Editor’s Introduction

Stephan A. Schwartz (real name) is a self-taught polymath with two published books on the scientific and practical application of remote viewing to archeology and 32 peer-reviewed journal publications and technical reports in the fields of international strategy, geopolitical analysis, maritime affairs, anthropology, archaeology, innovation and technology, and history. His collected papers will be published in early 2001. He is presently a Research Associate with Cognitive Sciences Laboratories. Previously he served as a Special Assistant for Research and Analysis to the Chief of Naval Operations under Admirals Zumwalt and Holloway (for which he received a Certificate of Commendation) and a Consultant to the Oceanographer of the Navy. He conducted research on intuitive and paranormal functioning while Chairman and Research Director of The Mobius Society from 1977-1992 and was a Visiting Professor at John F. Kennedy University from 1981-1983, as well as being Editor-in-Chief of Subtle Energies, the Journal of the International Society for Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine (ISSEEM). He has been an officer of both ISSEEM and the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness (SAC), for both of which he was a founder.

This experience, quite unexpected, happened shortly after he had finished a tour of duty in the Army.

Meeting Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather
Stephan A. Schwartz

In 1965 I had finished my tour in the service and was working as a reporter for both The Daily Press and the Times Herald in Hampton/Newport News, Virginia, when a man my age — about 23 — showed up at my family’s farm. Strangers showing up was very unusual since we lived at the end of a long lane, at the end of a n unpaved school bus road in Gloucester County, then very rural. Paul Ronder was a newly minted graduate of a New York film school who had gone to Williamsburg to produce a movie about the Revolutionary Period. We got to talking and the end result was that I agreed to write his movie with him.

We launched into the work with a will and I started making frequent trips to Williamsburg. What made the project particularly intriguing is that my mother’s family had been in the area since the 1600s and I was told that there was even a house in the colonial restoration area where a great-great-great-great grand father of mine had lived.

I got into the habit when I was down there of walking through the old town late at night, when all the tourists were abed, and the streets and houses, looked much as they had in the 1700s. One night in the fall I was walking and came around a corner. About 100 feet in front of me a man was walking. He was dressed in colonial garb with a tricornered hat. I took him to be an employee of the Williamsburg Foundation walking home after a long day. The employees who work in the restored area live in the houses, and wear period clothing.

We went along for a while companionably; nothing was said, and I thought he was unaware that I was behind him, although my footsteps on the brick walk seemed very loud to me. Since I walked faster than he, the distance between us shortened, and I was only a few feet behind him when he stopped at one of the houses and walked up the stoop. As he got to the door, he turned and, in the light of the moon, for the first time seemed to see me. We made eye contact which we held for a beat or two. Then he smiled, doffed his hat and turned back to the door. He reached out his hand for the knob… and walked through the door. Through the door. It never opened. I was left standing on the street with goose bumps and a dawning sense of what I had just seen.

The next day I went over to the Foundation offices to see the historian who had been assigned to help me with the details of the story. I told him what had happened. He asked which house and he looked at me very oddly. Then he left the room and came back with a large book. “Was this the man?” he asked. It was. John Watson, my grandfather many times removed.

Contributor’s Comments on the Experience

Over the years, as I have thought about this experience, what stays with me most is not that I saw a ghost. But that there is no question in my mind that he saw me. I saw a man in clothing out of my time; what, I wonder, did he see?