My father was a psychic spy in the US Army.

Yup, you read that right.

Growing up, I wasn’t quite sure what he did. All I knew was he was a ‘spy’ and that he couldn’t tell me what he did or ‘he would have to kill me,’ which was a joke he never got tired of using when I, or anyone for that matter, would pester him with questions about his work.

My father was born in Oregon, but he grew up in Boulder City, NV and spent most of his life in the West. As a newlywed, he joined the Army at the bequest of my mother, mostly because he didn’t have much else going on and they were a young and dirt poor.

While my father had read science fiction books indiscriminately as a youth, he wasn’t particularly one to believe in the supernatural, though his faith in Mormonism was unshakeable.

After moving to Ft. Meade, MD in the early 80’s, my father was unexpectedly recruited into a deep-cover unit that experimented with using ESP to spy on Cold War era threats like the USSR, the Chinese, and Hezbollah. The type of ESP skill they were developing is called Remote Viewing and was shaped through hundreds of experiments over the course of 20 years. My father was recruited and trained in this skill.

As for me, I am a documentary filmmaker, and for my next project, American (ESP)ionage, I am taking the opportunity to dive in and tell my father’s story.

I find the process of documenting his unique career an invaluable opportunity to explore his life as well as the events that shaped him and my family. Few people get an opportunity to research and critically engage with the stories that made them who they are. And on top of that, I am also being exposed to an incredible but true chapter in Cold War history.

But one of the things I have learned so far that I find incredibly fascinating, is that the US military is responsible for conducting scientific research that appears to confirm what all sorts of faiths and spiritualists have been saying for as long as humans have been around, that there is more to humans than just our physical bodies. This fact is what my father insists has reinforced his own spiritual beliefs, that of being Mormon.

The US government spent about 20 years and millions of dollars researching ESP. They proved beyond a doubt that Remote Viewing works and that people can describe far off places perfectly, without ever having been there. Remote Viewers have seen into the past and sometimes can even describe future events (see video). So at the very least, we have learned from the military’s experiments that people have innate abilities that go beyond what can be explained by science, and I say this as a self-identified atheist. It is clear, even to me, that there is more to humanity than we currently suppose.

To investigate this further, and to tell the story of my father and one of the most fascinating moments of military history, I am currently producing my next documentary film, American (ESP)ionage. Right now, we are Kickstarting our production phase. Please stop by to learn more and, if inspired, share far and wide.

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Editor: Renée Picard

Photo: courtesy of the author