In the movie Push, civilians with psychic powers—people who can manipulate thoughts, see the future, or toss objects with their minds—find themselves on the run from a shadowy government agency intent on using their beautiful minds for military purposes. Pure Hollywood hokum, right? Slow down. Retired Army Colonel John Alexander—once a Special Forces commander in Vietnam—knows differently. You see, he was once one of the key members of Stargate—a U.S. intelligence agency designed to prove that psychics could be more effective Cold War weapons than spy satellites or wire taps. The most unsettling part? He was right…


First of all, can you explain a little bit about, well, just what the hell you were involved with on behalf of the Army?
We were watching what the Soviets were doing—we're talking late-'70s, early-'80s—and had reason to believe they were taking the whole "Psi" area very seriously. We had what was then a classified program going. Part of it was an R&D program in "remote viewing" that became actually operational, meaning that it was being used to target a wide range of things—initially Soviet, later on drug smugglers and things of that nature. Psychokinesis, mind over matter kinds of things. I was conducting… well, beyond "experiments" because the colloquial press likes to make light of that. But the metal-bending effect was absolutely real.

You mean like Uri Geller or the kid in The Matrix who could bend spoons with their minds?
Uri Gellar happens to be a personal friend, but it's not folks like Uri. It was average, everyday kinds of, in our case, senior officers. So we were concerned because of the implications of what you could do. People would say, "What are you going to do? Bend tank barrels?" And you say, "No. We're just going to move electrons. Make computers either not work, or render them unreliable." This was right at the beginning of the Information Age, of course. That this worked is 100 percent real.


Were you a believer from the start, or were you skeptical at first?
Well, I considered myself the quintessential skeptic, as opposed to a debunker. Now, when you deal with Psy-cops and those kinds of organizations, they're not skeptical—they're debunkers. Meaning "it can't be, therefore it isn't." As opposed to us, because we've had enough incidents happen with folks right in front of us. The problem was, they didn't happen 100 percent of the time. And control was a significant issue, as were the theoretical models. Are you familiar with the "white crow" saying?

No…
The saying goes that it takes only one white crow to prove all crows aren't black. We saw absolutely certain kinds of things occur under pretty good observational conditions. We weren't being faked. These were, as I say, everyday people. In fact, there was something called the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory (PEARL) at Princeton. It was run by Bob Jahn, a supreme astrophysicist and dean of engineering at Princeton, and because of the things that they saw, they set up their laboratory. But if you came in and said, "I'm a psychic, I'd like to be tested," they'd say, "Thank you very much. We won't do that." The only people they would test were normal people. What they didn't want was somebody to come in and run some tests and put on their business card, "As tested by Princeton."

Do you remember the first thing you saw that made you a believer?
I had what we call a PK (psychokinesis) party at my house.  We had a guy by the name of Jack Houck, who had invented a process whereby we could teach these techniques to large numbers of people. My boss, who was a three-star general, and a bunch of others were there. But we had a woman hold a folk by the bottom and this thing just dropped a full 90 degrees with no physical contact.

Wow.
That's what we said, "Wow." It was like, "somebody needs to look at this." And then I learned the process and was able to do it again, teaching hundreds to thousands of people over time, many of them pretty senior officials. And we protected who they were because this is not career-enhancing stuff in most cases. The final codename for the operation was Stargate. But it lasted over 20 years and had a number of different names: Grillflame, Centerlane, Sunstreak. Over time we changed the names just to protect the program. But the results are pretty spectacular. The ability to gain information at a distance? Absolutely undeniable.


So…can you do these things?
Well, I'm not sure how to answer that. I come from a school that says everybody has capabilities, and psi-ability is like physical capability. As fast as I train, as hard as I run, I'm never going to break a four-minute mile. But there are people that do that routinely today. I think the same thing is true with these phenomena, that everybody has some capabilities. There are those that have more than others. By the way, the thesis in the movie Push is you have people trying to get away from the government. My take was the complete opposite: the government is trying to make them go away. Because we have all these people—particularly self-proclaimed psychics—who jump up and try to intrude. I said, "You've got this backwards," but it makes for a better movie.