We ourselves know that remote viewing can, and often does, work, but it is by no means 100 per cent accurate. One cautionary tale involves Courtney Brown, professor of political science at Emory University in Atlanta. Trained in remote viewing in 1992 by a former member of the Pentagon RV unit (he refuses to name him, but it was, in fact, Pentagon remote-viewing star, Major Ed Dames), he hit upon the idea of using remote viewing as a scientific research tool, specifically to investigate the question of extraterrestrial visitors on Earth.
Brown made several ‘research trips’, via remote viewing, to Mars in 1993 and 1994. The first was part of his training, when it was a blind target (clearly a favourite destination for RV trainers). He described a pyramid, and nearby a volcano erupting, devastating the area and causing the inhabitants to flee for their lives. Afterwards, his trainer showed him the target picture: it was Cydonia.
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Brown maintains, thanks to the evidence of his remote-viewing ‘eyes’, that there are not only survivors of the Martian race living underground on Cydonia, but also on Earth - beneath the mountains of New Mexico and in villages in Latin America. According to Brown, Martian civilisation at the time of its great catastrophe had achieved approximately the level of development of ancient Egypt, although we do not know whether that is the level understood by mainstream academics or that of the technologically advanced Egyptians of the New Orthodoxy. All but wiped out, the Martians were rescued by the arrival of the — by now familiar — Grey aliens, who took the survivors forward in time to our present and altered them genetically so they can live on Earth.
Things went badly wrong for Courtney Brown, though. He also claimed, based on the remote viewing evidence of his team, that a spaceship was following in the tail of the comet Hale-Bopp, a claim that he promoted widely, especially on the Art Bell show. Subsequently, the Heaven’s Gate cult committed mass suicide specifically so that their souls would be ‘beamed up’ to the Hale-Bopp spaceship. Someone else who believed that there was something suspicious about Hale-Bopp, to the point of accusing the US government of a cover-up, was none other than Richard Hoagland, who promoted the theory with his usual zeal.
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However, all this may well assume quite another interpretation when the possibility of remote influencing is taken into account...
‘The day we opened the door’
One may smile at the apparently fantastical beliefs of a remote-viewing professor of political science, and dismiss the wilder claims for a Mars — Egypt connection, but the fact remains that there
are
reasons to take seriously the idea of life on Mars, even if it died out millions of years ago. The breakthrough appeared to come when NASA announced, on 7 August 1996, that evidence of micro-organisms on Mars — life, if a very primitive sort — had been found in a meteorite in Antarctica that had originated on Mars. Designated as ALH84001 (ALH = Allen Hills, where it was found; 84 was the year; 001 means it was the first collected in that year), its age is estimated at 4.5 billion years, and the microfossils in it at 3.6 billion years. It is believed to have been blown into orbit by an impact on Mars about 15 million years ago, and to have drifted around in space until it landed on Earth 13,000 years ago. The microfossils are of minute bacterialike organisms, the largest being 200 nanometers (billionths of a metre) in length. The meteorite is just under 2 kg in weight, and ‘about the size of a small potato’.
Although thousands of meteorites rain down on the Earth’s surface every day, clearly this one was perceived to be different — but why? And what was the reason for the veritable circus of hype that erupted so abruptly over it? The sheer scale of the publicity surrounding the announcement and the way in which the whole business was stage-managed seemed odd at the time, but in retrospect it seems even more unusual.
A major press conference at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston was attended by the international media, ensuring that the news made headlines all around the world. The conference was hosted by NASA administrator Daniel Goldin, who hailed the event as ‘a day that may well go down in history for American science, for the American people, and indeed humanity’ - obviously he is not one to think small. He also called it, somewhat portentously, ‘the day we opened the door’. Later that day, President Clinton made a public statement hailing the event as historic and pledging that NASA would ‘search for answers and for knowledge that is as old as humanity itself but essential to our people’s future’: strange words, which appear to convey a subtext to those with inside knowledge, but only succeeding in mystifying the rest of us. What could there possibly be about micro-organisms in a piece of rock from Mars that is ‘essential to our people’s future’?
For a normally conservative organisation with a scientific reputation to maintain, NASA’s orchestrated media splash was unprecedented. This is particularly odd, because the evidence presented at that conference was by no means conclusive enough to justify such a major event. Many scientists, particularly in Europe, have since expressed reservations about NASA’s interpretation of the facts. The question of whether the ‘fossils’ really are biological in origin is still being hotly debated in the scientific community. They may well be, as claimed, evidence of primitive life on Mars, but it was NASA’s certainty about it, not to mention the almost evangelical fervour and the sheer hype with which they promoted it, that is so surprising as to suggest another agenda.
Bewilderment only increases when it is realised that such claims had been made before, though never with as much publicity as ALH84001. It is intriguing that this evidence had been brought to the attention of NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin just weeks before the announcement — by two of the original ‘discoverers’ of the Face on Mars, John Brandenburg and Vincent DiPietro.
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Brandenburg had been researching the history of Mars in order to establish whether it had ever had conditions suitable for sustaining life, when he came across scientific papers written in 1989 by a British team reporting the discovery of organic carbon in a meteorite known to have originated on Mars.
Even further back, Dr Bartholomew Nagy of the University of Arizona had reported the discovery of bacterial microfossils in meteorites in the mid-1960s, although he did not discuss their origins. Nagy’s findings — particularly the question of the biological nature of the material — were published in the 1960s and early 1970s and had been disputed by other scientists at the time. Nagy had found what he believed to be microfossils in a specific type of meteorite known as carbonaceous chrondites. Later, Brandenburg tried to establish where these meteorites came from. He could do this relatively easily, as individual ‘signatures’ are found in the composition of different types of rocks, based on the proportions of certain isotopes, that associate them with Earth, Mars or elsewhere. (This is how we know that ALH84001 is Martian, for example.) Brandenburg found that the carbonaceous chrondites studied by Nagy had the characteristic signature of Mars. (Since this technique is well established, it is a mystery why nobody had, apparently, used it before. Perhaps they had.) Nagy died in December 1995, just a few months before NASA’s announcement vindicated his earlier work, notching the subject up into that almost hysterical publicity circus. It may well have shocked and saddened him.
Brandenburg published a paper on his research in May 1996, and lectured on his discoveries in Germany in July. A month before his paper was published he had personally approached Daniel Goldin with the results. Four months later came the big announcement.
ALH84001 had been discovered in Antarctica in 1984, but was only recognised as Martian in 1993. It had been analysed in secret at the Johnson Space Center in Houston - specifically to look for indications of biological constituents, which begs a question or two about the protocol of the scientific method. Brandenburg (who was present at the Houston press conference) speculates that pressure had been put on the NASA team to release their announcement before his work stole their thunder, although there was an ethical problem in this rivalry because his May 1996 paper had been peer-reviewed for publication by the very scientists at the Johnson Space Center who were secretly studying ALH84001! Others have speculated that Brandenburg’s work may simply have inspired NASA, who needed a good excuse for their suddenly renewed interest in Mars.
In a further twist to this story, shortly after the press conference a Washington call girl confessed to the press that a client, Dick Morris - one of President Clinton’s advisors - had told her some time before the announcement that evidence of life on Mars had been discovered but was classified as a ‘military secret’.
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It has also been pointed out that Daniel Goldin, who hosted the press conference so exuberantly, is known to be a political appointee with a former career in top-secret defence-related industrial work. He had been appointed by President Bush - himself a former head of the CIA — and has overseen a marked increase in the amount of defence work conducted by NASA, as well as an influx of ex-Defense Department personnel into key posts within the space agency.
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The whole subject of the Martian microfossils and the press conference that announced them has provoked a flurry of conspiracy theories, which divide into two camps: one centred on the suspicion that this is part of a ‘softening up’ process that will eventually lead to the revelation of
intelligent
life on Mars, while the other argues that the story was a stunt to create a new climate of excitement about Mars, leading to more government funds being allocated to NASA in order to explore the planet further. These theories are not mutually exclusive, although one school maintains darkly that NASA wants to explore Mars for other, clandestine reasons of its own. Such theories are stimulated by the obsessive secrecy that surrounded the work of the NASA team at Houston, and the over-the-top manner in which the discovery was announced, sidestepping the usual stages of peer-reviewed scientific papers, going instead straight to a live worldwide press conference.
There has certainly been a marked scramble to explore Mars recently: funding for Mars Global Surveyor — currently sending back images - was rushed through after the loss of Mars Observer in August 1993. It was launched in 1996. Since the August 1996 announcement, a series of new Mars probes are being planned to continue the search for life on the Red Planet, including the bringing back of samples from the surface, and plans for a manned mission are now being seriously considered for the first time in decades. Russia and Japan are also working on their own Mars missions.
With or without persuasive evidence from those vexed microfossils, excitement about Mars is building, especially in US governmental circles. Officials within the Clinton administration and in NASA seem to have a strong belief in life on Mars, perhaps even in intelligent life, and we have seen the eagerness of certain influential individuals and organisations — such as the Pentagon’s remote viewers, SRI and the Hoagland camp - to promote a widespread sense of belief and expectancy about Mars. Are ‘they’ looking for a stargate, either a physical or hyperdimensional portal through which they could more easily reach Mars, and perhaps even make contact with Martians? More importantly, do ‘they’ really believe that such a thing exists?
Or is this multi-pronged attack on public awareness simply an insidious exercise in mass manipulation, perhaps testing how we would react to the idea that there were, and possibly still are, Martians? This could be a dummy-run for a real announcement in the near future, likely to be timed to coincide with the Millennium and the first few years of the twenty-first century, when people in the West have come to expect momentous public revelations.
The plot thickens considerably, however, with the discovery that some prime movers in the West are utterly convinced that the stargate has already been opened - and that contact with extraterrestrials is already well established.
4
Contact?
Few of the enthusiastic followers of the Face on Mars story realise that the ideas of both Richard Hoagland and James Hurtak — the main advocates of the Mars/Giza connection - are largely shaped by a highly influential cultish group who claim direct, telepathic communication with extraterrestrial intelligences. These alleged non-human entities have, we were to discover, adopted many different aliases over the course of several decades, but today are most often known as the Council of Nine, or simply ‘the Nine’. This may seem odd, perhaps even bizarre, but — one might think - hardly relevant. Who cares what peculiar ideas these people may hold privately?
As we progressed in our investigation, however, we were astonished, not to say disturbed, by the influence exerted by the people who believe in the Nine — and, ultimately, the Nine themselves. We gradually uncovered evidence of the extraordinary hold that these alleged non-human intelligences have over top industrialists, cutting-edge scientists, popular entertainers, radical parapsychologists and key figures in military and intelligence circles. We were to find that the Nine’s influence even extends to the threshold of the White House itself.
Behind the scenes
Richard Hoagland’s influential Enterprise Mission had two directors of operations, for the United States and Europe respectively, David P. Myers and David S. Percy. Both had significant roles in the promotion of the Message of Cydonia. American writer and former US Navy officer Myers joined the team in 1989, and London-based film producer Percy went on board shortly afterwards. Both left the Mission together in 1992.
It was Myers who ‘discovered’ many of the key measurements and angular relationships of the Cydonia monuments on which Hoagland bases his decoding of the Message. And it was Percy who surveyed the stone circle of Avebury in order to establish its relationship with Cydonia, as well as with other English sites such as Stonehenge and Glastonbury Tor. However, the source of Myers’s ‘unique insights’ (as Hoagland calls them in his acknowledgement in
The Monuments of Mars)
is neither mathematical skill nor deductive reasoning: he and Percy are part of a network of people who believe they are in direct contact with a group of advanced godlike extraterrestrials.