A NOTE TO THE READER

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT THE PARANORMAL A SUBJECT WHICH IN LATE twentieth-century Western society is inseparable from controversy.

However, I hope the skeptical reader will bear in mind that this book was put together with the standard techniques of investigative journalism. I conducted numerous interviews with people who participated at all levels in the events I describe. I cross-checked stories among sources, and I gathered as much relevant documentary evidence as I could. In the back of the book I have noted the source(s) of each significant piece of information in the text. Were the subject of this book a different kind of classified government program – say, the effort to develop radar-evading Stealth aircraft – it would not be necessary to say any of this.

Because so many of the projects and operations discussed in these pages are still classified, some of my sources spoke to me on the condition that I identify them, as sources, in general terms only – e.g., “a former senior CIA official.” This is the kind of practice commonly used, and often abused, in books about classified matters. However, most of the sources for this book spoke to me openly, “on the record.” This is their story, not a dramatic invention of mine.

Jim Schnabel August 1996

Marvellous as these methods of signalling may seem, there were medicine men who claimed that they could send their thoughts through the air and make things come to pass afar. Others could send their minds’ eyes to distant places and discover what was happening. White explorers have written of these things, but to say just how it was done must remain for modern medicine men to tell us.

-Arthur C. Parker, The Indian How Book, 1927