Five-Letter Vessel and the DEA's Psychic Tracker
By Eleanor Voss ·
Kept secret for decades, the record shows the DEA using a remote viewer to track contraband through the Caribbean, though analysts warned the results were biased
Cocaine shipments in the late eighties did not just cost lives in the streets of Miami; they cost the federal government its grip on conventional intelligence. When the tide of contraband became a flood, the government stopped relying solely on radar and informants and began paying people to see through walls and across oceans with their minds.
This was the operational reality of Project SUN SIREAK, the program managing these remote viewing sessions, though the record provides no further details on its funding or chain of command. On June 26, '09, a session was conducted to find a ghost: a suspected drug-smuggling vessel. The objective was not merely to find the boat, but to describe its secrets. The result was a report that focused less on the narcotics and more on the precarious psychology of the person trying to find them.
Below the Normal Hold
The target of the session was a vessel identified only by encrypted coordinates. The viewer tasked with the search, Viewer #095—an operative conducting these sessions whose further biography is not on file—was asked to report the status, location, destination, and origin of the ship. The viewer did not report a ship so much as a blueprint of concealment.
According to the record, "The contraband is stored in the vessel in a hold below the normal hold, i.e., below what is normally considered the bottom." This is the kind of detail that makes a Coast Guard boarding party change its tactics. The viewer noted that moisture was a "+ear" and that the smugglers had taken steps to make the containers "airtight and watertight." Most tellingly, the record states the contraband was refined and "mixed with a chemical that evaporates off."
This precision is where the document earns its tension. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the federal agency under the Department of Justice tasked with combating illicit drug trafficking, was not looking for a general area; they were looking for a specific cache. The viewer provided a visceral sense of the vessel's current state, reporting that it was "experiencing rocky side to-side motion and is within sight of a rock-faced coast."
Caribbean Preferences
The geography of the search followed a classic smuggling trajectory. The viewer placed the vessel "to the southeast a+ the Dominican Republic," the island country on the eastern part of Hispaniola. To establish a trail, the viewer looked backward, stating the vessel's prior location "was just south of Tobago," the island ward of Trinidad and Tobago.
But the analysts overseeing the session were not impressed by the geography. They were suspicious of it. A commentary in the record warns that "search results may be flawed, as viewer appeared to exhibit preconceived preference-for Caribbean/Florida area."
This is where the connection between the operative and the agency becomes the real story. The record reveals that Viewer #095 frequently performed target searches for the DEA. This was not a one-off experiment; it was a recurring professional relationship. The analyst noted that because of this "frequent repitition of the type of site," the viewer might be bypassing the usual stages of the remote viewing process and hitting the target immediately.
The desk's reading is that this "preference" was not a psychological flaw, but a sign that the target was already known. If the viewer was mirroring existing intelligence, she wasn't discovering a vessel; she was confirming a coordinate. The analysts' concern about "preconceived preference" suggests the DEA already had the ship on a map and was using Viewer #095 as a control for the methodology. The operative wasn't finding the boat—she was finding the answer the DEA already had.
The Signal Line
Much of the document is not about drugs, but about the plumbing of the paranormal. The analysts spent more time discussing "AOL" (Automatic On-Line) effects and "signal lines" than they did the contraband. They observed that upon the first iteration of coordinates, the viewer "seemed to demonstrate that she was immediately on the Gignal line," but then suffered from "internal editing" that led her astray.
This obsession with the process over the product marks the session as a methodological test. The record discusses the need for a "special-rase modification of CRY methodology" to better handle the tasking. This is the language of a laboratory, not a tactical operation. In a live pursuit, a lead on a hidden hold "below the normal hold" is actionable intelligence. In this file, it is treated as a data point to evaluate the effectiveness of the "S IV" stage of the viewing process.
If the shape of this file is what it appears to be, the vessel was a prop. The DEA provided the coordinates of a known ship to see if the viewer could describe the interior of the hull. The fact that the report focuses on the "S IV" and "AOL Drive" situations indicates that the project's true goal was the refinement of the tool, not the seizure of the drugs. The boat was simply the medium for the experiment.
A Five-Letter Name
The session ended with a move toward the United States. The viewer identified the final destination as "an long (n-s or island due east of Lake Okeechobee," the largest freshwater lake in Florida. A secondary, weaker signal was detected on the coast of Florida, the Southeastern state, "directly south of Tallahassee," the capital city.
Finally, the viewer attempted to name the target. The record states that "The name of the vessel at its final destination has five letters," and refers the reader to a sketch on page 11. However, the sketches on pages 10 and 11 are missing from the released text.
This gap is the most honest part of the record. The pattern of releasing session transcripts while withholding the primary visual evidence—the sketches—is a hallmark of these archives. The desk's reading is that the sketches contained non-verifiable or contradictory imagery. If the viewer had sketched a perfect silhouette of a known DEA target, it would be a triumph. If she sketched a cloud and a squiggle that the analyst desperately tried to interpret as a five-letter word, it would be an embarrassment. The redaction protects the project from the reality of the viewer's failure.
Furthermore, the analyst's note about "preconceived preference" functions as a bureaucratic liability hedge. By inserting a caveat about the viewer's bias toward Florida and the Caribbean, the program ensured that if the lead failed to produce a seizure, they could blame the operative's psychology rather than the failure of the remote viewing methodology itself. It is the classic intelligence move: build a window of plausible deniability into the report before the report even leaves the desk.
The pattern suggests that Project SUN SIREAK was not a weapon used to fight the drug war, but a program fighting for its own survival. The lack of any operational feedback loop—no report of a boarding, no seizure of refined contraband, no arrest of a crew—indicates that this session ended in a non-event. The DEA may have been the client, but the product was a series of technical exercises designed to justify a budget. The real cost was the time and resources diverted into a mirror-maze of "signal lines," while the actual vessels continued to sail into the Florida coast, regardless of how many letters were in their names.