But what if there was a way to explore our planet that didn't put us in harm's way and was more stimulating than scrolling through Google Earth? And what if, while we were at it, we could storm Area 51 too?

Late last year, the internet was crackling with plans to stage a million-strong raid on the supposed alien stronghold, Area 51. Now, with the COVID-19 pandemic forcing everyone to quarantine at home, venturing farther than the local park seems like a dream from a lost reality.

Here's how he says it works: the traveller creates an “astral scape” by visualizing a location in great detail. How do you visualize somewhere you've never been? Well, you use your imagination.

A nineteen-year-old Wisconsinite who goes by Commander XXX told Motherboard via voice call that he started the subreddit (motto: “projection for protection”) because he was intrigued by the possibilities of group astral projection.

Reddit's /R/AstralArmy is a focal point for the psychically curious to embark on out-of-body “missions” to off-limits locations, including military bases, Wuhan, the Pentagon, and supposed hives of paranormal activity like Skinwalker Ranch . The idea is intriguing: if you could go anywhere at all, what secrets could you learn?

Today, thousands of practitioners not only trade success stories for consciousness-expanding cosmic exploration, but have built a network to share techniques for traversing time and space using a toolkit available to everyone—the human mind.

Falling somewhere between a lucid dream and a near-death experience, astral projection is the sensation of separating from your physical self, keeping your mind awake while your body is asleep . Early records of the practice trace back to the Roman Empire. Experiences feel profound, and astral travelers have even claimed to learn things they otherwise couldn't have known .

According to a group of paranormal enthusiasts on Reddit, astral projection could be the vehicle we need.

"Most people are pretty basic astral projectors," Commander said, amid a baffling explanation that their missions are not necessarily representative of physical locations, but could be muddied by the interplay of how thoughts impact reality. His argument is that you never know if anything is objectively true anyway, a concept about competing forms of perception that is not as far-fetched as it first appears .

In 1995, the CIA declassified details of the DIA's nearly two decades of psychic research, the $20 million Stargate Project . From 1978, the program investigated the potential for psychic spying during the Cold War. Some of the wildest accounts of “remote viewing” entail visiting civilizations inhabiting the red rocks of Mars.

One group that took OBEs seriously was the US government’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

Then, you connect this visualization to a “sigil,” an occult symbol that is energized with a certain intent. By meditating on this sigil and recalling it in the out-of-body state, you can use it as a shortcut to the desired location, mirroring fast-travel in a video game. There's even a sigil for hanging out together, like an astral group DM.

Jane Aspell, a cognitive neuroscientist at Cambridge's Anglia Ruskin University, told Motherboard that one of the first studies was led by Olaf Blanke , who sought to determine whether people who had undergone these experiences had anything in common—say, brain damage.

But the group isn’t setting out to convince anyone, including me: they just wanted to discuss their experiments in consciousness undisturbed. Commander didn't care whether people believed, and would rather mainstream science did not investigate.

Others made even more extraordinary claims, including encountering a moon base protected by a gigantic bubble, and speaking to nautical folk legend Davy Jones aboard the ghost ship, The Flying Dutchman—a conjoining of myths pioneered by The Pirates of the Caribbean . Some of this, I felt, stretched the realms of believability, and I wondered if this was an elaborate form of crowdsourced role-playing.

Some of the Redditors who had claimed to infiltrate the Pentagon or the White House reported running up against barriers that prevented them from exploring further, feeling physically drained, or in one case, encountering astral Green Beret-esque guards .

"We choose to believe what we want to believe for the most part," he said. "I don't think astral projection is any less a question of being real, as the physical."

Blanke discovered a shared abnormality among five patients—four with epilepsy, and one who suffered frequent migraines—in the temporal parietal junction (TPJ), a part of the brain which deals with cognitive function and perception.

Suggesting a link between the TPJ and OBEs is a 2007 paper about a 63-year-old man who had intractable tinnitus and was implanted with electrodes to alleviate his condition. Instead, the researchers found they were able to consistently induce OBEs in the patient by stimulating these regions with the electrodes.

But the very nature of OBEs—that they tend to occur erratically, if at all—means they're incredibly difficult to study in a lab.

"We think this area is not functioning correctly, either because of damage, epilepsy, migraine, a stroke—or all kinds of reasons," said Aspell. "Or by stimulating it you can cause it to behave abnormally, so any kind of abnormal activity in this area can give rise to an out-of-body experience."

Whatever is happening, there's still much that's unknown.