The Men Who Stared at Coordinates: A Brief History of Looking Outside of Your Own Head
Back in the 1970s, the United States government became terribly worried that the Soviet Union was pulling ahead in the psychic arms race. The Soviets, it was rumored, were spending millions of rubles trying to read American minds and tip over cups of tea from across the Atlantic Ocean.
So, being a rational, bureaucratic machine, the American military did the only logical thing. They went out and bought a leaky wooden barracks at Fort Meade, Maryland, and filled it with a handful of people who knew how to sit very still in dark rooms. They called it the Stargate Project.
The military brass did not want to call what these people did "magic" or "prophecy," because those words sound like something from a carnival tent. Instead, they invented a beautifully sterile, mid-century bureaucratic term: Remote Viewing.
It is a wonderful trick of the human language. If you tell a general you have a wizard on the payroll, he will lock you up. But if you tell him you have a "trained intelligence collection asset utilizing anomalous cognition," he will give you a clipboard and twenty million dollars.
And there we have it.
*How to Look at Something Ten Thousand Miles Away.
The actual process of remote viewing was entirely unglamorous. It was as boring as algebra, which is probably why it occasionally worked. A viewer would sit in a room with a pen and a pad of paper. A handler, who didn't know anything about the target either, would walk in and read a random string of numbers. These were geographical coordinates — latitude and longitude.
The viewer wasn't supposed to think. Thinking, it turns out, is the enemy of seeing. The human brain is a terrible gossip; if you give it a second to breathe, it will start making things up to keep itself entertained. It will see a mountain and tell you it’s a chocolate sundae.
So the viewer would simply let their hand move across the paper, drawing squiggles and lines called ideograms. They were looking for raw data. Textures - rough, smooth, metallic, wet. Temperatures - hot, freezing, stagnant. Dimensions - vertical, hollow, massive, flat. By bypassing the noisy, opinionated ego, these viewers were able to sketch out Soviet submarine pens, missing aircraft, and hidden weapon depots with a frightening degree of accuracy. They weren't using their eyes. They were using a forgotten piece of human plumbing that connects every mind to everything else that has ever happened, or ever will happen.
*The Bureaucracy of the Soul.
The Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency kept this up for over twenty years. They had files, three-ring binders, and strict protocols for the soul. They proved, using the rigorous mathematics of statistics, that human consciousness is not trapped inside the skull like a bird in a cage. It can wander. It can go to Moscow. It can go to Mars.
But in 1995, the government quietly pulled the plug. They said the data was too inconsistent to help win wars.
What they really meant was that they couldn't weaponize it. You cannot put a psychic in a uniform and guarantee he will see the exact serial number on a Russian missile every single Thursday at 2:00 PM. The universe does not punch a time card.
The psychics went home. Some opened schools. Some went a little crazy because looking at the infinite cosmos while living in a trailer park is a very difficult thing to balance.
*Looking into Tomorrow.
The rationalists today think that because the government stopped paying for it, the phenomenon stopped existing. They think the only way to see the future is to build a massive computer model that predicts how quickly we are all going to destroy each other.
But the old remote viewers are still around. And when they look at the 2060s, they don't look at the coordinates of missile silos. They look at the coordinates of human hearts.
They see that we are going to survive our own cleverness. They see that the noisy, flashing, digital hallucination we are currently living through is just a temporary fever. On the other side of it is something quiet, small, and remarkably kind.
We just have to learn how to sit still enough to see it.
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If you want to read exactly what those viewers saw when they looked into the coordinates of our future — and how we can start building that quiet, green world today with analog tools — you can read my previous essay: Welcome to the 2060s: why the future is analog, egalitarian, and happening today.