“On Tuesday, the [CIA’s] security officers came,” he recalls, security officers who were investigating a possibly treasonous violation of the Espionage Act of 1917. “The names on the folders were correct,” says Green, referring to the names provided by Price. “The mensuration [measurements] of the details was correct. The location of the doors and the elevator, the number of floors, where the cabinets were located. The color of the cabinet was correct. It didn’t take judging. It didn’t take statistical processing. It was all correct.”
The CIA’s security investigation into the Sugar Grove remote viewing session remains classified. According to interviews with Kit Green and Hal Puthoff, each man was individually cleared by CIA of any wrongdoing. Neither had access to the classified material contained in Pat Price’s report; they could not have cued him with information. So how was the information obtained? The government wanted answers. What was going on at SRI, and who was this Patrick Price?
“A significant investigation was launched,” recalls Puthoff. He says it left “a trail of veteran security officers shaking their heads.” As for Price, after answering questions that apparently satisfied the CIA and the Defense Department, he was hired to be part of the SRI remote viewing experiments. Now there were two test subjects, Pat Price and Ingo Swann.
Weeks later, when Kit Green met Price in person, Green asked Price if he’d seen his colleague’s summer cabin in the woods. Green recalls Price saying, “Of course I saw the cabin. But you’re in the intelligence business. You had to be looking at what was down the road.”
Pat Price was born in 1918, in Salt Lake City, the ninth of ten children in a devout Mormon family. By the time he crossed paths with the CIA over the Sugar Grove remote viewing, he was fifty-five years old. His intent, said Price, was to make a nice sum of money and retire. He had been a wanderer for significant parts of his life, starting when he was a student pilot with the Army Air Corps during World War II. After that, he worked a series of jobs as a gold miner, a security guard, a construction worker, and the manager of an equipment packing plant. He married a nurse, had children, and for a time in the late 1940s and 1950s enjoyed a suburban lifestyle in Burbank, California. He became interested in local government and served as chairman of the Department of Parks and Recreation, on the Fire Commission, and as the City Council’s representative to the Burbank Police Commission. In the late 1960s, when he was fifty, he joined the Church of Scientology, which was where his psychic powers were awakened, he said.
His apparent ability to remote-view the classified facility at Sugar Grove with such precision set off alarm bells across the intelligence community. “There was no one else like him,” explains Kit Green. “His talents were immeasurable. His alphanumeric abilities were perfectly aligned with intelligence work.” While no one at SRI claimed to understand how psychic functioning worked, the consensus before Pat Price came along was that it was a right-brain function, nonverbal and intuitive, generally associated with visuals rather than words. Whereas the right hemisphere of the brain is generally associated with creativity, imagination, and intuition, the left hemisphere is analytical. Left-brain people tend to be good in logic, sequencing, and math. Ingo Swann was visual and creative. But Pat Price used extrasensory perception to discern technical details such as letters, words, numbers, and dates. In the eyes of the CIA, says Green, this made Price an intelligence-collection gold mine.
“Everyone who met him liked him,” remembers Puthoff. Except, perhaps, Ingo Swann.
Swann had created the concept of remote viewing. He was committed to transforming psychic functioning from something that was laughed at to something respected in the intelligence world. Now Price was stealing the spotlight. In August 1973, when his Biofield Measurements contract was up, Swann told Puthoff he had decided California was not for him. “The permanent sun was unbearable to me,” wrote Swann in his journal. Hal Puthoff recalls driving Swann to the San Francisco airport and saying good-bye.
The CIA now focused on Pat Price.
Kit Green was sent to California to run Price through a series of medical tests, including ones to determine his physiological, psychological, psychiatric, and intellectual health. Green also participated in a series of outbounder-beacon tests with Price. The Agency wanted to see whether Price could conduct a successful remote-viewing session against a moving target, ostensibly an aircraft or a submarine. The plan was for Green and Russell Targ as the outbounder-beacon team to go up in a glider. Hal Puthoff would wait with Price on the tarmac. Once Green and Targ were in the air, Green would write down three sets of three-digit numbers and put them in his breast pocket. At a prearranged time, Price would try to perceive the numbers.
“Price wrote down the correct numbers in the correct sequence,” Green recalls. “He said that part was easy.” The difficulty, Price said, was that there had been some kind of geometric shape or symbol interfering with the numbers as he was trying to see them. “He said the situation had made him queasy,” remembers Green.
When Green asked Price to draw the symbol that was interfering, he drew a variation on a cross. Green reached inside his shirt and pulled out a necklace he was wearing. It was an Old Testament cross called a tau cross, shaped like the Greek letter T. Certainly Pat Price could have noticed Green’s necklace at some point before the experiment; that wasn’t what intrigued the CIA’s neurophysiologist. “What interested me was the nausea,” says Green. “Nausea has to do with how the cortex obtains but does not process visual data. There’s a surge of serotonin in the area postrema. I began to think that remote viewing was as much neurology as it was psychology.”
In a separate outbounder-beacon experiment with Price, a more dramatic physiological event occurred. Green was in the car with an experimenter from SRI. They had opened their sealed envelope and were headed to the target when, “ten minutes into our drive, I said stop the car,” Green recalls. After his earlier experience with Uri Geller remotely viewing a page from one of the medical books in his CIA office, Green intended to devise a fail-safe remote-viewing test. This was it. The experimenter driving the car insisted that he wasn’t allowed to deviate from protocol. Green told him, “I’m the contract monitor, and I say stop the car.” So the experimenter stopped. “But I’m supposed to drive to the target,” he said.
Green instructed the driver to back up. “I said, I want you to go to that church back there,” pointing to a small Episcopal church beside the road. The driver did as Green asked and pulled into the church parking lot. Green checked his watch and waited until the prearranged time. Then he got out of the car. “I crunched across the gravel and into an arbor,” Green recalls. “I caught my foot on something and nearly tripped. I walked down to the sacristy,” the room where the vestments were kept. “I opened a window. I turned around, walked into the nave, walked down the right-hand aisle. Stopped and stared at a beautiful rose window over the altar.” In this moment in the church, he says, he was reminded of his time in seminary school and the strange notion of how different his life might have been had he become a clergyman instead of joining the CIA. Green felt a wave of emotion and decided to pray. “I knelt down, said a prayer. There was this beautiful baptismal font in front of me. I leaned over and looked into it. Then I was done. I crunched across the gravel, went back to the car.” The two experimenters headed back to SRI.
“Back at the lab, we went into the Faraday cage where the remote viewer [Price] had been [the entire time]. He was having a cardiac event,” Green recalls. “At minimum he was having an angina attack, and possibly he was having an MI [myocardial infarction],” more commonly known as a heart attack. After Price’s heart rate returned to normal, he turned to Green and said that that was the worst experiment he had ever done. Green recalls Price telling him, “It just made me so sick. You walked down an arbor. You almost tripped. You went into the most terrible building I’ve ever seen in my life. I saw you walk down an aisle and crumple to your knees. I began to worry about you. I saw you lean over
and vomit into an octagonal basin. I began to feel nauseated. I got chest pains.”
Over the next year Green began developing ideas about the physiology involved in remote viewing—“How the brain is involved for the sender [i.e., the outbounder] and the viewer, but in a very complex and precise way that connects emotionality,” Green explains. But there was a bigger, far more daunting question he began asking, he says, and that was “What are we dealing with here?”
Like so many before him, Green was asking himself what force was powering anomalous mental phenomena. His search for the answer would continue for decades.
As word of Pat Price’s talents spread through the intelligence community, SRI was flooded with requests. On February 5, 1974, the Berkeley police enlisted Price to use remote-viewing techniques to garner information about who might have kidnapped the heiress Patty Hearst. Hal Puthoff drove Price to the crime scene. In a memorandum for the record, one CIA analyst noted that Price’s help was solicited “the night after the kidnapping and before any publicity occurred.” According to CIA documents, Price provided law enforcement with a “significant amount of data, including identification of people later proven to be involved.” The CIA wanted to learn more about the data provided. There were intelligence-capability opportunities to consider, including proof-of-life issues. But the Agency felt limited as to what they could ask the FBI. “Even the appearance of CIA involvement with domestic police operations is a political[ly] explosive association,” an Agency analyst wrote.
Price’s abilities were inexplicable. He was likened to an intelligence-gathering shaman. His talents were among those the CIA had been pursuing in its MKULTRA Subproject 58 quest, the search for the God’s flesh mushroom. Price seemed able to travel across the globe, gather information, and come back. In the winter and spring of 1974, he conducted a series of operational tasks for multiple clients in the intelligence world. He provided NSA with valuable intelligence for a classified SIGINT operation in Africa. He helped CIA to “see” the interior of the Chinese embassy in Rome. He assisted the Navy in tracking Soviet submarines. As a result of his remote-viewing abilities, a concept called “the eight-martini results” was born. What Price seemed able to access through as yet unknown means was so unnerving that the CIA handler involved sometimes had to drink eight martinis in order to process the unfathomable nature of whatever “it” was.
On July 9, 1974, Price was given a highly classified target inside the Soviet Union. The facility was located in Kazakhstan, adjacent to the Semipalatinsk Test Site, Russia’s primary nuclear testing facility, which meant that its existence was known to only a few members of the intelligence community. This facility had two code names: URDF-3, which stood for Unidentified Research and Development Facility-3, and PNUTS, for Possible Nuclear Underground Test Site. The CIA and the Pentagon were concerned that URDF-3 was home to a Soviet directed-energy weapons program to develop space-based laser weapons. Satellite photographs indicated there was machinery at this site that U.S. scientists were unfamiliar with, and that there was a lot of activity going on here, some aboveground, some below.
The geographic coordinates were sent to Hal Puthoff for Pat Price to remotely view. Inside the Faraday cage room at SRI, Price sat in an easy chair. With him was Russell Targ. Downplaying the classified nature of the site, Puthoff and Targ told Price they were giving him a geographical target from a world atlas published in London. Price took off his eyeglasses and polished the lenses, which, he said, helped him to see. Price closed his eyes. Puthoff turned on the tape recorder.
The first thing Price stated was that he was getting the impression that the Soviets “have done a lot of rocket launching and recovery out of that area.” As had become customary, he first described the location through a lens of the weather, as if he were in a reconnaissance aircraft. “It’s dark over there at the present time, quite a cloud cover, and a full moon,” he said. He described a river and then told Puthoff he was “heading over to the facility now.” Puthoff listened and took notes. “I am lying on my back on the roof of a two or three story brick building,” Price said. “There’s the most amazing thing. There’s a giant gantry crane moving back and forth over my head. It seems to be riding on a track with one rail on each side of the building.” He sketched a detailed drawing of a very large crane on rails. He said he saw “an assembly room with a sixty-foot metal sphere,” something he described as “similar to a giant orange peel.” He said he saw a cluster of tall gas canisters shaped like silos, with round spheres at the top.
The information was sent to the CIA where the lead analyst assigned to the operation, a physicist named Dr. Kenneth A. Kress, compared Price’s descriptions to classified satellite imagery. Reconnaissance photographs confirmed the presence of rails for railroad cars and a huge crane. The gas cylinders also matched what Price reported seeing. But the spheres were not locatable, and this agitated CIA. “From experience it was obvious that Price produced bad data as well as good,” Kress wrote in a now declassified report. “I reviewed the photos of URDF-3 and chose two features which, if Price described them, would show the [information] channel at least partially working.”
Kress flew out to SRI. He took Puthoff and Targ to a motel and briefed them on URDF-3. As cloak-and-dagger as it sounds, a randomly selected motel room is generally more secure than a laboratory where numerous people were working, according to the CIA. Kress told Puthoff and Targ that Price had been very accurate regarding his description of the crane but inaccurate in his descriptions of other buildings. Kress told the SRI scientists that the CIA wanted to read Price onto the top-secret program, and they should try to get additional information from him. Puthoff, Targ, and Kress headed over to SRI to talk to Price in an electronically shielded room.
“When the decision was made to make Price witting, I decided to test him,” Kress wrote. “My branch chief and I sat in a conference room while Targ and Puthoff brought a smiling Pat Price into the room. I was introduced as the sponsor, and I immediately asked Price if he knew me.”
“Yes,” Price said.
“Name?” Kress asked.
“Ken Kress,” Price said.
“Occupation?”
“Works for the CIA,” Price said.
“Since I was a covert employee, the response was meaningful,” wrote Kress. (The suggestion that Puthoff or Targ might have revealed the identity of what is termed a contracting officer’s technical representative isn’t plausible, says Puthoff. Release of that information would have been a violation of the Espionage Act.) After Price signed a CIA secrecy agreement, Kress asked him additional questions about the target site. He pulled out a map of URDF-3 and pointed to a specific spot. “Why didn’t you see the four derricks?” Kress wanted to know.
Price sat back, put his glasses on, and closed his eyes. He concentrated for a few moments. “I didn’t see them because they are not there anymore,” Price told Kress, who made a note. Kress knew his satellite photographs were perhaps three or four months old.
Internal pressure was mounting at CIA. Scientists with the Office of Research and Development were becoming increasingly critical of Puthoff and Targ’s experimentation controls. “The rigor of the research became a serious issue between the ORD project officers and SRI,” noted Ken Kress. Given the highly classified nature of the URDF-3 operation, the ORD scientists reviewed the transcripts of Puthoff and Targ’s sessions with Price and noted numerous occasions when experiments were not properly controlled. Seeking independent scrutiny, the CIA sent the information to an imagery analyst at Los Alamos National Laboratory for a second opinion.
The Los Alamos analyst focused on Price’s knowledge of the rail-mounted gantry crane. “It seems inconceivable to imagine how he could have drawn such a likeness to the actual crane at URDF-3 unless: 1) he actually saw it though remote viewing, or 2) he was informed of what to draw by someone knowledgeable of the URDF-3.” The analyst came to a troubling conclusion, one that echoed concerns at CIA. “I only mention this
second possibility,” he warned, “because the experiment was not controlled to discount the possibility that [Price] could talk to other people—such as the Disinformation Section of the KGB. This may sound ridiculous to the reader, but I have to consider all possibilities in the spectrum from his being capable to view remotely to his being supplied data for disinformation purposes by the KGB.”
With this significant possibility broached, Ken Kress now questioned his own ability to be objective. In one of his CIA reports, he noted that the world of paranormal research was made up of “two types of reactions… positive and negative, with little in between,” and he stressed the Agency-wide need for value-free assessment. Individuals who supported pro-paranormal data often “have had ‘conversion’ experiences,” Kress wrote, something akin to a single “eight-martini result” that renders them “convinced that one unexplained success establishes a phenomenon.” The Los Alamos report suggesting a KGB disinformation possibility that he had overlooked caused Kress to question his impartiality. “I began to doubt my own objectivity in evaluating the significance of paranormal abilities to intelligence collection,” he wrote in a secret document marked “Personal Review.”
At Kress’s suggestion, CIA contracted with an outside scientist to evaluate the psychic research program. This scientist, described in declassified literature as “a disinterested consultant, a theoretical physicist with broad intellectual background,” was given the CIA data to review. His conclusion was that “a large body of reliable experimental evidence points to the inescapable conclusion that extrasensory perception does exist as a real phenomenon, albeit characterized by rarity and lack of reliability.”