Everyone Loves You When You're Dead. Neil Strauss
they knew that I was a government agent training psychics.”
How did you get involved with the remote-viewing program?
BUCHANAN: Most of it’s still classified, but I was in the army and I was writing a highly complex computer program. There was a jealous sergeant who wanted my job, and he would sabotage my code. So on the day when I had to present the code to the commanding generals of twelve different countries, I was in the bathroom getting ready—fixing my hair and straightening out my clothes. And when I returned, I saw the sergeant walking away from my computer. When I hit one of the keys on the computer, the screen just went blank and the guy said, “Gotcha.”
I got flaming mad. I’ve always had PK [psychokinesis], and so the whole computer network on the base just blew up—ninety-six computers and billions of dollars in damage.
How did they trace that to you?
BUCHANAN: There was a general named [Albert] Stubblebine. And he had a field officer whose job it was to look for talented psychic people. And when he saw what was going on, he reported what he thought to Stubblebine.
A couple days later, I ran into Stubblebine in the hall. And he got in my face and said, “Did you kill my computer with your mind?”
In my head, I saw my grandchildren still paying off the costs of the damage in the future. But I knew he wouldn’t ask that question if he didn’t know the answer. So I answered him, “Yes, sir.”
“Far fucking out,” he said. “Have I got a job for you!”
And that’s when they recruited you to join the remote-viewing project?
BUCHANAN: Yes. My reaction was, “We’re on Candid Camera, right? The army doesn’t do this stuff.” But they brought me out to Fort Meade and I became one of the viewers in the unit. When my skills got better, I became the trainer.
What’s the most amazing experience you’ve had?
BUCHANAN: Everybody thinks that we had the most amazing job in the military, and really we did. But after you do it eight hours a day for five days a week, you realize that you’re just going to work. It’s a job. We would do some of the most far-out espionage and mentally travel to all these sites, but at the end of the day we just wanted to go home.
But tell me something really interesting that happened.
BUCHANAN: Ten times in seventeen years, I’ve had a PSI experience.
What’s that?
BUCHANAN: A perfect site immersion. You see what you’re viewing so completely that you can’t tell that you’re not there. I live for it. In that, though, if you try to walk through a wall, it will really hurt you. The first time it happened, the Russians had developed a death ray—an extremely powerful particle beam weapon. They wanted to see how the particles moved to figure out how it worked and what it was. But they couldn’t get anyone in there, so they decided to put a remote viewer in. They said, “We need someone to volunteer to step inside a death ray.”
And you volunteered?
BUCHANAN: They moved me to the site and sent me back in time to when the beam was fired. I was describing it to them. And then they said, “Step into the beam.” I stepped in, and all this sandlike stuff was peppering me. I looked, and there were thousands of images of me in the beam. And my awareness was coming from all the points at once.20 [. . .]
Now that the program is declassified, can you teach anyone how to remote view?
BUCHANAN: Definitely. When the information first came out, we got eight to twenty applicants a day. I turned down ninety-five percent of them—flaming kooks, really bad. Now I’d say that ninety-five percent of the people who call us are very levelheaded. What we teach is the real thing. This is not a toy. If someone has mental problems, you don’t teach them this stuff.
Do corporations ever call you because they want to spy on competitors?
BUCHANAN: Yes, a significant number of corporations have been getting training lately.
How many?
BUCHANAN: I can’t say, but enough to make the other companies worry about it.
In 1991, Perry Farrell, the singer in Jane’s Addiction, started what became the pre-eminent touring alternative rock festival, Lollapalooza. But success is a mixed blessing. By Lollapalooza’s third year, he complained, “I felt like it had come out of my hands. The tug was that hard. People just saw like a money Ferris wheel there with every bucket full of cash.”
For a while, Farrell considered selling his stake in Lollapalooza. To prevent this from happening, music executives involved in the festival gave him more control for its fourth season.
Everyone tells me you have all these great ideas for Lollapalooza, but the corporate side of the festival always blocks them. So I thought that instead of doing a regular interview, we could discuss your dream Lollapalooza.
PERRY FARRELL: If we do that, what’ll happen is somebody else will do it. Or they’ll borrow one great idea and I’ll get real bugged about it. It happens sometimes because I’m always blabbing around about ideas and stuff.
So let’s just discuss a few of the ideas.
FARRELL: Okay. I guess one of my main ideas would be to have a place called Perry’s Space and (hesitates) . . . It’s like you get shuttled out to space—you know, to a place that could hold a few thousand people. There would be three stages out there, because (pauses)—I’m thinking to myself—you’d have a few thousand people on the main stage, yeah. That would work. The drive is always nice for clearing your head.
Would there be music on each stage?
FARRELL: You could also have other things. We could have maybe alien bands playing. And who knows what kind of techno stuff they would have to present. I mean right now we’ve got computers, right? But who knows what they’ve got. They might have like plutonium rides, where you’d really be like shot up in space and get a quick rush or something. And then instead of parachuting down, you would float down.
Imagine the insurance the festival would have to pay.
FARRELL: Actually, it would be nothing. You couldn’t get hurt. There might be strays that were shot into space and something happened, like current from a black hole that was like ten zillion miles away was starting to sort of gravitate toward us and people are getting sucked out. So there might be one casualty per show. But there always is anyway at the regular Lollapalooza shows, so . . .
So what would be on the main stage?
FARRELL: There’s a good question. God, all the alien music probably wouldn’t make sense. But they would produce things like certain kilohertz or megahertz because they would know how to physically manipulate your body through sound to make you cry and fall in love and actually have orgasms.
How about for the art and technology portion of the festival?
FARRELL: For their technology, they might show you crafts of flight like we have out in Nevada at Area 51. Maybe you would have virtual simulations of flying saucers and how they were made. They would probably give us classes on how to clean up the environment and how to repair the ozone. I think they could turn us on to everything that we had questions