Despite the relative lack of depth on his remote viewing training course, and his obvious unwillingness to share any of his credentials as a remote viewer or remote viewing teacher whatsoever, O'Donnell seems to continue to enjoy a relatively steady interest in his product.

His main sales vehicle, his website, appears to be a very slick piece of marketing. Encased in double talk and carefully placed quotes, he appears to offer a substantial course at a substantial discount. Closer examination however, reveals that his accounts and stories are full of holes and wordplay, and that his course can hardly be expected to teach one remote viewing in any meaningful way. O'Donnel's visualization and self-affirmation techniques bear little to no resemblance whatsoever to established military remote viewing protocols.

In fact, on his site O'Donnell claims that one of his associates by the name of "Jason," directly talked with an entity called "The One" in some sort of remote viewing session back in October of 1989. In 1989, the original military remote viewing project was still operating as a classified, active unit. It seems highly unlikely that at this time either O'Donnell or "Jason" would have been privy to either classified U.S. Army remote viewing protocols, or that another "unnamed Western European country" in which O'Donnell was serving would have been developing its own remote viewing training. In addition, it seems unlikely that someone with such intimate access to the government of a highly-developed Western European country would reside in the state of Florida. It also appears odd that he discusses the U.S. Army's publicly available results and experiments in such detail, while completely avoiding any detail whatsoever of his own "European experiences." He claims to be an instructor for that group, but offers none of his own anecdotal insights on how he stumbled across such a mental breakthrough.

Which is the more uncomfortable realization, that O'Donnell is fabricating his remote viewing background and/or techniques, or that he genuinely believes he has special abilities and has been regularly communicating with unseen, unidentified beings solely through his mind, I leave up to the reader to decide.

Most importanly however remains the issue of his training cassettes. From several sources we have heard of negative results gained from O'Donnell's tapes, and not one positive report. This meshes cleanly with reports from other areas of the remote viewing phenomenon. Lyn Buchanan, a bona-fide member of the original U.S. Army remote viewing unit, had this to say regarding Gerald O'Donnell:

From: Lyn Buchanan
Date: Sat Jan 1, 2000 3:35am
Subject: [stargate] Re: who are these guys???

Back about 4 years ago, I got a message from Mr. Gerald O'Donnell which asked me to put a link to his page on mine and told me that he was in the military unit with me, and that he took part in all our activities, and something to the effect that his job was so secret that even the people in the unit didn't know he was one of us, etc. etc. etc. I investigated his claims and then wrote him back and told him that I knew they were untrue, and that I would not put a link to his page on mine.

I had just been offered a goodly sum of money by another person to say that he was in our unit, to give him credibility, so he could start charging people for training tapes. I had been surprised that there were people out there so ready to bilk the public, and when the message came in from O'Donnell, I warned him that if he went around telling everyone that he was a member of our unit, just so he could sell things, I would expose him.

He wrote back, saying that he was actually a member of another country's unit, and castigated me for not knowing that there were other countries in the world. Everything he said in this message contradicted what he had originally claimed in the previous message about his participation in the US unit.

About 6 months after that, someone wrote to me asking about him, saying that he was selling audio tapes for $89 which would teach you everything there was to know about remote viewing in the span of 6 hours or so. They wanted to know what I knew of him and his tapes. I took a look at O'Donnell's page and found it to be very misleading. While it did say that he was a member of another country's unit, the wording was crafted in such a way, that you almost had to be an English major to not come away with the belief that he was in the US unit. Anyway, I felt that O'Donnell had crossed the line, and so I copied the question and my answer onto my web site. In my answer, I basically said that I felt that O'Donnell had not be in the US unit, and that his page was misleading, and that the reader should be cautious. As for the tapes, I hadn't heard them, so couldn't comment. I have left that Q&A page on my server, but I long ago deleted it from the web site menu - so it can't be reached in the normal manner. If you want to look at it, the file is at: http://www.crviewer.com/pj-crv-site-pages/gerald.html

About a month later, I got another message from O'Donnell, threatening to sue me in court, and that if I didn't take the Q&A page off, he would ruin my name. I put a copy of his message and my response onto my web site (and have long since taken it off my site for lack of interest.) He responded by putting a huge and very slanderous tyrade about me on his web site (it's still there, if you want to see it), and I got a few more private messages from him threatening legal action, etc. There was even one in which I was CC'd on a message he wrote to someone else, saying that I was a fraud, liar and cheat, etc.

In other words, when caught in a lie, he countered with sound and fury.

I have had several of my incoming students tell me that they had bought his tapes. So far, none of them have given him or the tapes decent reviews. That is all I know about the tapes - still haven't heard them, and so can't really give a valid critique.