Skip Atwater's Playlist (16 Videos)

[8.8-21.5] How did I come to be the president of the Monroe Institute? That's an interesting tale with lots of turns and twists that I didn't expect in the beginning. [21.5-30.5] When I was a young man in college, I began to look around for a job, a career of some kind. [30.5-44.8] This was the era of Vietnam, so young men in my position were always concerned about getting drafted, getting sent to Vietnam, and that affecting the rest of our lives. [44.8-52.8] And when I began to look around seriously for a job, that was the first question that employers would ask. [52.8-62.8] They would say, well, what is your draft status? Meaning, if we hire you and spend six months training you, is the government going to draft you and you'll be gone? [62.8-73.8] So after getting turned down for several jobs, even though I had college education, the idea was that I was going to solve this problem. [73.8-87.9] And so I joined the Army, which sounded kind of silly, I know, but if I get this Army thing out of the way, then I won't have this in my path any more than I can go out and get a job for real. [87.9-95.9] Well, that turned out to last 20 years. I stayed in the Army for 20 years and did a career in the Army for 20 years. [95.9-115.9] When I first enlisted in the Army, the only thing that seemed to appeal to me was a specialist in counterintelligence to learn how to detect enemy spy activity and how to counter that enemy spy activity. [115.9-138.1] So I spent my first nine or ten years in the Army doing that. And basically it's a job of doing backbound investigations on people, of making sure people don't talk about classified information on the telephone, making sure people lock up confidential material in a secure, safe, so forth and so on. [138.1-161.6] And I did several assignments around the world here in the United States, South America, Panama, over in the Far East in Korea, and eventually wound up teaching at the Intelligence School, teaching other junior people in my profession as they were coming on board. [161.6-170.6] But I then discovered a book written by Dr. Hal Pudoff and Russell Targ on a subject called Remote Viewing. [170.6-186.6] And they were studying at Stanford Research Institute a phenomena of people's ability to describe locations that were distant from them in space, distant from them in time, by mental means alone. [186.6-199.6] Now, in esoteric terms, we might call that clairvoyance, but they tried to put a different name on it that sounded a little bit more scientific, sounded more acceptable, called remote viewing. [199.6-218.2] And when I read their work, I was reading it through the eyes of a counterintelligence specialist, thinking, if this is true, if what these scientists are doing is true, then this is something that I haven't been doing for nine years. [218.2-227.2] I'm supposed to be a specialist in figuring out what enemy agents might do, and this isn't something I had been thinking about at all. [227.2-236.8] I mean, we'd had conversations about satellites flying over from foreign nations, and what do you do about the information they collect that way. [236.8-244.2] But the idea of this thing called remote viewing was pretty much an interesting thing that I hadn't been involved in. [244.2-250.2] And here were these scientists from California that were studying this and publishing a book on it. [250.2-270.7] So I began to seek out where this might be going on, and the serendipity or stumbling across this effort was interesting because I then went to Officer Kennedy School, became a lieutenant, [270.7-281.7] and asked an officer by the name of Colonel Webb to assign me someplace in the world where I could find out more about this thing called remote viewing. [281.7-294.7] And he said, well, he agreed. This is an interesting intelligence problem. He himself didn't know where this might be happening, but suggested that I be assigned to the Pentagon, [294.7-302.7] and I would be able to investigate on my own, find in the Pentagon itself where this might be happening. [302.7-316.7] But I never made it to the Pentagon. My assignment was diverted to Fort Meade, Maryland, where I was put on a special team of investigators that was... [316.7-327.7] There's a concept in military jargon of testing our systems, and we call it the red team, blue team system. [327.7-335.7] So one set of people will play the enemy and see how well they can attack the other team. [335.7-340.7] That could be with a weapon system or, in my case, an intelligence system. [340.7-351.7] So this team that was called the SAVE Team, S-A-V-E Team, sensitive. The military is really great on acronyms. [351.7-356.7] So it's a security activities vulnerability estimate, something like that. [356.7-366.9] And the idea is we would go to different United States, U.S. military facilities, research and development programs, [366.9-375.9] and pretend we were a foreign intelligence service and attack them, trying to get as much information as we could about them. [375.9-384.9] We'd tap their telephones. We'd stand outside the fence and take pictures and fly our own satellites over and take pictures, so forth and so on. [384.9-396.0] So we were mimicking a threat so that we could show the commander, this is what your picture looks like to the enemy. [396.0-403.0] The enemy is taking your picture, tapping your phone, so forth and so on. This is what they're finding out. [403.0-413.8] So it was a chance for that commander then to adjust his security posture based on the service we were providing to him. [413.8-425.8] One very fateful day in Redstone, Arsenal, Alabama, when we were telling the commands and staff about this problem, [425.8-432.8] they asked us about remote viewing. They actually put off in Targe's book out of a briefcase and put it on the table and said, [432.8-435.8] what do we do to protect ourselves from this? [435.8-451.9] That was a keynote day in my life and was the beginning of the next ten years in my life in becoming involved in a U.S. government counterintelligence effort in remote viewing. [451.9-463.4] I came to discover that this program that I thought was a very interesting program and was a threat, and we really ought to do something about this, [463.4-469.4] had been ongoing for a number of years funded by classified sources within the government. [469.4-482.4] So the work that Stanford Research had published were just a few little studies not revealing the totality of the effort that the government had been involved with for a number of years. [482.4-491.4] So when I came along as a young lieutenant thinking I had this brand new idea, others much smarter than I had also conceived of this, [491.4-508.0] so I became eventually the operations officer of a small army intelligence unit to provide remote viewing services to the greater need of the U.S. intelligence need. [508.0-523.7] In that process, it came a time when I had to teach people how to do remote viewing, to develop educational programs and systems to teach people how to do remote viewing, [523.7-533.7] because we were teaching soldiers, officers, female, male, civilian employees of the government, teaching them how to do this remote viewing. [533.7-541.7] One of the methods I investigated was the HemiSync technology at the Monroe Institute. [541.7-552.7] So in 1977, I met Bob Monroe. Now at that time this was all deeply classified, not declassified until 1995. [552.7-562.8] So in 1977 when I met Mr. Monroe, I couldn't say to him, gee, I train psychic spies for the government. How would your system work? [562.8-574.1] I could not say those words to him, but I did develop a friendship and a rapport, and he described his technology, allowed me to experience that technology, [574.1-581.1] and eventually we wound up training some of our remote viewers in this HemiSync process. [581.1-590.1] Years past, a decade later, I retired from the government, and Mr. Monroe asked me to come work down here at the Institute. [590.1-605.3] So in late 87, 88, early 88, I moved down here having retired from the government and began working for Mr. Monroe and worked in the laboratory. [605.3-611.3] So for nearly 20 years, I was the research director here at the Monroe Institute. [611.3-622.3] And then when Bob Monroe's daughter passed, when Laurie died, I was taken advanced, promoted into the president position here.