Brown, Courtney

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Brown, Courtney

Courtney Brown, a professor of political science who has become known for his interest in UFOs and remote viewing, was born in the mid-1950s. He attended Rutgers University, where he majored in English. Following graduation in 1974, he earned his graduate degrees in political science from San Francisco State University (M.A., 1979) and Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri (Ph.D., 1982). He taught at the University of California at Los Angeles for two years (1984-86) before joining the faculty at Emory University in 1986. Along the way he had taken the basic course in transcendental meditation, a practice he continues to the present.

Quite apart from his expertise in political science, Brown developed an interest in what he terms "nonlinear interdependencies in human affairs," and in 1995 completed a book, Serpents in the Sand: Essays in the Nonlinear Nature of Politics and Human Destiny. He also developed an interest in remote viewing, a form of clairvoyance. In 1995 he also founded the Farsight Institute, which happened to coincide with the revelations of Project STAR GATE, the government-sponsored research on parapsychology that centered on remote viewing. It was the claim of the researchers that they had discovered a new perspective on psychic perception that could be taught to anyone and that offered more accurate results.

Brown was trained as a remote viewer by Edward Dames (who worked with the remote viewers at Project STAR GATE) of PSI-TECH, and also took courses at the Monroe Institute of Applied Sciences. Having mastered remote viewing, in March of 1996 Brown began to teach it at the institute. The current program offering is in Scientific Remote Viewing, which he describes as a trainable procedure that allows the person to extract data for distant locations and across time. The shifting of awareness occurs while in the waking state and does not involve trance.

Brown himself has produced two books from his experiences in remote viewing, Cosmic Voyage: A Scientific Discovery of Extraterrestrials Visiting Earth (1996) and its sequel, Cosmic Explorers: Scientific Remote Viewing, Extraterrestrials, and a Message for Mankind (1999). In these books he asserts that Martians now live among us and seek out help, and that the television series Star Trek was inspired by aliens as a means to prepare humanity for contact with extraterrestrials. In material that resembles channeling, he also claims contact with Jesus, Buddha, and Guru Dev (the Guru of Maharishi Mehesh Yogi, who brought transcendental meditation to the West).

Brown's opinions inadvertently led to his involvement in an unfortunate affair in 1997. In November of 1996, he was a guest on the Art Bell Show, a late-night radio show that features interviews with people who espouse a variety of psychic experiences. That evening the question arose of a photograph of the recently discovered Hale-Bopp comet. The photo seemed to show a white circular object following the comet. Brown stated emphatically that the object was a spacecraft. As it turned out, Brown's statement found its way to a small group of believers in San Diego, California, who were looking for a spaceship to arrive and carry them away from Earth. Their belief in his statement became one factor leading to the mass suicide of the Heaven's Gate group at the spring equinox. Brown was, of course, in no way responsible for the suicide; his statement just happened to fit into their worldview.