Lianne Downey

While researching my upcoming novel (title TBD but it will be Book 1 in the Psychics & Aliens series), I read extensively about the U.S. government’s remote viewing experiments back in the late 20^th century.

When I saw this morning that a Marine Corps F-35 fighter jet was lost over the weekend—I mean literally, they don’t know where to find the multimillion dollar aircraft, partly because it’s composed of stealth materials—I immediately thought of a passage I include in my novel, based on real life stories told by Dale Graff, a remote viewing pioneer for the U.S. government's Stargate program and now author of several books on the subject.

First, and most importantly, you’ll be happy to know that the pilot in today’s report was able to eject and is in “stable condition,” according to The Washington Post. Whew.

But both the Marine Corps and the Air Force have asked the public to help find the missing craft, one of the world’s most expensive. One source said the plane cost $80 million; another said the price was not disclosed.

The brass believe it’s somewhere in the vicinity of Lake Moultrie in South Carolina. Not only was it built with detection-preventing materials, but its transponder is not sending out a signal for some reason. The lake is 75 feet deep and 14 miles across, so that’s likely where they’re focusing their search. But they could be wrong about that!

A similar situation happened in the 1970s, and it took a remote viewer—a woman, in fact, using only her mind—to outsmart all the high-tech equipment the government could muster. Did she get credit? Nope. And did they have to consult another viewer, a man, before they acted on her pinpointed detection, psychically obtained? Yes. But he was only able to provide general information about the crash site, not the actual location of that site.

The difference from today's quest is that during the Cold War, it was a Russian spy plane that went down in Africa. Our government wanted to be the first to get to it and harvest the goodies on board. Our psychic remote viewer, carefully trained and practiced through the government's Stargate program, was given a 40,000 square mile area to consider. After she placed an X on a topographical map and described the site, searchers found the plane within 3 miles of her X. Using all their high-tech equipment, they'd been searching 60 miles away! They weren’t even close.

The real problem happened nearly 20 years later, when former President Jimmy Carter let it slip that a government-funded psychic had located a downed Russian spy plane in the 1970s (according to a CNN report dated Sept. 21, 1995). Oops.

All hell broke loose in the media. Before we could say “balderdash,” the brass who’d always thought of the experimental remote viewing project as “the work of the devil” or just plain “stupid,” had a field day disclaiming it—and then dismantling the program, putting a lot of remote viewers and their handlers out of work. They buried any news about the successes of the program. Never mind that our Russian and Chinese counterparts were conducting similar programs that we’d been trying to keep up with. When the public said, “WHAT?! You spent money on WHAT?!” the programs shut down.

Truth vs. Fiction

I couldn’t resist re-telling this story in my novel—which happens to be about a contemporary remote viewer who works for the government (discreetly, you might say) and the extraordinary item she’s lost. Minda Blake gathers an unexpected team of helpers as she tries to retrieve the item and the missing teenager whose life her actions have endangered. She may find much more than she bargained for in my science fantasy thriller—speculative fiction at its best. Coming soon from Jolibro Publishing’s newest imprint, Spilled Secrets!

I do hope some skilled psychics among the public will help the military find their missing plane, before a Russian or Chinese remote viewer beats them to it. If they’ve asked for help from us, the public, that means their technology has already failed them. According to Dale Graff's book River Dreams, government-funded remote viewers have helped find more than one downed airplane.