When someone discovers that I'm "psychic," there is usually one of two things they want me to do: either forecast their future for them, or find something that's missing - or both. That was often the case with the military remote viewing unit as well, though our "customers" were federal and Department of Defense intelligence agencies rather than lonely souls hoping for some promise of future romance or store clerks who have misplaced the week's bank deposit. Unfortunately, telling the future and finding lost things are the two hardest things for remote viewing (and, frankly, most other psychic modalities) to do well.

We in what is known today as Project Star Gate (the code-name by which the US Government's psychic spying program has come to be known) were increasingly being given "search problems" - that is, we were asked to use our mental skills to help find people, locate past events, or track down objects that the US military had an interest in, but couldn't locate with its spy satellites, informants, or communications eavesdroppers. The last-ditch search problems that were sent our way usually involved tracing Western hostages being held by terrorist groups in the Middle East, narcotics shipments in the Caribbean or off the US west coast, or hidden missile systems that might threaten US or friendly interests.

However, remote viewing is a descriptive methodology. That means a remote viewer can often accurately describe the setting of something that someone wants found, but can't actually give you a street address, or latitude and longitude figures, or any other standard alphanumerical- type data that we humans use to specify a location somewhere on the face of the globe. That makes psychically "finding" things much more difficult than many people realize.

For example: I am often asked "Why haven't any remote viewers found Osama bin-Laden?" I answer that they probably have. More than one viewer has no doubt well-described the location of the world's most notorious terrorist. Let's say he is in a cave in some mountains in Afghanistan. Working "blind" (remote viewing protocol requires that a viewer not be told what her target is - so she would have no idea that bin-Laden was to be the focus of her perceptions) , the viewer might describe a robed and bearded man in a strange, long, narrow, room with rock walls, a carpet on the floor, in the middle of some mountains. Upon hearing the report, an excited intelligence analyst might exclaim "That's exactly right! Now ask the viewer where this person is." The viewer's annoyed response might be, "But I just told you where the person is: In a long, narrow, room with rock walls and a carpet on the floor in the middle of some mountains!" The remote viewer has indeed found the target, but has not located it. The most to be hoped for is that a viewer will describe a recognizable landmark. But in places with few (or too many) obvious landmarks, mere description doesn't usually work very well.

So that was our quandary: We could certainly find the targets we were tasked with. We just couldn't locate them very well. When we in the Star Gate Program discussed amongst ourselves ways to improve our ability to accomplish our missions, the subject of dowsing often came up. But though we had been extensively trained in remote viewing skills, none of us knew much about dowsing. I have since learned that some years earlier, in the California laboratory that had developed the remote viewing method many of us used, some research had been done into using dowsing and other related search strategies for problems similar to what faced us. But the lines of communication weren't always the best between our operation at Fort Meade in Maryland and the lab on the other side of the continent, so we were unaware of that research. Recognizing that we needed to know more about dowsing, I bought several books on the subject, including Christopher Bird's classic, The Divining Hand. But, helpful though they were, these references didn't provide the kind of specialized information that we at Star Gate really wanted. We needed to know how to locate things or people on the ground when the dowser was hundreds or even thousands of miles away. I learned some general things about map dowsing, but not enough to really apply it. When I walked into my first chapter meeting, it was with the hope that the folks I met there might be able to help. I was not to be disappointed.

Over the next three years, not only did I meet new friends and hear new and interesting ideas, but I learned a lot that really did turn out to be useful. I didn't attend every meeting, but I made it to most of them. Not all the programs had directly to do with dowsing. There were"new-age" sorts of discussions and presentations on such things as discerning people's auras, feng shui, and labyrinths. On one occasion, I myself gave a presentation on Rupert Sheldrake's theory of "formative causation," or "morphic resonance," which I had presented at a conference a few months earlier.

But more often dowsing was the focus of attention. One particularly useful demonstration involved the very approach we needed - a simple technique for map dowsing. Ed Dunn and another chapter member (whose name has since slipped my memory) showed how to move a ruler across a map while holding a swinging pendulum. The idea is that when the ruler crosses a line along which the desired location is to be found, the pendulum reacts, usually by reversing its swing. To gain a more precise location, the dowser slides the ruler across the map from a different angle. Where the pendulum indicates the lines cross is (hopefully!) the desired location.

I took this approach home to the remote viewing unit and we experimented with it, trying pendulums, L-rods, and other paraphernalia - even just being alert to internal body sensations, such as a tingle or a twitch. And, though it didn't always work, much to our surprise we had some successes with it. One of several notable examples was locating a stash of narcotics under a rock on an uninhabited island in the Caribbean. And as we worked with it, we began to discover and develop our own new techniques, and improved on ones we'd learned from my dowsing friends.

Sometimes I took my three young kids along with me to dowsing meetings. Once they dowsed for half-dollars wrapped in sandwich bags and hidden under bushes or behind trees in the park across the street. My son James, who may have a bit of a talent for this, found both half dollars using an L-rod.

Over the few years we were involved with the chapter, I wasn't the only military remote viewer to attend. In time I manage to persuade my colleague Gabrielle Pettingell to begin coming to meetings, also. Eventually, we even prevailed upon her to do a presentation or two. On one occasion she gave a lecture and demonstration on map dowsing. Without disclosing her secret identify as a psychic spy, she gave back to the chapter that had helped start us off on this tack some of the insights we had gained through copious trial and error on real-world targets.

In 1989 I was elected vice-president of the chapter, and then in November I became a life member of the ASD. Uncle Sam didn't pay for it - the dues came out of my own pocket. But I felt it was an important move I could make to support an organization I had come to admire and respect. In the spring of that year, the chapter took a field trip to Westminster, Maryland, to dowse for leaks in the city's water system. Unfortunately, the leaks our pendulums and L-rods indicated were under a large municipal parking lot, and it seemed unlikely that the city officials would be willing to tear up the extensive pavement just to verify our dowsing skills!

At the February 1990 meeting, my fellow ASD members elected me, the psychic spy infiltrator, their chapter president. In retrospect that turned out not to be such a good idea. Not that I wasn't still committed to dowsing and the chapter's mission - I certainly was. What got in the way (at first, anyway) was that I was, in a sense, perhaps too committed to dowsing, by default. The remote viewing program was by now heavily engaged in the war on drugs, supporting joint military task forces on both coasts. I and my fellow remote viewers started traveling to operational locations to do our viewing, and dowsing became an increasing part of the effort.

Much more frequently even than before, I got to employ many of the methods and techniques borrowed or developed from the ones I had learned from my friends at the Homewood Friends Meeting House. But some of this travel also took me away from my duties as chapter president. Fortunately, the very competent Chris Benowskyj and Dale Neiburg (respectively chapter vice-president and secretary) were there to pick up the slack. I'm only sorry that official secrecy requirements kept me from being able to tell them why I was out of the loop so much. And then, something even more dramatic occurred.

In August, 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. I was actually away on vacation at the beach when it happened, so didn't pay much attention. Then a few days later I suddenly had emergency transfer orders in my hand. I was ordered to join up with the 101st Airborne Division as a tactical intelligence officer for deployment to the Persian Gulf. Adding to the confusion, rather than the usual time for transfers of a few months, I had only four days to get my affairs in order and report to the Division's home base at Fort Campbell in Kentucky. I made a hurried trip to Chris's and Dale's house in Laurel, Maryland and unloaded all my chapter materials onto the hapless pair. To this day I appreciate their good-natured willingness to step up to the plate.

I shortly found myself in the middle of the sand and heat of Saudi Arabia, and later Iraq. I spent a total of seven months in the region, including the shooting phase of Desert Storm. I didn't specifically use my dowsing skills there. With the kind of intelligence support we were getting, and the wide-openness of the terrain, there wasn't much need. But I did get several nice letters from ASD members in the States, and I answered the ones that I could.

When I finally returned home, it was no longer to a remote viewing assignment. My career lay elsewhere, and I never had another opportunity to attend a chapter meeting. But I continued using dowsing on the occasional under-the-table remote viewing tasks that came my way, and upon my retirement from the Army began teaching dowsing techniques to students attending the advanced levels of the remote viewing training program that I offer. Every year, I pass along to my remote viewing students some of the dowsing knowledge that I gleaned long ago from my friends at the Chesapeake Chapter of the ASD.

In my book, Reading the Enemy's Mind: Inside Star Gate - America's Psychic Espionage Program, I briefly mention my time affiliated with the chapter and some of our military dowsing exploits. But I came to think there was much more about dowsing that I should pass along to the public - the folks whose taxpayer money had helped me learn all these skills in the first place. Starting in 2006 and wrapping up in 2007, I teamed with Remote Viewing Products, Inc. to create the Technical Dowsing DVD training set, to capture the fundamentals of the military dowsing system that we developed during some of the most productive years of the Star Gate program.

This training program is by far the most complete and effective military Technical Dowsing program available anywhere in the world and it's been making waves in the ESP industry for the last two years. I urge you to find out more right now at...