How many Sisters did the White Tower lose.

[Robert Laurel]

We are rediscovering lost mental abilities. When I was in the Intelligence Community I was aware of Project Stargate, the remote viewing program. They achieved an 85% accuracy rate.

[Thrasymachus]

We'll, I think the fact that we know about the existence of things like Project Stargate simply reinforces my point that we know there's no such thing as channelling, or anything else remotely like it.  For one thing, the CIA review of Project Stargate in 1995 showed that it never produced actionable intelligence.  It found several flaws in the structure of the program that enabled its leadership to claim results that could not be verified or independently evaluated or reproduced.  In fact, the head of the program refused to turn over transcripts and data to his CIA reviewers so his interpretations of their findings could be evaluated.  This is the program that launched the career of known charlatan Uri Gellar, and a handful of other minor conspiracy-theory celebrities whose main careers now seem to be appearing as guests on Coast-to-Coast Radio, that notorious late-night conspiracy-theory oriented AM talk show.

 

With the resources of the US Army, the DIA, and the CIA  behind it, if there really were such a thing as "remote viewing," they would have found something, and they certainly would not have closed the program and declassified it in '95, nor published their comprehensive review of the program three years ago.  If it actually worked, they wouldn't have declassified their investigatory program.  They would have transformed it into an operations program and given it higher priority as a method of viable intelligence gathering.  And more importantly, like all military technology eventually does, they would have found ways to commercialize it.  Insurance companies for one would be chomping at the bit to be able to look into someone's house to see if they're doing stuff to increase the risk of fires, or be able to "remote view" past traffic accidents or other accidents to determine liability.

[Robert Laurel]

Actually it did produce actionable intelligence. Religious fundamentalist members of Congress forced it to be shut down because they thought it was opening a channel to the Devil.

[Thrasymachus]

I mean, I'm sure that's one of the (likely many) narratives constructed by conspiracy theorists to explain its shutdown.  But in my experience, particularly when it comes to things conferring military advantage and that are potentially commercially lucrative, actually working trumps ideology, even religious ideology, every time.  It's not like it would be hard to convince them it was a gift from God or a manifestation of the Holy Spirit instead, particularly with the ludicrous power and wealth having actually working remote viewing in their pockets would bring them.

[Robert Laurel]

Not a conspiracy theory. I was there. I've also worked with ATTIP, the Pentagon's UFO program. It went deep underground after the fundamentalists went after it.

[Harldin]

Geeeez what have i set off.

Of course there is no such thing as Channeling, just like there is no such thing as the Stargate* its a fictional magic system created by Robert Jordan for a series of books that includes the possibility of a world very similar to ours being one of the 7 Ages, pure Fiction nothing else.

 

*the other Stargate guys as in SG1, Atlantis, Universe.

[Thrasymachus]

Project STARGATE was a defense department program that began under the US Army, wound its way through the DIA and ultimately the CIA.  Prior to 1991, it had a variety of codenames, GRILL FLAME, CENTER LANE, GONDOLA WISH, and many others.  Its purpose was to investigate the use of clairvoyance for intelligence gathering.  Needless to say, it was shut down after independent evaluation, that began when the program was transferred to the CIA, showed that it produced no reliable or actionable intel.  Many of its operational leaders and other participants claimed that it was working and showing progress, but many of them have also been shown to be frauds or dupes of a program leadership that was happy to falsify, massage and conceal their data in order to preserve their sweet government contractor checks.

 

The Stargate Program you're referring to was a fictional movie based around Ancient Aliens conspiracy theories that were popular in the 90's, that went on to spawn three popular sci-fi TV series.  While they have similar names, they're different things entirely.

 

When it comes to works of fiction, every one of them has at least one conceit.  Those conceits are what define the particular fiction it is.  For the fictional Stargate stories mentioned above, among their conceits are that the Ancient Aliens theory is true, that ancient Egyptian civilization is far older than archeological evidence suggests, and that the aliens were tyrants who ruled humans by posing as their gods, and who seeded ancient human populations around the galaxy to serve as convenient slave labor.

 

For Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, among the conceits of his fiction is the notion that our world, our time, is an Age in the Turning of the Wheel.  Not a parallel world very similar to ours, but our world exactly.  Jordan has been explicit on that many times.  That we have trouble reconciling our world, and all the knowledge we have gained in it, with the notion of cyclical time as presented by Jordan's fiction, doesn't change the fact that such is still a conceit of Jordan's fiction.  It simply reveals that such a conceit requires a more loose or charitable suspension of disbelief.  Insofar as we want to speculate about things that could happen within that fiction that are not spelled out explicitly in the text, we have to take the conceits of the fiction seriously.  Otherwise, we are not speculating about Robert Jordan's fiction, we're speculating about someone else's fiction, a fiction close to and inspired by Jordan's to be sure, but not the Wheel of Time.