The meetings began in 1995, in a conference room in an office tower near the Las Vegas airport. The group started small: there were a handful of scientists and engineers; there was a CIA spy. There was a former Army colonel, and two Apollo astronauts.
And there was the person who’d hand-picked the group and invited them to Las Vegas: Robert Bigelow, a Nevada real-estate magnate. He wanted to talk about aliens.
Bigelow, just turning 50 at the time, had made enough money as a commercial developer, opening budget hotels across the Southwest, that he could finally indulge a fascination with UFOs that dated back years, to a close encounter his grandparents had experienced and told him about when he was three years old. He dubbed the group, somewhat grandly, the National Institute for Discovery Science.
NIDS, as it took shape in those Las Vegas meetings, was mainly interested in two topics: UFOs and consciousness after death. Its members were experts who had gotten used to having their interests disrespected by their peers. The group’s co-founder was John Alexander, a retired Army officer who worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and had published books and articles on various aspects of ufology and the paranormal. Another was Hal Puthoff, an engineer and self-described parapsychologist who, while at the Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s and 1980s, had carried out top secret experiments for the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency on “remote viewing,” or using the human mind to sense objects or events far away. “One of the professors at Stanford thought that was all nonsense,” he said. “He wouldn’t let his kids play with my kids because of what I was doing.”
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