Jim Schnabel

Jim Schnabel is a journalist, author and science writer who published Round in Circles (1993), on the crop formations of Wiltshire and the people drawn to them, Dark White (1994), on alien abduction claims, Remote Viewers (1997), a history of the Stargate Project, and Forever Young (1998), on the science of aging. He wrote and narrated the Channel 4 documentary The Real X-Files, first broadcast in 1995, and has written science articles for Nature, Science and New Scientist.¹

Books

Round in Circles: Poltergeists, Pranksters, and the Secret History of the Cropwatchers was published in London by Hamish Hamilton in 1993 and in Amherst, New York by Prometheus Books in 1994. The Prometheus edition runs to xi and 293 pages with eight pages of plates.²

Dark White: Aliens, Abductions, and the UFO Obsession was published in London by Hamish Hamilton in 1994 (303 pages) and later issued by Penguin Books.³

Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies was published by Dell Publishing in January 1997. Schnabel has described the research and writing as taking place from 1993 to 1996. The book follows the program from the Stanford Research Institute contract work that Hal Puthoff began in 1972 through the U.S. Army unit at Fort Meade.⁴

Forever Young: Science and the Search for Immortality was published by Bloomsbury in 1998. A German edition of Remote Viewers, Geheimwaffe Gehirn: Die PSI-Agenten des CIA, was published by Herbig in 1998.⁵

Remote Viewers and its sources

The list of interview sources in Remote Viewers includes Fred "Skip" Atwater, Hal Puthoff, Ingo Swann, Joe McMoneagle, Uri Geller, Keith Harary and Michael Persinger, among others. The list states that a number of sources who spoke on background are not named in it, and that not all those listed spoke on the record all the time.⁶

The acknowledgments single out Atwater, Puthoff, Mel Riley, and Edmund Thompson as "heroically cooperative" sources to whom the author owed "a special debt."⁶

The book uses pseudonyms for a number of the people it names. Its notes state that certain names in the text are pseudonyms, and a "Pseudonyms" page near the end of the book identifies them.⁷

The acknowledgments thank the INSCOM Freedom of Information Act office and the Fort Bragg FOIA office. The chapter notes describe a set of memoranda summarizing Project Landbroker, cited under 1984, as "Released to the author after a FOIA request, 1995. Pages heavily redacted." The notes on the case of David Morehouse describe the court-martial case file and a set of INSCOM investigation documents as "available by requests under the Freedom of Information Act."⁸

The Real X-Files and the Stargate records of 1995

In a memorandum of May 30, 1995, Joe McMoneagle described a series of calls from Schnabel over the preceding eight months, six or seven by his count, and wrote that Schnabel had at first said he was interested only in the science side of the subject. McMoneagle wrote that he learned Schnabel would attend a Gateway seminar at the Monroe Institute in May 1995 and had seen his name on the participant list. He wrote that Schnabel gave himself as the writer of a program for Channel 4 on the history of remote viewing, covering the CIA's Project Scanate and the Army unit at Fort Meade, with a live remote viewing to close the second part.⁹

McMoneagle wrote that he declined to take part, and that he believed Schnabel "wasn't entirely open and honest with me during those conversations." He wrote that Schnabel told him the producer would guarantee in writing that McMoneagle would not be linked to military or Cold War issues if he performed the live remote viewing. He wrote that Schnabel said he had made promises to protect others, naming Puthoff among them, and that Schnabel said he had spoken with Harary. McMoneagle also wrote that Schnabel said he had a film of three experimental remote viewings McMoneagle had done at the Monroe Institute in 1983, which had been forwarded to Schnabel by a person whose name is redacted.⁹

On May 31, 1995, Edwin May of the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory in Palo Alto wrote a memorandum about Schnabel's approach to the program. May wrote that Schnabel was preparing a piece for Channel 4 that would cover Project Scanate and the Army's remote-viewing unit, that Schnabel listed five individuals by name, all retired from the program, and that Schnabel had also named some current personnel and retired senior officials. May wrote that it was his impression that Schnabel and Channel 4 were interested in an exposé.¹⁰

Schnabel wrote and narrated The Real X-Files, a one-hour documentary for Channel 4 directed by Bill Eagles, with Alex Graham of Wall to Wall as executive producer. It was first broadcast on August 27, 1995. An edited version was broadcast in the United States on the Discovery Channel on March 12, 1996.¹¹

His article "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Psi" ran in the Independent on Sunday's Sunday Review on August 27, 1995, pages 10 to 13. A CIA memorandum of August 28, 1995, filed in the STARGATE collection, circulated a Foreign Broadcast Information Service transcription of the article. The reference line of the memorandum reads "FYI. Interesting stuff."¹² Schnabel has written that the feature "got some official attention."⁴

In a memorandum of September 21, 1995, May wrote that he had obtained a videotape of the program, that it presented Schnabel's written piece in video form and featured Mel Riley and Ed Dames with interviews of Thompson, Adm. Turner, Puthoff, Lyn Buchanan and John Alexander, and that in his opinion "the show is sensational and makes no attempt to separate fact from fiction." May added that he had been told the producers of ABC News 20/20 had seen the Schnabel tape.¹³

Crop circles

Round in Circles examines crop circles around the world and the people drawn to them.²

In July 1992 Schnabel took second place in a circlemaking competition held at West Wycombe on July 11 and 12, and wrote "The Art of Circular Science" for The Cerealogist no. 7 (Harvest 1992). In November 1992 the MUFON UFO Journal, edited by Dennis Stacy, printed his article "Confessions of a Crop Circle Spy," five pages long, which recounts telephone conversations with a caller using the name Ntumba, whom Schnabel wrote that the photographer Rob Irving recognized as Henry Azadehdel, also known as Armen Victorian. Schnabel wrote that in a light-hearted moment he had suggested to the caller "that yes, it was all true, he was indeed a spy."¹⁴

The Circular, the journal of the Centre for Crop Circle Studies edited by George Wingfield, prepared an interview with Schnabel recorded by Victorian. The introduction to that interview, as reprinted by Bill Eatwell in the HUFON Report of the Houston UFO Network, stated that Schnabel had written an item in The Washington Post in 1991, had collaborated with Irving on a piece for the Independent Magazine implying that many major mid-Wiltshire formations were the work of the UBI group, and was a postgraduate student in sociology at the University of Bath, with a connection to Lincoln College, Oxford that the college had said at the beginning of 1992 no longer existed. The introduction presented the recording as Schnabel revealing himself as a paid disinformation agent for an unnamed Western intelligence organization, and stated that Schnabel now denied it and had telephoned to say he had been "winding up" Victorian.¹⁴

Eatwell wrote that Wingfield gave him a copy of the interview in October 1992 and said that his English publisher, Michael Green, had pulled it from The Circular. Eatwell wrote that on comparing the interview with Schnabel's account of it, some sentences were not word for word, and that Schnabel's article contained a statement about "ultra-secret Stars Wars weapons testing" that he could not find in the interview text.¹⁴

Journalism

A Science article listed on Schnabel's website is "New Alzheimer's therapy suggested," published June 18, 1993, pages 1719 to 1720.¹⁵ Later articles by Schnabel in Nature include "The sounds of silent movies" (August 5, 2008), "Neuroscience: Standard model" (August 2008), "Protein folding: The dark side of proteins" (April 7, 2010) and "Amyloid: Little proteins, big clues" (July 2011, in a Nature Outlook supplement).¹⁶ His website also lists articles for New Scientist, the Scripps Research magazine Endeavor, NYU Physician and the UNC Gillings School of Public Health, and the books Everything and Nothing: an introduction to quantum probability (Natura, 2012; revised as Quantum Theory and the Structure of Reality, 2023) and Age of Despair: Toxic Science and the End of History (Natura, 2024).¹

Reception

Susan Blackmore reviewed Dark White in Nature under the title "Minds possessed" on November 17, 1994.¹⁷ Praise for Dark White quoted on Schnabel's website is attributed to Anthony Clare in The Sunday Times ("His ironic, wry account contains all the classic UFO stories"), Boyd Tonkin in The New Statesman & Society and Jonathan Sale in the Independent on Sunday.¹⁸

Anthony Campbell's review of Dark White, carrying a 1999 copyright line, called the book "an excellent book on a difficult subject." Campbell wrote that the epilogue states Schnabel's position: "Here he makes it clear that he discounts the extra-terrestrial hypothesis."¹⁹

Robin Ramsay reviewed Remote Viewers in Lobster in the summer of 1997. He wrote that he approached the book "with some caution," that Armen Victorian and others were intensely suspicious of Schnabel's activities in the UFO and paranormal fields and "some suspect him of being a CIA asset," and that "On this I am an agnostic." He concluded: "But whatever Schnabel's role, he has written a very good book."²⁰