Courtney Brown
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Courtney Brown is presently an associate professor at Emory University in Atlata, Georgia, USA. He is also director of the Farsight Institute, a remote viewing organisation.
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[edit] Extraterrestrial work
He worked under the Star Gate project at SAIC with Ed Dames. In 1996 his book "Cosmic Voyager" detailed his findings with regards to two alien races which had previously had contact with Earth, as well as offering "the first demostrable proof of the existence of the human soul".
According to the book his first viewing of Mars was when his monitor supplied a set of coordinates for him to tune into. This occured on the 29th September 1993 and he described a pyramid, a volcano and people dying. It wasn't until after the session ended that his monitor (Ed Dames, though he is never actually named in the book) told him the target was actually on Mars: it was the Cydonia area which at the time had a number of theories about it regarding the face on mars, pyramids and cities (all of these have since been debunked by higher resolution photographs). In the book he writes "It took me the rest of the day and evening to get used to the fact that I had witnessed an actual fragment of martian history"
The book goes on to detail Brown's success in finding Martians presently living on the Earth and that the Mars Explorer that was to have landed on Mars in 1993 but never arrived was shot down by an alien ship. His investigation into extraterrestrial affairs continued into a second book "Cosmic Explorer".
[edit] Hale Bopp
In 1996 Brown claimed that remote viewers at the Farsight Institute had seen a UFO in the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet. They were prompted to do this when an amateur astronomer Chuck Shramek claimed to have seen an object in the tail of the comet. The object turned out to be a star that Shramek couldn't identify because he hadn't properly calibrated his instruments and a photo of the object (unconnected to Shramek) was later found to be a fake. Courtney Brown blamed "an entrenched and continuing disinformation campaign" aimed at discrediting his research (and, indeed, all research into UFOs).
As a result of this identification of a UFO, a small sect called "Heaven's Gate" led by the seriously delusional Marshall Herff Applewhite, committed ritualized suicide in order to join the ascended masters aboard the supposed UFO.
[edit] Recent work
The Farsight Institute continues to investigate remote viewing. In 2005 in an interview on the Farsight Institute web site Brown was asked if he still believed in the things he wrote ten years previously. He said "it's not that I believe what I wrote about in my first two books [...] I'm intriuged by what I wrote in my first two books." He explained that there was no way to know whether they were true or not and they should "really be understood in terms of fun books" although he was serious when he made them.
