The Light Beyond The Mountains
Chapter 22: UFO Medico
(Cover image © Tristan Maduro)
Chapter 22: UFO Medico
For understandable reasons, Kit Green’s biographical details for the years of his employment with the Central Intelligence Agency are sparse. His career with the US Federal Government began in 1969, when he became a Senior Division Analyst for neuroscience at the spy agency, rising to become a Branch Chief, Deputy Division Director, and Assistant National Intelligence Officer for Science and Technology before he left to join General Motors Corporation in 1985. He would eventually become GM’s Executive Director of Technology Intelligence, and Chief Technology Officer for Asia Pacific Operations.
From what it’s possible to glean from his biographical data, official and otherwise, few would deny that Kit Green has had a remarkable and fascinating near-60-year career. Today, he is a Professor in Forensic Neuroimaging in the Departments of Diagnostic Radiology and Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences at the Detroit Medical Center and Wayne State School of Medicine. He has held positions with and served on a dozen-plus Federal Science boards, including as Chair of the Board on Army Science and Technology, and is a lifetime member of the US National Academy of Sciences/US National Research Council.
What I admired about Kit – we met briefly at the BICS awards ceremony in Las Vegas and have spoken on several other occasions – was his sobre approach to investigation, as was evident in the way he assessed the scientists whose lives had been turned upside down by the Geller trials at Lawrence Livermore National Labs. This side of his nature is clear when you read the few interviews he has given to authors and journalists to discuss the more unconventional aspects of his work.
One of the first to write about this facet of his career was Jim Schnabel, author of the 1997 book Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America’s Psychic Spies, one of the sources I’d drawn on for the bizarre happenings that accompanied Geller’s visit to, and tests at LLNL. In it (Schnabel gives him the pseudonym ‘Richard Kennett’), the author fills in some of the key gaps in Green’s resumé, as well as his motivations for wanting to become involved in the Agency’s parapsychological work.
‘Ordinary science,’ Schnabel wrote, ‘like ordinary life, all too often left (Green) bored; he seemed more at home confronting the wild extremes of human behaviour. Religion and mysticism in particular fascinated him. Appropriately, then, he spent some of his CIA time monitoring the fringes of medicine and psychology, watching trends, attending conferences, visiting laboratories, looking for things that, though unconventional, might be useful to one side or another in the great game of the Cold War.’
Via this brief, one of the areas he soon came across was the remote viewing work of Puthoff, Swann, Targ and Vallée at SRI. The CIA had been highly sceptical that Ingo Swann’s coordinate-based approach to remote viewing had the merest chance of success and had asked Green, who was also dubious, to conduct an assessment.
Schnabel describes what follows: