Welcome to Unexplained Extra with Me, Richard acclaimed Smith, where for the weeks in between episodes, we look at stories and ideas that, for one reason or other, didn't make it into the previous show. In our last episode, Mobius Stripped, we learned about the curious work of Stephen A. Schwartz and his fascination with the nature of human consciousness. Over decades of work in various fields, Schwartz has become convinced that all life is interconnected and that consciousness is not
a local thing that exists only within ourselves. Instead, according to Schwartz, that sense of consciousness that we experience individually is in fact part of a much larger universal plane of consciousness that we can supposedly access. Schwartz has dedicated much of his time to researching the possibilities of remote viewing, a practice that has been described as the ability to acquire information about spatially and temporally remote geographical targets otherwise
inaccessible by any known sensory means. It is Schwartz's belief that it is the existence of a universal consciousness that enables people to successfully perform remote viewing by essentially allowing their minds to wander through it with the potential to
effectively see things happening anywhere at any time. At first, Schwartz directed his attention to the past, asking participants in a number of experiments such as the Alexandria Project as featured in last week's episode, to see if they could use remote viewing to look back in time. Then, in nineteen eight, satisfied that this was indeed possible, he had an epiphany. If experienced remote viewers could look back in time, could they also look into the future, And so he
decided to try and find out. Throughout the late nineteen sixties and seventies, Stephen Schwartz occupied a number of roles within the American geopolitical community. At some point in the nineteen seventies, the US Secretary of Defense at the time and the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology invited Schwartz to take part in a committee they were putting
together under the label Innovation, Technology and the Future. After taking part, Schwartz became fascinated with future studies, or strategic foresight, as it is also known, the study of potential social and technological advancement. Futurists are concerned with predicting future trends, and often work closely with governments and businesses analyzing relevant data to try and make predictions about future local and
global landscapes. To try and stay ahead of the curve with its unwieldy and highly unpredictable subject matter, considering all the many variables and unforeseen consequences that might impact what happens in the future, most futurists prefer their analysis to be based on solid, tangible facts and quantifiably predictive data.
There certainly little appetite within the future studies community for trying to apply something so numinous and scientifically nebulous as so called remote viewing, to the equation, but Schwartz had other ideas. In nineteen seventy nine, fresh from the apparent successes of his various remote viewing experiments through the Mobius Project, he began gathering participants for a new study, which would
become known as the twenty fifty Project. From nineteen seventy nine to nineteen ninety one, over four thousand people would take part in it from countries all over the world, including Russia, Germany, France, Jamaica, Mexico, Canada, and the United States. The participants were also drawn from all manner of backgrounds, from scientists and engineers to stay at home individuals, government bureaucrats,
and medical doctors. All were given the same simple instruction to enter a meditative state and imagine themselves on the same exact day they were undertaking the exercise, but the year twenty fifty, and then tell Schwartz what they saw there. Incredibly, despite the various professional, cultural, and geographical differences of the participants, according to Schwartz, many of their answers were strikingly similar.
Whether you believe in the legitimacy of Schwartz's methods or not, or dispute what it was exactly that led the participants to say what they said, there's no denying the results certainly make for some startling reading. With the test subject placed in a comfortable setting, Stephen would wait for them to enter a meditative state and then invite them to
try and send their mind into the future. Twelve percent of those who participated immediately claimed they were unable to do so since they no longer existed in the year twenty fifty. Those that did would invariably get to a point when they claimed to have arrived in the assigned temporal location, at which point Stephen would begin his interviews.
His method was to make sure never to offer a leading question that could influence the answer, So rather than ask what does your house look like, for example, he would instead say something like, stand in front at the place where you sleep and tell me what it looks like, since it was always the first thing on his mind. Stephen would begin by asking the participants if there'd been a nuclear war, or if there was any evidence that such a thing had taken place. Time after time he
was staggered by their response. No, they would say, but that's not all. The Soviet Union has disappeared. It's hard to comprehend to day just how strange that sounded back in nineteen seventy nine when Schwartz began conducting the study, and at first he couldn't get his head around what that meant exactly. When he asked how and in what way,
the participants responded that it simply no longer existed. Rather than making the world a safer place, however, as Schwartz had hoped, according to the subjects, the disintegration of the Soviet Union had led to a far less stable world. Prone to increased incidences of terrorism. Schwartz then asked his participants to detail the other major concerns of the day
with regards to global safety. All unanimously stated that the main threats were outbreaks of disease and infection, which would lead to numerous epidemics that plagued the globe for many years.
The first of these would be a blood disease, which they described as something that had crossed over from primates to humans at the time nineteen seventy nine nineteen eighty When the participants first started reporting this, Stephen apparently consulted a friend of his, who worked as the deputy director of cardiovascular research at the US's National Institute of Health, to ask if he knew of any such thing currently in circulation in the global population. He knew of nothing
like it. It was sometime later in the June nineteen eighty one edition of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report published by the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that five young men in Los Angeles, California, were reportedly being treated with strange cases of pneumocystis pneumonia. Two would die soon after. All were around thirty years old with
no previous health complications. The five men are thought to be the first reported individuals in America to have been infected with HIV, and the apparent revelations kept on coming. When Schwartz asked his participants again back no later than nineteen ninety one, but most from nineteen seventy nine and the early eighties, how people traveled, the response was again surprising. Overwhelmingly, the subjects responded that people didn't travel much at all
since technology had read did it mostly unnecessary? How so Stephen had asked, well, they would reply, there was a sort of apparatus you could use to project yourself into other spaces, like a kind of virtual reality. You could have meetings there or communicate with loved ones. Computers too, or at least the peculiar devices they saw that resembled computers in their functionality were no longer huge, unwieldy things, but small and pocket sized that you could easily carry
around with you on a daily basis. Concern about the climate was a frequent topic of conversation. By twenty fifty, many said we no longer burned carbon. As a result, all air travel had been significantly reduced cars were not so much cars, but devices constructed from a combination of a chassis and another device that was some kind of box that powered it like a battery. The same device
was used to power houses and larger buildings too. A much changed climate had also apparently left many coastal towns under water, and in places where the temperature had become too hot to exist in the ways were used to large domes had been built to regulate the climate inside, much in the manner say as Dubai's More of the
World project, which was first proposed in twenty sixteen. Many also described a world in which pharmacological medicine had almost disappeared, since most genetic predispositions such as cystic fibrosis or muscular dystrophy had been engineered out before birth. As for governments, they still exist, but the processes of power were much
changed and much more devolved. In the US specifically, although a federal government was said to exist, most power was exercised by the states or larger bioregions that had vested ecological reasons to keep their policies aligned. All in all, they said the global population was much smaller, and cities had become relatively smaller too, with people choosing instead to live in communities or communes with others who shared their
values and interests. This in turn had led to a hardening and tribal attitudes, since people tended to travel less and mix with other people outside of their chosen spheres of interest. Despite the increased polarization and entrenched views, many participants nonetheless reported that twenty fifty world in which gender imbalances had been largely eradicated, but one in which that had also been a complete shift in the way that gender was defined. This comprises only a fraction of what
Stephen Schwartz gleaned from his research. You can find out more by searching the twenty fifty Project online. Thank you to Diane Hope for suggesting this week's story Unexplained. The book and audiobook, featuring stories that have never before been featured on the show, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes, and Noble Waterstones, among other bookstores. All elements have Unexplained, including the show's music,
are produced by me Richard McClain Smith. Please subscribe and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share. You can reach us online at Unexplained podcast dot com or Twitter at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at Facebook dot com. Forward slash Unexplained Podcast