So he set out to test what he called the Conscious Unified Field Hypothesis, according to which the human mind can affect reality in tangible, seemingly impossible ways. His father, the nuclear physicist, helped him set up his main experiment: Farwell put a sample of plutonium inside a particle detector, and then he sat beside it. “My task was to command matter through consciousness,” he wrote, “to bring order into the otherwise random process of quantum particle emission, using nothing but the influence of consciousness alone.”
The book describes what happened next: Farwell sat there for a while in total silence, trying to affect the particles with his mind. A set of bar graphs fluctuated on a monitor, showing the time intervals between each release of alpha particles from the plutonium. If he could affect those intervals with his mind—that is to say, if he could exert his will over the timing of radioactive decay—then he’d have proved his theory. Sure enough, the intervals began to shift, he told me. Farwell’s mind had changed the intervals enough that he felt able to conclude—with “99.98 percent confidence,” no less—that “consciousness can and does command matter at the quantum-mechanical level.”
In Farwell’s words, he’d proved that “what has been taken to be the whole of reality in recent millennia is merely a tiny portion of reality.” That means we can all be pioneers in the exploration of higher states of consciousness, he said: “You can create the life you want. … The resources at your command are truly infinite.”
Despite this revelation, and the infinite resources that were now at his command, Farwell never found broad acceptance for his lie-detecting technology. (Nor has he found much support for his theory about the conscious control of matter.) Interest in the P300 method did resurge after 9/11, and Farwell reorganized his company to sell brain fingerprinting as a service. He says he’s made a living off that work, though he won’t discuss specific clients. (“Being in the field I’m in, there are things I can’t talk about,” he said.) Still, the business has not been as successful as he’d hoped—a fact he blames on the conservatism of the scientific establishment. On his personal website, he compares the discovery of brain fingerprinting to the invention of the airplane, claiming that it can take decades for people to grasp the significance of such a major innovation. “Those whose status or finances depend on the old ways of doing things” will always oppose scientific progress, he says, and brain fingerprinting is no exception to this rule. Still, “science always moves forward, and not backward,” he adds, “and the truth always wins in the end.”
It must have seemed providential, then, when Farwell heard from Krishna Ika in 2012. A noted swami in India, who happened to be a mutual friend, had tipped off Ika to Farwell’s work on P300s. Ika got in touch to propose a partnership: He would improve and try to automate the lie-detection technology—by simplifying the user interface, for example, and making the sensor helmet wireless—so that he and Farwell could market brain fingerprinting more effectively to an international clientele. Farwell agreed, and signed on as the “director and chief scientist” for a new company, Brainwave Science. According to Ika, Farwell signed over the patents for his technology in exchange for a 45 percent stake in Brainwave and a $10,000-per-month consulting fee. Ika also freshened up Farwell’s own marketing material with a heavy helping of B-school gobbledygook, noting, for example, that brain fingerprinting could help a client to “maximize intelligence collection disciplines across various security verticals” and “leverage forensic capabilities to unprecedented levels.”
Subu Kota, the espionage-linked businessman, joined Brainwave as a board member in 2013. In August 2014, Ika announced Brainwave’s official worldwide launch, claiming to have sold Farwell’s technology to police in Singapore and to a police department in Florida. In February 2016, Brainwave added Michael Flynn—who had been fired from his post as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency around the time of the company launch—to its advisory board. Two months after that, a friend of Flynn’s named Brian McCauley, who had just retired from the FBI, joined the board as well.
McCauley’s presence on the board would soon provide evidence for the interconnectedness of all things, or at least the interconnectedness of all scandalous shenanigans in Washington. In mid-October, the Washington Post reported on McCauley’s link to Hillary Clinton’s private email server and to documents related to the attack in Benghazi. In 2015, while still at the FBI, McCauley had proposed trading favors with the State Department, whereby the bureau would agree not to classify a Benghazi-related message from Clinton’s server. (He says that he quickly rescinded the offer when he learned the contents of the email.) Both McCauley’s and Flynn’s names have lately disappeared from the Brainwave website. Ika says they had to sever ties because both had taken jobs in the Trump administration.
Farwell, for his part, now asserts that he was duped by Brainwave. Ika lied, he said. He’d told Farwell that Brainwave would sell his brain-fingerprinting technology around the world, but then the company started offering customers something else—“a counterfeit technology that does not meet the peer-reviewed, published Brain Fingerprinting Scientific Standards.” Brainwave’s lie-detector wasn’t just a fraudulent knockoff of his product, Farwell says, but one that Ika “never succeeded in selling … to anyone.” In September, he emailed Flynn, still a Brainwave adviser, to warn the lieutenant general that the company’s fake lie detectors might pose a danger to national security. He first tried to leave the company in 2014, he adds, but wasn’t able to “extricate [himself] completely” until last summer. Despite these efforts to cut ties, the Brainwave website still includes a list of Farwell’s publications as well as his press clips and bold claims of the P300-MERMER’s “nearly infallible degree of accuracy.”
And while we’re at it, how much did Hillary Clinton know about Benghazi?
According to Ika, that story has it backward: Farwell is the one who lied. Ika says that most of Farwell’s patents had already expired when their deal was signed—and that Farwell hid this fact from him. In October 2013, Farwell reassigned the (mostly expired) patents from Brainwave Science back to their original owner, a company called American Scientific Innovations, run by one of his high school classmates from Seattle. (The patents have since been offloaded to another company affiliated with Farwell.) Ika claims that Farwell did not have the authority to make this transfer and that he falsely presented himself to the U.S. Patent Office as a “managing member of the company” so as to steal Brainwave’s intellectual property. After discovering the reassignment in July, Ika says, he called the FBI and terminated the consulting contract with Farwell.
Ika also stands behind his claim of having signed brain-fingerprinting contracts with police in Singapore and Florida—though it turns out that the latter deal, at least, began and ended with a free-trial period. No money was exchanged., and the technology was never put to use.
“I’ve told you the truth about Mr. Ika, and I take no pleasure in telling you those things,” Farwell told me in response to these claims and counterclaims of fraud. Ika’s version is rife with misinformation, in his telling. The original deal from 2012 was never signed, he says, so the original transfer of the patents was itself a fraudulent attempt to pilfer his intellectual property. Also: He and his business received 49 percent of Brainwave Science, not 45 percent as Ika claimed; and his consulting contract had been for $11,000 per month, as opposed to $10,000.
By this point what I’d understood to be the truth now seemed to be, as Farwell might say, “a tiny portion of reality.” I had no idea exactly who was lying and to what extent. Did Brainwave really sell its product to police in Singapore? Does Brainwave’s lie detector really work as advertised? Does Farwell’s? Who owns those patents, and why should that matter if they’re all expired anyway? How involved was Michael Flynn? Did Subu Kota sell secrets to the KGB? And while we’re at it, how much did Hillary Clinton know about Benghazi?
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