References:
Psychic Spies – The CIA Quest for the Ultimate Intelligence Weapon
History of Mind Control in America
Before we explore the mystery of Pat Price it is important to understand how inextricably linked SRI’s successful psychic tests were to Scientology. It will shed light on the resolution to the Pat Price puzzle.
It is a little-known history as it has been painstakingly buried apparently at the behest of the Military Industrial Intelligence Complex (MIIC). Even while remote viewing has become a hot current topic – e.g. podcasters from Joe Rogan to Shawn Ryan exploring it – nary a word of this history is uttered. The papers of psychic Ingo Swann and of CIA interrogation expert Cleve Backster preserved at the University of West Georgia made the resurrection of that hidden history possible.
The Price and Backster collections reveal that the remote viewing venture was a Scientology project long before the CIA ever became interested in it.
Twenty years before the Puthoff/Targ/Swann SRI trials, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard delivered hundreds of lectures on the characteristics of the spiritual being (which he termed Thetan) and its inherent ability to do all, and far more, than SRI ever attempted to prove. In fact, it was those lectures assiduously studied by Hal Puthoff, Ingo Swann and Pat Price that led directly to the creation of the art and science of remote viewing. Scientology’s entire cosmology revolved around these fundamental given principles:
- A Thetan is an immortal being who inhabits and operates a mind and body.
- A Thetan who is aware of ‘a’ is capable of rehabilitating every form of extrasensory perception and ability conceivable. Precognition, Clairvoyance, Telepathy, and Telekinesis were all written about in Hubbard’s many books and repeatedly talked about in hundreds of his lectures between 1951 and the late sixties.
- The individual goal of highest attainment in Scientology was the rehabilitation of the Thetan. While not the direct goal, Hubbard noted the frequent, consequent reattainment of some or all of those abilities along the route. The highest spiritual state is called OT (Operating Thetan). L. Ron Hubbard’s definition of Operating Thetan is: “A individual who could operate totally independent of his body.”
What set Scientology apart from virtually every other ism or philosophy that spoke to or addressed individual spiritual ability, was that not only did it supply the affirmation of spiritual ability it contained a comprehensive technology for helping to remove all of the crippling conditioning that led to an individual Thetan forgetting a and b above.
Thus, shortly after Ingo Swann had cleared the SRI psychic bar set by the physicists (the magnetometer experience, see Scientology Psychics) he wrote a thank you letter to L. Ron Hubbard. On July 6 1972, Swann wrote the following:
“I find that many government agencies here (Washington D.C.) have taken deep interest in me…A comprehensive report on recent events is being prepared, if not already, by Dr. Hal Puthoff at Stanford which will include a copy of my letter to you some time back in which I outlined the beginning of all this activity…In the short time since I have emerged into the fields mentioned, it has become generally accepted that nothing I can do, which includes the ability of precise communication through and up to various OT Phenomena (psychic abilities), could have been possible in the controlled state without your genius and the training and auditing (Scientology counselling) which I have undertaken in Scientology. And this, as you so kindly mentioned in your telex, has engendered the beginning of a serious and respectful acceptance of Scientology by both the scientific and government establishments.” (see, July 6, 1972 UWG Ingo Swann archives)
Keep in mind that Swann informed Hubbard that he and Puthoff (who is copied on the letter) are being thoroughly open and forthright with the scientists and government officials involved as to the Scientology connection and basis of the psychic program engaged in through SRI; and that that is apparently understood and accepted by all related parties.
While Puthoff and Swann later took extraordinary and deceptive measures to distance Scientology from themselves and the SRI program (which we will examine later), on the very day that Swann nailed the magnetometer experiment, both Puthoff and Swann sent a telex to L. Ron Hubbard to inform him. That is evidenced by the attached telex reply and congratulations from Hubbard addressed to the senders “Ingo Swann and Hal Putoff (sic)”. (see, Telex 6 June 1972, UWG Swann archives) The initial numbers are the date 1206 (days first as Scientology had adopted from the British) standing for 12th day of June – the precise day of the magnetometer experiment according to Swann’s book Remote Viewing: The Real Story.
Dr. Puthoff continued to write detailed reports to Mr. Hubbard on the SRI program for at least another year and a half. A November 11, 1974 letter from L. Ron Hubbard to Puthoff acknowledges that fact: “Dear Hal, It is with pleasure that I have received your letter of 29 October and the attachments regarding your research with “paranormal” (ha!) perceptics. It is fascinating reading, and very valuable as far as exposing the public to even more R (short for reality in Scientology) on this subject. In the not too distant, future, of course, they will accept this sort of thing as remarkably normal.” (see, Hubbard to Puthoff, UWG Swann archives)
In the letter, Hubbard’s, and by extensions the church of Scientology’s, motives and purposes for its involvement are made clear.
Ironically, it seems that the only principal in the original SRI program who was not a Scientologist, Russell Targ, got Hubbard’s message loud and clear. In Targ’s ultimate view, Hubbard’s letter to Puthoff spelled out the greatest discovery of their twenty years of research. That is, Targ noted repeatedly how Puthoff, Price and Swann’s work demonstrated that all people have inherent, native perceptions that are characterized by society as “extrasensory.” In fact, his film Third Eye Spy concludes with these words, “And as for Russell Targ, he continues to tell his story, showing people just like you and me around the world that we’re all psychic.”
A bizarre chain of events led to the non-Scientologist vindicating L. Ron Hubbard while the Scientologists involved died or disappeared. Spoiler alert, it was not by accident. And it was the Scientologists’ very adherence to the idea Scientology ought receive recognition that put them into the cross hairs for their physical or moral elimination.
In the early years Swann and Puthoff overtly promoted Scientology as the cause of the most credible, advanced scientific validation of the powers of consciousness to date. That was evident in June1973 when both were invited to the First International Congress of Parapsychology and Psychotronics (study of interaction of consciousness with physical systems) in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Swann presented a paper/address to the Congress, “Scientology Techniques: A Modern Paradigm For the Exploration of Consciousness and Psychic Integration” (see in two parts, Swann Prague Paper 1, Swann Prague Paper 2, UWG Swann archives).
In the paper Swann did a yeoman’s job of summing up where science and consciousness depart and where they may integrate, and then tied that into the very situation Hubbard created Scientology to resolve: “With the physical and consciousness sciences grappling with this vacuum (left between the two), Hubbard felt it necessary to interject a metaphysical premise, which became the basis of scientological thought. He introduced the concept that the considerations, that is ideas, which the conscious or psychic entity holds take rank over the mechanics of space, energy and time. Since this was by observation obviously not the usual case, he suggested that the individual might be in an inverted state, and that the primary goal of Scientology would be to bring an individual into such thorough communication with the physical universe that he could regain the powers and abilities of his own postulates, or ideas.” (pg 9-10, Prague Paper 1, Prague Paper 2, UWG Swann archives) This is a fairly accurate restatement of Hubbard’s own chapter titled A Summary of Scientology in the book Creation of Human Ability (1954).
Hubbard’s research on that issue is best captured in his recorded lecture series The Philadelphia Doctorate Course, delivered in December 1952 and January 1953. In that course he discusses the parallels between quantum mechanics discoveries and spiritual abilities, two decades before such became trendy (See e.g., The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra | Goodreads). Swann gives a competent description of Dianetics and Scientology in terms that people interested in consciousness and science can easily understand. He leaves no doubt that in his view Scientology produced the states of consciousness that were then being validated as effective at SRI.
In late 1973 Swann spoke of his SRI work in a Scientology publication, Advance magazine:
Advance: How would you describe the abilities in Scientology terms which you have had occasion to publicly demonstrate?
Ingo: Thetan interaction with matter, energy, space and time; bypassing the body.
Advance: How did these abilities develop with relationship to your auditing on the OT Levels (higher level Scientology Operating Thetan auditing)?
Ingo: They are solely the result of auditing (Scientology counselling processes). (see, Advance magazine, UWG Swann archives)
Pat Price had a more instantaneous out of body experience early in his Scientology involvement. It was remarkably similar to my own that I have written and spoken about many times over the past twenty years. Those familiar with my experience will recognize the parallels right down to us sharing the same take away concerning immortality. Price recounted that story to the author of The Search For Psychic Powers (Bantam Books, 1975):
The very first exercise the Scientologists wanted me to do initially made no sense whatsoever. I was told that before communication can happen with anybody, both parties must be there. That part of it made sense enough, but the way they wanted me to go about it didn’t. I was to sit in front of someone for two hours. When I found out that’s what the exercise was all about I started to tell them to forget it. But then I thought, what the hell – I’ll go through with it. The whole idea was to simply sit there comfortably, without creating a social façade or trying to be entertaining or interesting. That turned out to be one of the roughest hurdles I’ve ever encountered. After about three hours just sitting there looking at this guy and him looking at me, I suddenly located me. I mean, just like Bam! All of a sudden, I was exteriorized from my body. I was sitting on the other side of the room, looking at it. Knowing that there was a me that was separate and definable from what I’d thought to be me, knowing that the real me can never die – that’s the most exhilarating feeling I’ve ever had.”
It was the self-demonstration of the mechanics of life energy vis a vis the physical universe that L. Ron Hubbard describes in his books and lectures, and Swann summarized in the Prague paper. Incidentally, none of the later non-Scientologist remote viewers who were trained ever attained the out of body, full perceptions, states that Price described here and during each of his remote viewing episodes. After training in methods derived from Scientology – but watered down in secularized format – they were able to develop effective, extra sensory perceptions; but never as explicit, visual and accurate as Pat Price, or even Ingo Swann, both of whom trained on the Scientology source material.
Price, Swann and Puthoff seemed excited about the prospect of producing clinical evidence that these spiritual phenomena and abilities could be proven even to materialist scientists. As the SRI program was approaching its third year, Mr. Swann reported to Mr. Hubbard: “Working separately and together with Hal Puthoff and Pat Price, we have created as Scientologists a veridical platform that holds high interest about and does attract positively for Scientology in both the public and scientific sectors.” (see, Swann to Hubbard November 7, 1974 – UWG Swann papers). Perhaps foreshadowing accurate precognition, Swann noted in the same letter: “So far, I have not been subjected to extensive negative attacks, which might well be expected, and may yet come.”
