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Photography

Maya Deren's brochure for her films lists "Technical assistance: Hella Heyman, Alexander Hammid" for At Land (1944) and "Photographed by Hella Heyman" for Ritual in Transfigured Time.¹ Targ's tribute states that she was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1921 and "lived most of her adult life in New York and Los Angeles."³ Her obituary tribute in The Sun in August 1992, by the magazine's editor Sy Safransky, states that she was born in Germany and educated in France, England and the United States; that she was a freelance photographer for Life (magazine), Ebony and The New York Times and taught photography at the University of California, Los Angeles; that she photographed Anaïs Nin and Benjamin Spock; and that her photographs were included in books including The Family of Man. She had written in her contributor notes that she "lives in a treehouse in California."²

SRI, 1974

SRI's first progress report of March 12, 1974, records "a preliminary remote viewing pilot experiment" with "a subject (H.H.) previously screened by the EEG correlates experiment": "The target chosen at random was a small red clapboard schoolhouse structure with a bell steeple on top in a miniature golf course. The subject's response was that she saw a red clapboard structure with a steeple that seemed to be artificial as in a movie set." An outside reviewer noted that of six subjects in the EEG work, "one of the six subjects, HH, showed a consistent alpha blocking effort. Therefore, this subject was studied further and most of the data recorded is based on HH's performance."⁴ Jim Schnabel wrote that she arrived in 1974, "was not steeped in psi experiences as Swann and Price had been," and that of the six receivers in the EEG work only hers changed when the sender was stimulated, with slightly depressed alpha and slightly enhanced beta rhythms.⁵

Targ and Hal Puthoff described her in the Nature (journal) paper of October 18, 1974 and in later SRI reports as one of "two of our subjects (H.H. and P.P.)," the other being Pat Price, who "had not considered themselves to have unusual perceptual ability before their participation."⁶ Targ and Puthoff's account in the 1976 Proceedings of the IEEE paper calls her "a gifted professional photographer" who "was selected for this series on the basis of her successful performance as a percipient in the EEG experiment described earlier" and who "had no previous experience with apparent paranormal functioning," and records that she had "no strong feelings about the likelihood of her ability to succeed in this task." The paper contrasts her with Ingo Swann, who "had come to our laboratory fresh from a lengthy and apparently successful series of experiments with Dr. Gertrude Schmeidler at City College of New York," and with Price, who "felt that he used his remote viewing ability in his everyday life." It describes her series as a nine-experiment replication of the series with Price, the first replication attempted, in which she described a pedestrian overpass target as "a kind of trough up in the air" and drew nested squares at the bottom of the page, and described a barn-like structure with slatted sides, a pitched roof and "light and dark bars on the wall."⁷

David Marks wrote in 1982 that of the six transcripts of her series shown to him by the SRI judge Arthur Hastings, "four of the six Hammid transcripts actually carried dates" and "one transcript even carried the name of the associated target"; he listed twenty-four cues ("This is the 18th of September," "Russell Targ has gone to the remote site," "Hal has gone to a second target," "Hella has made a drawing of Hal's first location") from which a judge in New Zealand, using no descriptive material, matched the transcripts better than Hastings had, and reported that Hastings had received three target lists, one randomized and two not. Targ and Puthoff's own account of her had been that she was "a friend: 'I (R.T.) had known Hella for more than a dozen years.'"⁸

Schnabel wrote that in the series of nine outbound trials the judge matched five transcripts correctly and ranked her four other transcripts second, and that on one day she told Targ the site before it had been selected by random-number generator, which led Puthoff and Targ to adopt a protocol with ten sealed sites in which she described the target in advance and the target was then chosen by calculator; blind judging matched all four of her transcripts to their targets. Schnabel added that "Hella Hammid was the queen of remote viewers when it came to film canisters."⁹

The 1974 observer's report

A CIA officer who observed her in 1974, his name redacted in the released memoranda, wrote: "Hella is very alert and outgoing; although not insightful. She is very concerned with her performance. Her aim seems to be pleasing the experimenters rather than proving anything to herself." "She does very badly on absolute size estimates. She does very well on indicating lighting conditions, including the presence of steady or pulsing lights. She does not often describe colors, but is very accurate when she does." "There can be no question that Hella can repeatably, although not reliably, produce information not available through normal means." Set to describe an electric typewriter on which the officer had typed for ten minutes, she missed, while Targ, who had been questioning her throughout, "gave a nearly perfect account of the target." She had talked, "without provocation," about "the 'two men from DOD'" who had made her "tense" on a previous visit.¹⁰

During the same visit she was called in by a police lieutenant, Walt Konar, who "had exhausted all available leads" in the murder of a young woman in the Stanford University chapel some weeks before. She "gave details of the crime location, described the victim and her assailant, indicated the exact location of the fatal wound, alluded to the ritualistic tone of the crime, and traced the victim's movements before the crime as well as the relocation of the body afterwards," the only known error being earrings; Konar wrote SRI a letter and followed her leads. The officer noted that "none of the data that Hella generated, that has been verified, was unknown to Lt. Konar at the time of this experiment. Therefore, it is possible that Hella received all of her information from the Lt., by some unknown means." He warned that if funding lapsed Puthoff and Targ "will publish everything they have generated," including "their association with unreliable subjects." A cassette of September 19, 1974, is catalogued "Tape 'N' Text Editor and Drill Press, Beacon Russell Targ, Viewer Hella Hammid."¹⁰

A separate undated memorandum for the record by an officer of the CIA's Office of Technical Service, "Operational Use of Paranormals in Police Activities," reports that "two paranormal subjects being tested at Stanford Research Institute" had produced impressive data on two police cases, the Patty Hearst kidnapping and a Stanford student homicide, and that an OTS officer had witnessed the sessions in the second.¹¹

Project Deep Quest, July 1977

SRI's report of October 1978, Advanced Threat Technique Assessment, covering April 18, 1977 to April 15, 1978 for the Defense Intelligence Agency, describes a submersible experiment in July 1977 near Santa Catalina Island using the Taurus, a five-man vehicle made by International Hydrodynamics Company Ltd. of Canada and made available to SRI by Stephan Schwartz of the Philosophical Research Society of Los Angeles, who had arranged its use for an underwater archaeology experiment. Six messages were each assigned a Bay Area site; a team went to the site and stayed fifteen minutes while a subject aboard the submersible, "500 miles away," described the team's location and then chose the target from a list and noted the attached message. Four trials were planned. The first was aborted for failure to follow the dive schedule. In the second, on July 16, 1977, at 170 metres in 340 metres of water, the subject began, "A very tall looming object. A very, very huge tall tree and a lot of space behind them. There almost feels like there is a drop-off or a palisade or a cliff behind them"; the target was a giant oak on a hilltop in Portola Valley and the message "Rendezvous at Pickup Point Three" was correctly obtained. The third was aborted for lack of synchronization. In the fourth, with the submersible on the bottom in 78 metres, the subject described "flat stone flooring, walls, small pool, reddish stone walk, large doors," and the target was a shopping mall in Mountain View. The report does not name the subjects.¹²

Schnabel identified the viewers as Hammid, in the first successful trial at "550 feet beneath the Pacific," and Ingo Swann in the second, with Hammid suffering from seasickness; that the experiments were conducted for the Air Force contract of Dale Graff; and that Schwartz, a former Navy officer, had persuaded the two to serve as his viewers in a search for undiscovered shipwrecks, finding "some debris that suggested they had hit the right wreck."¹³ Annie Jacobsen, in Phenomena, wrote that Hammid and Swann each marked multiple locations on a chart of some 1,500 square miles around Catalina Island, that after known wrecks were eliminated a single target remained that both had marked independently, a few hundred yards apart, and that in the Air Force trial Hammid, "500 feet underwater and 375 miles away," picked from six sealed images of San Francisco sites the one where Puthoff and Graff stood as the beacon.¹⁴

Grill Flame, 1979

A memorandum for the record of September 19, 1979, by the Special Activities Office of the Army Materiel Systems Analysis Activity (AMSAA), reports that the four members of the AMSAA Grill Flame core group visited SRI on August 21 and 22, 1979 "for discussions with the SRI staff and Hella Hammid." It states that she "has participated in the SRI remote viewing (RV) program for the past 5-6 years," that she "originally participated in SRI's RV program as a 'control subject,' basically as a personal favor to Russ Targ, whom she'd known for several years," and that she "is in no way an absolute believer." She told them she had spent three weeks in Egypt with Stephan Schwartz using a procedure that was "basically coordinate RV in time instead of space," given a site and a date to view such as 200 BC, and had not yet received feedback; and that she and Targ had attended a two-day out-of-body experience seminar led by Robert Monroe at Esalen Institute during which she slept throughout. The group recorded that she "views lying down with her eyes closed" and draws each impression as it comes, "a compulsive doodler," that she "works practically exclusively with Russ Targ as her interviewer," and that "she did all of the box RV sessions," a 4 by 4 grid of sixteen bins. A separate part of the memorandum records that Manfred Gale met Puthoff and Targ that morning on the Army Science Board's criticism of their evaluation procedure.¹⁵

Later training

Schnabel wrote that Hammid and Gary Langford were trainees of Ingo Swann's coordinate method, that in May 1980 Swann gave them the coordinates of the erupting Mount St. Helens, and that Swann often told of a target he gave Hammid, a precipice over the Khyber Pass, in which the kinesthetic sense of the site was so strong that her hand "went sharply down, off the paper, and off the table." Schnabel also described a clash between Hammid and the SRI subject Keith Harary, who in his own opinion thought she had begun to see herself as a superpsychic.¹⁶

Hammid died at home in Los Angeles on May 1, 1992. In her last letter to Safransky she wrote, "I have looked death squarely in the face most of last year. I have cancer but am fighting it with everything I've got."¹⁷

Footnotes

Maya Deren Films (brochure, undated; the credits name a Hella Heyman and an Alexander Hammid), Cinema 16 and Art in Cinema materials, Vogel collection (identifier Vogel_MCHC81-068_B07_F026_DerenFilms), archive.org, https://archive.org/details/Vogel_MCHC81-068_B07_F026_DerenFilms ↩︎
Safransky, Sy. "Hella Hammid." The Sun, issue 200, August 1992. https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/200/hella-hammid ↩︎
Targ, Russell, "A Tribute to Hella Hammid: The First Woman Remote Viewer," as reproduced on her Find a Grave memorial. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/129802432/hella-hammid The tribute is quoted for what Targ states; it does not mention the name Heyman. ↩︎
Puthoff, Harold E. Perceptual Augmentation Techniques, progress report no. 1, March 12, 1974, SRI Project 3183, CIA-RDP96-00787R000100010001-1. "Review of Perceptual Augmentation Techniques," unsigned review of SRI progress reports 1 to 3, c. August 1974, CIA-RDP96-00787R000200230001-6. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. ↩︎
Schnabel, Jim. Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies. New York: Dell, 1997, chapter on the early SRI work, read in the archive.org full-text copy, https://archive.org/details/jim-schnabel-remote-viewers-the-secret-history-of-americas-psychic-spies_2 ↩︎
Targ, Russell, and Harold Puthoff. "Information Transmission under Conditions of Sensory Shielding," Nature, vol. 251, October 18, 1974, pp. 602-607, read in the CIA Reading Room copy CIA-RDP96-00787R000100220001-8 on archive.org. ↩︎
Puthoff, Harold E., and Russell Targ. "A Perceptual Channel for Information Transfer over Kilometer Distances: Historical Perspective and Recent Research." Proceedings of the IEEE 64, no. 3 (March 1976): 329-354, section on learner subject S4, read in the SRI report copy CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6 and in the CIA Reading Room copy CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080046-4, archive.org mirror of the STARGATE collection. ↩︎
Marks, David F. "Remote Viewing Revisited." Skeptical Inquirer, vol. 6, no. 4, Summer 1982, pp. 18-29. https://cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1982/07/22165420/p20.pdf Snyder, Harry L., and Arlene G. Snyder. Summary and Critical Evaluation of Research in Remote Viewing, Report RV-79-1, final technical report, contract 77F104420, Systemetrics, Inc., Blacksburg, Virginia, June 1, 1979, parts 1 and 2, CIA-RDP96-00791R000100440001-9 and CIA-RDP96-00787R000100260003-2. The sponsor of the contract is not named in the report. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. ↩︎
Schnabel, Remote Viewers, 1997, chapters on the SRI work. Schnabel's figures are his own account of the judging and of Puthoff's protocol and differ from the sum-of-ranks tables in the Proceedings paper cited above. ↩︎
"Experiments with Hella Hammid," CIA memoranda of 1974 with an officer's trip report of November 1974, author's name redacted, CIA-RDP96-00787R000200070006-9 and CIA-RDP96-00787R000200070002-3; "Objective Assessment of SRI Visit," CIA-RDP96-00787R000700090008-0; cassette catalogue card of September 19, 1974, CIA-RDP79-00999A000400040013-3. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. The warning about "unreliable subjects" is in the same officer's assessment of SRI, CIA-RDP96-00787R000700090008-0. ↩︎
Memorandum for the record, "Operational Use of Paranormals in Police Activities," undated, author redacted, Office of Technical Service, CIA-RDP96-00787R000200130013-4. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. ↩︎
Puthoff, Harold E., Russell Targ, Edwin C. May and Ingo Swann. Advanced Threat Technique Assessment, final report, October 1978, covering April 18, 1977 to April 15, 1978, SRI Project 5309, 132 pp., classified by DIA (OT), CIA-RDP96-00788R001300040001-4 and CIA-RDP96-00791R000200270001-7, the submersible section and figures 10 to 13. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. ↩︎
Schnabel, Remote Viewers, 1997, chapter on the Deep Quest experiments. ↩︎
Jacobsen, Annie. Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. Little, Brown and Company, 2017, pp. 196-199. ↩︎
Special Activities Office, U.S. Army Materiel Systems Analysis Activity, memorandum for record, "Visit of AMSAA GRILL FLAME Participants to SRI, 21-22 August 1979," DRXSY-DS, September 19, 1979, CIA-RDP96-00788R002000240011-3. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. ↩︎
Schnabel, Remote Viewers, 1997, chapters on Swann's training program and on SRI's internal politics. ↩︎
Safransky, "Hella Hammid," The Sun, August 1992. ↩︎

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