THE CIRCULAR RIVER: THE R.E.C. EXPEDITION TO SIBERIA IN SEARCH OF PETER HESSELBACH, 1944-46

After the Russian counteroffensive that pushed the Germans back behind the Dnieper River following their defeat at Stalingrad in 1942, Peter Hesselbach was listed as missing. In actuality, it seems likely that he deserted from the army, which he detested, with the idea of traveling on foot to Mongolia. At some point in his wanderings he was captured and sent to a prison camp in Siberia, where he was interned for several months before he managed to escape. During his imprisonment, a change seems to have come over Peter; his diary records that he began to experience recurrent nightmares and gaps in his memory. Inspired by stories he’d heard in the camp, he resolved to head for an isolated section of eastern Siberia occupied by the Buryat tribe, a land bounded by a vast circular river and a ring of mountains: a land almost completely unknown to the west.

In the summer of 1944, the Royal Excavation Corps decided to dispatch an expedition to try and find Peter Hesselbach. The question of why the Corps decided to attempt travel to one of the most inhospitable regions on earth to search for an obscure ex-glider pilot from an enemy nation during wartime with is open to debate. Certainly Peter was very well liked, and had been a valuable asset to the Corps, but this seems slender justification for such a quixotic venture. And how did the REC even know where to search for Peter or even that he was missing? The answer to these questions lies in the psychic phenomenon that was at the heart of the REC’s wartime researches: remote viewing.

In July 1944, Tyler McWeeks, a remote viewer with the Corps, had a particularly clear remote viewing session. In it, a white man sat and watched a procession of Turkic-featured men wearing antlers march through a flat, featureless, boggy landscape under a blank grey sky. “I know you’re going to think I’m crazy, but the white man looked just like that German chap who designed gliders for us,” he told Corps head Gordon Bindon-Bhore in the subsequent debriefing. Further sessions drove the already over-excitable McWeeks into a frenzy: “He can see the future, he can unwind the past, he is dreaming this conversation! He can project himself anywhere in time, he is madness, he is fire, he sees the burning cities, walks their streets, he has touched the unspeakable!” Remote viewer Colin Brockman also found himself feeling this pull: “ . . . he [Hesselbach] grabs my face and stares into it until I am looking out of his eyes, seeing his visions . . .” As the more and more of the remote viewers were similarly effected, Bhore came to feel that Peter Hesselbach had somehow mastered the remote viewing phenomenon and other things beyond.

Gerrard Westcott, Bindon MacRupert, and Ian Brockman were selected to undertake the expedition to find Peter Hesselbach. Gordon Bindon-Bhore, always interested in gathering anthropological data, insisted that as a secondary objective, the expedition should photograph and study the customs and rituals of Siberian shamanism. To this end, he supplied the expedition with several panoramic cameras with the stipulation that they keep a photographic record of their progress. Ian Brockman, by far the most level-headed of the team, was placed in charge of keeping the expedition’s log. Finally, on June 2nd, 1944 the expedition set sail for America aboard the steamer Penelope; several weeks later, after a long journey by train, they had reached Alaska. From here a specially fitted cargo plane flew them into Siberia, and airdropped them into the featureless, blank expanse of North-eastern Siberia.