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TWENTY-FIVE years ago, on September 4, 1979, First Lieutenant Frederick 'Skip' Atwater and Captain Ken Bell sat opposite one another in a small, windowless room, deep inside America's top- secret spy complex at Fort Meade, Maryland.
What happened over the next three hours would change the face of U.S.
military intelligence for ever. Atwater and Bell were conducting the first official operation for one of the Pentagon's strangest and most controversial projects - an attempt to harness psychic powers as a weapon of war.
Known as remote viewing, the technique involved clairvoyants projecting their thoughts to places far across the world, or even into the distant future, then reporting back accurately on what was happening there.
The two Army officers knew that, to sceptics, the very idea would sound like fantasy. But in the tense days of the Cold War, America's spymasters were ready to try anything that might give them the upper hand against the Soviets.
Earlier that day, Atwater had received a call from the Pentagon and been asked to use one of his remote-viewing operatives to locate a downed U.S.
aircraft. All he was told was that a Navy A-6E Intruder bomber had crashed during a training exercise.
'There was an air of excitement,' says Atwater. 'This was our chance to prove to the powers-that-be that remote viewing worked.' The room was soundproofed, dimly lit and stripped of all pictures and decoration to improve psychic perception. Bell - specially selected for his exceptional clairvoyance - lay on a brown leather couch to compose himself before joining Atwater at the plain oak table.
'As with previous training sessions, I gave Bell his orders in a sealed envelope,' says Atwater. 'He didn't even open the envelope and began to describe a large rocky outcrop.
'He told me: "It looks like a mountain, but there are no trees, bushes, nothing at all at the peak - it's totally bald. The plane has crashed on this mountain, which also has a flat top."
'As it was a navy plane, I was surprised. I would have expected it to have gone down over the ocean. But I reported the results to my superior officer, who then passed the information on to the Pentagon.
Later, newspaper reports...