Lehal Library

Chapter 1 INVOLVEMENT IN PSI RESEARCH The sequence of strange events narrated in this book took place because of my involvement with Psi research, which began out of the blue in 1971 when I was thirty-seven years along. My life might have flowed along lines presumably more gratifying in mundane but more comfortable ways had I never volunteered to be an experimental subject in Psi research labs. In these experiments, there were high and low points, successes and failures. And there was the opportunity to meet with many fabulous and wonderful people* But when one enters into Psi research, one also enters into a narrow cultural subset rather steamed up with high stress factors, intrigues, mainstream confusions, fear and apprehension, internecine warfare, and largish clumps of idiocy. Additionally/ Psi research subjects (guinea pigs) are nonentities who are expected to exhibit Psi manifestations. At the same time they are supposed to know nothing, think nothing, suppose nothing -because the job of knowing, thinking, supposing belongs to the researchers. The subject is something like a computer chip being tested to see if it can perform in the ways wanted- If the chip doesn't perform in the ways wanted, then it is tossed aside into the big pile of anonymous chips that have likewise failed. It is thus that the laboratory life-span of a test subject usually does not exceed three months, and during that time they have to undergo endless repetitive testing. One of the major outcomes of this is usually bottomless boredom. The appearance of boredom is deadly in Psi research - because a bored chip gets into a state of apathy or non-interest, after which its delicate circuitry fizzles. I knew most of this in advance, largely because Psi phenomena had always been of endless interest to me, and I had done a great deal of organized reading and study. So I had no expectations at all that my allotted three months would somehow turn into nineteen years, The major reason had not much to do with the Stygian climes of parapsychology itself. Unknown to almost everyone at the time, the American intelligence services became worried about, of all things, possible development of "psychic warfare advances" in the (now former) Soviet Union.