A link with Woodrow Wilson is entirely plausible: one of Cayce’s friends, and earliest promoters of his powers, was David E. Kahn, who had served with one of Wilson’s cousins in the First World War.
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Afterwards, Cayce, Kahn and Major Wilson went into business together to form the Cayce Petroleum Company to locate oil in Texas using Cayce’s psychic abilities. In its short four-year life, the company was a disaster. As Cayce wrote: ‘Nothing came of our efforts to produce oil except a financial loss to many people.’
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Even without Cayce’s vaunted psychic powers, surely they must be among the few prospectors not to have found oil in Texas! Hardly a good advertisement for his abilities.
It was Kahn who propelled Cayce Inie the li nelight, fixing up contacts with the great and the good. He had first met Cayce in Alabama in 1912 and was deeply interested in his diagnostic readings. When he went into the US Army in 1917, Kahn sang Cayce’s praises to his superior officers, with the result that a request for a reading was sent by an unidentified member of the Italian royal family.
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This was hardly the humble milieu in which we have been led to believe Cayce moved. Indeed, he said of Kahn: ‘Through him I made the acquaintance of some most prominent people - bankers, businessmen, lawyers, journalists, people in almost every walk of life.’
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In 1924 Kahn also introduced him to a circle of businessmen headed by New York stockbroker Morton Blumenthal, who agreed to finance a hospital and research institute at Virginia Beach in return for Cayce’s advice on their investments. This was the prototype ARE, although it only lasted for at most two years, when funding was withdrawn after a disagreement with Cayce. Blumenthal and his circle then transferred their allegiance to another psychic.
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In the mid-1920s three members of this group had acquired property on Bimini, and for some reason they had an idea that some treasure was buried there, so they flew Cayce and his family over to find it for them.
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Unsurprisingly, he failed to do so, but the sequel is perhaps more significant: only after his return from that trip did Bimini and Atlantis begin to feature in his readings.
Cayce’s influence had reached the Army, Italian royalty and the President, but he also had contacts in the world of intelligence. According to David Kahn, interviewed in 1965, the meeting between Cayce and President Wilson was arranged by Colonel Edmond Starling, head of the Secret Service.
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Kahn also described Starling as ‘a lifelong friend’ of Cayce, although the former’s name never appears in Cayce’s memoirs; the prophet was characteristically very discreet. Like Cayce, Starling came from Hopkinsville in Kentucky, which is perhaps why they were lifelong friends, although the latter belonged to an older generation and so it is more likely that they met through Cayce’s father. It is tempting to speculate that Starling and Cayce Senior were fellow members of the Hopkinsville lodge.
These associations can be seen as a microcosm of a much wider picture. As our investigation proceeded, an initially unlikely pattern began to form: strange alliances that surface time and time again among psychics, politicians, Freemasons, the world of big business and the intelligence agencies. Whether or not Cayce’s predictions were accurate is largely irrelevant. What really matters is that many highly influential people believed he possessed genuine powers. If they followed him then, do the same categories of people also believe in him now? Is this a motivating force behind what is currently going on at Giza, especially around the crucial last years of the twentieth century, when the Hall of Records will, according to Cayce, finally be found?
Although it may seem far-fetched that modern political movers and shakers may be influenced by the prophecies of Edgar Cayce, it is known that leading members of the Egyptian government — and members of the presidential family — firmly believe in the reality of the Hall of Records.
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Cayce himself drew together a chain of associations that included the Masons, intelligence agencies, politicians and other influential personages, but others besides Cayce - individuals and organisations - embrace a similar chain of associations.
The connections between psychic phenomena, technology and the world of intelligence and defence are embodied in another organisation with a key role in events at Giza, especially in the 1970s - SRI International. As Mark Lehner said: ‘SRI was in the business of looking for hidden chambers at Giza well before I or the Edgar Cayce Foundation met up with them’.
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Perhaps this is a little odd: ARE’s involvement with ( 3 i < <3 : perfectly understandable, given Cayce’s prophecies, but why was SRI searching for hidden chambers?
Founded by Stanford University in California as the Stanford Research Institute in 1946, SRI was originally planned as a means of attracting commercial business research to bring extra revenue to the university. This was not a success, and the parent body had to subsidise it for several years.
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SRI’s fortunes changed dramatically when it began to take on military and intelligence contracts, much of it classified. This included weapons testing for the Atomic Energy Commission and research into chemical warfare. It also developed other, considerably weirder, weaponry for both the Pentagon and the CIA. (Stanford University’s own metamorphosis from regional to national academic centre resulted from its acceptance of Department of Defense contracts, although the majority of this work was actually carried out by SRI.)
By 1968, SRI rivalled the university itself in size, and even employed more staff. But by then Stanford’s students had discovered the extent of the university’s involvement with defence and intelligence agencies, and over the next three years the administrators were forced to reveal that many departments - but particularly the Research Institute - were heavily involved in classified projects, including work on electronic surveillance for the CIA. Predictably, this horrified the students. As Stuart W. Leslie says in
The Cold War and American Science
(1993): ‘The extent of Stanford’s classified research program, although common knowledge among the engineers. shocked an academic community still coming to terms with the Vietnam War.’
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The students, appalled, started a campaign against the university’s links with the military, with a series of demonstrations and sit-ins specifically targeting the Research Institute. As a result, the university stopped taking on research on behalf of classified projects, and divested itself of the embarrassment of the main recipient of such favours. Stanford Research Institute became a private company, changing its name to SRI International.
Now on its own, SRI came to rely on defence contracts even more, the revenue enabling it to become one of the largest independent research institutes in the world. In 1993, approximately 75 per cent of SRI’s income came from the Department of Defense.
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It now has offices in ten countries outside the United States - including the United Kingdom — and operates an Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Cambridge University. It has a National Security Advisory Council, made up of former Department of Defense ‘decision-makers’, and carries out research for NASA.
In its work at Giza, SRI used ‘remote sensing’ - a hi-tech but resolutely mainstream scientific technique - which is entirely different from another of their specialities, the similarly named ‘remote viewing’ that was the focus of work on which they concentrated on behalf of the CIA during the 1970s. Masterminded by researchers Russell Targ and Harold (‘Hal’) Puthoff, this was pure
X-Files
research. It almost certainly inspired much of the concept of the cult series, not to mention being the catalyst for the Pentagon and CIA’s own lengthy remote-viewing programmes.
Remote viewing (RV) is an entirely psychic or paranormal technique, although it was investigated, and then taught, in Pentagon and CIA-funded projects known, for example, as Grill Flame or Sun Streak — and, significantly, Star Gate - over a twenty-year period at a cost estimated at approximately $15 million, although many sources put it much higher.
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The term ‘stargate’ has been popularised in recent years because of the successful 1994 movie and later television series of the same name, which presented the idea of an ancient device that, properly operated, could transport human beings to other worlds. Presumably the producers knew that the ancient Egyptian
sba
meant both ‘star’ and ‘gate’ or ‘door’,
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although the reason why a remote- viewing project was given the name Star Gate remains tantalisingly unclear.
Essentially remote viewing deliberately induces a form of out-of-body experience (OOBE) in order to ‘travel’ to distant locations - usually across space, but occasionally even across time - and then to report back on what was ‘seen’.
In the 1970s SRI’s research into RV was well-known among the international parapsychological communities, where it was on the whole received positively as exciting evidence for the existence of a mind, or consciousness, that could act independently of the physical body and brain. (Its implications are enormous, not least because it appears to confirm what religions and mystics have always taught: that there is an individual consciousness - spirit or soul — that can operate beyond the confines of the body, and which therefore could, theoretically, continue to exist after the body dies.)
Targ and Puthoff’s research attracted media attention in the 1970s, mostly because it appeared that, with minimal training, almost anyone could learn how to remote view. Their experiments were featured in several television documentaries. In one, the researcher, persuaded to participate, passed with flying colours, correctly describing a ‘target’ location that she had ‘seen’ with her invisibly travelling consciousness. But back at SRI it soon became clear that there were remote-viewing ‘stars’, notably New York artist Ingo Swann and former police chief Pat Price. After being trained as a remote viewer, Price went to work for the CIA. He was later to die in mysterious circumstances.
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Swann went on to train remote viewers for the Pentagon, and afterwards for a private company. But of all the stars who took part in SRI experiments, none were as famous as the young Israeli psychic who arrived in 1972: the handsomely charismatic Uri Geller, now internationally known as the metal-bender extraordinaire.
Geller had been ‘talent-spotted’ while entertaining in nightclubs in Israel and was taken to the United States, where his powers were tested by SRI in a controlled scientific environment.
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The man entrusted with persuading Geller to go to SRI was to become not only his mentor, if only for a short time, but also the key player in an astonishingly complex network of interlinked conspiracies and agendas. His name was Dr Andrija Puharich — truly, as we shall see, a name to conjure with.
The publicity surrounding Targ and Puthoff’s RV research at SRI never mentioned one major fact. The research into the RV psychic surveillance technique was funded directly by US intelligence agencies, especially the CIA’s Office of Technical Services and Office of Research.
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The SRI research was bolstered by an injection of $150,000 from the CIA over a period of two years. There were also, according to Jim Schnabel’s
Remote Viewers
(1997): ‘two small contracts with the Navy and NASA, plus money left over from private grants for the Geller research’.
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In the mid-1990s, SRI’s CIA and Pentagon backing was finally made public, partly because of the demands of the Freedom of Information Act, but also as a result of the testimony of ex-RVers themselves, especially David Morehouse, a former US Army officer, who had worked as a ‘psi spy’ on Operation Sun Streak in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In his book
Psychic Warrior
(1995), Morehouse describes his reaction to reading a file on the background to the RV projects:
I couldn’t believe it. This programme had been in existence since early 1974, for nearly 15 years. It wasn’t experimental any longer ... they knew it worked - they’d proven that at Stanford, and all the evidence was here. There were books written on the stuff by the researchers involved; nobody paid any attention to them. The books didn’t mention the intelligence involvement, but evidence of government fund
ing
was written all over the place.
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Morehouse also stated: ‘The government was funding paranormal research in half a dozen private, and as many state and federal research centres across the United States. They were pumping tens of millions of dollars into remote viewing and various related techniques.’
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During the 1970s, SRI undertook several different psi-related projects, but it was the remote-viewing research that was their most cherished and important. This was the time that SRI began their work at Giza. Was this just a coincidence, or was more going on behind the scenes?
A clue may lie in the experiences of the remote viewers. Many of them spontaneously reported encountering pyramids during their RV sessions. This, like all information gathered by remote viewing, was routinely taken seriously by the experimenters or ‘handlers’. Neither SRI nor the intelligence agencies themselves would have failed to seize upon this information, especially as they were already involved with excavations at Giza, directly or indirectly. However, it is known that when Lambert Dolphin Jr took charge of the SRI expedition to Giza in the 1970s he had information about the plateau gleaned from SRI’s remote viewers.
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Significantly, Dolphin’s friend James Hurtak also seems, in his usual elusive fashion, to have been involved in the establishment of SRI’s remote-viewing project. When they initially established it they called in a veteran parapsychologist, Harold Sherman, to advise them,
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and we know that Hurtak was in contact with him at that time. In the words of a spokesperson for Hurtak’s Academy for Future Sciences, Hurtak ‘shared insights’ with Sherman about remote viewing.
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