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Episode 128 - The Saga of Comet Hale-Bopp and its Fugacious Companion, Part 2

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Recap: Comet Hale-Bopp put on a fantastic display for Earth-bound skywatchers for over two years, often considered "the" comet of the 20th century. But, conspiracies and fear marred the event and led to the suicide of 29 members of the Heaven's Gate cult. In this Part 2 of 3 episodes, I discuss how decidedly unceientific claims and methods were used to divine information that became a key component of the mythology.

Additional Materials:

Episode Summary

Recap from Part 1: In Part 1, last episode, I introduced the idea that comets have been identified since time immemorial as harbingers of doom, enlightenment, change, or, just … SOMETHING. Despite living in what most of us like to think of as a scientific age, those same basic impulses and instincts continue to thrive but take on different forms with more sciencey-sounding terms. I also talked about the claimed photographic evidence of what became the most sensational part of the mythology surrounding comet Hale-Bopp: It’s phantasmagoric companion. I explained how, under the most generous interpretation, any semblance of proper protocols in analyzing photographs and reporting discoveries were not followed. I also explained how, under the most damning interpretation, named or unnamed real or fake people lied, committed fraud, and/or deliberately mislead their audience.

Claim: In this Part 2, I’m going to delve more into the claims related to the Hale-Bopp companion, but from what is decidedly a non-scientific method or source: Remote viewing. I talked about Courtney Brown and Prudence Calabrese last time, but I tried to very much do so only as related to their photographic presentations. In this episode, I’ll focus a lot more on what they claimed, and how - after that fateful night on Coast to Coast with which I ended last episode - we were all left hangi--

Remote Viewing: An Overview

When I started this show, I never thought that I would be able to discuss Remote Viewing. It has nothing to do with astronomy. Except, now — or, then, back in 1996 and 1997 — it did. So, an overview is in order.

Remote viewing, in my own words, is the claimed-“scientific” process whereby people are able to project their consciousness to view certain objects or events and sketch them and interpret those sketches to relate information about those objects or events. It is claimed to be scientific; in fact, it’s in the name of many of its modern-day practitioners, “SRV” or “Scientific Remote Viewing.” It is also claimed to be very precise, though the exact precision is debated.

On the night of March 25, 1997, when Art Bell interviewed several of the founders of remote viewing in the United States, they claimed that you cannot do any better than 70% accuracy with remote viewing. Other people, such as very long-time and frequent Coast to Coast AM guest, Ed Dames, claim accuracies are much higher, but lately he claims that you can never properly place the viewing in time. Courtney Brown has claimed that remote viewing accuracy is also much higher than 70%; at one point during the Hale-Bopp saga he stated that his own accuracy is better than 85%.

RV’s adherents will emphatically tell you that it is NOT psychic readings, that anyone can do it and be trained to do it, for a steep monetary price that they will happily collect. Some remote viewers will tell you that natural psychics make better remote viewers, while others will tell you they make worse remote viewers because of all the excess noise.

They will also proudly tell you that the US military paid for a remote viewing unit for many, many years, until it was finally disbanded, and everyone involved with that unit in any way will also tell you that they do not think that it was ever rebuilt, even in secret. But, the fact that the US military paid for it for awhile is proudly pointed to as evidence for its efficacy, because the US military has of course never paid for something that didn’t work. *cough*

As near as I can tell, the protocol that many of the main remote viewers today use, is CLAIMED (more on that later) to be along the lines of the following:

(1) A person decides on a target.

(2) That person assigns the target a random number.

(3 — optional) That person gives the intermediate the random number. This is optional, but it introduces one level of blinding.

(4) Either the original person or the intermediate then tells the remote viewer to view the target associated with that random number.

(5) The remote viewer does so, and then he or she gives the intermediate or the original person that information to interpret.

Therefore, it is CLAIMED that the remote viewer only knows a random number, and therefore there is no sensory input, no feedback, no prompting, no nothing that could possibly hint at what the real target is. Therefore, anything the remote viewer describes that is about the real target is amazing confirmation that it really works, and new information should be trusted.

That’s it in a nutshell, summarized by me, after listening to days worth of different remote viewers describe the process. And if you don’t believe me, here’s Courtney Brown describing it on the original fateful night of November 14, 1996: [clip from Coast to Coast AM, November 14, 1996, starting at 50:30]

"This person's mind extended out to that area - as we do in remote viewing - and got— and gathered information across time and space to make sense of this thing. Now, understand, this was done under blind conditions meaning, the viewer was not told what the target was. [Art Bell: “Right.”] A set of random numbers that were generated from a random number table or computer program were given to that person and only the monitor knew that those numbers meant um, uh, this-this anomalous object that was trailing Hot— Hale-Bopp. Moreover, our procedures are so rigid that absolutely no cues, no suggestions are given to the viewer with regard to what the target is. The viewer's subspace mind - the soul - has instantaneous awareness (because it's omnipresent) that those numbers mean whatever the target really is. But the physical conscious electrochemical brain, the mind, the physical mind, has no idea what that's about. So, the procedure, the-the-the viewer goes through the procedure, mechanically, uh, and just writes down all the information that's related to those numbers and then comes out with a complete, descriptive information about this."

Courtney Brown: Background

Listeners of the show will know that I prefer to look into a person’s claims rather than the person themselves, unless their own background is relevant to the claims. Which it is in this case. Some context as to who Courtney Brown is is warranted given that he was the main driver behind the Hale-Bopp companion after Chuck Shramek and Art Bell, and perhaps Whitley Strieber.

Courtney was then and is now a social scientist at Emory University, and in his field, he is known for promoting the use of nonlinear mathematics in the field of social science research. Which I’m all for — in fact, in my own field of planetary science, I’m organizing a conference to try to link our field with statisticians because we’re still doing things the way we were doing them in the 1970s despite advances in computers and mathematical methods.

That aside, and completely separate from his position at Emory - which in every interview I’ve heard is used as an argument from authority, that he’s at Emory - he runs The Farsight Institute, an institute he created at the urging of his publisher in 1995, soon before his first book was published in 1996: “Cosmic Voyage: A Scientific Discovery of Extraterrestrials Visiting Earth.” He has since written two other remote viewing books: “Cosmic Explorers: Scientific Remote Viewing, Extraterrestrials, and a Message for Mankind,” and “Remote Viewing: The Science and Theory of Nonphysical Perception.” He has continued to run The Farsight Institute for the last two decades.

To quote a bit from that source no student is allowed to cite: “Brown's remote viewing findings have been dismissed by scientists, such as his colleague at Emory University Scott O. Lilienfeld, who has claimed that Brown has refused to subject his ideas and his claimed psychic powers to independent scientific testing on what Lilienfeld describes as "curious" grounds. […] Among a variety of controversial topics, Brown has claimed to apply remote viewing to the study of multiple realities, the nonlinearity of time, planetary phenomena, extraterrestrial life, UFOs, Atlantis, and even Jesus Christ. According to Michael Shermer "The claims in Brown's two books are nothing short of spectacularly weird. Through his numerous SRV [Scientific Remote Viewing] sessions he says he has spoken with Jesus and Buddha (both, apparently, are advanced aliens), visited other inhabited planets, time traveled to Mars back when it was fully inhabited by intelligent ETs, and has even determined that aliens are living among us—one group in particular resides underground in New Mexico.”

With that background in mind - and again, the point is to just give you a background into the man to put his claims specific to this episode into context - let’s get into the claims.

The Nights of November 14 and 28, 1996

The night of November 14, 1996, was the night that Chuck Shramek sent his photographs to Art. And, while Shramek poked in a few times during the interview, the vast majority of it, even during the first hour, was with Courtney Brown.

Courtney claimed that after Art told him about the alleged object, he had three of his best remote viewers try to view it. Courtney spent over two minutes explaining that these viewers were all verified, they correctly view various targets, and have a great track record. All set up telling you to trust the results.

He then, over the next few hours, proceeded to relate - in other words, “read” - parts of the three reports that had been sent to him by the remote viewers. All of these were almost literally fresh off the press, so he hadn’t seen them yet and claimed to be reading them for the first time on-air.

During that time, he claimed many, many things. Among them were:

1) The object is headed our way.

2) There’s a galactic council “sitting around a table” watching this event that may go good or bad.

3) There is an attempt by the object to communicate by subspace, and that decoding that message is part of the learning process, and that the machine will act to awaken us.

4) The object travels by artificial means and it’s under control, but it’s made of materials that the ETs in question borrowed and don’t necessarily understand. During this point, he remarked that it’s a “big ET thing” and that the ETs know theater.

5) We on Earth may think it’s a weapon, but it’s not a weapon.

6) A whole lotta flowery new-age stuff about consciousness, galactic counsels and galactic evolution, and the object’s purpose being human awakening. Atlantis was also mentioned. There were various oxymoronic phrases, too, including “It’s watching but being watched,” and “It’s a new and historical discovery.”

In addition to these non-scientific points, many of the bits of claimed parameters for the object that I discussed last time came out in these sessions, all - strangely enough - agreeing with Chuck Shramek, like it’s larger than Earth, it’s hollow, it’s bright, etc.

Also, throughout the entire interview, Courtney continuously made random one- or two-word editorial comments, like “Wow!” “Gosh!” and “Oh my!” though not in nearly as sexy or deep a voice as George Takei.

This kind of editorial commenting created the perfect environment to give the impression that this eminent professor at Emory University was discovering this information right along with you, and that you were being part of and taking part in the discovery process of a generation.

Among this other information, Courtney also claimed a few factual things that were more minor, but since I won’t be talking about them later, I’ll just state now they were none-the-less shown later to be factually wrong. Such as the comet was starting to break up. That it’s impossible for a comet to be so bright when and where it was discovered. And predictions of ET visitations that everyone would see because it would be a flyover of thousands of ships carrying mostly grey aliens that were involved in a genetic exchange program and they’ve chosen us to be their parents. Oh, and that whole thing about a companion object.

When describing the remote viewers, here’s what Courtney said: [clip from Coast to Coast AM, November 14, 1996, starting at 56:44]

"The person's mind was extended is an extremely accurate remote viewer, basically has never failed us with a session, this person is extremely accurate in describing physically what's going on."

Eleven minutes later exactly - in my version of the audio - he said: [clip from Coast to Coast AM, November 14, 1996, starting at 1:07:44]

“Now remember, this person, this viewer, was never told anything but a couple random numbers, and now he's immediately picking up that there was a— that-that there's a guidance system for this object!"

Three minutes later: [clip from Coast to Coast AM, November 14, 1996, starting at 1:10:46]

"'Some organization,' and he puts down, 'The Government?' - uh, he's suspecting it's government - 'has taken pictures of the object.' Now remember, Art, this person wasn't told anything but a couple random numbers, nothin' else."

And 35 minutes later: [clip from Coast to Coast AM, November 14, 1996, starting at 1:42:37]

"Remember, this person is getting this information and was not told— This is a totally blind session with no leading cues at all. The only thing that person was told was a set of random numbers that are called the 'target coordinates' which have no meaning at all to the conscious mind."

And 20 minutes later: [clip from Coast to Coast AM, November 14, 1996, starting at 2:11:37]

"Yeah, now these remote viewers never talk to each other, they never have any idea, they're in different locations in the country, they communicate with their monitors, in fact, over-over speakerphone so that the monitor—monitor’s is listening to the session, but the remote viewer can't even look in the eyes of the monitor, so nothing is given away. And-and we are absolutely rigid with all of our controls. No hint at all, they're using just the mechanical procedures of scientific remote viewing to get this information." [Art Bell: “Alright.”]

In other words, “trust us, what we’re telling you is For Realz.” In fact, once I started to count, he emphasized that this was totally blinded AT LEAST six times during that interview. I point this out because it becomes important later on. And I’m not very good at indirect nor subtle foreshadowing.

It was also during this interview that Courtney introduced what I talked about in Part 1 - the concept of this mysterious astronomer who Courtney talked with, though he would later claim that he never talked directly with the astronomer, it was all Prudence who did so. Among other things, Courtney stated, "When we called up uh, our, you know, the professor of astronomy at uh, one of the top-10 major universities in the country, uh, he knew all about it, and gave us a list of other astronomers that would be willing to talk about it, and they had been observing it for a long while, and that they were totally aware the government doesn't want us to know— doesn't want people to talk about it very much."

About half-way through the interview, in my opinion, Courtney started to express a bit of an ego and messiah complex. He stated in no uncertain terms that he sees his role at this point as being a liaison between the ETs and the United States government. He assured Art that people from all government agencies were listening to them right then.

It would be in the interview two weeks later, with Prudence Calabrese, that Courtney continued what I interpret as an ego-trip, claiming that if he was wrong, it would take the entire galaxy to have fooled him: [clip from Coast to Coast AM, November 28, 1996, starting at 34:44]

AB: "Is it not possible that you know what they want you to know?"

CB: "We have gathered our data under such various conditions, so extensively, using targets that are, you know— getting targets that are across the whole spectrum, we can only say that if there was an attempt to manipulate the information that we have, it would have had to have been an attempt that was orchestrated by the whole galaxy. And it cannot be that the entire galaxy is all against us. I-it is just not possible that everybody everywhere would be conspiring against this small, back-water called 'Earth.'"

Finally, in what will be the next-to-last clip this episode, was the following exchange: [clip from Coast to Coast AM, November 28, 1996, starting at 40:07]

AB: "Is any of this ambiguous to you?"

CB: "None. Absolutely zero. It's absolutely certain. There is no ambiguity about it whatsoever. None. Zero. Zip. It [ambiguity] does not exist. It is certain that this thing is not a rock."

AB: "Alright."

The Big Reveal (Reprise / Recap)

So there you have it. You might be wondering by this point why I’m belaboring Courtney Brown, his “The Farsight Institute,” and remote viewing. After all, wasn’t it started by Chuck Shramek? Didn’t I argue that last time?

I did. But, while Shramek may have provided the bicycle and Art Bell the road, it was Courtney Brown that provided the hot air for the tires and the pedaling power to get that bicycle down the road.

Courtney may have really believed what he said, he may have really believed his remote viewers, he may have really believed there was a “top ten university astronomer/professor” who backed him up. I don’t think we’ll ever know for certain. But it was Courtney’s remote viewing claims that fanned this fire and mixed metaphor and his continued claims about photographs backing him up - photographs that were proven within 24 hours of going public to be fraudulent or a hoax.

And yet, as I played in the lengthy clip last time, Courtney continued to defend his work, despite when everything seemed to come crashing down. His primary argument was simply that the only photographs they went on were Chuck Shramek’s, and that the hoaxed photographs were only meant to be supporting evidence that he passed along. He specifically stated, “it doesn’t have anything to do with my remote viewing other than the fact I got a source I thought was corroborating the stuff we’d been doing.”

In his near-final statement, he offered this final defense: [clip from Coast to Coast AM, January 16, 1997, starting at 1:29:48]

"Understand this: Whoever did this was going after our remote viewing data on the Hale-Bopp [comet] and there's a reason. I can't stand by this photograph, I don't know why someone did— I don't know why— The, someone sent us some-some picture that's a fraudulent, someone tried to give us this disinformation and associate us with it. But, the reason was they tied it to the Hale-Bopp remote viewing data. That data I will stand by. That's ours! That came out of OUR shop! THAT'S GOOD DATA! There's some ship out there, that's the data!" [emphasis his; after this, they continued to argue about the same points]

And that was the last time he was on Coast to Coast AM.

So, he was the victim. In other media and elsewhere, he claimed people were bugging his phone, his contacts told him that he was in the middle of a disinformation campaign, and that others were trying to discredit him. That it’s the “powers that be.” Courtney stated, “Those who have attacked us have resources that extend beyond those of any university or professor.”

Going back to his earlier statement, I guess that means the entire galaxy was out to get him.

Courtney Brown Issues a Statement

But we can also start to pick apart some of the claimed “good data.”

You’ll remember about 10-15 minutes ago that I made a big point about Courtney emphasizing the remote viewing “data,” and how it was blinded. I counted at least half a dozen times where he made that point.

The day after he was last on Coast to Coast AM, January 17, 1997, he issued a statement. It is very lengthy, but I’ve put a link in the show notes if anyone would like to read it in full.

I really only want to read three sentences:

“The targeting of this object was a consequence of a photograph taken of the object (which was released on the same day as our remote viewing sessions) by the amateur astronomer, Chuck Shramek. To target the object with our remote viewing sessions, we did not use Shramek's photo. Rather, we used the verbal cue, "Anomalous object near Hale-Bopp comet (current time).””

Yeah, there it is. This was not blinded. The remote viewers did not have just “a couple random numbers” “with no leading cues at all.” Despite what Courtney claimed over and over on-air.

Courtney Brown lied. He either lied every time he said that there were no cues and that it was just random numbers, or he lied in his official public statement afterwards when he said that they told the remote viewers to look for the “anomalous object near Hale-Bopp comet (current time).”

Both statements cannot be true.

If he had gone on Coast to Coast AM and said that all the information that he was going to tell Art came about when he told like-minded people as him, who also believed in UFOs and aliens and a galactic council, to remark on what they think a UFO spotted by a guy in a photo of Hale-Bopp means to them, he would not have gotten nearly the traction that he did.

I think that’s all I really need to say on this matter.

Prudence Calabrese: Defense, Splitting, Admissions, Still Did Pseudoscience

I’ve gotten this far without getting into detail again on Prudence Calabrese. Despite also being a remote viewer and working for Courtney during this, Courtney in hindsight almost always just refers to her simply as his webmaster.

Courtney said that the stress of the hoax being revealed caused her to go into premature labor. Art said during open lines calls on January 20, 1997, that Prudence had left The Farsight Institute, though Courtney Brown and other sources later claimed it wasn’t until 1998 that she left.

Regardless, despite only referring to Prudence as his webmaster and the one who had been in contact with the “top ten university astronomer,” Courtney defended Prudence and tried to buffer her from the media backlash.

He stated: “We're trying to get her out of this. She did not want to go on the Art Bell show to begin with, did not want to talk about the photos. Art Bell asked her to do it, I encouraged her, Whitley encouraged her -- so she finally did it. She is not going on Art Bell again. She's already gone into premature labor over this thing. We're not going to drag her into this any more. They would love to just bury her.”

And I think it mostly worked because it’s taken me this long to get back to her.

But while I think her role should not be understated in advancing the Hale-Bopp companion story, it’s her open letter published a year later, February 9, 1998, that really kicks down all of Courtney Brown’s claims about objectivity in the matter. Here are a few excerpts:

“I am writing this to confess my sins: bad science and bad judgement. […]

“What I participated in over the course of a year and a half was nothing less than the manipulation of the public's mind, not by outright lying, but by the selective representation, improper analysis, and overblown presentation style of remote viewing data.

“[…] It does not matter that I was a student of remote viewing, involved in a learning process. It does not even matter that I, in as vocal a way as possible within the confines of my employment, spoke openly about the problems inherent in targeting the unverifiable, and drawing conclusions from the data obtained.

“I failed in my moral responsibility to let the public know exactly what was occurring with the data on esoteric targets publicly presented by The Farsight Institute (under the direction of Dr. Courtney Brown).

“The data are both flawed and incomplete.

“[…] The big problem with all esoteric targets -- no matter how wonderful the blind controls, no matter how benign the tasker, no matter how trained the viewer -- is that you simply cannot trust that what you get is actually something that truly exists when the cue references something unknown.

“[…] Several months ago, I restructured the Farsight web site [at the time, Calabrese was the Farsight webmaster], and placed a prominent disclaimer at the top of each of the session pages, stating that the sessions were not done under proper controls, and that the data therein was suspect. The viewers may have had significant target contact, but we simply did not know how to characterize the data. The disclaimer also mentioned that telepathic overlay could have contributed to the data. I was told by Dr. Brown to replace that disclaimer with one that merely stated that we were retargeting things using more refined methods, but that we had not viewed anything contradictory to what we had presented. I felt, from a scientific standpoint, given the types of controls and checks that are standard procedure in both experimental and observational sciences, that this was misleading the public. I stated so, but as an employee, I had to follow the order.

“All of those esoteric 'special projects' done at Farsight, and still linked to in the 'Sessions' section of The Farsight Institute Web Site were done under one or more of the following less-than-optimal conditions:

“1. Semi-blind sessions, where the monitor knows the target and the viewer does not. All sessions where the monitor knew what the target was are flawed, due to the potential (and likelihood) for telepathic overlay, subtle leading by the monitor, and leading by cuing from the monitor.

“2. Selective presentation (in ALL projects), where only the sessions that the analyst feels are "on target" are presented. Others that have opposing viewpoints, or data not consistent with the analyst's interpretation of the data are discarded. In some cases, the analyst was also a viewer!

“3. Leading Cuing, where the tasker makes an assumption and names the unverifiable thing in the target cue. Example: "Martians under Santa Fe Baldy (current time)" or "Anomalous object near Hale-Bopp comet." How can such sessions provide objective data? If the cue says Martians, then Martians the student viewers will find.

“4. Deep analytical overlay, due to strong ideas on the part of the analyst about what should or should not be in the data.

“5. Methods and procedures that changed on a sometimes daily basis, without the benefit of looking at the comparative results from a selection of controlled sessions, before something was implemented Institute-wide.”

That’s about a third of the statement. And, there are three things I want to tease out of it.

First, she completely contradicts the claims Courtney made over and over that this was properly blinded, and she points out that if you’re told to look for a pink elephant, that’s all you’re going to be thinking about.

Second, if you’re an acute skeptic, you may notice what all those steps 1-5 sound like: Cold reading, and even a bit of hot reading. The unconscious or conscious cues when something “right” is said, the selective presentation of results, leading questions, and interpretation within the story you want to hear, are exactly how claimed psychics, astrologers, tarot card readers, and many others operate. They exploit the foibles of the human mind - whether purposely or not - to appear as though they are extracting information that the sitter (in the case of a claimed psychic) wants to hear and thinks they have kept secret. Combined with what Courtney admitted in his own open letter, it’s not even cold reading, it’s hot reading because he primed the viewers with the photo he wanted them to see, and it’s even hotter reading in some cases when the people who do the reading are the ones doing the whole interpretation!

Third, it should be pointed out that Prudence continued to be a True Believer in remote viewing. She lamented in other parts of her letter that this has tarnished the reputation of it, and that it really does work. In fact, she went on to open her own Remote Viewing company that lasted for a few years. I’ve been unable to find what she’s been up to for the last decade, though.

While she had her own institute or company, she later claimed that she correctly foresaw - or remote viewed (sorry, the terminology all starts to run together) - the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the US. She claimed she did this while at The Farsight Institute. Which prompted Courtney Brown to state publicly that he looked back through all her viewings while there and could find no record of that foresight.

Wrap-Up

I’m going to wrap up the main segment for this episode with the following statement by Courtney Brown:

“The remote viewing will be shown as correct. That much I'm sure of. […] The whole issue is, is our remote viewing correct? And if this photograph is a fraud, then so what? It doesn't make the remote viewing incorrect. All we have to do is wait and see what that object does next. That's it.”

Yes, Courtney, that’s it. And the world saw that nothing happened next, that the “companion” was not real. That’s it.

Why Courtney Brown is still taken seriously in any field, but especially remote viewing and the paranormal conference and radio circuit, is beyond my understanding, and yet he’s still actively interviewed for his remote viewing claims.

But, assuming the official statement released is legit, and everything I’ve seen points to it being legit, then despite solid evidence of lying at the very least about his protocols that generated the information that led to this whole fiasco, people still take him seriously.

With that in mind, Part 3 is going to take this to the final step, where I will discuss the Heaven’s Gate cult, their suicide, and continued claims about conspiracies and mysterious companions.

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