Dale Graff was a former director of the U.S. military's so-called
"Stargate" remote-viewing program. This is an important
historical account of what actually happened during those years.
Dale Graff's initial exposure to remote viewing occurred when he
worked in the Foreign Technology Division of the U.S. Air Force
in the areas of physics and aerospace engineering in the 1970s.
He later moved to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) where he
worked as a physicist. When the U.S. Army's remote-viewing unit
moved to the DIA in 1985, he became the director of the program.
Mr. Graff was apparently the creator of the "Stargate"
name that has been used to identify the remote-viewing project within
the Department of Defense. He coordinated many of the activities
that transpired between Dr. Harold Puthoff's remote-viewing laboratory
at Stanford Research Institute (later SRI International) and the
Department of Defense. In short, Mr. Graff was a central administrative
figure in the U.S. military's remote-viewing program, and "Tracks
in the Psychic Wilderness" is an important historical marker
in the reporting of those government funded efforts to use remote
viewing for espionage purposes.
Mr. Graff's book has five parts. The first is his own recollection
of the history of the U.S. military's remote-viewing program. While
this initial section is only 17 pages long, it is nonetheless rich
in useful detail. One comes away from this introduction with a sense
that the U.S. government took its own remote-viewing program exceptionally
seriously. Always worried that the program might cause embarrassment
to the government if revealed to the public, the government nonetheless
highly valued the results of the program while it lasted. The government
occasionally used the military's remote viewers to successfully
assist in resolving intelligence concerns which were of high importance.
More often than not, when governmental officials decided not to
pursue leads offered by the remote viewers, it was later discovered
that the leads were accurate and that valuable time had been lost
by not taking those leads more seriously. Mr. Graff does at good
job at describing both sides of this dilemma, where results are
valued for their own sake, but the source of information is problematic
when reputations and career considerations become involved. Anyone
who wants to retrace those early remote-viewing efforts by the U.S.
government needs to read Graff's chronology of these events.
The second part of this book is a telling of many of the primary
experiences that Mr. Graff had that shaped his views on the remote-viewing
phenomenon. A few of these experiences occurred when Mr. Graff worked
with Dr. Puthoff at SRI. In some instances, the primary concern
is to test how well remote viewing works for different types of
targets, such as targets that are underground, or targets that are
very distant from the remote viewer. In other instances, Mr. Graff
is deeply concerned about exploring the potential for using remote
viewing operationally, such as for the purpose of rescuing lost
explorers. Here we see his interest in both the basic science aspect
of remote-viewing research as well as his interest in possible practical
applications.
Mr. Graph's third section in his book is about remote-viewing via
dreams. The book later ventures into the subject of things happening
in a seemingly coordinated fashion, where the coordination seems
to operate at least partially through the unseen realms of consciousness.
He calls this "synchronicity," and I suspect many readers
will find this discussion interesting, although it is not quite
as well connected to the book's overall theme as his earlier focus
on remote viewing. The final section of Mr. Graff's book is a section
of practical tips for developing capabilities in remote viewing,
dreaming, and synchronicity.
In my view, the real gem of this book can be found in the first
75 pages, where Mr. Graff discusses both the history of the U.S.
military's remote-viewing efforts as well as his own set of profound
experiences involving remote viewing. The fact that this book is
written by a director of the military's program is significant by
itself. Readers will likely find this book to be a useful introduction
to these interesting events. But I suspect that readers will also
find Mr. Graff's description of his own reactions to profound remote-viewing
experiences which he witnessed both in the laboratory as well as
operationally in the military to be a useful reminder that the remote-viewing
phenomenon itself is one that does not leave anyone unaffected.
The realization that remote viewing is a real phenomenon nearly
always is accompanied by a re-evaluation of the nature of existence,
and the human spirit.
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