Everyone Loves You When You're Dead. Neil Strauss

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      Lyn Buchanan is a genial, easygoing man with prematurely gray hair, a George Lucas beard, and a well-established paunch. He has spent most of his life working on guided-missile and computer systems for the military, and nothing seems to surprise or unsettle him. That’s why, when he was assigned to work in a special army unit at Fort Meade in Maryland, it took him years to realize that something was unusual about his job. This revelation occurred en route to Russell Targ’s research laboratory at Stanford University.

      LYN BUCHANAN: I was on a plane, looking at all the business people and secretaries, and I thought, “I wonder what they would think if they knew that I was a government agent training psychics.”

       How did you get involved with the remote-viewing program?

      BUCHANAN: Most of it’s still classified, but I was in the army and I was writing a highly complex computer program. There was a jealous sergeant who wanted my job, and he would sabotage my code. So on the day when I had to present the code to the commanding generals of twelve different countries, I was in the bathroom getting ready—fixing my hair and straightening out my clothes. And when I returned, I saw the sergeant walking away from my computer. When I hit one of the keys on the computer, the screen just went blank and the guy said, “Gotcha.”

      I got flaming mad. I’ve always had PK [psychokinesis], and so the whole computer network on the base just blew up—ninety-six computers and billions of dollars in damage.

       How did they trace that to you?

      BUCHANAN: There was a general named [Albert] Stubblebine. And he had a field officer whose job it was to look for talented psychic people. And when he saw what was going on, he reported what he thought to Stubblebine.

      A couple days later, I ran into Stubblebine in the hall. And he got in my face and said, “Did you kill my computer with your mind?”

      In my head, I saw my grandchildren still paying off the costs of the damage in the future. But I knew he wouldn’t ask that question if he didn’t know the answer. So I answered him, “Yes, sir.”

      “Far fucking out,” he said. “Have I got a job for you!”

       And that’s when they recruited you to join the remote-viewing project?

      BUCHANAN: Yes. My reaction was, “We’re on Candid Camera, right? The army doesn’t do this stuff.” But they brought me out to Fort Meade and I became one of the viewers in the unit. When my skills got better, I became the trainer.

       What’s the most amazing experience you’ve had?

      BUCHANAN: Everybody thinks that we had the most amazing job in the military, and really we did. But after you do it eight hours a day for five days a week, you realize that you’re just going to work. It’s a job. We would do some of the most far-out espionage and mentally travel to all these sites, but at the end of the day we just wanted to go home.

       But tell me something really interesting that happened.

      BUCHANAN: Ten times in seventeen years, I’ve had a PSI experience.

       What’s that?

      BUCHANAN: A perfect site immersion. You see what you’re viewing so completely that you can’t tell that you’re not there. I live for it. In that, though, if you try to walk through a wall, it will really hurt you. The first time it happened, the Russians had developed a death ray—an extremely powerful particle beam weapon. They wanted to see how the particles moved to figure out how it worked and what it was. But they couldn’t get anyone in there, so they decided to put a remote viewer in. They said, “We need someone to volunteer to step inside a death ray.”

       And you volunteered?

      BUCHANAN: They moved me to the site and sent me back in time to when the beam was fired. I was describing it to them. And then they said, “Step into the beam.” I stepped in, and all this sandlike stuff was peppering me. I looked, and there were thousands of images of me in the beam. And my awareness was coming from all the points at once.²⁰ [. . .]

       Now that the program is declassified, can you teach anyone how to remote view?

      BUCHANAN: Definitely. When the information first came out, we got eight to twenty applicants a day. I turned down ninety-five percent of them—flaming kooks, really bad. Now I’d say that ninety-five percent of the people who call us are very levelheaded. What we teach is the real thing. This is not a toy. If someone has mental problems, you don’t teach them this stuff.

       Do corporations ever call you because they want to spy on competitors?

      BUCHANAN: Yes, a significant number of corporations have been getting training lately.

       How many?

      BUCHANAN: I can’t say, but enough to make the other companies worry about it.