cover image Cosmic Explorers: Scientific Remote Viewing, Extraterrestrials, and a Message for Mankind

Cosmic Explorers: Scientific Remote Viewing, Extraterrestrials, and a Message for Mankind

Courtney Brown. Dutton Books, $24.95 (260pp) ISBN 978-0-525-94430-0

Written in a relentlessly plodding style, this m lange is part New Age tract, part laboratory notebook and part wild vista of subspace aliens and the destiny of humanity. Remote viewing is a controversial psychic technique whose best-known proponent is Ed Dames, founder of a company called PSI TECH. Dames trained Brown in remote viewing. Though both Dames and Brown assert that aliens are currently involved with humanity in complex ways, it's worth noting that Dames dissociated himself from Brown when Brown's previous book, Cosmic Voyages, was published, believing that Brown had forsaken ""scientific"" technique for channeling. Here, Brown extends his story, begun in Cosmic Voyages, about the destruction of an ancient Martian civilization by natural disaster, the rescue of its survivors by the highly advanced Grey aliens, the creation of an underground Martian base in New Mexico and the Greys' need for human genetic material to further their spiritual progress. Now, it appears that a subspace war is raging between the Greys and a race of Reptilian ETs. Before getting there, however, readers must slog through a mind-numbing 60-page methodological overview of scientific remote viewing intended to convince them that the book is grounded in solid scientific procedure. But Brown's digressions into ""soul communication"" and ""subspace mind,"" and his complete inattention to the impossibility of verifying his claims, undermine all pretensions to scientific rigor. Statements like ""[Buddha] currently has a leadership role in the Galactic Federation"" provide occasional comic relief. But only readers with an advanced ability to suspend disbelief will be able to take Brown's work seriously. (July)