Back in 1982 or 1983, Richard Kennett at the CIA had been asked to consult with the Army on its involvement with the Monroe Institute. Kennett had declined any involvement, citing concerns over the "human use" implications. He believed that by promoting altered states, one made the brain more unstable, more prone to spontaneous hallucinations and delusions. He could see no reason at all why the Army should be involved with Monroe, and could see many reasons why it should not.

One of Kennett's reasons, though unstated in his comments to the Army, was that he had once had his own OBE, using some tips he had picked up from one of Bob Monroe's books. He had felt himself separating from his prone, sleeping form, like a crab molting from its old shell. Then he was free. He walked across the room -- but now there were other beings in the room. There were monsters. Some kind of goblin hobbled up, put its nose right in his face, stared at him. Jesus! Kennett went back over to his bed, and tried to get back inside his body. He wasn't sure he could do it. The goblin --

Kennett made it back all right, but he would recommend, to anyone who asked, that out-of-body experiences be avoided like the plague. He suspected that the effects on the emotions, and on the nervous system in general, could result in heart attacks, psychological trauma, and even psychotic breaks in people who were already unstable.

[Compare this analysis with the remarks of Kenneth Grant in the chapter entitled "Dream Control by Sex Magick" from his 1973 book Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God: "It has been remarked by various of Crowley's critics that the women who did qualify for the role [of "shamanic" seer via highly specific orgastic/tantric physical and aetheric manipulations] almost always ended their term of office in Colney Hatch, or some similar institution. This may be true, but it is not a valid criticism of Crowley's methods for what is not considered is that a special kind of temperament is required to establish contact with the dream state while still awake. Western women who possess the required traits are rare, and as they have not the hereditary advantage of initiation into occult techniques -- as have certain African and Oriental women -- the sudden impact of magical energy on their personalities tends to disturb their sanity. Such women therefore easily astralize; it was their lack of proper preparation that resulted in ultimate lunacy." -B:.B:.]

Kit Green (l), Pat Price (c), Hal Puthoff (r)

One day, May 29 to be precise, Puthoff was sufficiently impressed with the coordinate experiments that he placed a call to CIA head- quarters, to the office of Richard Kennett.

Kennett was in his early thirties, with a wife and two young sons, and a house in the Virginia suburbs. He looked somewhat like the tennis player Jimmy Connors, though he and Connors didn't have much else in common. Within a decade, Kennett would be the assistant National Intelligence Officer [the NIO was the intelligence community's top analyst in a given subject, chairing interagency panels and writing annual reports on the subject] for chemical and biological warfare issues.

Here in the spring of 1973, Kennett was still only a few years into his CIA career, and served as an analyst in the Agency's Office of Scientific Intelligence. He had a Ph.D. in neuro-physiology, was soon to complete his M.D., and spent much of his time preparing top-secret evaluations of the health of various foreign heads of state.

Kennett was a man of eclectic interests. The free world's greatest spy organization often attracted his type. Ordinary science, like ordinary life, all too often left him bored; he seemed more at home confronting the wild extremes of human behavior. Religion and mysticism in particular fascinated him. Appropriately, then, he spent some of his CIA time monitoring the fringes of medicine and psychology, watching trends, attending conferences, visiting laboratories, looking for things that, though unconventional, might be useful to one side or another in the great game of the Cold War. One of the areas he kept an eye on was parapsychology, in particular the goings-on at SRI.

One day in the lab, several members of the Livermore [LLNL] group were monitoring [Uri] Geller during a metal-bending session. They recorded him with audiotape, filmed him with videotape, and photographed him with a variety of still cameras, including one that was sensitive to thermal infrared radiation.

After the experiment they developed all the film and saw something very strange. The infrared camera had caught what seemed to be two diffuse patches of radiation on the upper part of one of the laboratory walls. It was as if someone had briefly shone two large heat sources, either from inside the lab or outside pointing in. The patches grew in intensity for a few frames, then over the next few frames diminished to nothing.

The Livermore Group were understandably puzzled over this, but it was only the beginning of the strangeness that would soon consume them. When they checked the audiotape they had made during the experiment, they found amid everything else a distinctive, metallic- sounding voice, unheard during the actual experiment but now clearly audible, if mostly unintelligible. All they could make out were a few apparently random words strung together.

If Geller could be believed, things like this had happened before. According to one story, on several occasions when his friend Andrija Puharich had put him under hypnosis, audiotapes of the sessions had recorded similar strange voices. Another time, at a meeting with some Mossad officers, someone's tape recorder had suddenly seemed to start playing by itself, in full view of everyone.

In any case, Peter Crane and some of the others in the Livermore group quickly found themselves involved in more strangeness than they could handle. In the days and weeks that followed, they began to feel that they were collectively possessed by some kind of tormenting, teasing, hallucination-inducing spirit. They all would be in a laboratory together, setting up some experiment, or one of the fellows and his wife and children would be at home, just sitting around, when suddenly there in the middle of the room would be a weird, hovering, almost comically stereotypical image of a flying saucer. It was always about eight inches across, in a gray, fuzzy monochrome, as if it were some kind of hologram. The thematic connection with Geller was obvious, when one remembered that Geller claimed to be controlled by a giant computerized flying saucer named Spectra.

[cf. this somewhat similar event witnessed by Terrence McKenna: On the advice of a local contact, he sat down one day to watch a portion of the sky where, reportedly, a UFO might appear. After awhile, he noticed a strange, thin, horizontal cloud forming near the horizon. The cloud grew in length, then divided in two. The parts separated some distance, then moved back together again. Then the cloud appeared to move slowly toward him. McKenna wanted to rush to the nearby hut and wake his sleeping friends to come and see, but he was afraid to take his eyes off the moving cloud -- so he sat staring as it moved closer. Before long, he says, it was directly overhead, now clearly a flying saucer and so close he could see rivets in the metal. There was just one thing wrong. "I recognized this thing," he says. "It looked like the end cap of a Hoover vacuum cleaner, exactly the same fake saucer as in George Adamski's photos. This thing flew right over my head, and it was as phoney as a three dollar bill. I knew it was a fake." -B:.B:.]

On the other hand, the flying saucer wasn't the only form the Livermore visions took. There were sometimes animals -- fantastic animals from the ecstatic lore of shamans -- such as the large raven-like birds that were seen traipsing through the yards of several members of the group. One of them appeared briefly to a physicist named Mike Russo and his terrified wife. The two were lying around one morning when suddenly there was this giant bird staring at them from the foot of their bed.

After a few weeks of this, Russo and some of the others began seriously to wonder if they were losing their sanity. Peter Crane decided to call for help. He picked up the phone and called Richard Kennett.

Kennett had visited Livermore previously, in his capacity as a CIA analyst, to ask Crane and the others about their results with Geller. He had remained close-mouthed about the CIA's own psi research, but that had been expected. As far as Crane was concerned, Kennett was their best hope for a private, quiet solution to the problem. He had parapsychological experience, biomedical training, and high-level security access-an extremely rare set of qualifications.

On a Saturday morning not long thereafter, at the end of an otherwise unrelated trip to the San Francisco Bay Area, Kennett drove over and met with Crane in a coffee shop in the town of Livermore. Crane set out the situation for him, and soon Kennett was having long meetings with Russo and the others. They perspired, trembled, and even wept openly as they related some of the things that had happened to them. It was as if their world had collapsed around them. Nothing made sense anymore.

Kennett knew that if he took any of these stories to a regular psychiatrist, the diagnosis would be some kind of dissociative, hallucinatory, or otherwise delusional experience. Even when two or three people claimed to have shared a vision, it would almost certainly be dismissed as folie a deux, or folie a trois. Such terms were used to refer to rare group hallucinations, when one hallucinating or delusional individual had such a dominant personality that others came to believe they had seen or experienced the same thing.

Kennett didn't rule out such explanations, but he seemed fairly convinced that something else less pat and conventional was going on. For one thing, Crane, Russo, and the others had no history of involvement in the occult, and as far as Kennett could tell, their emotional situations immediately prior to these visionary experiences hadn't been particularly stressful or otherwise hallucinogenic. Moreover, they all had top-secret security clearances, which had required among other things that they be screened for psychological disorders.

Then there was the very strange business of the metallic voice on the audiotape. Among the few intelligible words it pronounced were two or three together which Kennett recognized as the code name of a very closely held government project. The project had nothing to do with psychic research, and neither it nor its code name was known to Crane or Russo or the others at Livermore. It was as if whoever or whatever had produced the code name on the tape had known that Kennett would soon arrive on the scene and had saved this special shiver down the spine just for him.

Kennett, going by the book, reported the code name incident to the security people at the CIA, muting the outlandish details only slightly. The security people filed it away, and wondered if Dr. Kennett might be getting a little too close to his subject matter.

The situation at Livermore eventually resolved itself, after Russo complained about a telephone call from the strange metallic voice. The voice demanded that the Livermore group cease its research activities with Geller. The group did, and within a month, the bizarre apparitions faded away.

One of the last such apparitions sprang itself upon a Livermore physicist named Don Curtis and his wife. They were sitting in their living room one evening, soberly, uneventfully, not talking about Geller or the paranormal, when suddenly there was this...arm ...hovering holographically in the middle of the room.

The arm was clothed as if it belonged to a man wearing a plain gray suit. There was no bloody stump where it should have connected with a shoulder. It merely faded into clear space. But at the end of the arm where a hand should have been, there was no hand, only a hook. The hooked arm twisted around for a few seconds in front of Curtis and his wife, and then disappeared.

Curtis related the story to Kennett, and for some reason, it seemed to push the CIA officer over the edge. He telephoned Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ and demanded that they meet with him on their next trip to Washington. He didn't quite believe that they could have cooked all of this up, using their SRI lasers to make haunted-house holograms. But he suspected that with their own ample experiences of Geller and his associated phenomena, they would be able to shed some light on what was happening.

Within a few days, Puthoff and Targ arrived in Washington for a scheduled fund-raising tour of government offices. Kennett met them shortly after they had arrived at their hotel, and though it was close to midnight, he sat them down and told them the whole story, including the story of the floating arm.

"And so the goddamn arm --" said Kennett, winding up his story. "The thing was rotating, with this gray suit on, and it had a hook on it. It was a false arm. What do you think of that?"

And as Kennett pronounced the word that, there was a sharp, heavy pounding on the door to the hotel room, as if someone were intending to knock it down. Kennett had a mischievous streak. Was he playing some kind of practical joke here? Puthoff and Targ didn't think so. The pounding was so loud, it was frightening. After a moment, Targ went over to the window and hid behind the curtains. Puthoff stood inside the bathroom. Kennett went over to the door and opened it.

Standing in the doorway was a man who at first glance was remarkable only by his unremarkableness. He was nondescript and unthreatening, somewhere in middle age. He walked past Kennett very slowly, with a stiff gait, to the middle of the room, between the two beds. He turned around, and said in an oddly stilted voice, "Oh! I guess...I must...be...in...the wrong...room."

And with that he walked out, slowly, stiffly, giving all of them time to see that one sleeve of his gray suit, pinned to his side, was empty.