Forty years ago, when William Higgins was an agent of the FBI, he went to make an arrest. But as he went to open the door to the suspect's bedroom, he got a bad feeling.

"Hit me in the stomach," he said.

So, as he tells the story, Higgins made the suspect's girlfriend open the door and go in first - which was a good thing for Higgins, because when the suspect saw her he put down the pistol he had had ready to fire at anyone else coming in.

"I became a firm believer in hunches and intuition," said Higgins, now a retired Navy captain. That belief has led him into realms of enquiry most people would consider strange and most scientists consider bogus. It also led him to Durham's Rhine Research Center for the Study of Consciousness, which is honoring him Friday night with its first J.B. and Louisa Rhine Distinguished Service Award.

"He was instrumental in the Rhine Center's survival," said Sally Rhine Feather, the center's executive director and daughter of its founders.

Friday's event features a concert of American composers' music - Gershwin, Sondheim, Copland and others - and a presentation more in keeping with the Rhine Center's line of work. Higgins' award is to be presented by Joseph McMoneagle, once "Remote Viewer 001" in U.S. defense agencies' experiments with psychic spying.

"Remote viewing" means receiving mental images of a target person, place or thing in accessible to the viewer's physical senses because of distance in space or time or some kind of psychic shielding. Friday night, McMoneagle said, he's going to "give some basic information on what remote viewing is and how it was used"; and describe some of his mental missions, such as tracking an intelligence agent's whereabouts.

In 1977, McMoneagle, then a warrant officer in Army Intelligence, was recruited for Stargate - the top-secret psychic experiments conducted for U.S. intelligence and defense agencies from the early 1970s until 1995 (and satirized in the 2009 movie "The Men Who Stare At Goats"). He retired from the military in 1984, but remained as a consultant with Stargate until its termination in 1995.

Now, McMoneagle owns Intuitive Intelligence Applications Inc., which serves clients in "everything from investments to missing persons," he said.

McMoneagle and Higgins have known each other for about 15 years, he said, since Higgins attended a seminar McMoneagle was leading at the Rhine Center.

Higgins said he began noticing his accurate hunches at the Naval Academy, where they "kept me out of trouble." A science buff and science-fiction fan, he was intrigued and wrote his senior thesis on hypnotism. (The academy said No when he suggested ESP).

"At the Naval Academy, I had become very well aware there was something going on," he said. "I learned a lot about the unconscious mind and the subconscious."

That was 1966. Since then he has delved deeper and deeper into such esoteric matters as clairvoyance, precognition and remote viewing. "I met a good many of the guys in the Stargate program" and learned to do remote viewing himself.

"If I hadn't remote viewed, I wouldn't be messing around with this stuff," he said. "[But] It was amazing ... and I've been involved with it ever since."

His "messing around" led him to involving himself with the Rhine Center, becoming a financial backer and then a member of its board. He's also developing practical applications for psychic research - such as tracking a customer's mood as he hears a sales presentation.

Besides his naval career, Higgins deals in real estate, experience that proved useful for the Rhine Center.

Some years ago, the center was in severe financial straits. To help out, Higgins bought its building and leased it back to the center on favorable terms.

"He enabled us to ... make a real turnaround," Feather said.

"I thought it was important to keep this going," Higgins said. "The mind is facing a great frontier today."

Perhaps, but whether remote viewing, precognition and telepathy are part of that frontier remains a matter of opinion and skeptics are many.

Said Higgins, "That's their problem."