However, there is another side to remote viewing, which raises some disturbing questions about the military and intelligence agencies’ enthusiasm for experimenting with it. Some commentators, such as Alex Constantine, argue that remote viewing was more concerned with beaming information
into
people’s minds than information-gathering from distant locations.
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Constantine maintains that remote viewing as we know it is merely misinformation, that the whole purpose of the Pentagon’s research was experimentation with mind control, and that the ‘psychic spying’ aspects were merely colour. Although Constantine presents a compelling case that some of the remote viewing projects had this hidden agenda, on the evidence, this rather extreme view seems unlikely. It is perfectly logical to assume that there was at least an element of ‘remote influencing’ in their research because, if remote viewing is a viable military technique, then some form of counter technique - like radar jamming — must also have been taken into account. Few researchers have even considered this aspect, so we cannot know for certain how far remote influencing has been taken by the authorities, although the mass of parapsychological evidence suggests strongly that all psychic processes are two-way and also occult tradition has always maintained that they can be used for good or evil.
For these reasons, the possibility of remote influencing should be borne in mind in all the following discussions about remote viewing, especially when dealing with some of the more extreme claims made by remote viewers.
Search for the Stargate
Perhaps no one will ever know the full picture of what has been going on at Giza during these last thirty or so years. The presence of apparently disparate groups and organisations such as ARE and SRI — with their often weird mix of hi-tech science and psi — and the Joseph M. Schor Foundation might at first suggest individual, even personal, aims and agendas. When the surface of this activity is scratched a little more deeply, however, the military and intelligence interest becomes increasingly clear.
Some more colourful than others, rumours spread about Giza and the organisations involved, even producing claims that the US government is searching for a physical artefact or ancient device, perhaps even of extraterrestrial origin. Are they looking for a real working stargate, as in the movie, maybe following instructions given by remote viewers? Or, more disturbingly, have they already found it? This stupendous — and very romantic — idea remains speculation. If the Americans are involved with ancient stargate technology, then it would be the most top secret project in history, and the number of people ‘needing to know’ about it would be minimal. But what can be said with certainty is that virtually all the individuals and groups involved in the present activity at Giza are engaged in exploiting the culture, religion and even the gods of the ancient Egyptians to fulfil various aims and agendas. Essentially they show little respect for the mysterious geniuses who built the pyramids and the Sphinx for their own specific mystical reasons.
If the intelligence agencies are seeking a device - or possibly information - then this implies that they regard the ancient Egyptians as being somehow more advanced, in some way, than our own civilisation. Once again, we return to the idea of a lost, advanced people, or perhaps an extraterrestrial connection, as promulgated most effectively by Robert Temple in
The Sirius Mystery.
Remember that - rather inexplicably — it attracted the attention of not only the Freemasons but also the CIA and MI5.
But what do Hancock and Bauval think about the extraterrestrial question? After writing
Keeper of Genesis
they continued to investigate the mysteries of Giza, and discovered some thought-provoking connections between some of the other people and organisations involved in clandestine activity on the plateau and the newly emerging mysteries about Mars.
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For a while, it seemed as if the conspiracy that they had uncovered also had a Martian angle. The original intention behind
The Mars Mystery
(co-written with John Grisby, but oddly credited to Hancock alone in the United States) was to reveal it to the world. Its original subtitle was to be
Message at the Edge of the World.
110
When the book appeared in 1998, although it included material about a possible civilisation on Mars and its connection with ancient Egypt, it had dropped the examination of the link with the modern Giza conspiracy in favour of a study of the dangers of the Earth being hit by a comet or asteroid.
While not explicitly expressing a belief in extraterrestrial intervention in human development, there is every indication that Hancock and Bauval are at least sympathetic to the idea. Bauval frequently acknowledges his own debt to Temple’s book, and was responsible for the publication of the new edition in 1998.
111
In recent interviews, Hancock has played down the extraterrestrial angle, saying that it is not necessary for his theories, but it has been stated that a chapter on this subject was removed from
Fingerprints of the Gods
.
112
Moreover, he and Bauval went on to write
The Mars Mystery,
which not only championed the idea of an ancient Martian civilisation, but also made an explicit connection with Egypt. Also suggestive is Hancock’s recent endorsement of the work, and implicitly the claims, of alien abductee Whitley Strieber (see Chapter 7).
Hancock and Bauval’s interest in the controversy surrounding Mars marks a significant development in this story. This forms another element that has been introduced into the wider picture over the last few years. The belief that there is some connection between ancient Egypt and a long-dead civilisation on Mars has been steadily growing over the last twenty years, but is it based on anything more substantial than a fantasy? Is there any real evidence for a Martian civilisation, and for a link between it and the ancient Egyptians?
3
Beyond the Mars Mission
In April 1998 the latest US space probe, Mars Global Surveyor, sent back new images of the surface features of the area of the Red Planet known as Cydonia Mensae. These were among the most eagerly awaited images in history, believed to be about to reveal details of the so-called ‘Face on Mars’, proof to many that Mars once supported a civilisation much like our own. With a resolution ten times better than previous images, these new pictures of the Face were released on the Internet to a largely stunned audience. The long-awaited images did not show new and conclusive detail of a strange face on the surface of Mars. They revealed a very eroded and very shapeless lump of rock, without discernible facelike features. The anticlimax, and in many cases, bleak disappointment, was appalling — analogous only, in our experience, to the results of the carbon-dating in 1988 that revealed the Shroud of Turin to be a fake. And although many believers in the Face are fighting back, the excitement about the anomalies on Mars has largely subsided. If Mars has a message for us, it appears to be keeping quiet about it, at least for the time being.
The pyramids of Mars
Mars is our near neighbour. Only 34 million miles away at its closest, the Red Planet is the fourth from the sun, the second closest to us after Venus. Just half the size of Earth, it has almost the same length of day (a little over 24.5 hours), but its year is 687 days, and its temperature ranges from an inhospitable ‘high’ of just 20 degrees Celsius to a low of — 120 degrees.
Associated in the minds of the ancients with armed conflict - our word ‘martial’ comes from the Latin
Mars,
the Roman god of war - the Red Planet has long exerted a particularly powerful, often awe-inspiring, influence on mankind. But only in February 1972 did the Mariner 9 probe show us what the planet was really like, sending back the first close-up images of our neighbour: it was rocky, barren — and yes, it was rather red.
However, neither the redness nor the rockiness attracted the most attention, especially in certain quarters. Images of the surface of Mars, taken on 8 February 1972, in the region known as the Elysium Quadrangle (15 degrees north of the Martian equator), appeared to show apparently pyramidal features — two large and two small three-sided pyramids. A second picture of the region, taken six months later on 7 August, showed the same features. These apparent structures were seized upon as evidence of an ancient Martian civilisation by, among others, Dr James J. Hurtak, then Professor of Oriental Studies at the California Institute of the Arts, who a few years later, as we saw in the last chapter, would carry out secretive work in the Great Pyramid.
In the 1970s Hurtak was described — by British author Stuart Holroyd — in these terms:
Hurtak ... was not so much a teacher as an experience, a guru-figure whose teaching was not an explanation of objective reality but a spontaneous creation of ideas and experiences that made his students explore new areas for themselves and in themselves. Dressed always in a crumpled suit and wearing a black beret perched on the back of his head, Hurtak held classes which sometimes ran as long as eight hours, during which he would alternate between reading long passages of scripture and delivering rambling commentaries on them.
1
Outside classes, Hurtak would lead groups of students on nighttime and weekend outings to ‘power spots’ in the Californian desert, revealing - if nothing else — a sympathy with the New Age faith in unseen energies and a living Earth.
Few people took the Mariner 9 images of the Elysium pyramids seriously, although they did inspire a
Dr Who
television story
2
and, ironically, intrigue that arch-‘Skeptic’ Dr Carl Sagan, enough for him to write in
Cosmos
(1981):
The largest [of the pyramids] are 3 kilometers across at the base, and 1 kilometer high — much larger than the pyramids of Sumer, Egypt or Mexico on Earth. They seem eroded and ancient, and are, perhaps, only small mountains, sandblasted for ages. But they warrant, I think, a careful look.
3
In 1976, a new American space mission, Viking, photographed the surface of Mars.
4
The two spacecraft involved, Vikings I and II, each consisted of an orbiting vehicle to send back pictures and other data and a lander that touched down on the surface to undertake — among other tasks - a search for life. In this, they apparently failed, although the results are still disputed among some scientists.
5
The journey took the probes nine months, and each spacecraft cost $500 million. Viking I’s lander was originally intended to touch down on 4 July 1976 to mark the American Bicentennial, but worries about the viability of the chosen landing site led to a delay to 20 July, thus instead marking the seventh anniversary of the first moon landing. Viking I landed successfully and sent back the first television pictures from the surface of Mars. Viking II landed on 3 September 1976 and the landers continued to transmit data on the Martian weather conditions back to Earth for six years afterwards.
On 25 July 1976, from an altitude of 1,162 miles, Viking I photographed the region of Mars known as Cydonia Mensae, about 40 degrees north of the Martian equator, on the other side of the planet to Elysium. The image that was returned to Earth showed what looked like a human face staring outwards into space. This feature, about a mile long, was noticeable enough to be pointed out at a NASA press conference the next day, but, as it could reasonably be supposed to be merely a trick of the light, this, too, was deemed of no special interest. The image was filed away with the 51,538 other pictures taken during the mission. (Incredibly, only 25 per cent of these images have ever been scientifically analysed, as the budget ran out before the task could be completed.) This particular frame was given the official identification code of 35A72 - that is, the thirty-fifth image taken by Spacecraft A, Viking I, on its seventy-second orbit.
This time the story was rekindled when the image was ‘rediscovered’ some time later, although, even among those familiar with the Face on Mars controversy, few know the full story. In effect, the image was rediscovered twice, but only the second of these events has received widespread publicity. The little known story of the first rediscovery begins with H. Guard Hall, the chief of operations at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the facility in Pasadena in California that controls space probes such as Viking. He was at that time the boyfriend (later the husband), of one of James Hurtak’s leading ‘disciples’, a Dutch woman named Marijke Posthuma (an artist, illustrator and set designer who once worked for The Beatles). Hurtak had told Posthuma about the image of the Face in December 1976, so she and Hall searched through the archived images until they found it.
6
Hurtak then used the image in lectures as early as April 1977.
7
Intriguingly, Hurtak was already referring to the Face as ‘Sphinx-like’, making an immediate and emotive connection with Egypt. Even more intriguing is the fact that Hurtak had predicted the existence of a Sphinx image on Mars in 1975, the year before the Viking pictures had been taken.
8
But it was his extraordinary extrapolations from this image that have far-reaching implications. Hancock and Bauval said that Hurtak: ‘predicted that further finds of similar structures, including a Sphinx-like monument, would be made on Mars, and that these structures would be linked to the Giza monuments in a great cosmic blueprint.’
9
Astonishingly, in some ways this was to be proved right: Hurtak’s ideas about Mars were to become the lynchpin of a new system of belief.
The story only really gathered steam in 1979 — the second rediscovery of the image — when Vincent DiPietro, an electrical engineer specialising in digital image processing at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center in Maryland, came across the image apparently by chance. DiPietro became intrigued, as did a friend, Gregory Molenaar, a computer scientist also under contract to NASA from the Lockheed Corporation. They wondered if it was possible to enhance the image to show more detail and determine whether it really was a face or something that only coincidentally looked like one. Their immediate problem was that the standard techniques for computer-enhancing the image available at that time were unsatisfactory, so they had to write their own software to do it, which they called the Starburst Pixel Interleaving Technique, or SPIT for short.