A voluminous amount of military research material had been obtained from the Soviet Union, largely by the intelligence community, Graff found, but most of it had yet to be translated properly, if at all. “We had machine translators but they did a rough job,” he recalls. “For more exact details, I had to find Russian linguists. This was not an easy task [seeing as] I had to have them assigned to translating ESP-related materials.” Graff’s report contained sections on Soviet and Warsaw Pact belief systems, political ramifications, and structure of government support. He profiled Soviet and Warsaw Pact paraphysics researchers, their laboratories, and how they were funded. He summarized the activities of individuals whose abilities were of concern to the U.S. intelligence and military communities, citing the “Geller effect” and the frog experiments of Ninel Kulagina, the Russian psychic who had allegedly stopped the beating heart of an animal, using only her mind.
The end result was a 125-page report. “It was a bump and grind job,” remembers Graff, but well worth the effort as far as he was concerned because he had a vested interest in paraphysics research; it was deeply personal to him. Something had happened to him eight years before, in 1968, when he was stationed in Hawaii during the Vietnam War, and he attributed this mysterious event to phenomena that were real but that science could not yet explain. As a scientist, he vowed to find out.
It was August 1968 and Dale Graff, age thirty-four, had just returned from Vietnam, where he’d been sent by the Foreign Technology Division of the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Graff was an expert in Soviet weapons technology, including fighter aircraft, and he’d been sent overseas to teach U.S. pilots survivability tactics in air-to-air combat situations against the Soviet MiG.
Graff was a temperate man. Born in 1934 and raised just outside the Great Depression period, he spent much of his youth on a rented Pennsylvania farm. He loved maps, rivers, and watching birds. In 1958 he married Barbara Faust, his teenage sweetheart, and now they had two young children, ages seven and nine. He was thoughtful and soft-spoken, optimistic by nature. But war can push people to their limits, and the trip to Southeast Asia had left him feeling distressed. With so many of his colleagues getting shot down and killed or captured, it grated on him that as a civilian scientist he was not going to be sent into combat. He sometimes wondered if it was fair that scientists were spared the dangers of the battlefield. Intellectually he knew his work was as critical to the war effort as having his boots on the ground, but still, he felt bad. “I returned home in a foul mood,” he remembers.
Graff had been with the Air Force for ten years, and was in Hawaii on a two-year transfer to Hickam Air Force Base. There were numerous beaches nearby, and on this day he made an early morning decision to go to one of them, swim hard, and disengage his mind from the feeling of powerlessness he couldn’t seem to shake. Graff packed up Barbara and the two kids and made his way down Bellows Beach. Under one arm he carried a small surfboard. He was an excellent athlete and had recently taken up canoeing, but today he planned to surf and swim. His Achilles heel was his eyesight. “I have extremely poor vision, 20/2500 [uncorrected], and I’d forgotten my prescription goggles at home,” Graff recalls. Using a trick called the pinhole effect that he’d perfected as a child, Graff squinted and was able to see.
There was a tempest brewing out at sea, the sky dark and foreboding. Even the lifeguard had gone home. Graff noted that the red flag was up, taut in a stiff wind. The waves were massive. Standing in his swim trunks at the water’s edge he took stock of the situation and then made a decision. “The hell with it,” he said to himself. “I’m going to go out and surf in these waves.” Barbara and the kids would stay on the beach and build sand castles. Graff entered the rough ocean and paddled through the breakwater. Up and down he went, over large, powerful waves. He was of average build, five foot ten, thin but muscular and physically fit. The situation was challenging but not perilous, and for some time—it was hard to say how long—he rode the waves, squinting to see. Soon he was far from shore.
As the waves grew bigger and the sky darkened, Graff decided it was time to head in. “The wind was so loud I couldn’t hear a thing,” he says. The storm was moving fast. He realized that his arms were tired and the situation was rapidly changing. His scientist’s mind assessed the situation. Things were getting treacherous. He needed to get in, now.
“Huge waves. Sore arms. Dark seas. Get to shore”—these were the thoughts running through his head. He paddled hard with intense focus. Get to shore, he told himself. Huge waves. Dark seas. Sore arms. Never mind, paddle. Get to shore. He told himself this again and again, the mantra of an athlete.
And then, over the deafening roar of wind and waves, Graff heard a distinct cry, “a sharp decisive human cry for help.” It was clear. Undeniably clear. “Except this was impossible,” he recalls. Was that his mind—? He stopped paddling. He looked around. Could he have heard a seagull? he wondered. The wind howled. Out here in the vastness of the ocean the waves were immense. He was floating in an ominous, dangerous sea. Graff scanned the area around him. His heart beat intensely and the wind howled in his ears. He took stock of the situation and made a firm assessment: “There is nobody out here but me.”
He resumed paddling. He knew his situation was extremely dangerous. His arms began to cramp. The sky above him was black and the storm was bearing down. He had a considerable distance to go. He had to get in, he thought. He paddled with all his might. Then, rather suddenly, something happened. Graff stopped paddling. He recalls: “With a few strokes I turned myself around and began paddling in the opposite direction, at a 45-degree angle, headed out to sea. ‘You have to go out there,’ my mind said. Dead ahead maybe fifty or a hundred yards… I spotted a coral reef.”
Coral reef, huge waves. This was a suicide mission. He was now headed into a death trap, yet he was driven. “I paddled and paddled. I saw no one, heard no one. But I was compelled. It made no logical sense and yet I kept paddling,” says Graff. “I got to the point where I was at the top of a huge wave. And as I began falling down [into the trough]… Boom! I crashed into a woman.”
A drowning woman. “I saw it in her eyes,” he recalls. “She was very close to death.” The woman’s mouth opened and she choked on seawater as she tried to grab a breath. She gasped. Then she went under. It was Barbara. She was out here in this dangerous ocean, too. Barbara couldn’t swim, didn’t know how to swim, yet she was here. Graff grabbed his wife and pulled her onto his board. His mind raced. She was barely breathing, going in and out of consciousness. Her life depended on him. He had to get to shore. Had to get Barbara to shore. “I realized we were caught in a rip current,” he recalls. And now his scientist’s mind kicked in. “I knew I had to swim at a right angle from the current, parallel to the beach,” Graff explains. One wrong move and Barbara would slip into the ocean and drown. Where were their children? He could not think about such things now.
His mind attempted calculations. With every few inches of progress he made, the rip current seemed to gain a foot. Salt stung his eyes. Waves crashed around him as he tried to hold Barbara on the board. He was drifting closer and closer to the coral reef. The pinhole effect was no longer working and he was virtually blind. One arm had gone stiff from holding Barbara, the other was numb from paddling so hard.
Was this what it was like to face death? A terrible truth came over him. He had to make a decision. He could not save his wife and also save himself. He was a father. They had two young children. He asked himself a monstrous question: Should I save myself and let Barbara drown? He knew he had to make a choice. Then, just as he was about to decide, he heard a word loud and clear in his head. The word was No.
“And then the strangest thing happened,” Graff reflects. “It was as if I went up over the situation. I was outside of my own body. I had a bird’s-eye view of myself.” From this impossible perspective, Graff could navigate the waves and the rip current. He could hold on to Barbara and he could see everything, including
a pathway to shore. “There was a sense of timelessness. It didn’t matter how long this would take. Time was meaningless. My arms were no longer sore. Paddling was effortless. Then suddenly, my knees hit sand.” The children were standing in front of him on the shore.
Graff pulled Barbara onto the beach. “She had some water in her lungs. Using CPR, I made sure I got the water out. Made sure she was breathing. Then I walked back into a grove of pine trees, of Norfolk pines, and I collapsed. I had no idea what had just happened,” he remembers. He wondered whether he ever would. It was 1968; the world was a different place, and husbands and wives often did not communicate so openly. “We did not discuss what happened,” Graff recalls. “We would not discuss what happened that day for another thirty-one years. I myself could not say anything. I had to wait until Barbara brought it up. If I told her that I saved her life she would feel beholden to me, and our relationship would change. I couldn’t do that.” That’s what he believed.
But the incident deeply changed his perspective and his own life. The next day he went to the public library in Honolulu and searched the card catalog for books that dealt with anomalous mental phenomena—aberrant occurrences in the mind that have no clear scientific explanation. Graff wanted to understand what might have happened to him at Bellows Beach. He was a sane individual. He carried a top-secret government clearance that required regular psychological tests. He did not take drugs. He had no neurosis or anxieties and had never experienced delusions of any kind. His had not been a religious experience; he was certain he’d not heard the voice of God. He also felt that what had happened to him was not a hallucination, it was real. He had perceived a human cry in an environment in which a human cry would have been impossible to hear: the waves were far too loud, and when he heard the cry, Barbara had been much too far away.
“It occurred to me the cry came from my own mind,” Graff explains. “It had to happen in order for me to save my wife, the mother of my children. My mind made the sound. But how? And how did I travel outside my body in order to see myself and get to shore?” The answer to these mysteries had to be explicable by science, he believed.
He scoured the card catalog for books on consciousness, the state of being awake and aware. Consciousness equals sentience and perception, he learned; it is the executive control system of the mind. But there were as many questions as statements. Does consciousness direct our actions and behaviors, or does it emerge from the operations of the brain? What is the function of consciousness? In the literature he learned there was no agreed upon or set idea. Reading about consciousness was like traveling down the proverbial rabbit hole. Scientists refer to “the hard problem of consciousness” because the nature of consciousness is a mystery that no one has been able to solve.
Graff searched for books that dealt with anomalous mental phenomena and arrived in a subcategory called parapsychology. Topics were broad and divergent, he found, and always excluded from orthodox psychology. Parapsychology included concepts as diverse as mental telepathy, psychokinesis, and out-of-body experiences, but also poltergeists and UFOs. The term “parapsychology” appeared to have been first used in 1889 by the German philosopher Max Dessoir, who defined the study as “a hitherto unknown fringe area between the average and the pathological states.” Parapsychology was fringe science, he read, an area fraught with superstition and the occult. It was a domain most mainstream scientists labeled pseudoscience, a collection of beliefs or practices not based on the scientific method.
In the card catalog under “Consciousness” Graff came upon the works of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. In the stacks he located one of Jung’s papers, “Concept of the Collective Unconscious,” written in 1936, and began reading. In this paper Jung put forth the idea that in addition to each person’s individual unconscious—meaning one’s mind or psyche that is made up of experiences that happen only to the individual—there exists in all humans something Jung called the collective unconscious, a universal, impersonal, and inherited psyche that is common among all people. Jung described this collective unconscious as something akin to the reptilian brain, the oldest of the brain functions shared by all mammals, without which we could not have evolved.
Jung believed this collective unconscious was embedded deep within every person, that it was a dynamic substratum common to all humanity. He rejected the idea that we are born as tabula rasae, blank slates. To Jung, the collective unconscious is populated by universal archetypes, or symbols—figures like the hero, the wise man, the trickster, and the savior; motifs like the apocalypse, the flood, the creation; events like birth, death, and the union of opposites. The collective unconscious is a force of nature and a product of evolution, Jung said, and it can sometimes cause men to act.
Graff was not sure what to make of Jung’s idea or how it pertained to what had happened to him at Bellows Beach, but he knew it was a start of something powerful in his own mind. Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious sowed a seed. Graff checked out a stack of books on consciousness, extrasensory perception, and the collective unconscious. At home in his spare time, he read.
The following year, he and his family returned to Wright-Patterson, in Ohio. The children were thriving, and Barbara began working at the hospital in Dayton as a nurse. Graff was promoted to chief of the Advanced Missile Systems Forecast Section of the Foreign Technology Division. He resumed PhD coursework at Ohio State University in aeronautical engineering. “I attended one course,” he recalls, “but I could not focus. As interesting as it was, I just couldn’t put my energy into this.”
The mysterious world of anomalous mental phenomena had sparked something in him. He believed that there were pursuits beyond the confines of orthodox science that had greater significance and should be taken on. What had happened to him one summer day in Waimanalo, Hawaii, in 1968 was life altering. It had shaped him. He did not know how or why, exactly—only that his conviction was profound and that what he’d experienced was what the military called ground truth, a real situation.
Eight years passed. In 1976 he was now head of the Electro-Optic Threat Assessment Section of the Foreign Technology Group at Wright-Patterson. A scientist among scientists, he worked as division chief on numerous classified programs, many of which dealt with advanced sensor technology. As chairman of the Radar and Optical Intelligence Working Group, he oversaw research on electro-optics designed to detect military targets, including the Soviet ICBM, at very long range. “We would research Soviet technology in these areas, write papers, and estimate future capabilities,” Graff recalls. United States–Soviet relations were in steep decline, and the need for foreign intelligence data on future threats never let up. Still, his interest in, and study of, extrasensory perception hadn’t waned. He wanted to work on ESP research as a scientist. So he reached out to Hal Puthoff at SRI. After the submersible experiment, Graff received the go-ahead to proceed on a small Air Force program. The real work had just begun.
“Quietly, I began locating people at our facility who seemed interested in ESP. It was a classified effort,” Graff recalls. “Rumors floated. Rumors that I was looking for ‘sensitive people.’ Remote viewers.” He was put in touch with a young administrative assistant named Rosemary Smith who worked at the center for satellite photography. “She was interested,” he remembers. “She came to me and said, ‘I think I have this kind of ability.’” Graff ran some outbounder-beacon and picture-viewing experiments with Smith using SRI protocols. “Nice results,” he says.
Five months had passed since Graff finished researching and writing Paraphysics R&D—Warsaw Pact. In the interim he’d been analyzing SRI data to learn how remote viewing might apply to the Foreign Technology Division in an operational capacity. “The Air Force has a repeating challenge, which is that aircraft go down. Because of this, the Air Force finds itself spending time searching for lost airplanes,” says Graff, “ours and theirs.” Figuring this was a good place to start, Graff wrote a proposal about how his division might locate a mi
ssing airplane with extrasensory perception. “I’d just finished writing out the protocols, the various steps involved, when there was quite literally a knock on my door. I was taken into an office in a classified setting and shown a photograph. ‘This is a missing aircraft,’ I was told. ‘Can one of your people help find it?’”
By now an expert in foreign technology, Graff recognized the aircraft as a Soviet bomber, a Tu-22 Blinder. He said he’d see what he could do. He was told nothing about the location of the downed airplane. “I figured it had gone down somewhere in Europe,” he recalls. He took the photograph to Rosemary Smith. Following the protocols he had recently designed in his proposal, he got to work with her. She had the correct clearances.
“It was informal,” Graff recalls. “I showed her the photograph and asked if she could receive or achieve any impressions. After fifteen minutes she was drawing, scribbling, in a light altered state,” he remembers. “She’d sketched a map, made little markings indicating north-south, noted a town and geological formations.” Then she told Graff assertively that the aircraft had gone down “in mountainous terrain, not far from a lake.” Graff asked if she could be more specific. “She was suddenly very focused and involved,” he recalls. “She put her pen to the paper and drew a flight path. ‘It went down here,’ she said, and made a mark.” On the map she wrote, “Plane possibly flew through pass or opening in mountains.” Smith provided Graff with an intriguing detail. “She said she saw the pilot bailing out of the aircraft. At the time I didn’t think it was important,” Graff explains. This detail would later prove to be key.
Now Graff had a crude rendering of a map. He took that sketch to the search team working on the Tu-22 Blinder operation, along with a summary of Smith’s remote-viewing session. The men thanked him for the work and he left. The following morning one of the team members came to his office and told him that his source had relayed something important. Graff was taken into a classified briefing room and read onto a classified joint CIA-USAF program.