Granted it was the 1970s and everyone was doing a ton of cocaine, more or less - because back when the coke was cut pure, back when it was more like a refreshing cup of coffee instead of a stochastic bowl of fentanyl soup, it was eight-balls and cigarettes every evening after six - but the question was still up for debate: should the quote-unquote ‘Agency’ really invest in remote viewing? Wasn’t that, like, just New Age mumbo jumbo horse shit or something? You have to remember, in that era this idea that our minds were capable of more than remembering phone numbers and daydreaming about t---ies was still highly controversial, and there were certainly varying opinions on it - remote viewing - from those who actually had a say at the Agency, although all of the participants fully agreed that the program, if it were to exist, should obviously be cloaked and shielded from taxpayer transparency. Yes. Remote viewing: have you heard of it? - this ability to supposedly exit your physical body for a set period of time, usually via a series of strict prompts, and then find yourself transported to a foreign locale as an ethereal exoskeleton. You might find yourself on the contemporary moon, or you could be in Soviet Moscow, or - shit - maybe you’d wake up on the planet Mars literally a million fucking years ago! Was this what the Agency should be dumping our hard-earned tax dollars into? Well, to be fair, it probably couldn’t go any worse than the time they tried to use high doses of LSD to control the minds of US citizens? (I mean, even I could have told them that ketamine was probably a better candidate!)

Again, there was a plurality of philosophies presented both for and against the notion - but in our empirically obsessed world what it would probably have to come down to was, well, did the shit actually get results? Could you actually corroborate anything in the real world from these fucking whackos? Could you, say, find a misplaced top secret US missile in the heart of the African jungle because some would-be psych-patient gave you a three mile radius to sift through after a quick remote view? Well! Enter our protagonists - let’s call them Ingo S and Joe M for convenience here - probably the two most qualified and accomplished remote viewers at least of their generation, if not of all time. These two fucks weren’t just grabbing espressos in Midtown then moseying into Headquarters to take quick remote peeks at alien bases on the far side of the moon, or dropping in on nuclear Soviet submarines off the coast of Finland, or keeping the ethereal company of decaying giant humanoid civilization in a post-nuclear Martian landscape - because, as fantastic as those well-documented peregrinations may sound, Ingo and Joe actually went a little further? Yeah, they bumped it up a notch. They managed to just bump it up a tiny bit. Should we bump it up a notch? Now, one minor problem in relaying what these two gentlemen accomplished is this: We still tend to think of vessels as objects carrying occupants, just like we still tend to think of so-called objective viewers as taking note of trees in the wilderness - in short, we’ve tethered ourselves conceptually to a particularly ruthless assumption of subject-object, of containment, that simply won’t apply to the 18 transcriptions presented in this book.

Ingo and Joe began to, not just view things remotely, but actually interact with entities from afar - as themselves (or a form of themselves). But these conversational partners weren’t exactly entities in the sense of your favorite science fiction novel. No - instead, the two travelers came across mechanisms that were imbued with being - namely, (1) a school bus sized orb who went by Carl, (2) a sentient tic tac shaped UFO named Dave, and (3) a floor fan in Moscow who told them her name was Tifa.