The military experiment that’s stranger than fiction: Paul looks like an ordinary soldier. He is actually an army-trained ‘psychic spy’ who claims he can solve one of Australia’s darkest crimes

For almost a decade, Major Paul H. Smith was one of the US military’s greatest secret weapons: a real-life ‘psychic spy’ tasked with exposing foreign threats using nothing more than the power of his mind.

Now the highly decorated US Army officer wants to use his extrasensory espionage skills to solve one of Australia’s most enduring mysteries: recovering the body of Peter Falconio.

The 28-year-old British tourist was shot dead in the Australian Outback in 2001 by Bradley Murdoch before the depraved drug-runner then tried to abduct his girlfriend, Joanne Lees.

While Ms Lees somehow managed to escape the deranged killer and raise the alarm, no trace of Falconio has ever been found – despite police spending thousands of hours scouring the country’s red centre for his remains.

Mr Smith hopes he can change that. 

The retried strategic intelligence chief was once part of a highly classified US Government project known as ‘Star Gate’. 

The top-secret $20milllion program was set up by the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1977 and operated for almost two decades before it was wound down and eventually de-classified.

Public revelations about the project’s existence – and unconventional tactics – have since inspired a raft of books as well as a big-screen black comedy, The Men Who Stare at Goats, based on its exploits. 

At times, it can be hard to differentiate between the factual and the fanciful but Mr Smiths says the Star Gate unit really did train a handpicked selection of ‘warrior monks’ in a parapsychology discipline known as ‘remote viewing’

The agents then deployed their supposed ability to ‘perceive targets’ anywhere on the planet using extrasensory perception (ESP) to infiltrate the Soviet Union and its allies’ nuclear programs at the height of the Cold War. 

As outlandish as that may sound to some, Mr Smith stresses it was a deadly serious – and successful – military operation.  

‘People don’t always believe me, or think I’m joking, when I tell them about my military career – but it’s no joke,’ he says. 

‘I was trained by the US Defense Intelligence Agency in the ESP-based skill known as “remote viewing” and I used it to spy on the Soviets, on Hezbollah… and the Chinese and narcotics traffickers.

‘I was literally a psychic spy. I had to be “read in” all the way up to “Top Secret” and had to pretend I wasn’t even in the Army or tell any of my relatives or close friends about my work.

‘We did a lot of remote viewing research into Soviet weapons systems and Chinese nuclear tests… and we did solve problems for the military using our so-called psychic techniques.

‘It didn’t always work but there were times when it absolutely did and there is evidence that it did.’

Mr Smith appreciates there will be sceptics in among both the police and the public, but given the vast passage of time since Mr Falconio’s murder, and the authorities’ repeated failed searches for his body, he believes there is little to lose.

‘Really, it makes sense to try remote viewing in cases where the authorities don’t have any other leads or possibilities,’ he says.

‘If you do try it, and get a remote viewer to work on this case, and you don’t find Peter Falconio, you’re not any further behind than you were.

‘But there are cases that have been solved – or at least significantly moved forward – by people using ESP or remote viewing.’

THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS 

Mr Smith was a promising young intelligence officer in the U.S. Army in 1983 when he was approached about joining the top-secret Star Gate program.

‘I had been working as a lieutenant, Arabic linguist and Mid-East analyst with Military Intelligence at Fort Mead, Maryland, when an official reached out to me and said, “Hey, we think you might be good at what we do,”‘ he recalls. 

‘I said, “Well, what do you do?” And they said, “We can’t tell you … but if you take these tests, and you score where we want you to … you might be able to find out.”

‘They were looking for candidates and their criteria was: you had to be accomplished in your military career, you had to be above average intelligence … and you also had to have an interest in some kind of creative field. 

‘When they discovered I had majored in art at college, and I was fluent in German, Arabic and Hebrew, they thought, “Well, we can’t not try this guy out” and that’s what motivated them to approach me.’

Intrigued, Smith says he agreed to sit the exams before being summoned to the fledging program’s on-base headquarters and briefed on its classified operation. 

‘I was told, “Our mission here is to collect intelligence against foreign threats using a parapsychology discipline called remote viewing – we essentially are asking you to volunteer to become a psychic spy.”

‘As you can imagine, that was a bit of a shock. 

‘They said, “You don’t have to answer right now – you can come back tomorrow and we can talk it over.”

‘But I did this logical calculation in my head: The government’s doing this, that means it must really work … so there’s no way I’m not gonna do this if they’ll let me.

‘In the end, it took me about 15 seconds to decide. I said, “No, need to wait until tomorrow. Where do I sign?”‘

From the moment he was inducted into the program, Mr Smith became a convert to the Star Gate cause and its ability to producer critical intelligence – but not everyone was equally convinced.

‘The very first operational session ever done by the Army remote viewing program was where the target was this massive building in a harbour in the White Sea in the northern Soviet Union,’ he says. 

‘The National Security Council knew the building was there but they didn’t know what was going on inside of it.

‘So we ran two viewers on it and they described seeing a large crane, travelling back and forth …. and they described it as helping build a giant submarine. 

‘They could see missile tubes in the front of the sub’s superstructure, which was underheard of at the time because missile tubes were supposed to be at the back. 

‘The people at the National Security Council rejected the idea the Soviet was building this huge sub – it seemed implausible to them. 

‘Eight months later, the Soviets floated out their new Typhoon class submarine – the largest submarine ever built with missile tubes on the front substantially as we described it. 

‘It was the very first ever operational remote viewing our program ever did and it was a huge success but the intelligence was never used because it wasn’t seriously.’

Over the course of the next seven years, Mr Smith says he conducted hundreds of remote viewing sessions for his country before transferring to a tactical intelligence role with the 101st Airborne Division during Operation Desert Storm in 1990.

But he says the unit’s battle for acceptance within the US intelligence community was never truly won, and ongoing cynicism led to it eventually being scrapped in June 1995.

‘Star Gate wasn’t a failure – the really big problem we had was that we had non-believers in the hierarchy in the government,’ he says. 

‘When the program was transferred from the Defense Intelligence Agency to the Central Intelligence Agency in 1995, the Director of the CIA [John Deutch] was notoriously a remote-viewing sceptic. 

‘He had a masters degree in chemical engineering and a PhD in chemistry and he was a diehard physicalist – and he rejected the idea that anything like this could work.

‘That’s why it (remote viewing) got killed off – the sceptics won.’

The military may have canned the project but not so Mr Smith. 

Since retiring from the army in 1996, he has dedicated his life to training members of the public in the controversial technique, with what he claims are astonishing results.

He insists of his proteges now use their skills to help find missing people, while others employ it to help pick stocks on the share market – though, as always, direct correlations between remote viewing and real life are hard to prove. 

Mr Smith says the goofy Hollywood portrayal offered by The Men Who Stare At Goats has only harden sceptical views around parapsychology. 

In the movie, a journalist stumbles on the story of a lifetime after learning about the unit of psychic spies and their professed abilities to run through walls, turn themselves invisible and disperse clouds through the power of thought. 

Clooney’s character comically believes he and his entire unit have been cursed after he harnessed his mental abilities to kill a goat after staring at it intensely for hours. 

‘It was a fun film – but I don’t want people to think the movie was anywhere close to the truth, because it wasn’t,’ Mr Smith says. 

‘It kind of made a laughing stock of us in a way.’

In stark contrast to the Hollywood portrayal, he says Star Gate’s elite operatives approached each and every operation with the utmost professionalism, in the understanding that lives could depend on them.

During ‘remote viewing sessions’, he says groups of agents were separated and each given a blind ‘tasking number’ and no other information.

They were then ‘turned loose’ to see if they could find the desired target wherever it was in the world – and whether their independent perceptions matched up.

‘The trick is you sit down at the table with paper and a pencil and try to visualise the target and cut through “the noise” and draw what you see,’ he says.

‘Remote viewing was, in a way, misnamed. It’s really remote perception because all of your perceptual modalities are involved: you can smell, touch, taste, hear and see things.

‘It’s kind of like a half-remembered memory that comes in but you know this is not a memory you ever had.’

IS IT REMOTELY SUCCESSFUL?

Feedback was rare for the military psychic agents amid fears negative results could harm the viewers’ skills and confidence.

But Mr Smith maintains the ‘art form’ remains one of the world’s most effective intelligence-gathering tools.

‘Remote viewing isn’t always the best method in the world to find things – but, overall, it’s better than anything else we have,’ he said. 

‘I am usually more successful than not; in most cases, probably 60 per cent of the time, [remote viewing] is helpful. 

‘For the military sessions we performed – 30-some per cent of cases, or about a third of them – our results had no correlation with the target – they were essentially failures.

‘About another third, there was substantial correlation, but there was a lot of noise as well. 

‘So it may or may not have been helpful, but at least there was some evidence to suggest it was. 

‘Then in the final third of cases, the results were highly accurate and, in fact, we were able to close cases – to solve cases – based on the information that was gathered. 

‘When you compare that to ‘human intelligence’ – people infiltrating organisations and informants – that’s only successful about 15 per cent of the time – so we were way better.’

Mr Smith says he is particularly proud of his work with a joint government taskforce that intercept a shipment of illegal narcotics being smuggled into the US ‘based solely on remote viewing’.

‘We had an informant had revealed that there was a container ship containing contraband coming into a certain US port on a particular day,’ he says. 

‘The problem was, there were six container ships coming in on that day – which one was it? And so I got tasked with investigating. 

‘I start off blind to all that (information) and I said, “Well, I get the impression of a vessel and that’s something on it that is not supposed to be there”. 

‘Then I managed to indicate where on the ship the stuff was located and, finally, I used the procedure to identify the precise ship.

‘The joint task force stopped that ship, they broke into the cargo at the position I identified and they found an entire container of contraband. It was a massive success.’

MISSING IN ACTION 

The former intelligence boss believes his military-grade ESP skills could be equally adept at helping Mr Falconio’s parents find closure by pinpointing the location of their missing son’s remains. 

‘I will do anything I can to help this poor family – they have been suffering for far too long,’ he says. ‘They deserve to know where their boy is and bring him home.’ 

It certainly seems no answers will be forthcoming from Mr Falconio’s killer.

In the almost 20 years since he was convicted of the young backpacker’s murder, Murdoch has refused to admit responsibility or reveal where he dumped Mr Falconio’s body.

The young Brit had been driving along the remote Stuart Highway between Alice Springs and Darwin with Ms Lees on July 14, 2001, when Murdoch drew alongside and signalled them to pull over.

The accused rapist told the couple there were flames coming out the back of their orange VW campervan. When Mr Falconio went to the rear of the vehicle to check it out, Murdoch killed him.

He then grabbed Ms Lees, bound her up with cable ties and bundled her into the back of his ute.

She managed to wriggle free as he dealt with Mr Falconio’s body and moved their van, and hid in the bush to avoid Murdoch’s dog while he searched for her.

Her boyfriend’s killer eventually gave up and drove off with Mr Falconio’s body before Ms Lees flagged down a truck and was taken to a nearby roadhouse in Barrow Creek.

The police hunt for Mr Falconio ultimately led them to Murdoch. He was arrested in 2003 and convicted of the backpacker’s murder two years later. The former truck driver was given a life sentenced with a non-parole period of 28 years.

Eligible for parole in ten years, he will not walk free without revealing the location of Peter Falconio’s body under the NT’s ‘no body, no release’ laws.

He is believed to have hidden Mr Falconio’s remains somewhere in the vast expanse of desert between Alice Springs and Broome, 1,700km away in Western Australia.

In September 2022, Mr Falconio’s mother broke her silence to beg for information about the location of her son’s body on what would have been his 50th birthday.

Mrs Falconio said she remained in contact with Ms Lees, who is now 50 and living in Huddersfield, the same West Yorkshire town as her late boyfriend’s parents.

She urged for ‘anyone with a conscience’ to help locate his remains. For now, it seems Murdoch isn’t willing to budge.

Smiths, however, was moved by her pleas and says he wants to do whatever he can to help them.

NORTHERN EXPOSURE 

The retired major – and one-time intelligence chief for the Military District of Washington – says his one and only stipulation – if Mr Falconio’s family were to accept his offer – would be that the Northern Territory authorities promised to act on his intel. 

‘All I would want is a dedicated connection with a person who has sufficient leverage to actually get the information into the system, get something done with it,’ he says. 

After all, he says he has been left disappointed once before.

He says his team believed they had located the body of a missing solider during a similar operation in the Middle East – only to later learn officials on the ground had refused to act on their intelligence.

‘The project was for Army Major Command: they were looking for a missing solider,’ he says. ‘They knew the guy was dead – he’d been captured by al-Qaeda in Iraq and they were trying to find the body

‘They had us do a set of remote viewing sessions – with absolutely no details about the desired target – and we produced data consistent with what the situation was.

‘We described a Middle East location, and the individual, and what the setting looked like.

‘I thought, “Hey, we’re going to find him, this one is going to work.” So I passed that data onto my contact, a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army.

‘He passed it on to the task force that’s supposed to be looking for this guy on the ground in Iraq, but he made the mistake of telling them what the source of the data was.

‘And they essentially said, ‘We don’t believe in this crap – we’re not going to use it.’

‘These guys were biased against it, right? And as a result, that body has never been found.’ 

It was a brutal rebuff that still reverberates with the former agent. 

‘The fact that the US government did this (remote viewing), that the military employed it and successfully, will never be enough for some people,’ he says. 

“Sceptics are always criticise, but most of them actually haven’t looked at the data. 

‘Most of them are going based on their own a prior assumptions and they criticise it based on what they believe, not on what the facts actually say.

‘It would be an honour to help with this family’s ongoing pain and grief if I can do it – and it seems we have nothing to lose and, potentially, everything to gain.’