well done. So, Paul—

Carrie Poppy: This is me clapping for me.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, sure. Well deserved. So.

(They laugh.)

Carrie Poppy: I didn’t want anyone to think it was you. It’d be humiliating for you. (Laughs.)

Ross Blocher: I appreciate the transparency. So, Paul H Smith—also PhD—is a retired major in the US army.

(Carrie mumbles.)

He was an intelligence officer. What’s that?

Carrie Poppy: I said that’s major. I tried to stop myself from saying it too, go on.

Ross Blocher: That’s alright. Give in to the urges. “He’s a retired army intelligence officer, a seven-year alumnus of the Department of Defense’s Stargate Remote Viewing Psychic Spy Program! He is president and chief instructor for Remote Viewing Instructional Services, Inc.” Another great place for us to learn remote viewing. “And a founding director and two-time past president of the nonprofit International Remote Viewing Association.”

Carrie Poppy: Okay, yes, I have run into this guy before then.

Ross Blocher: He has authored Reading the Enemy’s Mind: The Essential Guide to Remote Viewing, and co-produced the Learn Dowsing and Remote Perception Home Study Courses. He has been interviewed frequently by media outlets to include—” (Chuckles.) To include. “Coast to Coast, CBS News, A&E Network, History Channel, and many more.” Okay! We’ve got the guy here who is part of the Stargate program!

Carrie Poppy: Yes! So, Stargate, what can you say about it?

Ross Blocher: Yeah, this was a program meant to investigate the claims that people could do this. And it was sort of inspired by the Soviets at the time in the, you know, the late ’60s, early to mid ’70s, were investing lots of money and effort on—I think everyone just referred to it as psychic spying. And if the Russians were spending government money on it, well, we needed to keep up with ze Russians.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. And see if it works. I’m always for spend some money, see if it works, check it out.

Ross Blocher: That is my default as well. And you know, we hear about government programs. We’re like, “$10,000,000?! That’s crazy!” Well, you know, you’re paying people overtime and buying equipment and stuff. So, by all means, try it out. So, I’m not against the idea, but that’s kind of what started this. So, the CIA wanted to have our own tests. Can we find psychic super spies who can look into vaults far away and read the secret documents of the Russians and send us intel?

Carrie Poppy: And they worked with a private research firm called the Stanford Research Institute.

Ross Blocher: Yes. So, when we say SRI, or when they say SRI, they’re talking about the Stanford Research Institute. I don’t know. I feel like the emphasis on the Stanford Research Institute—well, it really was at Stanford, but so much is about, “Hey, a legitimate, well-known institution cared enough to do this. Also the CIA.” It sounds impressive.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. I think of John Mack and how much esteem he earned the UFO movement by his association with Harvard.

Ross Blocher: Harvard. Absolutely.

[00:20:00]

And I think in this community, whenever they can point to one of these well-known institutions or someone with a PhD in their title, they’re all excited to do that. And that gives it all the more credence. But then on the other side, when you have all of these other faculty members at Harvard who disagree with that conclusion, that’s not seen as impressive. That’s just, you know, the school system being against openness to conscious research or whatever. It’s not seen as an argument against the research. But when they have people with good credentials on their side, it’s definitely seen as a boon for the research.

Carrie Poppy: Which to be fair, it’s a signal to me that, okay, you went through a bunch of years of research. You wrote a dissertation; you sat in front of a panel of your peers, and you had to defend your perspective. It means something to me that you got a PhD. It really does. But all it really means to me is, okay, now you are in a new group of peers, and now I need to understand why you disagree with your peers. And if I’m clear on why you disagree and they’re still making sense to me, that’s it.

Ross Blocher: And as we’ve said many times before, you also probably want to look into: what is that PhD in? And where did it come from?

Carrie Poppy: Sure, yes. Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, we’ll check these when we’re done here and make sure there isn’t anything completely crazy. Okay. So, Ingo Swann comes up within five minutes of this panel. So, we should explain who Ingo Swann is.

Ross Blocher: There’s going to be a cast of characters here that are going to come up quite often. So, we’ve already mentioned Russell Targ. He’s one of the main movers and shakers. Yeah. Ingo Swann, interesting guy. He’s kind of primarily known as an artist who got into this world of remote viewing and actually came up with the name remote viewing as a substitute for psychic spying. So, thank you, Ingo.

Carrie Poppy: A name that so reminds me of Fubbi Quantz.

Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) Sure. Yeah. Sounds like he could be an Ascended Master. Okay. Fun fact I stumbled on. He was also a Scientologist.

(Carrie “ohhh”s.)

And not just Ingo Swann, but also another guy who’s going to come up—Hal Puthoff. He was really involved in the late ’60s and even reached OT7 by 1971.

Carrie Poppy: Interestingggg.

Ross Blocher: And at the time, that was as high as you could go.

Carrie Poppy: Okay, that really makes everything sort of in a different light for me.

Ross Blocher: And apparently there’s a documentation of him citing his wins in Scientology, and something akin to remote viewing was one of those wins.

Carrie Poppy: Okay, there you go!

Ross Blocher: So, two of the major founders were involved in Scientology!

Carrie Poppy: Yeah! So, now that psychic spies have come up, Alan starts to ask his panel members, “So, what I really want to know is how can we actually do it? How can the human mind extend its field into a nonlocal viewing of what’s beyond this local space?”

Ross Blocher: And Paul H. Smith, who you would expect to answer—he’s the guy who was involved in the program. He says, “Well, if we knew how it worked, the debate would be over.” And everybody laughs about that. And I’m thinking you teach it!

Carrie Poppy: Right!

Ross Blocher: But I guess I can see what wavelength he’s responding to that on, which is, you know, if we knew the exact mechanism, there would be no debate about it. Which I agree with. If it was a measurable thing, predictable, and we knew the mechanism, then yeah. It wouldn’t be a debate. (Whispering.) But it is.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) But you can at least describe what you do, you personally, when you engage in remote viewing, even without guaranteeing I’ll be able to recreate it and do it as well as you do. You should be able to give me three or four steps! “Close your eyes. Put your head in this space. Think about this.”

Ross Blocher: And then he immediately goes to—well, first of all, not answering the question. But then he starts redefining science and saying, “You know, and science isn’t really about proof. It’s about a preponderance of evidence.”

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. True in a very technical sense.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. But I feel like, okay, you’re already stalling for “how do we expand kind of what we accept as definitive, so that this will be okay by scientific standards”.

Carrie Poppy: Right, it’s like using the “evolution’s just a theory” kind of reaction. And then, okay, now I have to stop and define what theory means in science versus the way you’re using it.

Ross Blocher: And almost in the same breath, Paul Smith trots out the Arthur Conan Doyle chestnut. “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Which is not actually a good principle.

Carrie Poppy: No, that doesn’t leave you with anything. You’re still left with one thing that you have to decide why it’s possible.

Ross Blocher: And maybe you’ve ruled out some things that you came up with, but you don’t think of—

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, you haven’t actually ruled out everything! That’s the whole idea. The third variable problem! (Strained.) The third variable problem!

Ross Blocher: And even if you list four variables, you might’ve forgotten variables 5, 6, 7, 8, through 12. So.

Carrie Poppy: Right, right, right, right. Correlation isn’t causatiooon.

But he says it really does work. The evidence is there for it. It’s actual reality. But yeah, never gets to exactly what that evidence is.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. He just kind of rests on the idea that some part of us is nonphysical.

[00:25:00]

And it’s doing the thing.

Carrie Poppy: Right. But he also said that remote viewing is evidence that there is a nonphysical aspect of our consciousness. And then he said—(chuckles) and then he said, “I know how it works. But I can’t tell you.”

Ross Blocher: “The bummer is that you can’t explain how it works in human terms. In a way, that’s a hand wave and a cop out.” I’m thinking, okay, yes. He says, “I can’t tell you how it works. I think we’ll leave it there.”

(They laugh.)

Okay! Alright! This is going to be a great panel. Paul clearly talks about this a lot and has some kind of ready go-to’s talking about, you know, science and how we can look at this in a different light. And he’s talking about the hard problem of consciousness and how we don’t understand how the matter that creates our neurons gives rise to the phenomena of consciousness.

Carrie Poppy: We don’t fully understand that, yeah.

Ross Blocher: Right, right. That’s a very good point to make, because we know we could end it by destroying said neurons.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. And we know a lot about consciousness, just not as much as we want to.

Ross Blocher: Right. We don’t have a full model, but we have—right. A lot of useful parameters at the very least. But he sort of segues that into saying, “Consciousness could be an emergent property. Remote viewing could also be just sort of an emergent property of having a functioning consciousness. It’s like water has wetness.”

Carrie Poppy: (With a sigh.) Sure. It could. Yeah, sure. It could. It could be like that.

Ross Blocher: And then he talks about the phenomenon of the white crow, which is relevant to this discussion. The idea that in a world with black crows, it’s very easy to prove that there are black crows. But to prove that there’s a white crow, you only need to find one. And so, the idea is that if you find someone who’s a real psychic or a real remote viewer who delivers the goods, who performs beyond scientifically expected results, that’s your white crow.

Carrie Poppy: And then you capture that psychic, and you vivisect them, and you pull them apart, and you confirm for sure that they’re a white crow! No, these things are hard to confirm. It’s not going to be that simpleee.

Ross Blocher: This was interesting too. He pointed out that empiricism, you know, sort of referring to the Scientific process, means from experience. “So, when someone experiences remote viewing or lucid dreaming or astral travel”—these related phenomena—”it’s experientially real, and it’s bad science to ignore it.” And I thought that was a pretty smooth move. I feel like he’s practiced at doing this, sort of like setting these little axioms about science and attitudes of science, so that we’ll be more receptive to this remote viewing phenomenon.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. He’s essentially saying psychology is the study of the subjective human experience, and we shouldn’t ignore that. And I’m like 100%. Every university agrees with you. There was no problem. I hope you’re satisfied.

Ross Blocher: But it sure sounded good to the audience and now makes it sound like remote viewing is just that much more legitimate. I was thinking of Ray Hyman’s Maxim. And Ray’s going to come up in this conversation quite a bit because actually he’s very involved in this whole Stargate story. But his Maxim is, “Do not try to explain something until you are sure there is to be explained.” Because we can spin our wheels coming up with explanations before we’ve actually established there’s something here that we need to explain.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Gosh, this comes up so much when someone tells me a story and then asks me to explain it, because they know I don’t—I depart from paranormal explanations. They’ll know that. And so, they’ll say, “This happened to me, what do you think?”

And they’re daring you to be like a sourpuss at it? “Uh, well, I don’t know! What do you want out of this interaction?”

But a lot of the time the story is just like, well, if I take it at face value, then you’re right. There are parts about that don’t make sense. But I don’t believe you. I don’t think you have this right. I think that probably even your storing and retelling of the story is inaccurate. Now, what am I supposed to do?

Ross Blocher: I heard a great response from James Randi in this interview that our friend Richard Saunders sent me recently. He was on like some Florida talk show, and people were calling in toward the end. And he was trying to tell this woman who had this amazing reading from a psychic what might’ve happened that, “You know what? You might’ve revealed that information to him.”

And the woman said, “Oh, no, no! I know for a fact that he told me the name of my son before I said anything.”

And Randi’s response is, “Well! Then he’s psychic.”

(They laugh.)

It was so funny. And the host just loved it. They’re like, “Oh, that was hilarious!”

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, that’s great. Yeah. I thought you were going to say that he said, “No, you’re not sure!” That’s also true.

Ross Blocher: It was such a was such a funny way to be like, “Oh, well then he’s definitely psychic.”

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. That’s great.

Ross Blocher: In other words, “Well, if you’re that convinced, I can’t help you.”

Carrie Poppy: “I guess I am too.” Yeah. Right. (Laughs.)

[00:30:00]

Yeah, someone—a dear, dear friend one time told me about a mug flying off her desk, rushing to the other wall, and smashing into—and how could I explain it?! And I was like, “Yeah, I can’t explain that as described.”

Ross Blocher: If that really happened! Yeah!

Carrie Poppy: “Okay. So, tell me about the day this happened. Oh, you were really tired. Wow. And what were you doing? Oh, you were studying for a test. Okay. And okay. And how far did it fly? Wow! How far away was the wall? Oh, more like two feet. Okay. And did it—?”

(They laugh.)

Ross Blocher: Oh, ‘cause that’s not the mental image the way you described it gave me. I was picturing more Exorcist action.

Carrie Poppy: “Tell me about your desk setup. So, you got your computer here. Where’s the cup? Oh, over here. Right. Okay. So, you’re right-handed. Okay. So, you turn, and then what happens? Oh, the cup goes flying, huh? Is that one way this COULD HAVE HAPPENED!?”

Anyway. But they’re asking you to say all this to them. And I’m like I don’t want to say all this to you!

Ross Blocher: It’s an unhappy burden. And yeah, you have to take an extraordinary story and slowly peel off the layers of retelling.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) And then they’re mad at you! What is this?!

Ross Blocher: Exactly, yeah. Who is this for?

Carrie Poppy: You came up to me at a party and asked me, ‘cause you saw my TED talk or whatever! Now you’re making me peel apart your personal experiences?!

Ross Blocher: Oh, amazing. So, Alan asked Tracey Dolan how she does remote viewing. And she said, “Well, can I comment on what Phil said?” So, she also didn’t give the practical application or instruction. But she started talking about brain states and how we’ve learned when the brain is in a delta state, as with lucid dreaming or dreaming in general, that we can measure all of these different changes inside the brain in different specific parts and spikes of activity. And I don’t know if she had a real point to all of that.

Carrie Poppy: I think she was saying that when lucid dreaming has been tested in the lab, that people who are in the lucid dream state have MRIs that are lit up similar to people who are awake, instead of what you’d expect—which is something more like someone who’s asleep. And she was just—she just thought that was mind blowing. And to me, I’m like, well, yes. That’s kind of what we’d expect in a lucid dream where like you’re still exercising some amount of control and volition. A lot of people find lucid dreaming really tiring, because you are sort of awake.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Your brain is doing work. And when you’re having a dream during that part of your sleep cycle, your brain is generating images.

Carrie Poppy: It’s doing a lot of work.

Ross Blocher: On a closed circuit. You know, your eyes aren’t involved, but yeah. It’s still active. So, my thought during that was, okay, have we hooked up remote viewers to brain scans to see if this is relevant conversation about what their brains are doing?

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, and if it is lucid dreaming, doesn’t that kind of explain away your theory? That I’m doing something physical somewhere else? Because now you’re just evoking a biological phenomenon I have an existing understanding of.

Ross Blocher: That is pretty well understood. Right. That, okay, you’re just somehow doing something that’s like dreaming or hallucinating. Okay.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. That you can control a bit.

Ross Blocher: Interesting, that your brain already has hardware for and processes for. Huh.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. I’ll actually need less explanations at that point, but okay.

Ross Blocher: So, yeah, we’re still going to need some more data on whether this is even a real thing or not.

Carrie Poppy: Tracey also said that “highly intuitive, high functioning people had additional connections in the brain.” I wonder if she’s talking about the white matter abnormalities in schizophrenia. People with schizophrenia have more interrelations between their white matter. And then Alan was also saying that there’s a part of the brain that’s overly developed in abductees and remote viewers.

Ross Blocher: Interestiiing.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Again, I’m thinking like, you know, I wonder if we’re talking about—

Ross Blocher: There might actually be something there, but not quite what you think it is.

Carrie Poppy: Mm-hm. But it’s interesting. ‘Cause I mean, those connections are also relevant in people with autism. Like, famously Einstein’s brain. They wanted to know about the connections between the different parts of the brain.

Ross Blocher: Oh yeah. That he was supposed to have had like a thick corpus callosum, connecting the two sides of the brain.

Carrie Poppy: (Strained.) Ohhh, we’re out of my depth.

You mentioned Elizabeth Rauscher?

Ross Blocher: Yeah, Rauscher. Yeah. She was a coauthor with JJ Hurtak.

Carrie Poppy: So, JJ in describing her says, “She wrote over 450 scientific papers.” Very impressive. “And is probably the most elegant and sophisticated female physicist.”

(They laugh.)

Such a specific set of words. He had three female physicists up on his wall, and he’s like, “Oooh.”

Ross Blocher: Which one is the most influential and elegant?

Carrie Poppy: (Laughing.) Sophisticated and elegant female physicist?

Ross Blocher: He was the Linda Moulton Howe of the panel. JJ Hurtak, you really don’t know where he’s going to lead the conversation. Because Alan Seinfeld was trying to prompt him. “Oh, so you wrote a book with Russell Targ”—this pioneer of remote viewing—“called End of Suffering, and Ingo Swann did the illustrations. Very cool.”

[00:35:00]

And he was trying to get JJ to comment on that, and JJ starts to talk about this cosmic egg in the universe that represents the human mind. And that consciousness we know by deduction must be beyond space time, and it can’t be explained by quantum physics. And I’m going, “What is going on?!” And that’s where he starts talking about Elizabeth Rauscher and her elegance.

Yeah, I have a hard time summarizing anything JJ Hurtak says. And I don’t know if it’s me projecting, but like I’ll just feel this sort of discomfort of the panel. Like, well, is he done now? Can we talk about something substantial again?

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) But everyone loves him. So, let’s give them more of him, I guess.

Ross Blocher: (Sighs.) I mean. Okay. I got to say for the moderator, Alan did a lot of talking in this panel. He was very much involved as a participant.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, that’s true. Though, at least he gave direction. He kept the conversation going somewhere. And where was that somewhere? Back to his original thought. How do you do it?

Ross Blocher: Right. Well, we certainly needed that structure. So, by all means, thank you, Alan, for providing that.

Carrie Poppy: Absolutely. So, Alan now is kind of trying to think of illustrations that might help us understand remote viewing better. And he says to Desiree, “You know, is it kind of like a radio? Like, if you open a radio, you won’t find the announcer or the band. It’s just getting a signal from someplace else.”

Ross Blocher: It was a good analogy.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. “So, I feel that’s an analogy for what the brain is. You know, what do you think of that, Desiree?”

She goes on with that idea for a while. She talks about the CIA. She goes off on her own little reverie. And then she says, “You know, maybe you start developing certain parts of your brain when you start remote viewing, and that’s what we want to encourage here.”

Ross Blocher: Maybe. Okay.

Carrie Poppy: (Chuckles.) “Because we want to be actually on par with the extraterrestrial intelligence who use a similar part of their brains to do this.”

Ross Blocher: And she starts telling us a little bit of this history, of how all of this came together at the Stanford Research Institute. Hal Puthoff and Ingo Swann met in 1971, and it was Hal who pulled in Russell Targ, who the bio here tells us is “a physicist, author, and ESP researcher and pioneer in the earliest development of lasers and their applications in the 1950s and ’60s. He has published nine books and more than 100 refereed papers on ESP research, lasers, plasma physics, and laser applications. And his latest book is The Reality of ESP: A Physicist’s Proof of Psychic Ability. And also recently produced a two-hour documentary film, Third Eye Spies.”

Carrie Poppy: Clap, clap, clap.

Ross Blocher: “Describing the true story of CIA psychic spying.”

Carrie Poppy: Which you’ve seen.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, I watched it. And it’s funny—towards the very end of it, he complains that Wikipedia blocked him, because he kept trying to go into his own article and add references to his work with lasers. And he said that they wanted to censor him, because they only wanted to hear about his remote viewing accomplishments. And I thought, okay, well, I feel like he’s probably misrepresenting or misremembering what happened with Wikipedia. First of all, you’re not supposed to edit anything about yourself.

Carrie Poppy: Yes, that’s right.

Ross Blocher: So, that’s just not allowed. But also, yeah, you’re there because you’re notable for something. And is he notable for his work on lasers? It might be interesting. He might’ve made great contributions, but he’s notable because he kickstarted this whole RV thing.

Carrie Poppy: And what you’re notable for is for other people to say.

(Ross agrees.)

That’s really pretty much the definition of being notable is “do other people think so?” I had a guy who introduced himself to me at a party once and said, “Hi, I’m Bob. I’m famous.”

And I said, “No, you’re not!”

(They laugh.)

“You don’t have to introduce yourself to me this way if you’re famous enough to walk up to people at parties. And say, ‘Hi, I’m Bob. I’m famous!’” Uuuugh.

Ross Blocher: Bob has his whole spiel worked out, and then he’s waiting for you to say, “What are you famous for?” And you just weren’t gonna play along.

Carrie Poppy: Well, don’t worry. He told me anyway. He was dragging around a whole box of books about why he was famous, and he gave me one of his self-published books. And it was about how he taught students about the dairy industry and got them to go vegan, but they were in eighth grade, and they were supposed to be learning science or whatever. So, the school district was like, “That’s very nice, Bob, but you need to get out of here. This isn’t your job.” And then Bob had to quit, and then Bob was in a parade, and now he’s famous. ARE YOU IMPRESSED NOW, ROSS?!

Ross Blocher: Oh no. And how long did it take you to learn all this? Good part of a party, I’m guessing.

Carrie Poppy: No, several years. ‘Cause of course I’m going to read that whole book.

Ross Blocher: Okay. (Chuckles.) Well, one of my Bible teachers in high school was also a pilot, and he flew some of the planes in the famous Tom Cruise fighter pilot movie.

Carrie Poppy: Oh yeah.

[00:40:00]

Time to Fly with Tom Cruise.

Ross Blocher: And everybody’s yelling, (singing) “Highway to the danger zone.” Top Gun!

Carrie Poppy: (Singing.) “Take my breath away—” That’s it!

Ross Blocher: Some people are so mad right now. (Laughing.) They’re like, “Top Gun! Top Gun, you idiot.” He had been one of the pilots of that. Anyways, he had a great joke, which I’ve heard many versions of now with different professions. But he said, “How do you know there’s a fighter pilot at your party?”

Carrie Poppy: He’ll tell you?

Ross Blocher: He’ll tell you.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) People say that about vegans all the time. And you know what?! Bob’s walking around parties proving it!

Ross Blocher: He’s famous. Amazing. And also, Russell Targ at the end of this documentary, he was also complaining that his TEDx talk had been censored by TED for being too controversial. But then it went on YouTube, and now it has 3,000,000+ views.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. TEDx is like reasonably concerned about keeping bad science off their platform.

Ross Blocher: Right. Which we ran into when we interviewed Paul from the Etherian Society, he had given a TEDx talk. And it had similarly been pulled for maybe not being quite in line with the standards of TED.

Carrie Poppy: Yep, yep. There you go. That does happen. Mine’s still up there, so.

Ross Blocher: No one’s removed it.

Carrie Poppy: (Whispering.) Yeah, so just something to think about.

Ross Blocher: Legit, you’re famous.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) That’s why I walk into parties, and I say, “I’m Carrie. I’m famous.”

Ross Blocher: So, anyways, Desiree was talking about Hal pulling in Russell Targ into the Stanford Research Institute, AKA Stargate program. They got funding from the CIA. This is how she summarized it. And then they brought in these other two guys, Pat Price and Joe McMoneagle, it’s spelled like McMon-Eagle.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, interesting.

Ross Blocher: And they were essentially two of their white crows, these super talented remote viewers. And it’s interesting, the documentary Third Eye Spy—one of the opening scenes is Russell Targ wandering around this Memorial Park, the cemetery that I instantly recognized. It’s the Valhalla Memorial Park in Burbank in North Hollywood.

(Carrie “wow”s.)

Yeah. Which actually, I have multiple relatives who are buried there.

Carrie Poppy: Are interred? Oh, wow.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, and he was looking for the grave of former police officer Pat Price, who was one of their white crows. This amazing remote viewer. And of course, in the documentary, you’re just going to hear tons and tons of stories about these amazing hits that Pat Price had. Oh, and there was one woman as well, who was well regarded as a reader—Helen Hammond, who was just the secretary, but they tried having her do some of this remote viewing. And it turns out she was great at it as well.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, that’s right! Yes. They made a big deal out of how she had, you know, not really had any particular history, but.

Ross Blocher: Which was kind of like a common thread. Because at one point the remote viewer didn’t show up, and Russell had to step in and do the remote viewing. And it turns out he was really good at it too. So, the researchers could do it. Sounds like anyone could step in and produce something that would impress these people.

Carrie Poppy: And to kind of give a spoiler, I think we do eventually find out why that is. Which is, they’ll run a test on us. They’ll have us predict what it is they’ve got hidden in their hand or under their desk or whatever, and then the audience is made to guess. And you can get anywhere in the vicinity, and they’re like, “Yeah, you did it.” But what they discourage you from doing is actually labeling it. They want you to just describe the shape, the color. They want you to be as vague as possible. And then if you’re too specific, they say, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no!”

So, some people were saying, “Oh, well, I think it’s a toy.”

And they’d be like, “No, no! Not a toy! Not a toy! Wh-wh-what are you picturing that makes you say toy?”

“Okay. Something rectangular.”

“Okay! So, something with edges. Got it.” And all of a sudden, anything’s a hit in that standard.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, and Alan Seinfeld really did point that out as like part of a good protocol where you avoid from naming like a specific structure. Like, don’t say it’s the Empire State Building, just stick with, “I see something pointy and metal; it looks like a triangle.”

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) Yeah. And now—okay, now I can just say you got a hit, even if it’s my pyramid that’s over to your left here. That’s a pointy metal—right? Yeah. So, it—ugh. It leaves so much room.

Ross Blocher: There it is. Yup. And if the actual target was the cat painting next to it, then they’d be like, “Oh, well it was right next to the pyramid!”

Carrie Poppy: Right next to the pointy metal thing!

Ross Blocher: There’s so many ways to fuzz the edges and turn a miss into a hit. But since they’re talking about the project, Alan asks, “Paul, can you tell us about your involvement with Project Stargate?”

Carrie Poppy: “And can you tell us any secrets?”

Ross Blocher: Yeah. “Can you tell us anything you can’t say?” And everyone has a good laugh at that.

Carrie Poppy: Very disclosure lunch.

Ross Blocher: So, he gives a little bit more of that history of the Russians having spent a lot of money on this and says that, you know, a lot of skeptics have lampooned the Stargate program for costing like 20- to 25,000,000 over many years. But the Russians spent way more, so.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, okay. (Laughs.)

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Alright. Does that make it better?

Carrie Poppy: You would think that you should be applauding the Russians then, if you think this research is worthy.

[00:45:00]

Ross Blocher: Well, he’s just saying if you’re going to pick on someone, pick on the Russians. And he even tries to make the point that the CIA knew that Russians don’t spend money on things that don’t work. And I don’t know. They had a whole brush with Lysenkoism. You know, bad ideas can catch on anywhere.

Carrie Poppy: Oh my—yeah! Well, also science is all the time having to test things that turn out to be, quote/unquote, bad ideas. We run through them and try to find better ones.

Ross Blocher: Mm-hm. Paul also lets us know that the Stargate label did come later. Originally it was just SRI. And eventually, the CIA kind of internalized the program.

Carrie Poppy: One of my undercover trauma therapists thought that I was a survivor of the Stargate program.

Ross Blocher: Oh, and are you? Can you tell us anything you can’t tell us? That you can’t say?

Carrie Poppy: (Playfully coy.) I don’t know! (Laughs.) I don’t know, but that was her theory for my migraines, a bunch of problems.

Ross Blocher: Okay. And speaking of like how there—I guess there’s really just no qualifications for this. How do you get into such a thing? You know. I was going to say, you don’t go to school for remote viewing. Though, now you do with these people. But Paul was saying that back in 1983, when he was recruited, he’d never heard about any of this. He just happened to live near two of these guys. I think it was like Pat and one of the others. But they had just seen him like in his garage and saw that he had majored in art at BYU.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, yes! Uh-huh. Yeah. I thought that was interesting. A Mormon school.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. And that he wrote short stories. And so, they asked if he wanted to take this testing to be a psychic spy. And he said yes, and that’s how Paul Smith got involved in all of this. Okay!

Carrie Poppy: Wow. Really one of those moments that changes the trajectory of your life.

Ross Blocher: No kidding. So, then Desiree is mentioning like ways to test these abilities. And she mentions this app that you can get on Android. I found it on iOS. It’s called ESP Trainer.

Carrie Poppy: Yes! Okay. I haven’t gotten this yet. I got to get it.

Ross Blocher: Alright. Well, shall I test you on mine here?

Carrie Poppy: Oh, please!

Ross Blocher: And there were two different versions. There was one that was like a casino ESP app. And I guess you could use it to test your abilities at the casino?

Carrie Poppy: But I want Stargate ESP Trainer for a dollar.

Ross Blocher: Stargate ESP. Yeah. And it’s got like this eyeball of someone with red skin. And their actual iris is the planet Earth. “Stargate ESP trainer is designed to help you learn to describe distant or future events. It is a direct outgrowth of the secret $25,000,000 CIA Stargate program with dozens of viewers at SRI, where we show that psychic abilities are real and available.” I won’t describe the methodology to you, ‘cause I think it’ll become very clear very quickly. But let’s just test you, Carrie, to see how well you do with these targets.

Carrie Poppy: Okay.

Ross Blocher: It’s going to have 12 targets that you’re going to try to identify. And it’s going to ask you yes or no questions about them.

(Carrie affirms.)

Carrie’s looking about probably thinking, “What’s the target?”

Carrie Poppy: Well, I’m just asking myself—yeah. What’s the target?

Ross Blocher: Which they don’t seem to care about.

Carrie Poppy: What?!

Ross Blocher: It’s just seems like if you tell a remote viewer, “Focus on a target,” somehow they’re okay with that, and they just magically focus on a target. I want more details! Where is this target?

Carrie Poppy: Okay. Okay. Alright. I’m going to close my eyes and just—I also have a weak inner eye, and this is not much direction! Okay. So, I’m just going to picture something. Okay.

Ross Blocher: Okay. So, this is for Carrie.

Carrie Poppy: Okay. Ready. Okay.

Ross Blocher: Target one. Is there water? Your options are no water, or—you guessed it—water.

Carrie Poppy: No water. Okay. Now I have to picture something else though?

Ross Blocher: No, this is going to be one target. We’re going to stay on this target. You’re going to answer the yes or no questions. And then I’m going to present you four pictures of—it’s going to be one of those, and then you’ll tell me which one it was.

Carrie Poppy: Okay. I’m going to have something in my head. It’s not going to be that though! But okay!

(They laugh.)

Ross Blocher: Well, yes, this is the problem. But alright. Is there water? Is there no water?

Carrie Poppy: No water.

Ross Blocher: Are there trees?

Carrie Poppy: I mean, I don’t think so, but I can make this a tree if I force it?

Ross Blocher: Trees or no trees?

Carrie Poppy: Um—?! Oh fuck. Okay. Let’s say yes. Tree. Yes, trees. (Chuckling softly.)

Ross Blocher: Yes. Trees. Okay. Now choose the true target from one of these four pictures.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, okay.

Ross Blocher: So, they give you four images.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, it’s—okay. Alright. So, I’m going to pick this pyramid.

Ross Blocher: Okay. So, the target image was no water, no trees. Player picked no water, but trees, and there were no trees. So, we have so far zero picture matches, but we have one property match. Because you were right that there was no water.”

Carrie Poppy: So, the answer is the image that you have at top, which is a brick doorway?

Ross Blocher: Yeah, that was the correct target. Yeah.

Carrie Poppy: That’s what I was supposed to picture. Okay. Here’s what I pictured.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, a brick archway with a mountain behind it.

Carrie Poppy: Ugh. And then I picked a pyramid.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, and I bet you could make an argument for like, well, look! You’ve got the mountains in the background, very much the same shape as the pyramid.

Carrie Poppy: True. But what I pictured when you said to picture a target was a green triangle. So, then when you said a tree, I was like, “Oh, I can make that like a Christmas tree if I force it.” (Laughs.)

[00:50:00]

Ross Blocher: Oh, we are off to the races! Yes. That is such a strong hit, Carrie. Green triangle.

Carrie Poppy: It’s exactly like a curved arch. (Laughs.)

Ross Blocher: That’s kind of fun that a pyramid was one of the options, but misleading. Okay. But you had an image that you created. Okay. Now you’ve got a second target, and now you kind of know how this is going to work. You’re eventually going to see four images, and it’s definitely going to be one of them.

Carrie Poppy: Okay. I’m picturing something. Okay, I’m picturing something.

Ross Blocher: Are there bridges?

(Carrie wheezes out a no.)

No bridges? Okay.

Carrie Poppy: What?!

Ross Blocher: Is there water?

Carrie Poppy: I should be picturing locations, clearly. Um, okay. Is there water? (Laughs.) Yes, I guess so.

Ross Blocher: I’ll admit when I was doing this, I would see their prompt, and then I would like form an image and be like, “Okay, no trees. Okay, water.”

Carrie Poppy: Okay, I’ll try that next time.

Ross Blocher: So, now here are the four images. You said no bridges, and there is water.

Carrie Poppy: Okay. I pictured a kitten, and you’re showing me—(laughing).

Ross Blocher: Yeah, Carrie’s got options to choose from. All of them have like human edifices—like buildings, but no humans in them.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughing.) None of these are kitten-like. One’s a barn. Okay. I guess a kitten would most likely live at the Colosseum, ‘cause that’s all run down and that’s where feral cats live. But no, it was—

Ross Blocher: (Teasing.) It’s so similar though, Carrie. We could make an argument.

Carrie Poppy: A community on the sea.

Ross Blocher: A bunch of houses, looks maybe European, and it’s like right on the water.

Carry Poppy: Yeah, maybe Spain.

Ross Blocher: But you picked the Colosseum.

Carrie Poppy: And I pictured a kitten.

Ross Blocher: But hey, you got no bridges and water. Both of those were correct.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) I picked water, because I was like, sure, a cat has spit in its mouth.

Ross Blocher: So, you’re up to three property matches out of two targets. Okay. Let’s keep going.

Carrie Poppy: Lord.

Ross Blocher: Is this a single object or structure?

Carrie Poppy: Okay. So, now I’ll picture something. Okay. Okay. I’ve got it. Okay. Is this a single object or structure? Yes, I guess so.

Ross Blocher: The options are single object or no single structure.

Carrie Poppy: (Chuckles.) What are the options?

Ross Blocher: These are linked together. Is it a single object or structure? So, are we looking at one thing? Or are we looking at a bunch of things?

Carrie Poppy: One thing.

Ross Blocher: Okay. Single object. Is there grass?

Carrie Poppy: No.

Ross Blocher: And I hope all of you are playing along. Okay. So, now Carrie gets to choose between colosseum again, this yellow house, a winding road with lots of trees—like kind of in a mountainside—or something that looks like ruins of a like Parthenon or something like that.

Carrie Poppy: Okay, I pictured Notre Dame. So, I’m going to—

Ross Blocher: And we’re seeing the Colosseum image again, so already I’d be like, “Well, I’m not choosing that again.”

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, fair. And then what’s the one on the bottom right, Parthenon?

Ross Blocher: Something akin to that.

Carrie Poppy: Okay, I’m actually gonna—Notre Dame evokes to me the bell tower, comfort, being in solitude, a comforting solitude. And this image at top right also has a similar vibe. So, I’m picking that—only to discover it was the Parthenon.

Ross Blocher: Oh! You talked yourself out of it. But you did get that it was a single object and there was no grass. So, you get two more property match points. Alright. Target four. Bridges or no bridges?

Carrie Poppy: Oh my god, all these—

Ross Blocher: Or Jeff Bridges.

Carrie Poppy: (Chuckles.) Right. Okay. Okay. Yes. Yes, there’s a bridge.

Ross Blocher: There are bridges. Is it a single object or structure?

Carrie Poppy: Yes.

Ross Blocher: And now we’ve narrowed it down to like an aqueduct, or like a modern building with a palm tree in front of it, or a snowcapped mountain in front of a grassy plain, or a bridge that’s covering like a lake.

Carrie Poppy: (Sighs heavily.) Well, this time when you asked me if it was a bridge, I just decided to picture a bridge. So, that gets it down to two options. (Laughs.)

Ross Blocher: Hey, you’ve got two bridges. Okay. 50%.

Carrie Poppy: And I pictured the bridge that Jeff Bridges walks across in Bridges on Bridges.

Ross Blocher: Is that a thing?

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, yeah. It’s the St. George Street Bridge in Los Feliz.

Ross Blocher: Wow.

Carrie Poppy: So, okay, I’m picturing that. And now I’m going to zag. Ah, well, see—both of these bridges are on water. That bridge isn’t on water. Oh, fuck! Um?!

Ross Blocher: Uh-oh. So, you’re giving this way more thought than I did.

(They laugh.)

Carrie Poppy: Okay. I’m going to pick the one that has LA-like architecture, because I pictured something in LA. UUUUGH! And it’s the Golden Gate Bridge. Fuck.

Ross Blocher: Oh no! Okay. You did zag. You picked the palm tree thing. Okay. But hey, you have seven property matches.

Carrie Poppy: Property matches. What can that possibly mean here? I’m losing! I’m not doing well. I should be losing.

Ross Blocher: I guess there’s 24 total property matches you could get. And you’re only partway through, so you’re doing pretty well on property matches.

Carrie Poppy: But I haven’t gotten any correct, so how is that happening?

Ross Blocher: Yeah, you have zero picture matches. When, for me, I would just have to like—I would have to commit.

Carrie Poppy: So, maybe it’s like I got some questions right.

Ross Blocher: If I had already, like said bridges and trees, I would have to choose a picture that had bridges and trees.

[00:55:00]

I would just stick to my guns, essentially. Target five. Buildings? No buildings?

Carrie Poppy: Okay. (Sighs heavily.) Uuuh, there’s a building.

Ross Blocher: Are there repeating elements?

Carrie Poppy: (Snorts.) What?! Um, no? I mean—I mean—

Ross Blocher: No repeating elements.

Carrie Poppy: In life, there always are.

(They laugh.)

Ross Blocher: Okay, here are your options to choose from. We’ve got just kind of this nice, bucolic house out on a flower-covered hill. Then we’ve got something that looks like the Hagia Sophia, like a large mosque. And we’ve got what looks like an architectural dig site in the desert. Yeah. Some sort of ruins. Oh, it looks like almost the step pyramids. And then we’ve got snowcapped mountains.

Carrie Poppy: None of these are Drew Spears Productions at 1960 Riverside Drive, which is what I was picturing. So, I’ll pick—

Ross Blocher: Carrie looks helpless, hopeless. Hapless.

Carrie Poppy: I guess I’ll pick the most modern looking one, because I pictured a modern scene.

Ross Blocher: Okay. How’d that work out for you? You got it! Yay!

Carrie Poppy: (Elated.) Oh my god! Finally! Finally! Oh my god.

Ross Blocher: Carrie got it! Okay, we got a target image.

Carrie Poppy: Oh my god. I did it.

Ross Blocher: Alright, new one. Water or no water?

Carrie Poppy: Oh no. (Weakly.) Okay, I have to picture another thing? Okay, water.

Ross Blocher: Water. Trees or no trees?

Carrie Poppy: Trees.

Ross Blocher: Oh my goodness. We have two pictures of pyramids, and then we’ve got what looks like St. Peter’s Square and a nice sandy beach.

Carrie Poppy: I pictured a farm sanctuary, so I was picturing pigs. (Laughs.)

Ross Blocher: You said water and trees, so it seems like that kind of connects you to the beach.

Carrie Poppy: A mud bath—okay. Good.

Ross Blocher: Oh, and it’s a pyramid.

Carrie Poppy: But no, it’s a pyramid.

Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) Oh no. Uuh, okay. Next target. Buildings? No buildings?

Carrie Poppy: Okay. Buildings.

Ross Blocher: Okay. Buildings. Single object or structure or no single structure?

Carrie Poppy: No single—well, I mean, there were multiple structures. So, no single structure, I guess.

Ross Blocher: Okay. And now you have to choose between the winding road, a kind of a distant view of a lot of mountains, another pyramid but more different pyramid, and a Joshua tree.

Carrie Poppy: I pictured the Howard Johnson Anaheim, and I’m going to pick pyramid, because it at least has an interior.

Ross Blocher: Building. Okay. Yep. There we go. Okay. And it was the Joshua tree. Oh no, what is going on here? I’ll be interested to show you my results. Grass or no grass?

Carrie Poppy: How many of these are there!?

Ross Blocher: There’s 12.

Carrie Poppy: Okay. We’re at eight. Okay. Okay. I can do it. Okay! Picturing it. Okay. Is it grass or no grass? grass.

Ross Blocher: A single object or no single structure?

Carrie Poppy: A single object. (Chuckles defeatedly.)

Ross Blocher: Okay. And now your options are a mountain with snow, a building with many columns, another beach and harbor, and kind of like grass shacks with trees in the background.

Carrie Poppy: Okay, I need to stop reaching for things I’ve actually seen.

(Ross agrees.)

I pictured the McDonald’s on Vine. Okay, so.

Ross Blocher: There’s some arches here.

Carrie Poppy: Okay, yeah! Let’s do that one. Good.

Ross Blocher: Hey, we got that one right!

Carrie Poppy: This is the way to do it.

(They laugh.)

Ross Blocher: Alright. You’ve gotten two image matches. Okay. Single structure or no single structure?

Carrie Poppy: No single structure.

Ross Blocher: Repeating elements or no repeating elements?

Carrie Poppy: Repeating elements.

Ross Blocher: Okay. And?

Carrie Poppy: Just like life!

Ross Blocher: Okay. We’ve got people standing by a beach. We’ve got like sand dunes. We’ve got Grand Canyon and another step pyramid.

Carrie Poppy: Okay. I pictured like an Ireland scene, like rolling green hills.

Ross Blocher: Okay.

Carrie Poppy: So, I guess the bottom left has the most of that.

Ross Blocher: Okay. Grand Canyon it is. And, oh no, it was the step pyramid.

(Carrie sighs heavily.)

Alright. Number ten, is it manmade or natural?

Carrie Poppy: Oh, okay. New thing, new thing, new thing, new thing. Okay. It’s man made.

Ross Blocher: Is there water?

Carrie Poppy: Yes.

Ross Blocher: So, now we’ve got step pyramid photo, the first one. There’s a lot of repeats here. We’ve got kind of a city view with like a bunch of European bell towers and buildings. We’ve got the repeating columns at an angle receding into the distance. And we have like a desert pulled off to the side of the road scene.

Carrie Poppy: Okay. (Sighs.) I pictured the fountain in front of Melissa Scott’s Faith Center. And I would say Melissa Scott’s Faith Center looks the most like bottom left.

Ross Blocher: Okay. And step pyramids, number one. Two more, two more!

Carrie Poppy: Two more.

Ross Blocher: Okay. Modern or ancient?

Carrie Poppy: Modern.

Ross Blocher: Trees or no trees?

Carrie Poppy: Trees.

Ross Blocher: Showing Carrie the options. We’ve got like a blown-out photo with—it looks like that could be Rythmia.

Carrie Poppy: Okay, I know this time.

Ross Blocher: Oh, you know which one?

(Carrie confirms.)

Which one?

Carrie Poppy: I pictured Disneyland, definitely bottom left. Closest.

Ross Blocher: Oh, hey, okay. Yeah, someone on a boat with a bridge. Oh no! It was the top left one.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, hm. Bottom left, top left, so close.

Ross Blocher: Are there buildings or no buildings?

Carrie Poppy: There’s a building. No—there’s buildings.

Ross Blocher: Okay. Single object or no single structure?

Carrie Poppy: Single object, sure.

Ross Blocher: Single object, okay. And here you have a different view of the Colosseum. See, like even after you’ve done this for a while, you kind of—you’ll learn what images are available.

[01:00:00]

Carrie Poppy: I know, and you’d think that I’d pull them up. But then as soon as you ask me, I reset, and I just pictured my childhood home.

Ross Blocher: And we’ve got like a rutted desert.

Carrie Poppy: So, I’m gonna say this one’s the most like my childhood home. And we’ll see how—

Ross Blocher: You got it!

(Carrie cheers.)

Hey, success on your last one. (Claps.) Okay, so you ended up with three picture matches out of 12.

Carrie Poppy: Yikes.

Ross Blocher: And then 14 property matches.

Carrie Poppy: (Weakly.) What does that mean?!

Ross Blocher: Which means you have ESP ability present.

Carrie Poppy: Oh my god. So, that must mean that when I answer those yes/no questions, they’re counting those too as hits or misses.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, if you get some of the properties right, then you’re A-OK. I was very similar.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, properties! I was picturing like—(chuckles) like the property your house sits on. That’s what I thought you meant. Oh, you mean like—

Ross Blocher: No, like the properties of what they asked you yes or no on.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, characteristics.

Ross Blocher: It had trees, so you got that property right.

Carrie Poppy: Okay, yeah. I was like I didn’t get any properties right! Why does it keep saying that? (Laughs.)

Ross Blocher: Yeah. The Property Brothers would not accept this whatsoever.

Carrie Poppy: Fuck! Okay. I get it now.

Ross Blocher: So, I did ever so slightly better. I got four picture matches instead of three. And I got 14 property matches, same as you. So, I also have ESP ability present, but it caused me far less anguish.

Carrie Poppy: Oh wow.

(They laugh.)

You didn’t work as hard?

Ross Blocher: I didn’t work as hard.

Carrie Poppy: You got to think about every question! I gave myself a headache! (Laughs.)

Ross Blocher: Look at us! We’re potential ESP celebrities. I have an animation degree. That’s all you need.

Carrie Poppy: Ugh. I gotta drink some of this Powerade now.

Ross Blocher: That’ll hydrate you. Carrie is hydrating. She’s getting back her important brain connections. This is a good time—

Carrie Poppy: (Garbles out a musical scale.) That’s a harp.

Ross Blocher: Oh, that’s—that’s a lovely harp you have there.

(Carrie thanks him with a laugh.)

Yeah, this is a good time to let you all know that we’ve shot forward in time. Because we were recording, but then we had schedules. And now we are back recording.

Carrie Poppy: But now time has passed, and I have given Drew the remote viewing app test. Would you like to know his results?

Ross Blocher: Okay, so you got the Stargate ESP trainer on your phone. By the way, I don’t know if we mentioned that Russell Targ is listed as the developer of the app.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, I didn’t even notice! Okay.

Ross Blocher: So, you couldn’t ask for a more legitimate use of your 99 cents. So, okay. You had Drew try it, and how did he do? How did he… Drew?

Carrie Poppy: (Chuckles.) His picture matches were three.

Ross Blocher: I was going to say, when I asked you earlier how Drew’s doing, I think you would have told me if you had proven he was psychic.

(Carrie laughs.) But continue. Picture matches, three.

Carrie Poppy: Maybe. 24 hours have passed and even if this had said, “You’re psychic!” I think it would have worn off by now.

Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) Okay, three. So, that’s the same that you got.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, was it? Okay. And then property matches. He got 12. What did I get?

Ross Blocher: 14.

(Carrie chuckles smugly.)

Carrie’s going to lord this over him tonight. He’s going to hear about it.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) This says, “a good beginning”.

Ross Blocher: A good beginning. Okay. So, we just passed over the threshold where they’re like “some psychic ability present”.

Carrie Poppy: Yes. Yes, exactly! So, I am more psychic than Drew. Good. Gooood.

Ross Blocher: Well, in the spirit of full—

Carrie Poppy: Are you more psychic than me though? Shoot.

Ross Blocher: Well, I had one more picture match the first time I did it. But in the spirit of transparency, I went through and did it again and I just tried to do it like just super-fast, just kind of clicking on stuff to see what would happen. Only one picture match and nine property matches. So.

Carrie Poppy: Mm! Okay! So, you really did do better by using some kind of strategy, though you did share with us that you had an internal coherence strategy you were following at least.

Ross Blocher: Mm-hm. Yeah. If I had chosen properties, I was going to make sure I was picturing one that matched those properties.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. It’s interesting. My rigid way of locking in on it was, okay, the very first thing I picture, I need to be faithful to, and now I’ll answer all these questions as faithfully as I can to this original image I’ve got in my head. But they don’t really tell you which of those things to do.

Ross Blocher: Which is fair, especially if this were more of an open-ended thing where you weren’t constrained to four options with each test.

Carrie Poppy: Yes, totally. Eventually you learn which pictures might come up, and you start to be like, “Okay, I’m going to try to picture a kind of a bridge-like scene, because there seem to be a lot of those!”

Ross Blocher: This is interesting. Just in our very quick results here and what we were saying about me doing better when I was trying, it reminds me of one anecdote from an interview I saw with Dr. Jessica Utts. And she’ll come up. She was one of the paper writers who evaluated the Stargate project. So, we’ll probably be talking about her soon. But one thing she mentioned was the sheep goat effect, and I like this. So, apparently people who believed in the ESP remote viewing phenomena tended to do better than chance. And people who did not believe tended to do worse than chance. That was referred to as the sheep goat effect. That’s a fun one to add to my tool belt.

Carrie Poppy: So, what is the effect?

[01:05:00]

Can you break it down?

Ross Blocher: Okay. So, this is from the APA website. The way they set this up tells me something. They say, “In parapsychology experiments using Zener cards or similar targets, the sheep goat effect is a supposed difference in outcomes found between trials involving participants who believe they may succeed in the given task—sheep—and trials involving those who assume that this is impossible—goats.” And it was coined by parapsychologist Gertrude Schmeidler. So, my guess is this could also be tied to like a measurer effect or a bias in the experimenters.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, it sounds like it actually reveals non-randomness in the methodology, the testing process.

Ross Blocher: Or if the testing method itself somehow rewards people who are just kind of engaged and trying. For example, we were talking about how there’s a lot of massaging that happens later with, “Oh, oh! Well, I saw a triangle. So, that makes sense that it would be a pyramid.” I’m guessing perhaps the people who do believe in the phenomenon to begin with are less likely to haggle and try to—

Carrie Poppy: Like I didn’t. Like I was describing, I rigidly was like, “No, Carrie! The very first thing you pictured, hold on to that.” Because that’s what I think of as honest.

Ross Blocher: And they encourage you to do, but do they actually do that when they’re testing themselves?

Carrie Poppy: Oh, do they encourage you to do that?

Ross Blocher: Well, that was during the panel, they were saying, you know, whatever the first thing is that comes to your mind—Desiree was saying, hold on to that, stick with it.

Carrie Poppy: Mm, yes, okay. Oh, that’s true.

Ross Blocher: Cool. Thanks for trying that out on Drew.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, by the way, Drew was so mad through the whole thing. He was furious. He also—

Ross Blocher: (Laughing.) Just at like how this app was built?

Carrie Poppy: Yes. Well, he had the same reaction I did of just like, “Oh, wow. Okay. I need to cough up an image every time? Let me stop and pause and think about it, I guess.” So, he was doing all that work—the same level of work I was doing that you found funny. But that level of work I find like amusing, he was like, “This is ridiculous! Why am I spending this much time doing this? It makes no sense!”

Ross Blocher: I think that puts me just on that goat end of that spectrum, where I was like, “Do I want to put the effort into this thing that I know is not going to reward said effort? No, I do not.”

Carrie Poppy: Oh, interesting. Okay.

Ross Blocher: So, yeah, I don’t think this is a well-designed app. Sorry, Russell Targ.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Also, I don’t even know that I believe that it’s predicting anything! That it like has that picture in mind when it asks me the questions that come before. I don’t know if I even buy that!

Ross Blocher: Oh, after taking it a few times, you realize it has a limited set of images that it’s using as targets. So, at some point I could just start homing in on what I think is a good aggregate of features that are likely to show up in the images, like counting cards or something. Yeah. Problems with these protocols. Definitely something that will come up here. By the way, Russell Targ, we mentioned still alive. He’s 90 years old.

Carrie Poppy: Oh wow!

Ross Blocher: Yeah, so still kicking.

Carrie Poppy: Now, did Desiree talk about someone walking around the Kremlin in her head, and then someone else tracking submarines, and that’s why the West won?

Ross Blocher: Yeah, Paul—who was on the panel—she was singing his praises, saying that when they first recruited him, and he was a later recruit; he started in 1983.

Carrie Poppy: Okay. Oh, so did I. Heh-heh-heh-heh.

Ross Blocher: He had been, I guess, using boards to track Russian submarines, and he was giving details about that. I don’t know how they were able to verify it.

Carrie Poppy: Like psychically tracking them?

Ross Blocher: Yes. Correct.

Carrie Poppy: Okay. Got it. Got it. Okay.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, that should be assumed.

Carrie Poppy: Okay! I don’t—okay!

Ross Blocher: For this panel, if we’re talking about someone traveling to Russia, they probably were doing it in their heads.

Carrie Poppy: Okay. I’m just making sure!

Ross Blocher: Okay. (Laughs.) And then she may have been talking about either Pat Smith or Ingo Swann. Those were like their two main guys also traveling. Because the Soviets were the big enemies, and there was a lot of interest in what was going on in the Kremlin. What are they hiding?

Carrie Poppy: Right. This was all over media at the time. It’s so prevalent, like Indiana Jones—just like there was an era there where if there were Russian people, they were put—it was within this lens. It was like, oh, of course. They’re going to be the villains. And they’re—

Ross Blocher: Yeah. I remember reading Tom Clancy novels. I was really into them when I was young, and it would always be the Russians who were the antagonists. But you know, sometimes ze Germans and sometimes maybe the Chinese, if you were lucky, would get involved somehow. And then I remember around the Gulf War, all of a sudden we had this whole new cast of characters like, “Oh, we can write about people in the Middle East!” These things go through trends. I remember Mitt Romney getting kind of laughed at in a debate with Obama during the 2012 election when he was asked what our biggest enemy was, and he said Russia. And people were like, “Come ooon. Like, that’s played out. You’re a little late for that.”

Carrie Poppy: Right, right, right. That feels very ’80s.

Ross Blocher: And now people are like, “Heeey, maybe Mitt Romney was onto something.” Because they are certainly aggressors now.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, also around this period, everybody’s starting to get their pitches in. We’re hearing about a lot of books. We’re hearing about a lot of podcasts.

[01:10:00]

Russell Targ’s Third Eye Spies movie again.

Ross Blocher: Yes! I definitely went to check that out.

Carrie Poppy: I gotta watch.

Ross Blocher: And I won’t do any kind of like big run through, but I feel like I’ll have a lot of interesting little anecdotes to share from it. But I got to show you the very first quote that they lead off the film with, because it involves our man: Jimmy Carter.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, okay!

Ross Blocher: He gets brought into this story too. He’s kind of like a major figure here.

Carrie Poppy: I just realized we have two Jimmy C’s that we both really love.

Ross Blocher: (Using his deep ‘Jimmy Church’ voice.) Jimmy Carter.

Yeah, that’s interesting! Well, and let’s not forget Jiminy Cricket. Related.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, I do actually really like Jiminy Cricket. Yeah, that was one of my like go-to characters as a kid,

Clip:

Jimmy Carter (Third Eye Spies): One time we had a small plane go down somewhere in Africa, and we were not able to find it by surveillance. So, the director of the CIA heard about a woman in California that was a medium or something. I don’t know the title for it. And she gave him the latitude and longitude of the plane’s whereabouts. And we located the plane where she said it was. And that’s the only time that I have ever experienced something that was inexplicable while I was president.

 

Ross Blocher: That was Jimmy Carter, apparently recorded 2016. And it’s interesting. He offers that little qualification. “That’s the only time I have ever experienced something that was inexplicable while I was president.” Because there’s the other story of him seeing the UFO.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, I see! Yes.

Ross Blocher: That the UFO community makes big hay out of. So, look, here he is like giving credence to the remote viewing community.

Carrie Poppy: Yes. But you know what I hear in that is compulsive honesty. Just—which I so get. I so have this quality where I’m just like, (strained) “Okay, you asked me. Fine, then. Okay, then here’s the example you’re looking for. Fine.”

Ross Blocher: I totally get that from Jimmy Carter. I think that’s a correct assessment. And apparently the Soviet plane, I’ve gotten multiple dates on it. So, it was either ’78, which they said in the documentary, or ’76 when the spy plane crashed. And apparently this was in Zaire, and they credit Rosemary Smith—a young administrative assistant who was recruited to the project. She supposedly correctly gave them the coordinates. And then like in the telling of the story, they mentioned that they got to the place, and then they saw someone like emerging from, you know, out in the hinterlands with pieces of metal from the plane. So, with all of these stories, of course, we’re only getting the version of them from the people who are really excited to tell them and have told them many times. So, I’m highly suspicious.

But I just get this mental image of them knowing roughly the path of the plane. And this remote viewer saying, “Here’s where I think it went down,” probably already being within a fairly constrained radius.

And then them saying, “Hey, we landed where we were told, and turns out just a mile away, there was this plane.”

So, anyways. Still, it’s interesting. And yeah, good on Jimmy Carter for sharing it. But apparently, he had said this first publicly in 1995 at like a commencement or something for Emory University students. And he wasn’t supposed to. This project wasn’t declassified yet.

Carrie Poppy: Oh! Whoopsie! Okay. (Inaudible) on that.

Ross Blocher: In the documentary, they say he kind of outed us all in that moment. And so, the government had to do some quick action to, I guess, make this public?

Carrie Poppy: Oh wow!

Ross Blocher: Maybe that’s why? You know, I could be overstating that. But it seemed like the timing was right for them to finally reveal that this project had happened as a result of him telling this story that involved the government using psychic spies.

Carrie Poppy: You know, when I worked for the James Randi Educational Foundation, I remember we put through a FOIA request that—I’m trying to remember what the production actually said, but I remember that there was a program where they were paying for dowsing rods to be used to like—

Ross Blocher: Oh, for bomb detection! Yeah, I remember that.

(Carrie confirms.)

Oh, which is so frustrating, because that’s a life and death situation, and you’re giving people nonfunctioning dowsing rods. Well, I mean, dowsing rods. Don’t mean to repeat myself.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) Yeah, I’m all for throwing research money at these things. But yeah, once you’re down to application, brand new questions arrive! Like, does this work? Do we have any reason to think this works?

Ross Blocher: Right, you’re sending personnel out with this device saying, “Here, this will help you detect bombs.” Oh my goodness. But as you might guess, this film Third Eye Spies is also produced by Russell Targ. Busy guy. And this was 2019, so not too long ago. He’s still in his, you know, 80s at the time. And it retells a lot of these stories from Project Stargate—which by the way, it went by a lot of different names during the program. And it wasn’t dubbed Stargate until like the ’90s.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, I know. I was in it.

Ross Blocher: Oh, that’s right. I forgot that you had been involved, that your therapist had told you this. (Chuckles.)

[01:15:00]

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, that’s correct. That’s right.

Ross Blocher: Crazy. So, it was just notable as well, because all of the usual players came on screen. I’m going to say—yeah, you might guess. Like, when you think of researchers involved in psi, paranormal phenomenon, parapsychology.

Carrie Poppy: Okay, okay, okay. Let me pull up some names. Rupert Sheldrake.

Ross Blocher: Oddly, not Rupert Sheldrake. You would think so. You would totally think so, but you’re thinking exactly the right kind of people.

Carrie Poppy: Okay. Okay. Okay.

Ross Blocher: Dean…

Carrie Poppy: Dean?!

Ross Blocher: Dean Radin.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughing.) Oh, that guy!

Ross Blocher: He was in it. Gary Schwartz, another noted parapsychology researcher. Charles Tart. He’s still around too. If you’ve spent any time in this world, you’ve seen these people, because these are the kind of fringe researchers. Some of them managed to have tenure. And they research things like dogs who know when their owners are coming home or people feeling that they’re being watched by someone from behind their back and slightly affecting the random generation of numbers by a random number generation machine. Just all these really weird things where subjectivity and custom data culling and deviations from the mean can be pruned to give them results.

Anyways, it was just like this who’s who. And of course, who else would they bring on but famous psychic and unsinkable rubber duck—

Carrie Poppy: Sylvia Brown?

Ross Blocher: Think James Randi.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, Uri Geller. Aaah! Of course! God.

Ross Blocher: Uri Geller. And we haven’t mentioned him yet, but this troublemaker who shows up in the first few pages of The Men Who Stare at Goats is also involved in this project, and he was originally one of the early recruits as a psychic for this program.

Carrie Poppy: (Quietly.) One of the Uri recruits.

(They laugh.)

Ross Blocher: Uh-huh! In the 1970s. And so, they were already getting quote/unquote, promising results from him. And in the film, they make it sound like the government was concerned, because he had Israeli citizenship. So, maybe he’s not working for us. But in another telling, I hear that the government called in Ray Hyman, who will show up 20 years later to help in this. Hats off to Ray Hyman for holding his own, sharing good statistics and test design through all of this.

(Carrie “wow”s.)

But even as early as 1970s, he was brought in to evaluate Uri Geller in these experiments and said, “The guy’s a total fraud. He’s cheating you.” And he got kicked off the project! So, Uri was not involved after those Urly (early) days.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, Uri got kicked off the project? Okay! Because of Ray Hyman?

(Ross confirms.)

Hey! Way to go, Ray Hyman!

Ross Blocher: In the mid ’70s. And then Ray Hyman comes back 20 years later to deal another serious blow to this whole project.

Carrie Poppy: That’s cool.

Ross Blocher: But we’ll talk about that.

Carrie Poppy: I’m really getting Uri Fury.

Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) Yeah, it’s justified fury. He’s a problem.

Carrie Poppy: I really am. My man, Randy, died a few years ago. And he was so obsessed to his grave (laughs) with how bad Uri Geller is. And I must admit, I had that, you know, “Oh, this is my cute old man friend response,” a little bit about it.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, who’s just a little too surly and grumpy.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, which he was. But also now I’m like, oh my god, the New York Times is still fucking publishing fluff pieces about this true con artist and then being cute and coy about it, and the authors on Twitter are being like, (mockingly) “Oh, well, you know, isn’t there magic left in the world?” NO!

(Ross laughs.)

You’re a reporter! Oh my god!

Ross Blocher: This is not your job!

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, actually, no! There is no magic left in the world! That’s correeect! You’re a reporter! You should know this by now! (Sighs.) Ohhh my god.

Ross Blocher: Uri’s one of these people who will just say anything. And he’ll say it with conviction. In the documentary, he’s all up in a tiff and says—

Clip:

Music: Serious orchestral music.

Uri Geller: Hey, this is real. Don’t you try to debunk this, because it is scientifically proven.

 

Ross Blocher: It’s like, UGH! I don’t like you!

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. I will try to deny it. Come and try! Let’s sit together. Let’s break bread.

Ross Blocher: Let’s design an experiment and have you actually do a test, which Uri avoids.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, thaaat’s a better plan!

Ross Blocher: Uri avoids at all costs, because he knows what he’s doing. Sidney Gottlieb was a character in this.

Carrie Poppy: Oh yeah, I know that name.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, I’d read a really good book about him. Poisoner in Chief.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, that guy! Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, the MKUltra guy.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, the guy who introduced LSD into—well, the US. But, you know, through the CIA MKUltra program, right. And he was still around at the time, and he was saying, “Oh yeah, this is great research. You should have the readers take LSD!” (Laughs.)

Carrie Poppy: Of course he was. That’s his solution to fucking everything.

(They laugh.)

Ross Blocher: When you’ve got a hammer—

Carrie Poppy: Why not take some acid?

Ross Blocher: Everything looks a lot like a nail.

(They laugh.)

Edgar Mitchell was in here as well. He was the sixth man to land on the moon.

[01:20:00]

The sixth person. They just all happened to be men. And he’s another guy who just unfortunately is a little too credulous and willing to kind of sign on to alien visitation.

Carrie Poppy: And he’s been to the moon?!

Ross Blocher: I know! Yeah, he’s another—

Carrie Poppy: Aw, buddy.

Ross Blocher: I know. He’s not doing anybody any favors here. A little too willing to believe a lot of this stuff. And so, that’s another person that’s another person they can always draw credibility from. “Look, you know, he was part of the Apollo program!”

Carrie Poppy: Now I’m thinking about our friend, Terry… who’s our friend who’s been to space?

Ross Blocher: Terry Virts!

Carrie Poppy: Thank you. (Laughter.) Our friend who’s been to space, Terry Virts, believes in God. Wild. Just wild, but that’s how the human mind is. So, that means I’ve got these things, Ross. They’re off in a corner somewhere, and people are like, “What’s that, Carrie?” And I’m just walking around thinking that it’s consistent.

(They laugh.)

Ross Blocher: I mean, even the God piece doesn’t surprise me that much. ‘Cause there—you know, there are plenty of working professionals who were raised with God belief and had found ways to just kind of incorporate it rationally. But the fact that he went into a very creationist statement when we were talking to him on the show is just wild!

Carrie Poppy: Uh-huh. In the 11th hour.

Ross Blocher: Wild!

Carrie Poppy: Just really the very end.

Ross Blocher: After a whole conversation about promoting science to people. Yeah.

Carrie Poppy: It was great though. I mean, it was great. It’s one of the best moments, because that really—I don’t know. The human mind.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, our minds also got blown on that episode by something else that came to light, but we were asked not to share it. So, we haven’t.

(Carrie confirms.)

I guess those were the big figures, but it was a real parade of the people you would expect in this documentary. Which, if you know the context, definitely it’s great to watch. If you don’t though, I feel it’s like so deceptive for just the general populace who would go in and think, “They were getting 1,000,000:1 odds!” Because that’s really how they sold it multiple times saying that this was really proven. And then you have to ask, well, then why aren’t we still doing it? If it got results, why doesn’t the government use it?

Carrie Poppy: Well, they could be using it secretly.

Ross Blocher: I guess so. But apparently nobody in this community seems to be aware that it’s still happening. They all seem to admit that the government has moved on.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, yeah, do they?

(Ross confirms.)

I mean, there’s all those Project Monarch people.

Ross Blocher: Which one is Monarch again?

Carrie Poppy: Project Monarch people think that there’s still a government program going on to kidnap kids, bring them to Disneyland, brainwash them—yeah, and then—

Ross Blocher: Aw. Bless their hearts.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, and generally the kids are given like multiple personality disorder or something like that. So, a lot of parents with kids, especially with developmental disabilities, will interpret it this way. Not great, not great.

Ross Blocher: I would say you’ll always find Someone on the fringe who will say whatever weird thing it is you want to ask about, but I think generally this community realizes that it’s been sort of deprecated, pushed to the side, discredited, and they’re upset about that, but they’re not like kind of turning around and being like, (out of the corner of his mouth) “Oh, but secretly, actually they’re still using it.”

Carrie Poppy: There were Project Monarch people at this conference, though.

Ross Blocher: Were there really?

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, yeah. Drew and I talked to them.

Ross Blocher: Okay. Like, in the audience or actually presenting?

Carrie Poppy: No, tables. Tables.

Ross Blocher: Oh, okay. People with tables. Oh, interesting. Okay. ‘Cause you do get some conspiracy theorists. Like, that’s kind of how we met Dylan Lewis Monroe?

Carrie Poppy: Dylan Lewis Monroe. I really feel I have a soul connection with Dylan Lewis Monroe.

Ross Blocher: So, I’ll probably share some more little anecdotes from the film. And if you’re interested in this topic, it’s worth watching. Just remember, it is a very lopsided presentation, as you might expect.

Carrie Poppy: So, then they talked about someone predicting a terrorist attack in London?

Ross Blocher: Yeah, oh my goodness. That story introduces, I think, an important element in that this person who had the vision of the terrorist attack—the panelist just referred to the guy as Graham who had this vision, and I was able to find that it was Graham Nicholls. And apparently this was in 1999, but he described this terrorist attack and a bomb going off. And “they have four or five people who signed affidavits that they heard him make that prediction!”

Because it didn’t happen that day. It happened—was it four or five days later?

Carrie Poppy: (Clearly unimpressed.) Uh-huh.

Ross Blocher: Okay. Well, you already have the correct reaction, but they use that as a way to expand this ability to say, “Not only can you view remotely in three-dimensional space, but you can slip through time in fourth dimensional space time and predict things that are going to happen in the future!” Which is just another way to always be right.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, well, okay. So, I picture a guy who’s at a party with all his friends. And he’s like, “Oh, I had this dream, and it was in London, and there was a whizbang and a flash.”

And they’re all like, “That’s Graham again. He talks about this kind of stuff. Alright. Uh-huh.” And they go on with their little lives. And then this thing happens, and he turns around, and he’s got affidavits for everyone.

[01:25:00]

And he’s like, “Remember how I said there’d be a whizbang?! And there was a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?!”

Ross Blocher: “Please sign here.”

Carrie Poppy: And they’re like, (exasperated) “Yes, Graham, yes, Graham. Okay. Listen—”

Ross Blocher: We’ve only got testimonials to work with. So, your written affidavits are going to be very impressive. And only we in Scientology and a few other weirdos insist on people signing affidavits.

Carrie Poppy: Exactly. “Yes, I will sign this, Graham. I need my keys back from the last time you were staying here, and you left all your shit on my couch.” I think that’s—

(They laugh.)

Ross Blocher: That’s how you picture this all going down? Probably not far from right.

Carrie Poppy: Yes! Four affidavits.

Ross Blocher: There was, later on, an anecdote from Desiree that similarly irked me and was on that same thread. She said that Elizabeth Rauscher, their collaborator on that book, that— you know, the most elegant scientist.

(Carrie agrees with a laugh.)

The most elegant female scientist.

Carrie Poppy: The most elegant female physicist.

(They laugh.)

Ross Blocher: She would use remote viewing to help her find her keys. Now that would be useful if it worked! I know prayer works just as well for it.

Carrie Poppy: Or an airtag.

Ross Blocher: Airtags are even more effective. Yeah. Technology always steps in with a real solution that we actually end up using.

(They laugh.)

Carrie Poppy: Less time!

Ross Blocher: And Elizabeth would even remote view restaurant food items.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, I do that too! Before I go, I look it up.

Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) Well, I mean, it’s one thing to look at it on the menu, but she wants to see how it’s actually going to look and whether she’ll enjoy it.

Carrie Poppy: Yelp. Okay. She needs Yelp.

Ross Blocher: Hey, if that actually worked, that would be a great skill. I would use it every day. But Desiree said that she had a lucid dream about her secretary, Lila. And she was told in the dream that Lila doesn’t work here anymore.

Carrie Poppy: Okay! Okay. This is great news so far.

Ross Blocher: Nine months later, Lila’s husband got cancer,

Carrie Poppy: Oh, this isn’t good news.

Ross Blocher: And he asked her to stop working, I guess to support him. “And so, nine months later, Lila no longer works there. And (gasps) my lucid dream was correct!”

Desiree! That’s now how this works!

Carrie Poppy: Oh, man. This blows! I thought this was going to be like a lesbian fantasy where she was like, “Ohhh, she’s not my coworker anymore!”

(They laugh.)

“I get to follow up on my dreams!” Oh my god.

Ross Blocher: That would be relevant for the panel.

Carrie Poppy: But then it turns out she has a husband, and her husband dies. Great. Oh, fuck! Terrible.

Ross Blocher: Nine months later! Give me a break!

Carrie Poppy: Terrible!

Ross Blocher: She didn’t say whether the husband died or not. So, you can imagine him still living. And you can still imagine them having a lesbian dalliance on the side sometimes.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughing.) Okay, thank you! I think I will!

Ross Blocher: But what really irked me was the, “So, nine months later, after I had this—” Give me a break! Like, Lila can’t work there forever, Desiree. She can’t work there forever.

Carrie Poppy: She’s gonna eventually quit, is what you’re saying. So, a dream that someone is quitting should only be good for like—yeah, probably like five weeks.

(They laugh.)

Right, ‘cause it’s not a prediction.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, there needs to be a fall off period, at which point you don’t get to take credit anymore.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it’s like if I had a dream that you died and then took credit when you die in your 70s.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, exactly! Yeah, at some point, yes, I will have to die. That is the only available option. In the documentary, again, Dean Radin, this well-known researcher of all these things, is saying, “Maybe consciousness is quantum mechanical. If I want to go see Pluto 1,000,000 years ago, I should be able to.”

(Carrie muffles a laugh.)

Which tells you plenty about the quality of Dean Radin’s research.

Carrie Poppy: And the sense of entitlement!

(They laugh.)

Ross Blocher: And yeah, sure, the universe should give me that!

Carrie Poppy: If I want to see Pluto 200,000,000 years ago, I should be able to!

Ross Blocher: Okay, I’m seeing it now and—oh, it looks pretty similar. Okay. Wait, let me see it again now. Okay, let me see it a million years ago. Oh, that crater wasn’t there! That crater’s new. Okay. The important thing is that I got to see what I wanted to see.

Carrie Poppy: And the important thing is I deserve this.

Ross Blocher: So, just know that not only is remote viewing through space—we were talking earlier about how they had kind of opened up the definition on the program. Maybe that’s part of it is just, you know, “Well, now we’re allowing time travel!”

Carrie Poppy: Yes. Oh, right. Mm-hm.

Ross Blocher: And this is shooting forward in time as well, but JJ—her talk was talking about how this is expanding our minds so that we can start communicating like in the fifth dimension and preparing us for communication with aliens. Of course.

Carrie Poppy: Finally. What I mean is, finally, we’re going to get to this fifth dimension. I have been waiting and waiting.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Desiree was saying that Elizabeth Raucher agrees that there is an eighth dimensional space where you can know past, present, and future. Okay.

Carrie Poppy: An eighth dimensional space, but you only get to know those three dimensions in it?

Ross Blocher: I don’t know.

Carrie Poppy: Where are the other five? You’ve just introduced five more and now left me hanging.

Ross Blocher: Right. But you just want to brag about results that are describable in the third dimension or fourth dimension. But yeah, what are you going to do?

[01:30:00]

Promo:

Music: High energy rock.

Biz Ellis: This is Biz. And this is the final season of One Bad Mother, a comedy podcast about parenting. This is going to be a year of celebrating all that makes this podcast and this community magical.

Speaker 1: I’m so glad that I found your podcast.

Speaker 2: I just cannot thank you enough for just being the voice of reason as I’m trying to figure all of this out.

Speaker 3: Thank you, and cheers to your incredible show and the vision you have to provide this space for all of us.

Biz Ellis: This is still a show about life after giving life. And yes, there will be swears. You can find us on MaximumFun.org. And as always, you are doing a great job!

(Music ends.)

 

Ross Blocher: Okay, so, speaking of little side trips, they kept giving us all these things to look up. Like the app, like the movie. Desiree tells us a lot of this data was made public in the mid ’90s. And she said, “You can even find it on the CIA website if you’re willing to go there. You can search for Evaluation of the Remote Viewing Program.” So, I did this. I did dare to go to the CIA website.

Carrie Poppy: Okay, nice. Yeah, I feel like I’ve seen this before. In the Reading Room?

Ross Blocher: Yes! Yeah. They have a lot of downloadable PDFs about this project, because it’s been declassified. I guess it was released in 2002, but the reports were written in 1995, specifically “An Evaluation of Remote Viewing Research and Applications”. Though at first I found the scanned version of the draft that was printed a week before the final report was published. And it was called “An Evaluation of Remote Vewing Research and Applications”. I always love me a good government typo.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Remote vewing. Sounds fun.

Ross Blocher: They left out the first I. (Laughs.) So, this was prepared by the American Institutes for Research.

Carrie Poppy: AIR?

Ross Blocher: Yes, AIR. There were three primary authors. But I think the most interesting figures here are our man Ray Hyman. He was brought in as one of the expert reviewers, as was Jessica Utts, Dr. Jessica Utts.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, I know that name.

Ross Blocher: U-T-T-S.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, who is that?

Ross Blocher: She is a professor of statistics at the University of California, Davis. And Ray Hyman was a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon. So, they were selected to represent the two sides as, you know, statisticians who could look at these tests that had been done in the Stargate program. Dr. Utts, I’ve read elsewhere people saying like maybe she shouldn’t have been included, because she had already coauthored papers with one of the main researchers at the Stargate program, at SRI. I don’t know, just already kind of revealed herself to be sort of part of the operation there and certainly sympathetic. But you know, that alone wouldn’t disqualify her.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, okay. That’s their Ken Lanning. I see.

Ross Blocher: And then Dr. Hyman, again, just a great researcher and longtime skeptic. I’ve met him a few times, but I finally got a picture with him recently. He’s still kicking. He’s 95!

Carrie Poppy: Oh, wow.

Ross Blocher: So, it’s 183 pages. So, I’m just going to give you a few quotables from it. But first they kind of lay out sort of the protocol overall that they’re trying to use. There’s a system of viewings that happen, and then you’ve got evaluations that follow them up in the form of interviews. And of course, subjective means of just sort of rating how accurate some of these viewings are. And the protocols were a variety of things. Like, some of them were shifting the random number generators. Some of them were picking targets from a collection of 100 images from National Geographic that were used as targets. And then some of them were like going into a location and trying to determine something that was there.

So, going back to the report. “This multifaceted evaluation effort led to the following conclusions: One, the conditions under which the remote viewing phenomenon is observed in laboratory settings do not apply in intelligence gathering situations. For example, viewers cannot be provided with feedback, and targets may not display the characteristics needed to produce hits.”

Carrie Poppy: Viewers should not be provided with feedback. (Laughs.)

Ross Blocher: Well, yeah. Like, you know, you’re not gonna be like, “Hey, Kremlin, how did we do? Can we see your papers?”

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Yeah. And if you want to see if someone is truly remote viewing something, don’t give them feedback. Just verify.

Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) Right. Well, one of the big stories, shooting over to the documentary for a bit, that always gets touted for Stargate was that you had the Burbank police officer, Pat Price. He had apparently tried to break into an NSA facility remotely and look into the third-floor vault underneath the ground.

Carrie Poppy: How’d it go?

Ross Blocher: And find a file cabinet and sift through it with his mind.

Carrie Poppy: In his head. Uh-huh.

Ross Blocher: And then he reported back—okay, I’d always wondered about this, ‘cause I’d heard about this NSA spying and I’d wondered what did he actually find? He had said—again, this is just how we’re presented the information, so there’s a lot of other steps along the way. But he had said that on the folder markers—

[01:35:00]

—there were names that were drawn from pool terminologies, like billiards. I can’t even remember what they were, but like rack or behind the eight ball or something like that. Yeah, eight ball. And apparently the NSA got freaked out and said, “(Gasps.) You’re looking at our stuff! And now we need to investigate your program. Why are you spying on us? Who are these people?!” That’s how the story’s told. Do I believe it? Only as far as I can throw it. And it’s a story. I can’t throw stories.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) I wonder how specific he actually got when he said that to them.

Ross Blocher: Mm-hm. There’s sooo many opportunities for wiggle room here.

Carrie Poppy: Okay. I’m going to try to give you a word, and let’s see if you can make it about pool.

Ross Blocher: Okay.

Carrie Poppy: Okay. Apple.

Ross Blocher: Apple. Yeah. An apple is round and shiny, kind of like a cue ball. It’s very clear you were looking at the ball that is red, that’s a solid red. It’s one of the early ones, two or three or something like that.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, you’re right! Okay, okay. How about, how about, how about… calendar?

Ross Blocher: Calendar is in a grid. I’m trying to think of like the pool table itself and how it gets broken down as like a mathematical series of angles. I don’t know. I bet you could make calendar work as well. If you work hard enough. Alright. But there were calendars in the folders.

Carrie Poppy: True. Oh yeah. True.

Ross Blocher: “(Gasps.) He’s got one of our calendars.”

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Yeah. This story is as good as how much the other person on the line freaks out.

Ross Blocher: I mean, if we’re talking about 1970s? How many references are guys going to make when they’re coming up with little codenames for things?

(Carrie laughs.)

Bowling, pool… dames.

Carrie Poppy: Those were the three things then! Prove Ross wrong!

Ross Blocher: Alcohol! We’re out of things.

(They laugh.)

Carrie Poppy: That’s it!

Ross Blocher: I’m less impressed than maybe I’m supposed to be, but okay. So, going back to the second bullet point from this report. “The information provided was inconsistent, inaccurate with regard to specifics, and required substantial subjective interpretation.” God love this report. Why did Desiree want us to read this? Has she read it? Third bullet point. “In no case had the information provided ever been used to guide intelligence operations, thus remote viewing failed to produce actionable intelligence.”

Carrie Poppy: Oh, good. Okay, there you go.

Ross Blocher: That’s why the program was discontinued. Like, the one thing that they even claim is remotely—heh, remotely—close to that is the downed plane in Zaire from the ’70s. At least that I’ve heard. So, shooting down. “The conclusion, the foregoing observations provide a compelling argument against continuation of the program within the intelligence community. Even though a statistically significant effect has been observed in the laboratory, it remains unclear whether the existence of a paranormal phenomenon, remote viewing, has been demonstrated. The laboratory studies do not provide evidence regarding the origins or nature of the phenomenon, assuming it exists, nor do they address an important methodological issue of inter-judge reliability.” Which I thought was great.

So, then I got to say both Hyman and Utts are prolific writers. Their reports are quite long. Dr. Jessica Utts does end up concluding that she feels the program has demonstrated the existence of these psychic abilities. She feels like we have enough to say that it’s real and that if you continue the program, it shouldn’t be to test whether it’s real. It should be to actually like find ways to make it actionable. So, she feels convinced by it.

Carrie Poppy: Wow. So, not even needs more study.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, she’s saying, “At this point, we’ve ascertained there definitely is an above statistically significant proof that this ability exists.” That’s her takeaway.

And Ray Hyman very kindly kind of responds to that and says, “Okay, well, while I respect and agree with Jessica on a lot of things, here’s some additional addenda I would make.” And it was quite collegial. It was nicely written. At least, you know, I didn’t read the whole 183-page report, but I was kind of skimming and reading relevant sections. So, there are some other great lines here from Ray in the report. “Remote viewing was and continues to be a controversial phenomenon. Early research on remote viewing was plagued by a number of statistical and methodological flaws. One statistical flaw found in early studies of remote viewing, for example, was due to failure to control for the elimination of locations already judged. In other words, all targets did not have an equal probability of being assigned all ranks. Another commonly noted methodological flaw was that queues in the remote viewing paradigm, such as the time needed to drive to various locations, may have allowed viewers to produce hits without using any parapsychological ability.”

Carrie Poppy: Oh! Also known as cheating, I believe. Yes.

Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) Exactly! “Oh, this is 14 miles away. Oh, I can draw a map in my head. What’s about 14 miles away from here?”

Carrie Poppy: It sounds like maybe you could do this form your home or something.

Ross Blocher: Leak info.

Carrie Poppy: And so, you could just like drive there and—like, okay, so if you tell me, “We’re going to be remote viewing whatever is at 1234 Bonnie Meadow Road on Saturday, so see you on Saturday, at my house.”

[01:40:00]

What am I gonna do between now and Saturday?!

Ross Blocher: “Oh, I got 48 hours between now and then? Oh, cool. Guess where I’m driving?” Absolutely. Yeah. And I’m guessing, especially just knowing like Uri Geller’s involvement and that he was considered credible… it just tells me that there was ample opportunity for someone who wanted to cheat. And we’ve talked before about the project where James Randi had these young magicians join Project Alpha and mess with the researchers and under the rubric that if they were ever asked, “Are you cheating? Are you doing this by cheating?” They would say, “Yes, we are.”

Carrie Poppy: “Yes. And James Randi sent us. James Randi trained and sent us.” They were supposed to tell them that.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, so.

Carrie Poppy: But no, just sailed right on through, because they were good magicians. One of whom is our friend, Banachek.

Ross Blocher: Yeah! Steve Shaw. You can see him in Vegas.

Carrie Poppy: Not anymore! Just closed his show.

(Ross gasps.)

You and I saw it like just before it ended. Thank goodness we did though. Because he had this big homage to Randi that was really moving and wonderful.

Ross Blocher: It was fantastic. Yeah. We’ve been wanting to talk about it on the show with him. So, hopefully we can make that happen.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, okay, I’ll—this is motivating me to follow up on it.

Ross Blocher: Renew these talks. But yeah, it was at the Stratosphere. And I think I was there for the 500th show, because they were filming it for some kind of special occasion.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, the stratosphere. Oh, the stratosphere. Got it. It’s called the Strat in my head. Got it, got it.

Ross Blocher: The Strat, yep. Another great line from Ray Hyman. “We know that with enough cases, an investigator will get a significant result regardless of whether it is meaningful or not. Parapsychologists are unique in postulating a null hypothesis that entails a true effect size of zero if psi is not operating.”

And yeah, I had to read this one a couple of times, but it’s essentially saying the parapsychologists are just assuming that you would get zero correct. You would get nothing right if you were just guessing or not using something supernatural. So, any positive effect gets treated as—

Carrie Poppy: Right, any result needs explaining now.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, exactly. And then it gets measured at the size of the positive effect. Rather, hey, if we compare this against people who are just guessing, then that sets a more realistic baseline, and your margin’s going to be a lot smaller.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, certainly. So, that suggests to me that the control groups were not very good in this.

Ross Blocher: Correct. He says, “Any significant outcome then becomes evidence for psi.” P-S-I, AKA anomalous mental phenomenon.

Carrie Poppy: ESP, if you will.

Ross Blocher: I will. “My concern here is that small effects and other departures from the statistical model can be expected to occur in the absence of psi. This statistical model is only an approximation.” I thought that was just so well put. And then elsewhere he wrote online, “Psychologists, such as myself, who study subjective validation, find nothing striking or surprising in the reported matching of reports against targets in the Stargate data. The overwhelming amount of data generated by the viewers is vague, general, and way off target. The few apparent hits are just what we would expect if nothing other than reasonable guessing and subjective validation are operating.”

Yeah. And he wrote that the same year this report was released. And yet, in the documentary, do they have Ray Hyman talking? No. But the one time they mentioned him is they say, “Oh, he even admitted that there was evidence for paranormal phenomena.”

Carrie Poppy: Oh, wow! That’s quite a stretch from those quotes.

Ross Blocher: And I was like, yeah, where are you pulling that from?

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) So, yeah, they must—so, they completely misunderstand the whole point. They’re saying he admitted that there is—that we were able to create a supposed effect in the laboratory.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. They even wrote this on the screen. “In his final report, even skeptic Ray Hyman admitted there was some demonstrated evidence for remote viewing.”

Carrie Poppy: Wow. Yeah, I don’t see that.

Ross Blocher: I do not think that is a fair synopsis of Ray Hyman’s viewpoint.

Carrie Poppy: Definitely not.

Ross Blocher: Frustrating. So, thanks, Desiree, for the mention. That was a great article. Why did you want us to read that? Because it looks like this isn’t a thing.

Carrie Poppy: Thanks for going back over that. I haven’t thought about Stargate in so long. You know, as a survivor of it.

(They laugh.)

Ross Blocher: I also watched a really interesting interview with Dr. Jessica Utts talking about her takeaways, and she’s still very much convinced that it’s a real phenomenon, that the statistics work out. Oh, by the way! I don’t want to forget to say—I’d already mentioned that Hal Puthoff and Ingo Swann were involved with Scientology. So, was Pat Price, I learned.

Carrie Poppy: What?

Ross Blocher: He was the Burbank police officer who was another major remote viewer and considered, you know, like the original white crow.

Carrie Poppy: This really is Scientology shit.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, and I think that’s totally consistent with the kind of things that you do in your Scientology training to visualize and, you know, do this kind of mind over matter stuff that they probably pulled directly from that. So, it’s just wild, the intersection. And according to Martin Gardner—

[01:45:00]

Russell Targ was introduced to the paranormal by his father, who owned a Chicago bookstore and carried works by Helena Blavatsky, Erich von Däniken, like Chariots of the Gods.

(Carrie “ah”s knowingly.)

So, you just see like all of these kinds of other ideas creeping in.

Carrie Poppy: Yes. Helena Blavatsky from the Theosophical tradition. Yeah. Yeah, interesting.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, so these beliefs, they play a role. And then when you’re in the sciences, you know, as a budding researcher, psychologist, you may try to find a way to use that to justify conclusions you came to for different reasons.

So, going back to the panel, Paul was telling the story about Charles Tart and how he would do remote viewing. He was a long promoter of the paranormal and adjacently involved in all of this. Anyways, he would do remote viewing, and he would get elements right within a target house. Then he would get some details wrong, like the color of the carpet. And so, Paul then says, “The wrong details fascinate me. They tell us something about metacognition.”

Carrie Poppy: (With joking decisiveness.) Yes. Agree. Agree. 100%.

Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) Wow, you look at that and you don’t think, “Oh, those are disconfirmatory.” No, it just tells us about how, you know, he got this other detail right. So, I know it’s alright now that I put a pin in that, but he got the carpet color wrong. So, hm, that’s interesting. Does that mean colors can change in our perceptions with the remote? Hilarious.

Carrie Poppy: Right, right. I mean, at least he’s thinking about them? Some people just discard them entirely and never even log them.

Ross Blocher: And then he says that phrase that bothers me more than it bothers you. But he says that, “You know, when you think about it, we only use 10% of our brains.” And he transitions from that into saying something about our brain structure, that “roughly 10% of our brains are neurons. But think of all the glial cells, the glue that holds everything together. Maybe those are doing something.”

(Carrie laughs “yes!”.)

And that got applause from the audience.

(Carrie claps.)

Like, yes! Oh, he’s found the clue.

Carrie Poppy: They’re doing something for sure!

Ross Blocher: Yep. Yep, that’s right. Please don’t take mine away. I need those.

Carrie Poppy: I don’t remember talking about the 10% of the brain thing. I didn’t find it annoying before?

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Well, I think you just thought that like people got overly up in arms about it.

Carrie Poppy: Ohhh, I see. I see. Yes. Yeah, it’s some people’s just absolute favorite sticking point.

Ross Blocher: Okay. But there were enough of them on this panel that I was like, ohhh, you again! Poorly quoted piece of info.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, yes. We don’t just use 10% of our brain. We use the whole thing. That’s why we’ve got the whole thing.

(They laugh.)

Ross Blocher: That’s right. Yeah. Evolution tends to do away with things that aren’t entirely necessary.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Even things that you could do without—your second kidney, your appendix—they’re doing stuff! They’re not just hanging out.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Yeah. Alan Steinfeld asked an interesting question of Tracey, whether she could differentiate between remote viewing and astral travel or out of body experiences.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, yes! Yeah. And near-death experience. Right. Which, yeah, I was like good, yeah, an hour into this. Let’s define our terms. Yes, great.

Ross Blocher: These related phenomenon. Yeah. And JJ Hurtak kept trying to like cut in with some other story that he just remembered. But Alan, credit to him, he kept saying, “Now Tracey, I really want to get your answer to this question.”

Carrie Poppy: Oh yeah, they kept interrupting Tracey. And I felt like Alan was aware like the gender dynamics here do not look stellar let’s keep not interrupting her. (Laughs.)

Ross Blocher: Good on Alan. That was good moderation there. Yeah. And she had an interesting answer to that, which was that it has to do with retention of control over your body. So, if you’re remote viewing, you’re still very much aware that you’re at the table and that you have the proprioception of your hands and everything. But when you do these other things like near-death experience, astral travel, you lose connection to the body.

Carrie Poppy: Yes. And astral travel, I think people tend to think they’re doing it when they’re asleep. And remote viewing, people tend to think they’re doing it when they’re awake.

Ross Blocher: So interesting you would say that, because Paul Smith said, “Oh yeah, that’s so right, because I find when I’m traveling out of body, when I come back to my body, I have to put what I experienced into memory. Like, I have to make this effort.” And I thought that sounds exactly like waking up from a dream and being like, oh, I need to remember. Okay. I had the dream about Jeff giving me the bag. Okay. If I just keep repeating “Jeff gives me the bag” I have a hook, and I can remember the dream, but if I didn’t do that moments later, I would completely forget. Shoot! I had a dream. It was somebody I know! And like, seconds would go by, and I would lose everything.

Carrie Poppy: Yes, yes. Yeah, that effect is definitely compounded after waking up. Though I do feel like I’ve had conversations where I’ve immediately been like, “I need to replay this immediately, so I don’t forget exactly how this happened. Because this was wild.”

Ross Blocher: Oh, fair. Well, that is kind of like our podcast, right? We have to like immediately make records of everything.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughing.) Yeah, I guess so. I guess so.

Ross Blocher: This was another fun moment for Alan. Oh, he’s making me like him. I mean, I already liked you Alan, but he said that consciousness needs clearer definition, and he said he gets so frustrated every time he talks to Deepak Chopra. And yeah, what a nice little humble brag there. “Every time I talk with Deepak Chopra.” Then again, I’m not that impressed because it’s Deepak Chopra.

[01:50:00]

But he says, “Deepak will just talk in all these generalities about, you know, what consciousness is and metaphors for how you can think about consciousness.” And Alan will keep coming back to him and saying, “Deepak, what is the practical application of that consciousness?” And I just loved it!

(Carrie laughs.)

The thought of—

Carrie Poppy: Alan, he’s gonna get too frustrated for this scene eventually.

Ross Blocher: I just love the thought of these two together and him being like, “Come on, you’re being too loosey-goosey for me!”

Carrie Poppy: But who is George King, and why should I believe him?

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Even Deepak Chopra will not answer the central question of this panel.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. That’s gotta be so frustrating for Alan.

Ross Blocher: Absolutely.

Carrie Poppy: Like, I’m watching someone up there floundering like, “But explain it! But explain—I know we’re all in on the same belief system, but I seem to be the one who can’t figure out how to do it! Why is that guys? Why is that guys?”

And they’re all like, “We don’t know. Well, end of panel.”

Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) You know, I’ve got to hand it to Desiree. At least she was the one who kept making references to useful things to look up on the outside. And another one that she mentioned was the story about remote viewers betting on the stock market. Or I think she said the silver market, but you know, the idea was to gain money by determining when to buy or sell based on remote viewing targets. And this was bizarre. Apparently—I think Alan was also helping tell the story, but like when the market was going up, you would envision an ice cream cone, but if it was going down, you would envision a pancake.

(Carrie giggles.)

Yep. Yep. That is the correct response. And so, then apparently they made purchases at the University of Boulder following the stock market, and they said it was so accurate and they earned like—and they estimated $10,000. It ended up being, I think, $16,000 was the net gain. And Paul Smith chimed in and said, “Oh, I’m so proud of my son, Christopher. He was involved in this.” So, I found a video of Christopher talking about this test.

(Carrie reacts with excitement.)

And he was, you know, so proud of it. “Oh yeah, we were gaining all this money.” But turns out near the end, someone broke protocol and they ended up losing—they had $35,000 in gains, but they ended up only having the—I think it was $16,000. And someone in the audience, god love him, asks Christopher—

Clip:

Speaker: Why ain’t you rich or are you?

(Chuckles from the audience.)

Christopher: Well, I’m not rich, ‘cause I didn’t invest the money in the experiment. (Laughs.) But actually we were pretty financially successful with this, and you know, I’d say you could be rich if you wanted to invest the time. It’s anybody, as you can see, using inexperienced remote viewers could really do this. And I’m surprised that not more people are. Or if they are, they’re not talking about it. One of the two.

 

Ross Blocher: He certainly wasn’t.

Carrie Poppy: I didn’t and won’t be. (Laughs.)

Ross Blocher: It was just so clear they had ridden a stock market rise and then had regressed to the mean, like most people do.

Carrie Poppy: It’s every casino story.

Ross Blocher: ‘Cause it’s a form of gambling!

Carrie Poppy: Yes. It’s every story about a friend going to the casino who’s up by so, so much. Oh, you’d never believe it. If I had only left at 2AM that night, boy, I would be sooo rich.

Oh, but you left at four, didn’t ya?

Ross Blocher: But the story is told just in terms of the little piece of the graph where the thing was going up. Look, it worked for that brief shining moment! We just need to recapture that moment.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. What if we capture that and make it something close to a study?

Ross Blocher: Even Desiree followed up the story with, “Yeah, I wouldn’t recommend doing this.” Yeah, why not, Desiree?

Carrie Poppy: Interesting. Yeah, why not? Yeah. That gives away the game of actually kind of knowing that it’s a risk.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, exactly. I feel like the underlying purpose of all of this is very much like what we see with psychics, like when we’re seeing the cold reading performances. All of the energy is being expended on validating the psychic and their readings. And that’s exactly what I see here. Everything is expended in service of saying, “Hey, look! See, look! I’m doing something, this is real! I’m connecting with something that’s not physical!” Where you get no actionable intelligence out of it.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. You’re saying it’s like Cindy Kaza’s, “your grandpa says hi”.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, exactly! “I went to the Kremlin and, your enemy says, ‘Nyet.’”

(They chuckle.)

Carrie Poppy: Right, right. Yeah. There’s no usable info. Yeah. If you could do that—if you could remote view, what’s something you’d go remote view? What would be useful to you?

Ross Blocher: Oh, I mean, this is my go-to when people ask me “what superpower would you want”. I say I would be able to find anything. I would find my stolen bike. And I’d go grab it. I would find things I lose all the time.

Carrie Poppy: Uh-huh. That’s interesting. ‘Cause you’re saying I would attach the power to the missing object.

Ross Blocher: Just the ability to find anything.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. I don’t know that that’s remote viewing.

Ross Blocher: Functionally would be the same thing. A piece of information. I could find information. So, let’s say I want to know—I was going to say the winning score on a ball game. I wouldn’t want to know that, but you know.

Carrie Poppy: Like, the balls that are going to fall down at the lotto.

Ross Blocher: Sure. Yeah. Let’s do something crass and commercial like that.

[01:55:00]

Why not? You know, I could give the money to charity if I’m just so full up on money.

Carrie Poppy: If it’s California, it goes to education fund.

Ross Blocher: I have very mixed feelings about that.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, really?

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Just cause it encourages people to keep doing this thing that education should prevent them from doing.

Carrie Poppy: Sure, that they won’t win money at. Yeah. Touché, fair. But if you freeze my life at the one time I bought a scratcher at 7 Eleven and it was $80. An $80 result, Ross?

Ross Blocher: Ooh, you won $80? Cool!

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. If you freeze my life at that moment, suddenly scratchers become very impressive. Now, if you continue the story, you learn that I left it out, and someone picked it up, and threw it in the trash. So, it’s not a good get rich quick scheme.

Ross Blocher: Oh noooo! The one time you were so close.

Where did I leave my retainer? That’s a remote viewing question that can be answered.

Carrie Poppy: But they would say they send to a location and then—so, when they’re looking for like a missing kid, you don’t just go, “Okay, I’m just going to remote view the kid.” They tend to say like, “I’m going to this location and seeing if the kid’s there.”

Ross Blocher: Well, I mean, the end result is the same. If that was the form of the power, I would take it. And the utility of the information would be the same. And they don’t have that. They’re missing that piece. ‘Cause again, all of the energy is just validating that the ability exists. That’s as far as you ever get.

Carrie Poppy: I’d see Paris.

Ross Blocher: You’d see Paris? Just as a tourist? Remote viewing tourist.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, like well, I love Paris. Yeah, I’d remote view Notre Dame. I’d remote view Guatemala. One of my favorite places I’ve ever been.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, sure. That’d be great.

Carrie Poppy: Remote view the Dick Van Dyke Show being made.

Ross Blocher: Speaking of technology, you know, this is the stuff I can do with a VR headset, and it’s way cooler there. Because it’s vivid and real and videography from another location. I can go visit Paris that way. I’ll still take in-person if I can do it.

Carrie Poppy: It’ll make me sick.

Ross Blocher: Oh yeah, you’re not big on the VR headsets.

Carrie Poppy: They make me sick. That’s one thing remote viewing has! Doesn’t make you sick.

Ross Blocher: JJ Hurtak, he told a story of from 7,000 miles away, finding the tomb of Osiris in 1977—many years before the archeologists found it. But unfortunately, we weren’t able to access it. So, the world only found out about it when (chuckles) everybody else found out about it from actual researchers with picks and shovels.

Carrie Poppy: Mm. Mm-hm. That was a shame.

Ross Blocher: That’s the story he tells, which reminded me of Andrew Collins from your lunch. He was the guy who had found the deep underground—

Carrie Poppy: Yes. That’s who I thought you were talking about for a second.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. It’s essentially the same story.

Carrie Poppy: Yup. I believe it was Tracey who told a story about a remote viewer who failed a remote viewing test, because they said there was a water tower in that location. And the testers go and look, and they say, “No, there’s no water tower.” But then—

Ross Blocher: Here we get the time dilation again.

Carrie Poppy: Yes! Then all the believers say, “Well, hang on, hang on! Maybe there was a water tower here one time!” And they go and they dig through the city record and discovered—

Ross Blocher: Turns out about 100 years ago…

Carrie Poppy: There was, in fact, at some point, a water tower sort of near. (Laughs.)

Ross Blocher: How convenient. And it’s like they really don’t see it that way.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. I mean, how is that even useful? You know, if you say, “Okay, I want to know if my wife is cheating on me.”

And I’m like, “No problem, Ross. I have remote viewing power.”

And I go and I look and I’m like, “Okay, she’s out there cheating on you now or 30 years ago.”

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Oh, this might be her previous relationship.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, exactly!

Ross Blocher: Can’t tell.

Carrie Poppy: Could be her next life, but is she cheating?

Ross Blocher: The carpets are blue, but really they could be any color, because apparently this isn’t very good for that.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, useless.

Ross Blocher: There was another story told about how, when they would have people come visit the lab or learn more about this project, they would have them try the remote viewing themselves before telling them anything about their results. ‘Cause 85% of the time they would have like some measurable markers of success that would make them a lot more bullish about the technique itself.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, interesting. That’s actually a little manipulative, but okay.

Ross Blocher: So, there’s that. There’s just trying to get them to have a favorable outlook on whatever’s going on here.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. It’s like the guy who walks up to you in the mall and is like, “You should be a model. Actually, I teach a modeling school.”

Ross Blocher: But then I think this was Anthony Peake talking. He said something so telling, which was, “And you know, people get something more from it just by having done the experiment, it’s a form of self-actualization. They learned that mind is more than body.” And I thought (gasps) this is like firewalking where, you know, nobody does that. And they’re like, “Oh, I’m going to go like burn some wood in my backyard!”

Carrie Poppy: Walk on fire more! Yeah, yeah.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, no one cares about that. The only takeaway is I can achieve anything!

Carrie Poppy: Right, right.

Ross Blocher: That’s apparently what you’re getting a light version of here.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. That metaphorical hit. Uh-huh.

Ross Blocher: This is Later Ross chiming in. A couple of days after we recorded this, I was watching a Jack Houck PK party. Jack Houck was this guy who put on parties where you would test your psychokinesis, your ability to move things with your mind, and this would often center on spoon bending. And he was even mentioned in this remote viewing panel.

[02:00:00]

But as he was introducing this event in 1985, he made this exact point clear and even used the firewalking analogy. So, I thought I’d include that here.

Clip:

Jack Houck: Now the bottom line to it all, the PK party—it’s really not to bend the metal. It’s to learn and get it clear to your subconscious that you can do anything. And as I talked the other night, today, or whenever it was, there are a number of these seminars going around that get your attention. That get it very quick and clear that you really can do anything. The firewalking seminars are another example. Fortunately, tonight I didn’t have time to light up the coals. So, all we have to do—

(Chuckles from the crowd.)

I mean, really, normally I show a tape of firewalking at the PK parties, because people are very happy to bend metal then.

(Laughter.)

No risk, you know. The only risk is you’ll learn you can do anything! You know? And for some people, that’s kind of a change.

 

Carrie Poppy: So, he does finally get Tracey to list some things she does to get in a state to provoke remote viewing.

Ross Blocher: She’s got a list?!

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, I think maybe the only person on the panel who gives specifics at all.

Ross Blocher: Okay, yeah, what does she tell us to do?

Carrie Poppy: Here they are, everybody! You ready? You’ve been waiting for it. We’re 71 minutes into this panel. Here’s how you remote view.

Ross Blocher: Okay.

Carrie Poppy: Clear off a space, play some music, something you like, something that lets you let go.

Ross Blocher: Mm-hm. I liked her phrasing here. “The day has tentacles, and it holds on to us.” You have to clear your mind. I kind of like that. I’m going to use that.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, that’s nice! Yeah.

You want to pick a specific relaxing place. Being a little bit hungry is good.

Ross Blocher: Interesting. Okay.

Carrie Poppy: She meditates.

Ross Blocher: Yes?

Carrie Poppy: And this is the key! Not chasing it.

Ross Blocher: Oh yeah. And I think she spent some time with a blank page that she was going to draw on and just spent some time. And I thought this is a lot of work setting up for this! I feel like she’s describing at least 20 minutes’ worth of effort.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. But it’s all just like basically relax. Give me better instructions.

Ross Blocher: Oh, it’s everything you would do to prepare for meditation, and it includes meditation.

Carrie Poppy: It might be what you do to prepare to take a shit. I mean, it’s like clear off space, but like—you might do this before dinner, before you did anything. This gives me no specifics.

Ross Blocher: We’ve gotten to where now we’re ready to do it. And—! That’s the end of the story.

Carrie Poppy: Yes! Exactly. No actual instructions.

Ross Blocher: She doesn’t give any real tips like, you know, “Pinch your third eye!” Or something like that. (Chuckles.)

Carrie Poppy: Yes! Yes. Then what? Then what?

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Imagine that you are looking up towards the crown chakra. Or you know, anything like that! There’s no practical application in this entire panel.

Carrie Poppy: You know what this panel is?

Ross Blocher: What is it?

Carrie Poppy: It’s that joke. What’s the best way to get into Hollywood? Take Fountain.

Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) I hadn’t heard that! But I like that kind of joke.

Carrie Poppy: Alan is just asking that for two hours, and the whole two hours, they’re like, “Take Fountain.” Fountain is a street that will take you into the Hollywood district. And the joke is! That you’re not asking that! You’re asking for something faaar different!

Ross Blocher: It’s the adult version of the kind of humor that works so well with little kids. Like the, you know, what’s the difference between a table and a moose? Well, one of them is a moose.

(Carrie giggles.)

It works on little kids. And my friend, Catherine.

Carrie Poppy: Touché! Did you know that if you remote view an ET in its entirety, they themselves are aware that someone’s remote viewing them?

Ross Blocher: (Ross laughs and then sighs.) Oh, Alan. That was Alan. And in the same thought, he said, “Like quantum physics tells us, if you’re looking at something, you’re affecting it.” Okay. I’m going to step up on—oh, you have a soapbox here. This is very convenient. I’m going to stand in your soapbox. This came up recently, just the misunderstanding of the observer effect. And I’ve heard other scientists say that it would better be called the measurement effect. I’m going to start calling it the measurement effect, because it’s not at the scales he’s talking about.

Usually when we’re talking about measuring, we’re talking about bouncing photons off of something. Let’s just say for the shorthand, that’s how we’re doing measurements. So, it could be visible light, could be another form of light, but you’re seeing something. Like, I’m seeing you right now in front of me because there are photons from outside bouncing off of you into my eyes, and I’m perceiving them.

Carrie Poppy: You’re welcome.

Ross Blocher: When I am trying to observe the path of an individual photon, bouncing a photon off of it is going to do something to it! Now, bouncing photons off of you right now, Carrie, does not knock you off of your seat. So, it doesn’t have an effect. But if I’m trying to observe an effect that is so tiny that it’s at the scale of an electron or a photon, yeah, me bouncing other things off of it to be aware of where it is and what it’s doing is going to have an effect on it. That’s the measurement effect! That’s the observer effect.

[02:05:00]

It’s not that like the universe knows you’re looking.

Carrie Poppy: Right, right. It’s not some—

Ross Blocher: It’s not a statement about consciousness.

Carrie Poppy: —spiritual connection between me and what I’m observing. It’s me actually making the decision to perform a science experiment.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. And taking a measurement. And it works even if you’re not there watching. If you have a camera doing it all by itself, you have the equipment doing it.

Carrie Poppy: Sure. That counts as a decision.

Ross Blocher: Anyways.

Carrie Poppy: No, that’s a good summary.

Ross Blocher: Thanks. So, here came the moment that I’ve been waiting for this whole time, because we’re at a remote viewing panel, they’re telling all these amazing stories.

Carrie Poppy: We’re 80 minutes in.

Ross Blocher: I’ve got an object burning a hole in my hand, because I just want to get up to the Q&A and ask them, “What’s in my hand?” Because these are people who teach this. They can wax philosophical about it. Can you actually find something?

Carrie Poppy: But fortunately!

Ross Blocher: Alan is thinking this way! Yeah!

Carrie Poppy: Yes! Thank you, Alan. Alan is our kind of people. Alan, Whitley Strieber. Come on, man. (Snapping.) Let’s join forces here!

Ross Blocher: Yeah, I’m all for it. So, he says, “Let’s do a little experiment. I have something in my left pocket.” And I’m like thank goodness! You know what it is. And that’s maybe a problem, but we’re getting somewhere.

(Carrie affirms.)

So, he has everybody close their eyes, and the panelists like really get into it. You know, Tracey’s got to set her mood music—(chuckling) no, she doesn’t have time for all of that.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughing.) She does a meditation for half an hour.

(They laugh.)

Ross Blocher: So, all of them are like exhaling, and you can hear them like (breathing deeply), “Okay.” You know, like let’s get serious about this. We’re going to figure out what’s in his pocket.

Alan tells us, “Don’t use your left brain.” And they’re all giving us—

Carrie Poppy: Which, again, these people conflate with thinking.

Ross Blocher: Right, being analytical. If we haven’t made it clear in this episode, there are certainly features of the left and right hemispheres in your brain that handle certain things. And brains are really cool. If somehow you lose a hemisphere of your brain, the rest of the brain is quite plastic and will take on new abilities. But the overall distinction of the right brain being more creative and the left brain being more analytical—no, it just really doesn’t pan out that way. It’s not that simple.

Carrie Poppy: It’s also so elitist. It’s so anti-science. It’s always like my fellow art kids being like, “The science kids are bad!” I’m like, fuck you, no they’re not. Yeah, that’s how it always feels to me. It’s just like, “Oh, well, we’re not good at science, so science is bad, ‘cause we’re the art kids.”

And I’m like, listen, I wasn’t naturally gifted at math or science! I just get that it’s real!

Ross Blocher: Yeah, and that strikes me as defeatist too. Like, well, might as well not work on developing this ability, because I didn’t just naturally get it.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah! Yeah, I don’t like it! Don’t like it!

Ross Blocher: I’m with you. So, we’re getting all these bits of advice from the panel, because we—the audience—are invited to participate as well and project our brains into Alan’s pocket.

Carrie Poppy: Yes. So, one woman makes a guess that it’s a candy cane. And boy! They fucking do not like that!

Ross Blocher: Oh, she gets shot down! “Don’t say candy cane! No! Say spirals!”

Carrie Poppy: (Laughing.) “You piece of shit! Don’t say candy cane!”

No, they’re like, “Don’t try to—no, no, no, no, no, no, no! That’s left brain stuff. That’s left brain stuff. You are trying to impose your own interpretation on it. Just let the images come. So, is it a red and white spiral? Okay. A red and white spiral. Got it. Don’t say anymore! Red and white spiral.”

Ross Blocher: And this is where we’re told to think in terms of texture and shape. And don’t guess! Just let it come.

Carrie Poppy: Get as unspecific as possibleee!

Ross Blocher: And then we were given an example from, of course, the great Uri Geller. He, for example—like, there would be, “Glasses, but he would just say, ‘I see straight lines and circles.’”

Carrie Poppy: Then we would do the rest for him!

(They laugh.)

Ross Blocher: Yes! So, other people call out from the audience. There’s a woman who says, “I’m getting a spiral, something smooth and grooved like a screw.”

And another man says, “I’m getting a sphere. Orange and blue.” And all of you maybe get whatever you’re getting in Alan’s pocket. And hey, you can do it in the past. So, go back in the past and find Alan’s pocket.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, I wish I remembered what I pictured, but I do remember not being impressed with my results.

Ross Blocher: You know, I didn’t write mine down, which tells me I may have just been fixating on getting the opportunity to ask them about my target. So, I don’t know if I was close or not.

Carrie Poppy: I remember distinctly feeling disappointed when he brought out what it was.

Ross Blocher: Okay. There’s a woman who says, “Something round!”

And there’s a man who says, “Something red!”

And we’ve already contradicted the sphere that is orange and blue.

Carrie Poppy: This is starting to sound like the beginning of Jaws.

(They laugh.)

Ross Blocher: And Paul on the panel—again, he was part of the program. He teaches this stuff. He says, “(Sighs.) I don’t know. Smooth, grayish, hollow, rounded, beveled.” He throws out all those words. Which, like cold reading, is a good technique. Just like put out a bunch of stuff.

Carrie Poppy: Smooth, but beveled. I mean, it’s possible, but they’re strange things to put together.

Ross Blocher: And Alan says, “Oh, I’ve just heard the best answer so far, which is ‘I don’t know.’”

(They “ooooh” together.)

Carrie Poppy: Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap!

[02:10:00]

We paid $600 to be here! Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap!

(They chuckle.)

Ross Blocher: And then he repeats some of those words that just came from Paul. And I noticed he’s being selective. He’s not repeating the entire list. He repeats the ones that probably connect with the thing in his pocket.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, nicely spotted, Blocher!

Ross Blocher: Yeah, he says, “Oh, so smooth, grayish, hollow, rounded.” He’s repeating those. And I’m like, well, now I know what it is. Alan does have a little bit of fun with the audience though. He says, “Is anyone getting a plastic toy? Oh, you did?” To a person in the audience. “‘Cause that’s not what it is.” Sneaky.

Carrie Poppy: Heh-heh! Nice. Now that person can’t turn to the person next to them and say that they got it.

Ross Blocher: Tracey says, “I’m getting fragments. It’s shiny, silver, and smooth in segments. There’s a repeating pattern. There’s a straight line and something with a shape that I’m not able to make out. And there’s a point on it.”

Carrie Poppy: Oh, something with a shape. Yeah, good.

Ross Blocher: “But there’s a point on it, but also smoothness.”

(Carrie giggles.)

And then Anthony from the panel says that it’s sharp and star-like.

So, Alan says, “Okay, is everybody ready for the reveal? It is a round, smooth, bevel, spiral shell in my pocket. It’s a pen!” And he’s got like, you know, a clicker pen—like, a nice one, a silver one. So, some of the words that got shouted out match that, and everyone can feel really good about themselves. But a lot of the words did not match that at all.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. So, supposedly Tracey got it. Like, she held up her picture and kind of waves it at him in a “I got close enough for myself!”

Ross Blocher: And there’s a few people in the audience shouting exultantly like, “Oh, I totally got it! I got it!”

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, And there’s no particular confirmation, just a lot of, “Oh, and you got it! You got it! You got it! That’s all! Yay! That’s great! That’s great! You’re satisfied? You’re satisfied? Great!”

Ross Blocher: Which reminds me a lot of the spoon bending party, where we’re all like congratulating each other after we know we know we all just put our grubby mitts on these spoons and bent them. Come on.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, yeah. No, it’s like a recital for children where you all get up and play the violin badly, and everybody’s like, “Mmmm!” (Claps.)

Ross Blocher: So, Anthony points out, “There’s a pressure element here, which makes it a difficult test.”

And Desiree reminds us all, “And you just got to stick with the first thing you think of.”

Carrie Poppy: First thing that comes to your mind. That’s the main thing. And clear everything else.

Ross Blocher: Paul describes this as martial arts for the mind and reminds us that he’s been doing this for nearly 40 years, since 1983.

Carrie Poppy: Damn. And did he get the object right?

Ross Blocher: He had said enough words that did match it and some extras that didn’t. Like—

Carrie Poppy: That was him. Okay.

Ross Blocher: Beveled, I think, would be the hardest one to sell. Hollow, rounded, grayish, smooth. You know, not bad, Paul. Not bad for 40 years of effort. You described a pen very vaguely.

Carrie Poppy: I will also say the fact that it’s in your pocket at a conference. What were the odds of a silver pen? If I had stopped and thought about it or been doing this for 40 years and had this test performed a lot of times?

Ross Blocher: Does he have a live frog in his pocket? Probably not. Does he have a paper crane?

Carrie Poppy: A house?

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Like, there’s certain amounts of things that you have on your person. And of course, mentalists use this all the time. What’s the woman going to have in her purse? You know, there’s a certain range of reasonable, smart things to have in your purse. Oh, and before all of this, Anthony Peake had sort of warned us as we were about to do this together. He said, “By the way there’s an effect of multiple people doing remote viewing at the same time. It’s called telepathic overlay. And one viewer can hijack the process. And if they seem super certain, other people will sign on to their strong opinion and get it wrong.”

Carrie Poppy: Aaah! Cindy Kaza’s piggybacking effect.

Ross Blocher: I’m thinking, oh my goodness! Yet again, you’re just finding a way to ignore bad results and like label it something else.

Carrie Poppy: And make it a group effort to label it something else. Turn it to everybody in the crowd to clap for Tinkerbell.

Ross Blocher: “Those other people were reading correctly until they got swayed the wrong way by this overly persuasive person.” Uh, sneaky. So, they open up the Q&A, and I’m right there. I’m ready.

Carrie Poppy: Hell yeah.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. And I’ve had something in my hands. I’m ready to go with it.

Carrie Poppy: I think I’m right behind you.

Ross Blocher: All of you listening maybe try to picture. What are you getting? You can go back in time and space as well and figure out what’s in my hands.

Carrie Poppy: What’s in Ross’s hand? And I don’t totally remember.

Clip:

Speaker: … pass off the microphone, we might not get to everyone. Go ahead.

Ross Blocher: Hello. Well, you anticipated where I was going with this, but I have an object, and I thought this was a great opportunity with such an esteemed panel. It’s in my hands, and Alan doesn’t know what it is.

Alan: I don’t know what it is. It’s in your hands.

Ross Blocher: I would just love to hear your process.

Paul: Air. You’ve got air in your hand.

(Laughter.)

Ross Blocher: There’s an object.

Alan: Okay, I have to focus. Okay, okay, okay. Tracey, anybody want to try to stab at it? Ummmm… I’m getting little things with analytical overlay levels. Like, like a little spike type thing, round, like a jack or something like those old toys.

[02:15:00]

Anybody else get anything? Okay, we don’t have that much time. What is it? Anybody else?

Ross Blocher: Okay, nobody else?

(Overlapping talk from the crowd.)

Alan: What?

Ross Blocher: Round, I’m hearing round a lot. Any colors?

Alan: Colors, purple.

(More chatter from the crowd.)

Ross Blocher: Okay, no other strong impressions?

Alan: What have you got?

 

Carrie Poppy: Turns out this is much easier when it’s my object in my pocket that my hand put there!

Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) Paul immediately chimes in with, you know, a smartalecky answer, hoping he’ll catch me being smartalecky. And he says, “Air! You’ve got air in your hand.” Okay. Yes, technically. But I said it’s an object. So, I finally revealed that I had a green gummy bear in my hands.

Carrie Poppy: Gummy bear? Green gummy bear! I had a blue gummy bear in my notes. Okay.

Ross Blocher: So, then Desiree is like, “Wait, what color was it? I couldn’t see.” Green. Oh, okay.

Carrie Poppy: Okay. I’ll update my protocol now!

Ross Blocher: So anyways, yeah, nobody got it or anything close to it. So, yeah, failed on the remote viewing, but I’ll probably end up buying a remote viewing course from one of these people on this panel.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, I think I’d like to. I think it sounds wonderfully frustrating.

Ross Blocher: Oh yeah! Oh no, I’m totally down for it.

Carrie Poppy: So, I was next to ask a question. So, I had seen Tracey’s talk earlier that weekend, and she had talked about schizophrenia in particular being a condition where people had their third eye open and could remote view or astral travel, etc.

Clip:

Carrie Poppy: I was wondering how neurodivergence fits into this, because I went to your talk, Tracey. You mentioned schizophrenia as one condition in which people are more susceptible to these sorts of visions. So, that made me think about how neurodivergence is often medicated. And what’s your stance on all of that?

 

Carrie Poppy: She gave a very long answer that started with her explaining the difference between the right and left brain, of course.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, she’s really into that.

Carrie Poppy: And she said it’s always been difficult for her to fit into the left brain world. Okay. But she said that people like her who have highly visual spatial operating systems, they find it hard to process things in a linear path. And yeah—basically, yes, she thinks that might have something to do with why they’re able to connect on this level to the hereafter.

Ross Blocher: Okay, so she was willing to at least sign on to this as like a workable hypothesis that might warrant further examination. Okay.

Carrie Poppy: So, she’s—I think she’s basically saying, “Yeah, I agree that these neurodivergent experiences put you at—what we’d say in psychology—a greater risk of experiences like hallucinations, delusions, things like that.” But she would flip it on its head. She would say, “You know, that’s the pathologizing mindset. Yes, of course, the people who have those quote/unquote ‘illnesses’ can see the hereafter, but that just proves that we’re pathologizing these natural, spiritual gifts.”

Ross Blocher: Ah, got it. You think she might say that would be reductionist or just looking at it the wrong way?

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, discrediting people’s spiritual experiences as nothing but mental illness.

Ross Blocher: The wrong frame to describe such abilities.

Carrie Poppy: Right. She said, “When we talk about going off into pathology—you know, pathology is in those realms that’s all about the inability, the unhealthy brain to differentiate between fantasy and reality.” So, she’s like, “Yes, those things overlap, but I see that as good and not needing any treatment.”

Ross Blocher: It seems like she wants to give credit to the spirit for good things and give blame to the body for bad things.

Carrie Poppy: I think a simpler way to say it is I would say she doesn’t believe in mental illness. Yeah, I think she doesn’t believe in mental illness. She thinks that it is a spiritual experience and that, therefore, when you go out and study these spiritual experiences and which personality types they cluster over, of course you’re going to discover that it’s things like schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder. Of course you are! Because that’s the mismanagement of science over a spiritual experience.

Ross Blocher: Ah, but that’s your focus. So weird then that she would even care about this whole left brain, right brain thing then. I mean, what does that affect your spirit?

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, touché. Touché. Yeah.

Ross Blocher: Interesting. I’ll be interested to hear, The other things you learned from her.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. She’s interesting.

Ross Blocher: Okay. Well, there were certainly more questions and some funny anecdotes about aliens. And there’s one in particular we’ll have to share as our “and remember”. It wasn’t even a question. It was a little speech.

Carrie Poppy: (Giggles.) Yeah. A little witness testimony.

Ross Blocher: About his remote viewing ability. Apparently he’s a longtime friend of Alan. Aren’t we all? That’ll be our “and remember” audio. Okay. So, I did check on some of these doctorates.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, good! Thank you. Yes.

Ross Blocher: Paul Smith received his doctorate degree in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin in 2009.

[02:20:00]

Yep. Legit.

Carrie Poppy: Alright, fine.

Ross Blocher: JJ Hurtak—here’s an interesting character. He has a PhD from the University of California in 1977. (Ramping up into a falsetto.) I think in philosophy? That’s as high as I can say the word philosophy.

Carrie Poppy: University of California. I wonder which location. That’s funny.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. And another from Minnesota, 1993, which I think is in history, because that’s where he linked to when he mentioned that. But he also has a master’s in theology from Luther Theological Seminary, where he studied early Greek, Latin, and Coptic literature from the patristic period. So, I mean, the guy’s widely studied, and I found a link to his research papers. And you know, he’s still writing them on ResearchGate. And, boy, was that a wild collection of things like—I don’t know, metacognition and quantum dynamics and a lot of like buzzwordy stuff.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, I’m sure.

Ross Blocher: So, he’s getting published somewhere. But none of it sounds like mainline stuff. It seems like he got like a good education, and then he’s just kind of run with his own personal philosophy.

Carrie Poppy: Mm-hm. Mm-hm. I know the type.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. And then Desiree, this one took some work to find. She has a master’s degree in international relations from Syracuse university and a PhD from the New School University in the area of public policy. And she does like NGO work, non-governmental organization work. So, sounds like she, again, got legitimate, credentials there. So, none of those were like big red flags or anything. Well, we did make it to the end. The end seemed remote, but now we are viewing it!

(Carrie giggles delightedly.)

That was a wild experience. Yeah, I certainly do want to study. And I’m hoping that we’ll get some more solid tips and tricks on how to do this.

Carrie Poppy: Yes! Now, do not write to your favorite remote viewer and be like, “You should have Ross and Carrie come and remote view here!”

Ross Blocher: Don’t do it.

Carrie Poppy: Nope, that will ensure we don’t go there. So, don’t do that. But if you want to email us good remote viewing tips, tricks, maybe.

Ross Blocher: Well, that’s it for this episode and this particular story from Contact in the Desert.

Carrie Poppy: Yes. Thank you, remote viewing panel! Thank you, Alan Steinfeld. And thank you, Ian Kremer, administrative manager of Oh No, Ross and Carrie!.

(Ross agrees.)

A wonderful person who’s been with us for—gosh, since—?

Ross Blocher: Episode one! He recorded it.

Carrie Poppy: Since episode one in 2011! A magical, magical man.

Ross Blocher: And our theme music is by Brian Keith Dalton.

Carrie Poppy: This episode was edited by Ross Blocher.

Ross Blocher: You can support everything that we do—this podcast and all that comes with it—at MaximumFun.org/join. You can leave us a positive review. You can tell a friend. There’s so many ways to spread the word!

Carrie Poppy: Mm-hm. You can get a tattoo on the bottom of your foot.

Ross Blocher: You can come to a conference that’s being held in Halifax.

Carrie Poppy: Nova Scotia.

Ross Blocher: Nova Scotia! I’m so excited. I’m going to go there. It starts on May 15th. It’s called The Devil. It’s The Devil Conference! And the—

Carrie Poppy: Okay. And you are speaking?

Ross Blocher: I’m going to be on a panel. Hey, panels!

(Carrie cheers.)

Yeah, talking about the devil in the media and Bob Larson and all of that fun stuff. Absolutely. You can find that at Devil2024.co. That’ll get you to the conference. And it starts May 15th—coming soon!—in Halifax. And I’m really excited to visit there.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah! I’ve never been to Nova Scotia. You’ll have to send me some pics.

Ross Blocher: I have not! Yeah, I will. My dad and my niece and I all just read a book called The Great Halifax Explosion—

Carrie Poppy: You were telling me about this.

Ross Blocher: —about the big explosion in 1917. It’s a wild story. Look it up if you haven’t heard about it. So, if you haunt all the history museums around then, you’ll probably see me. And speaking of things coming up soon: this summer, we’re having Camp Omni. You’ve heard me talk about the summer camp that my son and I both volunteer at as counselors. If you’re in the California area or in driving distance, we’re having our NorCal camp this June 23rd through 29th. And in SoCal, July 7th through 13th. There’s still time to sign up. It’s a great weeklong secular summer camp experience.

And I want to announce for the SoCal session, July 7th through 13th, I’m putting out a scholarship. So, if your family would like to attend, email info@ohnopodcast.com with the subject line “Camp Omni Scholarship”, and just tell me a little bit about your family and why you’d like to go. And I’ll be giving out three scholarships for $500 each. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. Just let me know why you’re interested. And for those three families, once you’re registered, I’ll send you that scholarship. We’d love to get more people at both camps. There’s still room. Hope to see you there. Learn more at CampOmni.org. That’s camp O-M-N-I dot org.

Carrie Poppy: And remember!

Clip:

Speaker: Hi, I am an abductee and an intuitive. In 2010, I used my abilities to work with the CIA and the FBI to stop major terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC.

[02:25:00]

And I did all of those things that you all were talking about. I knew the date, I knew the location, I knew where the terrorist cell camp was outside Montreal. I knew all the details. I had no training to be a psychic. And what happened after these incidents was that the men in black demanded to see me. I thought they were the FBI. And the reason I’m sharing this is because they asked very specific questions. “Who are they? Where do you get your information? How do you call them in? How many—?” All of this.

And so, what I get from that very clearly, and in my experiences afterwards—because I didn’t know at the time that I had been an abductee, or that that’s where I was getting my information. But it seems very clear to me that this is where I got all that information from—good alien races that were helping me to do this. And then I also want to add that I had already also drunk a lot of ayahuasca.

(Chuckles from the audience.)

(Inaudible) to bring that into the equation. And then I’ve also—

Alan: An abductee on ayahuasca.

Speaker: And that I also, from the very beginning, I never trusted just myself. I’ve always worked with teams. I’ve always consulted with other psychics. So, I just wanted to confirm all of these things as part of the process.

Alan: Thank you so much for that comment. I appreciate it.

Speaker: Alan and I have known each other for 20 years.

Alan: Yes, we have.

Speaker: So, thank you for letting me speak in front everyone.

Alan: Of course. Thank you.

Speaker: I’m going public with all of this now, so.

(Crosstalk from multiple people.)

Alan: Thank you. Okay.

Music: “Oh No, Ross and Carrie! Theme Song” by Brian Keith Dalton. A jaunty, upbeat instrumental.

Promo:

(School bell rings.)

Music: Playful synth fades in.

Caroline Roper: Alright, class. Tomorrow’s exam will cover the science of perfect pitch, the history of pride flags, and speed running video games. Any questions? Ah, yes, you in the back.

Student: Uh, what is this?

Tom Lum: It’s the podcast Let’s Learn Everything!

Ella Hubber: —where we learn about science and a bit of everything else.

Tom: My name’s Tom. I studied cognitive and computer science, but I’ll also be your teacher for Intermediate Emojis.

Caroline: My name’s Caroline, and I did my masters in biodiversity conservation, and I’ll be teaching you Intro to Things the British Museum Stole.

Ella: My name’s Ella. I did a PhD in stem cell biology. So, obviously I’ll be teaching you the History of Fanfiction!

Tom: Class meets every other Thursday on Maximum Fun.

(Music ends.)

Student: So, do I still get credit for this?

(They laugh.)

Caroline, Tom, & Ella: (In unison.) No!

Ella: Obviously not.

Caroline: No.

Tom: It’s a podcast.

(They laugh.)

Transition: Cheerful ukulele chord.

Speaker 1: Maximum Fun.

Speaker 2: A worker-owned network.

Speaker 3: Of artist owned shows.

Speaker 4: Supported—

Speaker 5: —directly—

Speaker 6: —by you!

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