Edition 672 - Paola Harris, David Christian And Paul H Smith
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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you for being part of this show.
Thank you for being part of my life.
To be perfectly honest with you, your emails and contacts with me through the official Facebook page of The Unexplained or through my website by sending me emails through theunexplained.tv.
Very, very important to me.
And thank you.
All right.
What am I going to do on this edition of the show?
Very good question you ask.
Three items from my recent TV show that I want to put here for posterity.
And if you don't get to see the TV show, they'll all be new to you.
Number one is Paula Harris, old friend of this show, of course.
I've been talking to Paola for 20 years or more, UFO researcher.
This is about the latest on her research, along with Jacques Varlais, on a contact case named Trinity.
The book that they wrote about this is called Trinity.
We've spoken with them before about the book.
This is about an update on the book and some other thoughts, too, to do with an article I saw on a website that essentially just reminded us of the fact that ufology was older than Roswell.
And this case that Paola Harris will talk about is indeed a couple of years before Roswell and potentially just as interesting or perhaps even more so.
So Paola Harris, number one.
Number two, author and thinker David Christian will talk about the future.
He's written a book about it.
It is very cerebral stuff, but I found him on the TV show absolutely fascinating to listen to, just as an experience to talk with.
So David Christian is guest number two.
Guest number three, Paul H. Smith, world famous remote viewer, about the latest in remote viewing.
Three things, all different, and all hopefully good from my recent TV show.
So let's get number one now.
We'll start with Paula Harris and the history of UFO events and contact.
It may well predate Roswell.
Great to see you.
Nice to see you.
I'll get it this way because then we can get to see each other.
Well, no, exactly.
The last time we did an interview for my podcast, you and Jack Falay were sending me beautiful video back.
I think you were in your kitchen, and I was only able to sign you sound.
Now I am sending you with love from London video too.
So this story that I read that once again re-enlivens what you were saying in the book puts in the public mind that actually the history of modern ufology goes back further than Roswell.
It's beyond 1947.
It goes back before that.
And I think that's a fact that a lot of people don't appreciate.
Yeah?
Yes.
And the irony was I was living in Europe and I read this story about two little boys that actually witnessed a crash one month after the atomic bomb exploded in Trinity near Socorro.
Actually, the place is called San Antonio, New Mexico.
And when I was in Italy and I came back from Italy in 2007 to live in the United States, I said, why aren't my colleagues following up?
Because these people are still alive and you need to have witnesses.
And Roswell is the mecca of ufology.
And we don't have the exact place and we don't have any of the exact witnesses alive anymore.
So I said, why don't they go for it?
But I didn't realize, and I listened to what you said about synchronicities, and my whole life is filled with those, that it was me that had to do the research.
So synchronistically, the son of the pilot who flew over that area got hold of me and was talking to me on the phone and gave me the telephone numbers of the two little boys nine years ago.
This is a nine-year research effort.
I started it five years ago, and then Jacques Villais jumped in four years ago because he heard there was metal involved.
The nine-year-old little boy went inside the craft and pulled out a piece of metal that looks like a bracket.
And crucially, this is not 1947, the year of Roswell.
This is 1945.
No, because I've come to the conclusion in my 40-year career that whatever happens happens for a reason in a timeline of geopolitical history.
So what happened there was not that whatever was flying around, and it was an avocado shaped ship with a dome.
Whatever was flying around was not on vacation.
It had just come out of that area in White Sands where the atomic bomb was exploded.
And it was called Trinity Site in White Sands.
There's a memorial there right now that's so ironic.
The words of Robert Oppenheimer, I am death, the killer of worlds, plural, it comes out of the Bhagavad Gita.
For Oppenheimer to write, I am death, the killer of worlds, and that's what's on that plaque, means that we entered the nuclear age.
And I don't have to go into detail as to the geopolitical importance of that.
To cut a very long story a lot shorter because of, you know, what time is like when you're doing a show like this, it's always pressing you.
We're saying we think that whatever it was back then was interested in what was happening there.
There was an interest, as we've seen so many times, there's an interest in, apparently, in nuclear missiles and weapon sites.
This was a nuclear test.
So whatever that was we think that was witnessed by those two boys was a response to what was being done there.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I mean, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the timing one month later, 10 miles away, 10 miles away, witnessed by these two boys.
And I consequently found three other witnesses.
So, you know, this is something that should have been jumped on a long time ago.
But the reason why these boys didn't come forth is because they stole something, you know, that belonged, you know, to the recovery era.
They're not going to admit they went inside and pulled out a piece.
So where is that piece then, Paolo?
The piece is now going to Rice University, but it was in Stanford University with Jacques Valley.
He was examining it.
So when we talked about the release of the book, which is, gee, you know, the last couple of years have just been like, it was about a year ago, I think, but I couldn't give you a precise date.
So that piece of material is now being analyzed.
When will we hear more about that?
I don't know.
Jacques is in Paris right now, but we have updated the book.
So the book looks different.
With the new witness, this is the book.
It's the updated version of Trinity.
It just came out with the new witness.
And that new witness had to do with the fiber optics.
It was strewn all over the ground.
That new witness was one of the people that trimmed the Christmas tree with stuff they didn't know what it was because it was all lit up.
Wow.
And you're saying that there was fiber optics all over the ground when we didn't know what fiber optics were.
Not in 1945.
And we don't even know if they're fiber optics.
They were all lit up.
They were all colors and they were constantly lit up.
So the kids not knowing what they were.
And the witness was 15 years old.
He trimmed the tree.
They didn't have electricity.
That's an astonishing story.
You've updated the book with Jacques.
What else are you going to do about it?
What else is there?
It sounds to me like there is more that you can do.
Well, the only thing that can happen, and if it's destiny, it'll happen, is that they can make a documentary about this because we still have three of the witnesses still alive.
And, you know, I'm hoping that, and we can go back to the location because unlike Roswell and different crashes, we have the exact location.
There's a mark on the ground of the UFO.
It was 30 feet in diameter and 15 feet tall.
And where is it now?
It's in San Antonio.
It's in San Antonio.
But what happened to the wreck?
That's the thing.
Oh, who knows?
That was the recovery in 1945.
We think it was taken to Los Alamos.
And what Remy, the younger boy, told me, the six-year-old that later was the first person I spoke to, is that this case is in the files of the Atomic Energy Commission, not Blue Book, not the Air Force files.
There was no Air Force then.
It was Army Air Force.
And he worked for Dixie Lee, who was the governor of Washington State.
She let him see the case.
And it was in the Atomic Energy Commission files, which are top secret higher than any files.
Not even the president can get into the Atomic Energy.
So you're never going to be able to see those files because of where they are.
No, I just have the testimony of Remy that did see it as a thank you from the governor of Washington because he helped get her elected governor.
So he told me that.
She thanked me by letting me see it.
But we don't know where the craft went.
But that was one of like four crashes in the 1940s in New Mexico, as you know.
Paula, we need to talk more.
Thank you very much.
It's nice to see you in video.
And I'm really delighted that you've been able to take the research forward.
And it looks like it can go even further forward from here.
Show me the book again so that my listener and viewer can see it.
Or rather, my viewer can see it.
It's a great book.
And Jacques is very, very proud of it.
And, you know, I think they will find it extremely interesting.
His writing is beautiful.
And it's very, very much like a novel.
I saw the original.
Thank you very much, Paola.
You take care.
Paola Harris, a friend of mine, guest on this show and on the podcast and radio shows for years and years and years.
The book is called, Check It Out, Trinity.
Available now, as they say, in its updated form.
The great Paula Harris.
Good to see that her work is ongoing.
Let's get now to another item.
David Christian, thinker and author, who's written a book about the future, how we regard the future, why the future is important, and how there are all kinds of different ways to think about it.
This is David Christian.
Before we get David Christian on, I'm just going to read a little bit from the beginning of the book, which might help.
This book describes how philosophers and scientists and theologians have thought about the future.
It discusses how other creatures, from bacteria to bats and baubarb trees, deal with the same deep mystery using immensely sophisticated biochemical and neurological machinery.
It employs the unique way in which our own species thinks collectively and often consciously about the future and then tries to shape it.
So, what is the future and how can we be sure that our perceptions of it are what it might turn out to be?
David Christian is the man who's asking some of those questions and many more.
He's online to us now.
David, thank you for doing this.
A pleasure.
A pleasure.
Now, I don't know whether I set out the stall adequately there.
Perhaps you can correct me if I've got anything wrong so far.
I don't think so.
No.
Good man.
Okay, that's a great start.
Let's start by asking the question, what is the future?
You know, we think about the future as being what's going to happen to us in our immediate lives next week or next year.
But in a scientific definition of the future, what exactly is it?
Look, really, I'm not sure that there is a terribly helpful scientific definition of the future.
I mean, in a sense, it's very simple.
The future is the rest of time.
The time that starts now.
History is about the time up to now.
And for many years, I've taught courses about the whole of time from the Big Bang up to now.
But this book looks at The next stage.
So, really, the questions the book is asking about is how can we think about and prepare for what's coming towards us, given the fact that we seem to know very little about what's coming towards us.
But isn't by definition, unless you're a seer or a psychic or somebody who claims that they know what's going to happen intuitively, isn't that by definition what the future is?
The future is unknown.
The future is in the past, for most of human history, I think it's true to say that just about everyone assumed that the world was full of spirits, conscious beings of many different kinds, some of whom could tell you about the future.
And that implied that the future was perhaps to some extent knowable.
Well, modern science, particularly since the early 20th century, is probabilistic with quantum physics and many other changes.
So modern science actually treats the future as not predetermined, as slightly open.
And therefore, what that really means is we have absolutely no direct evidence about what's going to happen in the near future.
Okay.
But there are various ways of looking at the future and looking at the elapsing of time.
And quite early on in your book, you lay out two views through history of what the passage of events may be.
One sees time as a river, and the other sees it as a map.
Tell me about the difference between those two definitions.
I'm in Sydney, as you know, and I think the internet's struggling slightly with our conversation.
No, I mean, your video is absolutely superb for Sydney.
It's an awful long way away.
I was talking about the two definitions of time, one being as a flowing river and the other as a map that you talk about a lot at the beginning of your book.
Yeah.
In the early parts of the book, I try to look at how scientists and philosophers have tried to come up with strict, tight definitions of what we mean by the future.
And those discussions are absolutely fascinating.
And some of them go very, very deep indeed.
And they include scholars from St. Augustine, whose writings on the future are still worth reading, to Einstein in the early 20th century and beyond.
But the truth is, as ordinary people trying to deal with the future, those philosophical discussions don't always get you very far.
The main payoff to them is that if you live in the modern world and you take seriously a scientific view of reality, then what follows is that the future really is not predetermined in detail.
And that's a very powerful conclusion because it means we actually have responsibility.
We actually have some degree of choice about the futures.
If the future really is predetermined, then of course morality, ethics, the very idea of freedom of choice, all of those go out the window.
So that's a very important thing.
How can we know?
I mean, I know it's a question as old as time itself, isn't it?
How can we know to what extent, if we think it might be, to what extent time, the future is predetermined through time?
How can we know that?
I think that one of the reasons I wrote the book is because I realized that as an ordinary citizen, I had never done a course about the future and how we think about the future.
So I was trying to sort of tease out, are there basic rules?
And I think there actually are.
None of them mean that we can know definitely about the future.
That's the first principle.
We cannot know, we cannot guarantee our ideas about the future.
Nevertheless, we can have ideas about the most likely futures.
And not only humans, all living organisms actually have mechanisms for helping them predict which futures are more likely.
And that's built into the idea of natural selection.
And the basic principle is actually very simple.
It's that if you look at the world around you, there are many types of processes.
Some of those processes are very regular.
Some are very irregular.
Now, it's the regular processes that give us some sort of grip on the future.
For example, the sun has risen every day in the morning, as far as I know.
So I'm prepared to bet a lot of money that it will rise tomorrow.
But there are some questions, if you ask them, I really haven't a clue.
Horse racing is somewhere in between.
You can look at the track record of a horse, and that gives you some ideas about trends in the past that may extend into the future.
So the basic principle is this.
You look for regular trends in the past, and then you take a bet that they may continue into the future.
And there are never any guarantees that your bet will pay off.
And is that the best we've got, David?
Is that the best method of predicting the future that we have?
In other words, to look at the past, see what happened in the past, and there is a probability, and you can put a number on that if you wish, that those things will recur.
I'm asking you this for a reason.
There's somebody I used to have on this show called Paul Gurcio with a partner that he works with.
And they created something in America that's based on a computer program called Time Tracks.
And it does precisely what you've just talked about.
I don't know whether you've ever heard of their work, but they program in all sorts of features of the past, things that have happened with certain regularity in the past, and then project those forward in time.
And lo and behold, they say, quite often, those things happen at the time and in the way that their program predicted.
Yeah.
Yes, I think.
Now, remember, I'm a historian trying to make sense of the future in a way that ordinary people like myself can understand.
But I think it's true to say this is the only guide we have to the future.
For most of history, people have tended to believe that actually we can get a glimpse of the future.
But nowadays, modern science, within modern science, the argument is no, we cannot get a glimpse of the future.
The only way of thinking about it is to study regularities in the past and project those into the future.
So the people you're talking about, that's exactly what they're doing.
This is what political pollsters do.
It's what weather forecasters do.
They look for regular trends in the past.
Then they say, let's hope that they will continue into the future.
And some of those trends, as I say, are so regular that we can be pretty sure they will continue into the future.
I'm pretty sure the government's going to tax me next year as it taxed me last year, for example.
Possibly somewhat more in this country, but that's a whole other difference that we don't necessarily need to have here.
Of course, it's one thing to predict trends in the future based on what you think you know, and it's another thing to listen to what that knowledge tells you, what that deduction tells you.
For example, and maybe it's a bad example, there was a report published in September 2019 that predicted, because I talked about it on this show and I was one of the very few people who did, that predicted that the world was in for a pandemic in September 2019.
Now, we didn't know that we were going to be in the teeth of a pandemic until some months later.
And nobody, certainly in government and certainly not here, appeared to listen to that warning in that report.
But that report was published around, I think, late August, beginning of September 2019.
So it's one thing to extrapolate and it's another thing to listen to it.
Yep.
And part of the reason is because these extrapolations are actually extremely difficult.
Once again, it's very like betting on the horses.
If your bet works, it's very tempting to think, yeah, I knew, you know, I predicted the future.
In fact, there's a hell of a lot of luck.
So that's why you get profound disagreements about these predictions, because they are probabilistic.
There's a lot of guesswork involved.
And it's a very, very familiar thing that when a prediction turns out right, people often claim that they could actually see it coming.
What they're really doing is they're making the same probabilistic calculations or estimates as everyone else.
Sometimes they get it right, sometimes they don't.
But of course, you can make those predictions with greater or less precision.
And that's why in the modern world, there are many predictions we can make that they simply couldn't make in the past, such as meteorological predictions.
And the reason, again, is very simple.
If the basis for thinking about the future is studying trends in the past, then it follows that the more information you have about trends in the past, the better, and the more you can manipulate and calculate those trends, the better your predictions are likely to be.
So today we have fantastically powerful mechanisms for storing information about the past.
You think of weather forecasting.
Weather forecasts are based on information from all over the world.
And in the past, that information just wasn't available.
So today, we simply have so much more information.
And that increases the chances of getting many types of predictions right.
Although, having said that, there are those domains of reality which are less regular.
And I happen to think that politics is one of them, because politics is so shaped by the decisions of individuals.
And that's something very unpredictable, that predicting politics is, in many areas, a bit of a mugs game.
I think I can only agree with you about that.
So there are degrees of predictability.
You use a phrase in the book, and I wasn't entirely, I mean, you know, there's a lot of deep stuff to think about here, and I just had a day to go through it, not even that.
But you use the phrases fast thinking and slow thinking on page 114.
I wrote it down.
And I wanted to ask you about those.
What is fast thinking versus slow thinking?
Yeah.
Now, I'm embarrassed.
I've gone blank on the name of the thinker who wrote a book.
Maybe you can help me here.
I ought to have this at my fingertips.
But there's a very famous book which argues that we have sort of two modes of thinking in general.
And this applies very much to thinking about the future.
Fast thinking is based on kind of algorithms in the brain that allow us to make decisions quickly.
And they've worked pretty well in the past.
They'll work pretty well in the future.
That's fast thinking.
You react quickly, you react, it almost feels instinctively, and you're often not aware of any conscious effort.
Slow thinking is the thinking you do when you sit down, you study the numbers, you study the information, you grind out the trends, you do the calculations, and then you come up with your predictions.
It's much slower.
It doesn't work in situations where you need to make a decision quickly.
But there are situations in which you really need slow thinking.
So both those things together are, they're very, very, very powerful.
Daniel Kahneman is the person I've been trying to say.
You know, something I was going to write down his name, Kahneman, with a K. Yes, that was him.
I think that's fascinating because the fast thinking is a kind of prediction, but it's a quick prediction for situations that present themselves quickly.
Presumably, things that happen to you, perhaps when you're driving your car or whatever.
It's almost like a reaction, but it's also based on what did I do before when that happened?
That's it.
Both types of thinking are actually based on past trends.
Animals, intelligent animals, mammals use both types of thinking, but a hell of a lot of it, quick reactions, are based on fast thinking.
One of the things that struck me in writing this book is that Kahneman's book is about thinking in general.
And there are lots of very, very good books about thinking.
But so much of our thinking is actually about the future.
That was something I'd never fully understood before.
So that his principles about fast thinking and slow thinking, a hell of a lot of the time, they're really applying to thinking about the future.
Because a huge amount of the time we're thinking, we're thinking about the future.
You come to a very big question at the end of the book, and we can come to it now at the end of our conversation.
And that is about predicting the future of our planet.
Because you remind us, you know, if we hadn't thought of it before, you remind us of the fact that we are custodians of this planet.
We may come to realize that we're part of something much bigger, and there may be other planets with other civilizations with whom we have to mesh in the future.
But we have to have some notion as we walk forward into whatever future that may be, that we're managing a planet.
We are no longer just people going through our lives and doing what we do.
We're custodians of an ecosystem, of a planet that may be a part of many other planets and civilizations.
And we need to do a little bit of future predicting to get a handle on how we're going to handle that situation.
Yep, absolutely.
And I've spent many years teaching about history on very large scales.
Now, if I'm right, if you want to think about the future at large scales, then you need to be studying past trends on very large scales.
So in the case of human history, you need to be looking at the whole of human history and looking for big trends.
Well, there are quite a few big trends you can find.
One of them is our technological creativity.
And that makes me quite optimistic that we will come up with a lot of solutions to existing problems that we don't know about.
But another one is our increasing interconnectivity.
And that has increased rapidly during my lifetime.
So when you said we are custodians, the idea of we doesn't mean English people or Russian people or American people.
It now means humans.
It means the whole species.
And because of that interconnectedness, what we thought of 200 years ago of we, we was our village or our town or our city.
Now we is all of us.
That's right.
So now, if we're thinking about the future, we have to think about the future of that we.
And that we, humanity, is now a planetary force.
We are the first species in four billion years that has become so powerful collectively that we will change the planet.
And eventually, almost certainly, all the trends suggest we will migrate beyond this planet.
The technological trends, but also the migratory trends.
We're a migratory species back in the Stone Age.
Humans were migrating slowly around the entire Earth.
So that is an example of using very long historical trends as the basis for probabilistic predictions about the future at scales of many hundreds or even thousands of years.
This is deep and complex material.
It's a book that I had to speed read and I was sorry that I did.
And I'm going to go back to it when I get a chance because it's a book that people need to read and think about because the future is something that we need to ponder.
And if we can get more of a handle on where we're headed as a species, then I think we're doing ourselves a favor.
And I hope I've done your book some justice here, David.
Thank you so much for joining me from Sydney.
David Christian.
And thank you very much for your questions.
I really appreciate it.
David Christian, Future Stories, What's Next?
Is a huge question posed by that book.
Well worth looking at, but you've got to give yourself some time and space to check it out because it's not an easy thing.
You know, it's not a magazine.
It's something that takes some thought.
David Christian, on the future.
Gee, imagine how rich I could be if I could actually predict it with accuracy, hey?
That's a skill that I don't have.
Sometimes I do know things are going to happen.
Sometimes I can predict what's going to happen to me.
Certainly when I start new jobs and stuff.
But not with any great reliability.
The future is a fascinating thing, is it not?
An enigma in itself.
Okay, last guest, Paul H. Smith, remote viewer.
Paul H. Smith is a retired major in the United States Army who served for seven years in the U.S. government's remote viewing program at Fort Meade in Maryland.
During 1984, he became one of only a handful of government personnel to be personally trained in Coordinate Remote Viewing, or CRV, by the very famous Ingo Swan.
Paul was the primary author of the program's CRV training manual and served as theory instructor for new CRV trainees, as well as recruiting officer, unit security officer, and unit historian.
He's credited with more than a thousand training and operational remote viewing sessions during his time with the military unit at Fort Meade.
We've talked many times over nearly 20 years of doing the unexplained in its various venues about what remote viewing is and how those who are trained in doing it, and let's remember, the Russians took it seriously, the United States military took it seriously,
I have reason to believe that we here in the United Kingdom took it seriously, that there were those, it is claimed, can use their abilities of mind to be able to know what is happening in other places, to be able to see them, to be able to sketch them, make a model of them, write down details of them.
It's a remarkable thing, and if it's all true, it's a gift.
Paul H. Smith is online to us now.
Paul, thank you for doing this.
Sorry to have kept you waiting.
No, that's fine.
It's quite interesting.
In fact, I'm sorry we should have had a three-way with David Christensen because I would have had something to add to his story of predictions.
Really?
I mean, you know, I was going to, and I wasn't sure whether it fitted in that conversation, but I was going to mention remote viewing because to an extent, and I know it's not all of what it's about, Paul, but, you know, it's kind of about prediction, isn't it?
It's certainly about knowing information that you couldn't ordinarily have divined by ordinary means, if you know what I'm saying.
That's true.
And of course, there is a predictive element in it as well.
There is certain ways of using remote viewing to actually make predictions about future outcomes successfully.
And not in the probabilistic way that Mr. Christian's, Christian, yes, Christian, I gotta get ahead of it.
David Christian.
Yeah, and not in the predictive way he was necessarily talking about.
Now, everything he said was correct, but there is an added dimension here that involves what people like to think of as paranormal.
We do have the faculty, the capability of, to some extent, seeing the future.
Now, I say seeing the future because it's not necessarily completely visual, but nonetheless, there have been a number of science projects worked in a number of laboratories around the world where they successfully demonstrated that people can, through their own consciousness, predict future outcomes in a way that isn't explainable in our normal everyday physicalist terms.
Can you do that?
I've done it a number of times.
Maybe if we have time, I'll explain the most spectacular time I did it.
It was quite interesting.
But there's also a mode that people are using today.
You know, oftentimes people say, well, if you're psychic, why aren't you rich?
Yeah, right.
Because you've brought me out.
You are a guest that keeps on giving and a gift that keeps on giving, Paul, because that's exactly what I was going to say.
First thing you would do, most of us, is you would predict your local lotto numbers, wouldn't you?
You would try and see them and then you'd use them and then you'd take the money and retire, wouldn't you?
Well, that's the idea, right?
And there are people today who are using remote viewing as an investment tool and making a substantial amount of money with it.
Now, as with any attempt to invest, even if you have this magical tool called remote viewing, if you will, it isn't perfect, right?
And there are limitations and such, but people do indeed make money with it.
And it's very obvious from the way their protocol is used and from the statistical results that there is not a normal worldly explanation for it.
It really does work.
It doesn't work all the time, but under the right conditions, and if you're doing it properly, you are more successful than not.
So for example, if you're doing sports betting and there's two teams involved, and then you want to bet on the team that wins, normally, if you're just guessing, you'd have a 50% chance of winning.
With remote viewing, using, it's called a social remote viewing, you can enhance your success up to between 60, 70, sometimes even 80% of being correct, even if you know nothing at all about the different capabilities of each of the teams.
Right.
But you've always got to be prepared if you get up to 80%, that there's a 20% possibility that you're going to lose your shirt.
And that happens oftentimes.
We've had people using it in the stock market, and they'll be right eight out of 10 trades, but they'll be wrong two trades.
And the problem is that they're only when they're right the eight times, oftentimes it's only incrementally, like maybe one or two percent, right?
But then the two trades they get wrong, it's like 80%.
It's like the stock drops 80%, like whatever.
And it wipes out all of their gains, even though they were right eight out of 10 times.
So what, I mean, those people, and we'll talk about the protocol and how it works, because we haven't given a definition of remote viewing.
You know, a lot of my viewers tonight will know or have a rough idea of what this is because of the number of people that we've talked to over the years on this show, including people like Major Ed Dames and many, many others who've been involved in this field.
So I think they'll have an idea, but we'll define the protocol.
But just on that specific point of people playing the markets using remote viewing, are they seeing movements that have happened already?
I'm saying this for a specific reason because we've made this country, I say we, the United Kingdom, has made international news because of the plunge in the value of our currency in recent weeks.
As you may have discovered, you know, we've had certain ructions and turmoil within our government.
We've got a new one, and they made some decisions the markets didn't like, and the value of the pound against your currency went right down.
It's recovered a bit now, but it's still not great.
It was nearly parity one pound, one dollar.
I should have come over to visit.
Well, no, I mean, listen, Paul, you're welcome.
Now is the time to do it.
You know, don't wait.
I think the pound might recover.
He was hoping.
But seriously, though, those people who are doing this kind of thing and looking into financial futures in this way and using the protocol, are you saying that they are seeing things that have yet to happen?
Or are they just riding the wave of trends?
No, they are not seeing something that's happened yet.
And let me explain a little bit.
The kind of future prediction I'm talking about here, associate remote viewing, you're not directly trying to get information about the event itself, such as what is the market close going to be?
Well, let's say the pound versus dollar market, where's the currency market going to be at the close, right?
You want to predict that so you know which way to buy or sell, right?
You're not trying to tell that.
What you're doing, it's kind of like you're sending yourself a message From the future.
What happens is the person who's managing the project will pick two particular objects.
We'll make this very simple: pick two particular objects.
And one object will stand for the pound going up, and the other object will stand for the pound going down.
So let's say you pick a red rubber ball for the pound going up, and you pick a paperclip for the pound going down, right?
And then what you do is you tell the remote viewer before the market closed, you say, okay, I want you to describe for me the object I'm going to hand you after the market goes down.
And so the viewer says, well, let's see, it's round and it's red and it's kind of spongy.
And then the person doing the tasking says, okay, that sounds like the red rubber ball.
That means the pound is going to go up.
So I'm going to buy pounds now so that I will buy them at the lower price.
And then after the market closes, we'll assume the pound does go up.
Then the person doing the tasking hands the viewer the red rubber ball because that stands for what actually happened.
So is it all about signs and symbols?
Well, in this case, we're not even talking signs and symbols.
We're talking concrete objects, right?
And what the viewer is doing is looking into the future to see what the object is that he or she is handed.
And the tasking person themselves have decided what that means.
So it is assigned to the tasking person.
To the viewer, it's just the concrete object that they're going to experience.
And how do you know that, I'm sorry to jump in, but I think this is kind of important and I think viewers might want to know.
But how do you know that by doing what you're doing, you're not influencing what happens?
You know what I'm saying?
That by using the process, that you're not actually changing events, not just seeing them.
That's a fairly complicated thing to discuss.
And I'm not going to answer the question that way directly.
I'm going to answer it in a different way.
I'm going to say, so what?
If you get the outcome you want, does it matter what's happening in that respect?
Well, I'm asking it for a reason, and it's a real left-field reason, but I think you might chime with it, Paul.
I used to, years ago, I used to work on a radio station where I was on the Morning Drive Show.
It was a big show.
And you had to be good every day.
Years ago, this is, as my colleagues will tell you.
You had to deliver and perform every day on a Morning Drive show covering London where millions of people were listening.
It was a tremendous responsibility.
Even if you had the flu or you had an early form of COVID, right?
Well, whatever your situation was, and I went in there with all kinds of personal circumstances and tried to leave them at the door.
But what I would do is that on the way to work, and they would send a car to take me into work, I would see myself coming out of the revolving doors of the building, saying to myself, you've just had a great day.
And if I believed that, now this is true, if I believed that was what was going to happen and then forgot about it, I'd not keep worrying it all day, invariably I would come out of that building feeling that I'd had a great day and indeed having experienced a great day.
Was I predicting the future?
Was I making the future?
And the answer is probably yes to both of those things.
So let's talk about this.
I mean, first of all, you're envisioning yourself coming out of those revolving doors saying you had a great day before you even went into work.
Yeah, I'm on the way into work.
Yes.
Okay.
So, I mean, there's a mundane explanation here.
You could have just been, in a way, convincing yourself to have a good day, to get yourself into the right mood, the right frame of mind.
So I was just sucking myself up.
Yes, and it could be that.
It could be that you are getting information from your future self that you did have a great day.
Then there's this further possibility, and I don't know what the likelihood of it is.
People argue about this all the time.
There's a further possibility that by doing that, getting yourself in that frame of mind, you actually mentally influence the future to give you a great day.
Those are the three possibilities.
But as you said, to an extent it's academic, it doesn't really matter.
If the result is a great day, then whoopee.
But there's another lesson to learn here, and that is we don't have the capability of telling which one of those things is the correct explanation.
Yeah.
So it isn't.
It is.
And as you trained with the military, it's a science, but it is an inexact science.
Yes.
Yeah.
Which makes it all the more fascinating.
Can we just give, do you have, and you must get asked the question all the time, like a one-sentence definition for those who want to know of what RV is?
Well, I don't know about one sentence, but I'll make it as short as possible.
All right.
So it's an ESP or a psychic skill that we all have the capability of doing.
It can be learned and essentially allows the remote viewer to perceive and experience distant locations, events, and objects and report back in sketching and writing.
And it is, well, yeah, in fact, the military developed it.
So I don't know if that helps much, but it's kind of, I like to say it's a kind of a sort of a disciplined or controlled form of clairvoyance.
You could think of it like that.
How did you get into this program?
How did they know that you could do this?
Well, they didn't know, but they suspected.
How did they suspect?
So at the time, I was at Fort Meade.
This is 1983.
And they were looking for people, because they had a contract and they were looking for capable people to be involved in the training contract to, you know, military people in the training contract to learn how to do this so they could replace folks who'd been transferred out of the unit.
They needed more remote viewers.
So they were looking for military intelligence officers that met a certain set of criteria.
First of all, they had to be accomplished in their jobs, they had to have good report cards, if you will.
But that's not uncommon.
Obviously, they should be able to find a large population of those.
But then they also were looking for officers who had a little bit different kind of a profile than your usual.
They wanted folks who were kind of screwed right, you know, skewed right brain a little bit, involved in studio art or music or some kind of creative effort that is not as typical of an Army officer.
Foreign language is helpful, although that's a little more common in the intelligence field.
And it so happened that I had majored in art at Brigham Young University.
I like to write short stories and send them off and have them rejected.
I'd been playing guitar for about 20 years at the time.
One day, my neighbor, who actually was in the program and one of the people looking for new recruits, came into my house and he noticed some of my art that I had hang on the wall.
And he looks at that and he says, oh, you might be good at what we do.
I said, what do you do?
He says, I can't tell you.
Okay.
All right.
Well, how do I know?
He said, well, I'll tell you what.
And we'll give you some tests.
And if you score where we think you want the tests, then we'll read you on and ask you if you want to volunteer.
So I took the tests and apparently they were happy with where I scored.
And these are standard personality and psychological tests.
Invited me over to their offices.
And another one of my neighbors sat me down.
He was a captain in the army, but he had a full beard and wore jeans all the time.
He said, well, what we do here is we collect intelligence against foreign threats using a parapsychology discipline known as remote viewing.
Essentially, we want to know if you're willing to volunteer to become a psychic spy.
And did you at any stage say to them, you must be kidding.
You're doing this stuff?
I only read about that stuff in comic books.
Yeah, no, I said, where do I sign?
So you were, obviously, they picked the right guy because you were intrigued by it.
Well, I was.
And a little backstory.
I had always been a science fiction reader.
I love science fiction.
And a lot of science fiction I read had this ESP element in it, right?
And in junior high, I don't know what that corresponds to in the English school system, but roughly seventh, eighth grade.
So I was probably 12, 13, something, 14, somewhere in there.
I was involved in a science fair experiment that was ESP based.
It had to use the Zener cards, which are the cards with the stars and the wavy lines and stuff.
And that had totally failed.
That whole experiment had failed.
Nobody had shown any evidence of psychic ability at all.
So I'd gotten a little bit skeptical of it.
And now he's sitting here telling me there's a line item in the federal budget that pays to train people to become psychics.
I said, in my head, I'm saying, there's no way I'm not going to do this.
So it was a pretty exciting opportunity.
They were a little bit surprised that I agreed so quickly, but they didn't know my backstory either.
So if they had known your backstory, they'd have known how fascinated you were by this.
What was the first remote viewing target, the first remote viewing project that you got?
A donut shop.
A donut shop.
Well, there's a little more to the story.
So there's one mode of remote viewing usually used in training and research.
It's called an outbounder, where people you know go to a location that you don't know.
And then what you do is you psychically go out and find them.
And in so doing, find the location as well.
So we did that.
My very first target session was that.
And so I'm in a closed room.
They go off somewhere.
I have no idea where.
Turns out this massive water tower is painted blue.
It's huge.
It looked like a giant spider sitting on the ground, right?
And that was their target.
And they come back from the target after I've done my session.
And in the session, I described a room with windows with lacy curtains and these little tables with chairs and a counter, counter kind of thing with a window in it and stuff behind the window and all of this.
And that's what I described, right?
So they come back and they bring along a bag of donuts and we're eating the donuts as they take me to the target.
We get to the target, it's this massive blue water tower.
Nothing, nothing that I had described.
On the way back, we're driving down the road and all of a sudden I felt kind of pulled over this way.
I'm looking over there and I'm saying, wait a minute, what's that over there?
And my training officer, Skip Atwater, says, he says this, because he'd figured out what had happened.
He said, if you don't remote view the target, it doesn't matter what you remote view instead.
And I know, what are you talking about?
He says, okay, okay.
So we pull in over there.
We walk into this shop.
Lacy curtains on the walls, little tables with chairs, a counter, glass behind it, donuts.
So that was the donut shop they had stopped at to get those donuts to bring back.
And I had remote viewed the donut shop, not the water tower, because obviously I was more interested in donuts than I was in a steel structure out in the middle of the field.
Okay, so the viewer has an impact on the project.
They have a vote as well.
And is that why you have to do it in teams?
I'm sorry, in what?
Is that the reason you have to do it in teams?
Because if you did it as just one person, then you would get one person's impression.
You need another person for a different reason.
So that's one of the reasons you do it blind, obviously, is because you don't want to have a preconception of what the target is, right?
But you do it in teams because you are supposed to be blind.
And so you can't pick your own targets.
You can't decide what you're going to remote view.
If you are aware of what the target is, then all of the things you already know about it, all of the conjectures, the guesses, the speculations you can have about it are all right there in your head.
And the true signal is kind of subtle.
It's not a really strong signal.
And you have all this stuff going on in your head, we call that mental noise, that can distort the signal, in fact, completely smother it if you're not careful.
So the viewer has to be blind to the target.
And in a science setting and in operational settings, even the person working with you has to be blind.
You have to have a double-blind setting.
The exception to that is if you're in training, but that's not important here.
And so you have to have at least one other person, actually, usually two other people working with you.
One to decide what the target is going to be, one to act as the monitor for you, and the monitor can't know what the target is either.
So automatically, you need kind of three folks to make this work.
Right.
And nobody, it's a kind of need-to-know basis.
Nobody can know because you ruin it, you break it.
Nobody can know what the target is.
Because you can't do your job if you do it.
That has anything to do with the viewer.
Now, obviously, somebody has to know what it is because they have to pick what the target is.
But we use numbers to task.
We use tasking numbers.
In other words, my favorite one is 8675309.
you may or may not be familiar with that.
That sounds like the number of...
No, it was somebody else.
That was the guy who, it's the song about the guy who walks into a public restroom and sees the number for his girlfriend on the wall of the bathroom.
All right.
Now, listen, we're running out of time, and this is a fascinating subject that we really needed more time on.
But, you know, we have the time that we have.
And thank you for giving your time to us.
Why aren't you remote viewing?
Maybe you are.
But if I was a remote viewer and I could do this and I could tap into this universal pot of information, then I would be trying to find out at the moment in 2022, I would be trying to find out whether aliens exist and whether they're watching us now.
Is anybody trying that and could you do that?
Oh, over and over and over again.
And what does it come out with?
Well, in fact, so I have an event I'm organizing at the end of the month out here in Utah.
It's called the Cedar Mountain Remote Viewing Summit.
And a presentation I'm giving at the summit is called, well, it's about how to remote view aliens and UFOs in a responsible way, with integrity, right?
There are probably thousands of people out there in the remote viewing community who are remote viewing all kinds of supposed alien events, you know, UAP, extraterrestrial events, all that stuff.
But they often do it front-loaded.
They often do it without the right protocols and safeguards.
And they often do it against events that they believe happened or probably imaginary.
Right.
So you're saying that nobody's done it properly yet, but isn't it time that somebody did?
There has been a few cases where it's been done properly.
I've even done a few where I think they've been done properly in terms of managing the project and even done some remote viewing myself.
But the majority of attempts to remote view these kind of what I call anomaly targets are done really poorly.
And so that's the point of my presentation is to explain if you're going to do it, how to do it with the highest chance of being successful in terms of getting real data, not just imaginary data.
We've only got a minute.
It's a big question for one minute or even less than a minute.
Can you remote view events in your own life like your, just as all of us are going to die, your eventual expiration?
Technically, that's possible.
You'd have to have somebody else target you on it.
You'd have to be totally non-suspecting that that was your target.
You'd have to be completely unaware that that was the target in order to have any chance of success at all.
But I'm not sure why would you want to?
I wouldn't want to know that.
No, I wouldn't, but there might be people who did.
Just as a thought, you know, it's macabre, but fascinating.
Paul, we're out of time and we must do this again and we'll do more.
If people want to know about you, where do they go online?
rviewer.com.
That's the letter R and the word viewer, R-V-I-E-W-E-R.com.
Three guests from my TV show, three very likable and very different people.
Paul H. Smith, you heard latterly, remote viewer.
Before that, David Christian on the subject of the future.
What an interesting man.
And before that, Paola Harris, one of my first guests on The Unexplained when it was a radio show years and years ago in 2004.
So I've known her for very many years.
More great guests coming in the pipeline here at the home of the Unexplained.
So until we meet again, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.