Love Story: In The Web of Life by Ken Renshaw Read Free Book Online Page B

rules for our relationship, taking gender out of the
equation.
    "Have you had any personal experience with
psychic phenomena?" she asked.
    "My experiences are only from movies, TV, and
Edgar Allen Poe reading assignments in school." I
admitted.
    "Good!" She replied, "A good clean slate to
work with. Here is a book, a good starting point, written by Steve
Manteo who is the psychic who was ignored by the Sheriff in our
case. We will get to the scientific case later after you understand
the phenomenon involved." She produced a hardbound book with a
bright red cover, and the title "The Psychic Spy Who Never Had To
Leave His Office."
    'What have I gotten into?' I thought as I took
the book. 'Good way to kill the flight time to Palo
Alto.'
    The uniformed pilot with the blond hair poking
under his cap appeared from the cockpit, served us coffee, and a
sandwich, and returned to the cockpit.
    "The pilots are a couple," confided Dore, "They
are also writers who do screenplays in their spare time waiting for
us and on layovers. I like the arrangement because I know they are
not late hour partying when we overnight somewhere and are always
fresh for our flights. I suspect that I am a character in some of
their stories, but they have never have admitted it." Dore opened
her laptop.
    I was incredulous as I scanned the book. Steve
Manteo had been an undergraduate at Stanford taking a lower
division psychology course. One of their lab sections had an ESP
test to see who could perceive large printed numbers taped to the
entrances of different buildings on campus while their lab
instructor viewed them. For example, at the start of the lab
session the instructor, without announcing his destination, would
walk to the location of one of the numbers such as at the campus
post office. Students are asked to meditate and perceive the number
that the instructor viewed. Although few in the lab section had any
success in perceiving the numbers, Steve perceived nearly all of
them.
    The class did not know that the professor was
doing both legitimate academic research and searching for
candidates for a classified government sponsored research program
at SRI, the Stanford Research Institute. Soon, Steve was
interviewed by a researcher at SRI and asked whether he would like
a part-time job. Since Steve was working his way through school, he
accepted the offer. He filled out an employment form that he
thought required an unusual amount of detail on his personal
history and family background. A few weeks later he was called to a
SRI office where he signed security pledge forms and was briefed on
a highly classified psychic spy program under development for the
CIA. He worked part-time until he graduated in architecture, after
which he went to work for one of the CIA's classified contractors,
known as Power Industry Consultants, or PIC.
    He worked on the CIA–sponsored program for
twenty years, spending hours each day perceiving assigned cold-war
psychic targets, the location and activity of people of interest,
or the nature of activities in buildings or factories in the Soviet
Union. In the book, he was only able to give two examples of his
work, which had somehow escaped the classification process, to
describe the process.
    I closed the book as I heard the jet's flaps go
down in preparation for landing.
    Dore closed her laptop and said, "Amazing stuff
isn't it. The psychic spy program went on for twenty years, and
nobody ever heard of it. The contractor Steve worked for had annual
incremental funding from the CIA, which meant every year someone
had to justify the program's effectiveness for it to continue. Our
company funds startups. We positively don't continue ventures that
aren't panning out. Someone high in the Government must have valued
the program."
    I nodded and looked out the window as we
descended to the Palo Alto airport, trying not to reveal my
skepticism about this whole turn of events in my life. I was still
mulling over what I had just read.
    I