Courtney Brown

Biography

Brown claims to be a psychic. He says he has applied remote viewing to the study of multiple universes, UFOs, Atlantis and even Jesus Christ whom he claims to have met.[1]

Brown is the owner of The Farsight Institute, an organization which investigates remote viewing experiments and supports quantum woo, aliens, Atlantis, Mu, crackpot conspiracy theories and failed 2012 apocalypse predictions.[2]

Brown is an associate professor of political science at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.[3] The university has denounced his crank theories and pseudoscientific work into remote viewing. Brown has said that his research into remote viewing is not related to Emory. His fellow scientists from Emory have highlighted flaws in his remote viewing experiments and criticized his work as pseudoscience.[4] Notably, while he has received several fraternity teaching awards and continued to publish books and articles related to his formal research interests in the quantitative social sciences, he has not been promoted to full professor (usually a bureaucratic formality for tenured faculty who have published two or more peer-reviewed books related to their disciplinary interests) since receiving his current appointment in 1992.[5]

Brown is the author of the book Cosmic Voyages: A Scientific Discovery of Extraterrestrials Visiting Earth which Brown claimed to use powers of "remote viewing" (an alleged psychic ability permitting individuals to "see" objects at enormous distances) to visit Mars and observe the actions of aliens. He purports to have uncovered evidence that two races of extraterrestrials, Martians and Greys who moved from Mars to live in the dark recesses of Earth. He claims that Adam and Eve were architects of a "genetic engineering project" and that numerous Star Trek episodes were written with the assistance of aliens.[6]

Science writer Kurt Butler has written regarding Brown's Cosmic Voyages:

The book is reminiscent of the classic science fiction novel Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. However, it is subtitled A Scientific Discovery of Extraterrestrials Visiting Earth and sold as nonfiction. This makes the book a hoax. Brown is apparently sincere and has said that his career in academia is over if NASA’s Martian probes do not confirm his claims. He is clearly delusional and his plight may be an example of the havoc TM can wreak on mental health.[7]

An article by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) wrote that Brown's nonsensical beliefs from remote viewing about alien races and Martian civilizations is a case of self-deception.[8]

Adolf Hitler

Brown believes he can remote view into the past. He claims to have remote reviewed into Adolf Hitler's mind. In two crazy YouTube videos he describes his experiences.[9][10]

The Hale-Bopp fiasco

Brown was the origin of the myth that there was an alien object following the comet Hale-Bopp, leading eventually to the mass suicide of the members of Heaven's Gate.[11][12][13]

He developed this idea as a result of remote viewing sessions at the Farsight Institute, saying "The remote viewing results clearly suggest that the object was artificial in nature, and that it was under intelligent control."[14] His report, on the overnight radio show Coast to Coast AM, created a sensation that the Heaven's Gate loonies evidently treated as though it were established fact. The mass suicide was reported by them as a way of traveling to the alien object.

Whether or not Courtney Brown was responsible, or partly responsible, for the Heaven's Gate deaths has been a hot item on the Internet debate stage ever since. Keep an open mind, folks, just don't let your brains fall out.

Publications
  • Serpents in the Sand: Essays in the Nonlinear Nature of Politics and Human Destiny (1995)
  • Cosmic Voyage: A Scientific Discovery of Extraterrestrials Visiting Earth (1996)
  • Remote Viewing: The Science and Theory of Nonphysical Perception (2005)
  • Politics in Music: Music and Political Transformation From Beethoven to Hip-Hop (2007)
gollark: Lua does.
gollark: Also, just using `==` to compare ~~a password and hash~~ secret values of some kind is actually somewhat unsafe because timing channel attacks.
gollark: 2 xor 1024?
gollark: Password hashing algorithms generally let you pass the salt as a separate parameter.
gollark: Anyway, good password hashing algorithms are designed to be hard to parallelize, and to require large amounts of memory, so that they're hard to implement on FPGAs/ASICs/GPUs and run fastest on general-purpose CPU hardware (this is what your server has).

References
  1. Shermer, Michael. (2002). The Borderlands of Science: Where Sense Meets Nonsense. Oxford University Press. pp. 3-4
  2. The Farsight Institute
  3. Courtney Brown at Emory University
  4. The Courtney Brown affair and academic freedom
  5. http://polisci.emory.edu/home/people/biography/brown-courtney.html
  6. Remote Viewer Courtney Brown has Critics at Emory
  7. Butler, Kurt. (1999). Lying for Fun and Profit: The Truth about the Media: Exposes the Corrupt Symbiosis Between Media Giants and the Health Fraud Industries. Health Wise Productions. p. 62. ISBN 978-0967328102
  8. Remote Viewing
  9. Inside the Mind of Adolf Hilter, Remote Viewing the Fuhrer, Dr Courtney Brown
  10. Courtney Brown - Adolf Hitler: Remote Viewing a Mass Murderer
  11. Exposing Pseudoastronomy Podcast Episode 127: The Saga of Comet Hale-Bopp and its Fugacious Companion, Part 1: 2 March 2015
  12. Exposing Pseudoastronomy Podcast Episode 128: The Saga of Comet Hale-Bopp and its Fugacious Companion, Part 2: 14 March 2015
  13. Exposing Pseudoastronomy Podcast Episode 129: The Saga of Comet Hale-Bopp and its Fugacious Companion, Part 3: 1 April 2015
  14. Official statement 20 January 1997
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