Courtney Brown
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- For the American football player, see Courtney Brown (football).
Courtney Brown, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of political science at Emory University and is known for promoting the use of nonlinear mathematics in social scientific research. He is also known as a proponent of remote viewing, a form of extra-sensory perception alleged to have been used by the DIA and CIA until 1995.
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[edit] Academic profile
Dr. Brown's academic work focuses on the mathematical application of nonlinear dynamical systems to social and political phenomena using differential and difference equations. This is a relatively rare focus in the social sciences, where most mathematical work involves the statistical application of linear models. The published reviews of his work have been notably positive.
[edit] Remote viewing
In the early 1990s, Dr. Brown was instructed in remote viewing (RV), a psychic technique originally developed for the Central Intelligence Agency through Stanford Research Institute. According to proponents, Remote Viewing can be used to access information from any geographic or temporal location; however, it has been generally considered a pseudoscience by mainstream scientists.
After his training, Dr. Brown then developed a methodology he calls Scientific Remote Viewing (SRV). In 1995, he founded The Farsight Institute, a non-profit organization whose purpose is to conduct scientific research of the remote-viewing phenomenon, and to train remote viewers.
[edit] Books
According to Brown, all remote-viewing data are speculative until verified through normal physical means. He says: "One can never say that something is real because someone has remote viewed it." [1] Brown makes no immediate demand to accept his findings as accurate without independent verification, and explains that it is necessary to wait to see how many if any of his perceptions turn out to be correct.
Brown wrote two books that have been highly controversial using remote viewing "data" on the subject of life in the Universe: Cosmic Voyage and Cosmic Explorers.
In his books, Brown describes a coalition of extraterrestrial civilizations and spiritual entities that he calls the Galactic Federation. This group includes the Greys, a race of aliens that Brown says can be categorized by their spiritual development, as he identifies four groups of Greys. Involved with the Federation are the consciousness of terrestrial spiritual masters such as Jesus and Buddha.
Brown wrote that there is intelligent life on Mars today. He claims that a race of humanoid Martians are living secretly under the surface of Mars and in hidden retreats on Earth due to an eons-old natural disaster on their planet; and a race of reptilian warriors, a renegade group who operate behind the scenes from another dimension, and have a dark agenda for the future of humanity.
[edit] Hale-Bopp on Art Bell
In late 1996, after Brown had been interviewed on the Art Bell radio show about his book Cosmic Voyage, he later returned and corroborated claims made by amateur astronomer Chuck Shamek that a large object appeared to be located behind Comet Hale-Bopp. According to Brown, remote viewers at The Farsight Institute had remote viewed the so-called “Hale-Bopp companion” and suggested that it appeared to be a complex artificially constructed object of non-human origin. Brown explained that all remote-viewing data needed to be confirmed through traditional means but he later said that his statement seemed to have gotten lost in subsequent sensationalism of the story.
In November 1996, Brown was asked by Bell to provide him with the photograph of the comet companion that one of The Farsight Institute's employees claimed to have received from an unnamed astronomer at a major university. Brown said that he never communicated with the source of the photograph, nor was the source's identity ever fully confirmed to him. Against Brown's urgings, Bell later released the photo on the Internet. Within 24 hours, professors from the University of Hawaii then claimed that the photo was an altered forgery that had been made from a comet photo taken at that institution, discrediting Brown's claims about the comet companion. He was never invited again on Art Bell's show after January 1997.
Brown felt that this photo was sent to his institute in order to discredit remote viewing, though he always maintained that he never used the photo for any purpose relating to remote viewing and remained opposed to its release, arguing that he did not own any rights to the photo. Brown wrote an open letter on January 20th, 1997, suggesting that the comet photos sent to him were part of a "wide-scale and highly organized disinformation campaign" with "resources that extend beyond those of any university or professor," and that the Farsight Institute had walked into a trap by talking about the photo on the radio show. "Disinformation campaigns," says Brown, "are not unusual in the area of extraterrestrial life."
The radio show host then continued having other guests speak about the comet companion, and the story later evolved into a scandal when, in March of 1997, the cult group Heaven's Gate chose the appearance of the comet as a signal for their mass cult suicide. They claimed they were leaving their earthly bodies to travel to the space ship following the comet, though they also wrote on their website that whether Hale-Bopp had a companion or not had nothing to do with their decision.
[edit] Scientific research on remote viewing
From 1997 onwards, after being notably advised by Michael Raoul Duval, a former Special Counsel to President Ford, Brown re-directed The Farsight Institute to conduct only basic science experiments and research on the remote-viewing phenomenon. [2] The conclusions of this research are the main focus of his most recent book Remote Viewing: The Science and Theory of Nonphysical Perception, a book dedicated to Duval who was a student and a Board Member of Brown's Farsight Institute.
In this book, Brown claims to have made a breakthrough by having discovered the psychic mechanism that allows remote viewing to work. He says that a remote-viewer's perception during a remote viewing session appears to be guided by the thoughts of the person who later ultimately analyzes the remote-viewing data. His book explains that the person who analyzes the remote viewing data can potentially cause a corruption of this data. It also states that this has been demonstrated through various experiments using the scientific method of replicability where the data is compared with more than one target.
Brown's research has received notable positive reviews from other controversial scientists such as Fred Alan Wolf, William A. Tiller, and Daryl Bem.
Brown's finding potentially challenges a great deal of previous remote-viewing research in which the experimental design included multiple targets in the analysis process, leading to a possible debate and dispute among scientists who study remote viewing.
