The Second annual Schwartzreport Conference, co-sponsored by IRVA, The A.R.E. and Atlantic University, was held Oct. 30 to Nov. 2, 2003, at the headquarters of the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.) in Virginia Beach, Virginia. More than 270 participants came to hear and see virtually all of the founders of remote viewing in the same place at the same time.
Ingo Swan was there, and Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ. So were Paul Smith, Skip Atwater, Dale Graff and James Spottiswoode. (In fact, nearly the only living remote-viewing superstar not there was Joe McMoneagle.) Among them, they comprised witnesses to the birth and development of remote viewing as a discipline, first at SRI , then in the armed forces.
But the conference did not confine itself to history, fascinating though that was. Ringmaster Stephan Schwartz made sure that it moved on to other questions:, such as where do we go from here; how can remote viewing be used for self-actualization; what are the wider social and ethical implications. And the context was broadened ever farther by talks from Edgar Evans Cayce, sole surviving son of Edgar Cayce, who might in some senses be called the first and best remote viewer of all, and by Ingo Swan, in what he said might be his “swan song.”
Watching this many-ringed circus was particularly interesting to me, given my background as publisher of metaphysical material and sometime experimenter in psychic matters. I went to this conference because Russell Targ serves as editor of our Studies in Consciousness series, and because my company had published Skip Atwater’s book, and Joe McMoneagle’s, and even a little-known book of Ingo Swan’s. I hadn’t any doubts about the reality of remote viewing (though I hadn’t ever had any luck doing it), and I very much appreciate the achievement of these and other men and women who brought remote viewing into the mainstream.
But, I admit, I found myself asking why people needed to go to such lengths to “prove” that something could be done, when it is so easy, relatively speaking, to just do it. My natural inclination is with psychic explorer Robert Monroe, who used to advocate replacing our beliefs with knowns by means of personal experience. Of course, the limitation of that method is that it converts those beliefs into knowns for yourself and no one else. These scientists, and these military men, had set out to do something with much broader social implications, and I think that anyone who listened to the presentations would have to agree that they succeeded. The only way to disbelieve in remote viewing today is to be ignorant of the data.
(For those who still prefer personal experience, the program allowed participants to try their hand at three remote viewing experiments.)
Stephan Schwartz introduced the program, and the first speaker, Thursday night, was Dr. Harold Puthoff, who gave a great presentation on the early years of SRI. Had I known that the next day Paul Smith was going to ask me to write up the conference for this newsletter [the IRVA internal newsletter, of course], I would have taken notes! As it is, I am left with an impression of lucidity and unassuming brilliance. Hal walked us through the strange way in which he and Russell Targ, hooked up, how their careers went from physics to ever-weirder theory and practice, how the CIA (and CIA funding) got involved, and how things moved from there. I expect he would agree with the Grateful Dead, “What a long strange trip it’s been.”