"I wish that hadn't happened"

What good am I if I know and don't do,
If I see and don't say, if I look right through you - Bob Dylan

Jack Houck is a retired defense consultant who spent 42 years with Boeing Aerospace as a systems consultant. He is also a "researcher of paranormal phenomena," who has been throwing "psychokinesis parties" for 25 years.

Houck dates his interest in the paranormal to the mid-70s, when he learned of Stanford Research Institute's remote viewing program, and was encouraged by SRI's Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ to conduct his own experiments. The results persuaded Houck of the reality of remote viewing and the significance of psi research, and ever since he has been instructing thousands around the world, many in defense industries, "how to use the power of your mind" to perform PK feats such as metal bending. Including, yes, spoons.

Here Houck describes his "first PK Party":

[W]e were sitting in a circle and I had passed out my grandparents antique silverware --- it has all been dedicated to science now. There was a lot of giggling and laughter because I do not think people believed that this was really going to happen. I don't think that I thought it was going to happen either. However, I was testing this conceptual model and had to follow through with the experiment. All of a sudden a fourteen-year-old boy had the fork he was holding begin to have the head slowly fall over. He started screaming and yelling; he jumped up out of his chair. That got everyone's attention so that everyone in the room saw the fork bending over. As I looked around the room, everyone's eyes were huge as they stared at this boy's fork. I like to call this an instant, belief system change. All of a sudden, other people found that the silverware they were holding became soft in their hands. They later described it as if the metal became a little warm and felt like putty in their hands. It seems to lose its structure for a few seconds. The metal stays soft for between five and thirty seconds. Here they were, finding what is normally nice hard silverware becoming soft and structureless in their hands. Most of the people in the room then began to wildly bend up the silverware. They were screaming and yelling, and this was a real peak emotional event occurring in my living room. In the middle of all this pandemonium I reached back to my dining room table and grabbed the big steel rod, handed it to the fourteen-year-old boy and said, "Bend this!!" He looked at me and said "I can't do that." Then I said "Don't ever say can't --- that is like putting a block in your mind." He agreed to try and started rubbing his hand up and down the steel rod. After about five minutes I again heard him yelling. He was jumping up and down in the middle of the living room. With no more force than simply moving his hands while holding the rod over his head, he bent that rod into a 270 degree turn. The next day I rushed over to the Sears store and bought all the rest of the rods that size in their bin and took them into the laboratory. We had the head metallurgist try to physically bend one of the similar rods. He was a big man, about 200 lbs. He was not able to bend the rod until he finally bent it over his knee, using all his might --- red faced and all. Seeing the difference between the young man doing it with no apparent effort at the PK Party, and the big metallurgist using a tremendous effort to bend it physically, really impressed me.

Retired Major General Albert Stubblebine, then commanding officer of the US Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), was an attendee of Houck's parties, and was so impressed he added it to the itinerary of a retreat for senior INSCOM staff officers at a conference facility near Leesburg, Virginia. Jim Schnabel tells the story in his book Remote Viewers:

Someone handed out spoons and forks, and Stubblebine gave a short talk on how it was done, and then 25 to 30 colonels and generals stood around holding these eating utensils and staring at them, waiting for something to happen.

At one point, a somewhat skeptical colonel turned his head to say something to a colleague, and as he did, his fork suddenly drooped into a ninety-degree angle. Everyone looked at him and his fork, at which point the fork bent back up, then down again, and finally settled into an angle of about forty-five degrees. The colonel whose fork it was put the thing down, shaking his head, evidently unsettled. He was a Christian, and later would denounce the entire thing as the trickery of the devil.

"I wish that hadn't happened," said the colonel.

I don't think there can be true comprehension of how America got here from there, without assuming that sentiment has been often thought and voiced in the halls of the cryptocracy.

Psychokinesis should be only a mild offense to the psyche of someone raised with the convensions of either mainstream faith or anti-faith, and I don't mean to suggest that spoonbending is the work of the devil. But other things colonels and Christians have found themselves mixed up in could certainly be described as such. Mind control, for instance. Think of brainwashing and hypnotism in the alleged service of national security: of being able to take a life in your hands and make of it an experimental marionette like Candy Jones, or a programmed patsy as Sirhan Sirhan almost certainly was. I have to think that somewhere in the beta-testing of human subjects, consciences were appalled at the successes - "I wish that hadn't happened" - but because success was the only condition, just as with an unwise black magician, the work continued, and was refined. Subjects became younger, methods became harsher to better imprint more elaborate and deviant programming. "And I really wish that hadn't happened."

We should be able to see how this happens. Acting against one's conscience in a relatively small matter can set up a logic which justifies actions more terrible in order to see the "pay off" for the first offense. And the way is eased, naturally, in a military culture where private conscience is expected to stand down for "national security." (Though over time that mask has slipped, and it has become simply what it is: horror and high crime.)

I may be wrong, but I doubt there are great wizards in the Pentagon. I imagine, instead, a bunch of sociopathic punks playing with the Necronomicon and thinking they're they have the power, seeing something about it seems to work but not understanding why, or how that could be a bad thing. Meanwhile, the silent witnesses and conflicted perpetrators mutter to themselves, "I wish that hadn't happened."