Dr. James Hardt (Interview Archive)
Retreat is a word you don't say in the military, so they called it a meditation encampment instead. The facility had a meditation hall, and that hall is where things got physical. Some of the men were willing to try the program and sat there quietly, contemplating their own navels, getting nowhere. Others, and remember these were action-oriented soldiers, flat-out refused. One would say this is nonsense, I'm not sitting here. Another would tell him to give it a chance. It didn't take long before they were throwing punches at each other right there in the hall.
I had a chance to measure their brain waves on both sides of that encampment, before they left and again when they came back. The month was so stressful that their general alpha levels came out lower at the end than they had been at the start. Whatever meditation was supposed to do for these particular men, it wasn't doing it. So when they returned and got told they'd now be doing the technological version of meditation, plenty of them pushed back about as hard as a disciplined military man is allowed to.
What helped was a rank I hadn't known existed. For the duration they gave me a military rank that worked like this: whoever stood in the room with me, including the full bird colonel running the base, I automatically outranked by one step. That let me run the whole process on military discipline. Before long the men figured out the training touched things they actually cared about.
Skipping past the fine detail: once both 12-man teams had been through the Alpha One training, I left the equipment on the secret Army base for close to three months. Once a week they got a voluntary day, free to sleep in, swim, play ball, see their girlfriends, whatever they wanted. Two-thirds of them spent those days going back for more Biocybernaut alpha training because they saw it as serving their mission. They voted with their feet. They believed in it.
A few discoveries turned up along the way. Before the encampment I'd brought a portable unit and recorded four-channel EEG on all of them across three different baselines. Then I sat down with each man for a private half-hour to talk through his brain waves. One of the 24 showed a pattern I've come to call the angel pattern. Every single time I see it, I ask the person whether they see angels, and the answer is always yes.