Phenomena: The Secret History of the US Government’s Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis
This month we are looking at all the things the government spends your hard tax earned dollars on, making this weeks book Phenomena: The Secret History of the US Government’s Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis by Annie Jacobsen. So let’s do this!
Now, ESP is a touchy subject with the military and intelligence communities. As Jacobsen identifies, in 1942 Dr. Gertrude Schmeidler, an experimental psychologist with a PhD from Harvard, was conducting a questionnaire on individuals beliefs about ESP and Psychokinesis (PK). This led her to coin two terms which pretty accurately describe the camps, and have made their way into modern parlance. Any guesses?
Sheep refer to individuals who were confident about the possible reality of ESP and PK. Goats refer to those who doubt the existence of such. Doubters are a lot more rare than believers. Which to me raises the question of how much of reality do we create for ourselves?
Anyways, America came into the government funded study of such in kind of a round about way, and largely thanks to the Cold War. But the journey in this book starts with Henry Karel “Andrija” Puharich, who was a rather brilliant doctor born of Yugoslavian immigrants in 1918. He very early on believed in ESP as a result of an incident when he was working on a Dairy Farm and a guard dog cornered him. He was worried he was about to be attacked, but mustered up and started projecting feelings of calm and peace. The dog sat down and stopped barking. This led Puharich to believe in ESP, that his projection of calmness had calmed the dog down.
Now, I want to say up front that I do believe in ESP. I think there’s a scientific explanation for it we just haven’t discovered the science yet. And if you think that’s stupid, 150 years ago, science was unaware of x-rays. Now we have quantum computers. There is a whole lotta science still waiting to be discovered, while American universities push gender critical studies.
Having said that, most likely, the dog read Puharich’s body language and realized he wasn’t scared, and that’s what got the dog to back down.
Regardless, this made Puharich determined to become a doctor, and then study the phenomenology of ESP. Which he would do, initially under the aegis of rich benefactors. That’s totally cool, rich people can spend their money on whatever the fuck they want, I don’t care. I care about what the government spends MY MONEY on. And the government would eventually tap Puharich for military reserve duty where he would work for the Dept of Defense (DoD), delivering classified lectures on ESP to high ranking Pentagon officials.
Puharich found military work stifling and would eventually work out his reserve contract, retiring from the military and reconnecting with his wealthy benefactors, where he was...less than savory in some of his experiments. Like, he would follow Sidney Gottlieb’s example and slip drugs into his test subjects drinks. This had a similar effect to last weeks book, only his test subjects were people who were already sensitives. And the drugs seemed to stifle that sensitivity.
So I know those that follow the Timothy Leary mindset of tune in, turn on, and drop out were of the opinion that LSD and other psychedelics are consciousness expanding. And that may be true for some. But for people who were already ESP/PK sensitive, it seemed to have the opposite effect, turning off whatever mechanism had worked for them. So, that’s important information. If you are psychic, drugs will probably not help you any. Unless you want to turn it off.
The government continued to quietly test the possibilities of ESP through various contracts with outside companies, like the Stanford Research Institute….yes that Stanford...when they found out that Russia allegedly had a psychic who could stop a beating heart with her mind. As tested on frogs I believe. Her name was Ninel Kulagina. And this sent the American military and intelligence apparatuses into an absolute frenzy of what the hell can we do about this?! I mean, you can buy body armor to deflect a bullet, but how do you stop mental death rays?
So the CIA actually took the lead, although this was not part of MKULTRA. The only part MKULTRA played in the testing of ESP/PK was their subproject 58, which was for “Supporting an expedition for the purpose of studying and collecting hallucinogenic mushrooms (Gordon Wasson).” That quote is from last weeks book, Project Mind Control. That list of subprojects at the end really is handy to have.
The CIA became fascinated with Uri Geller, who is an Israeli...well Wikipedia calls him an illusionist. Whatever he does he’s damn good at it. He got his start doing map dowsing, initially assisting General Moshe Dayan locate religious relics buried in Israel. He’d have a map laid out, then dowsing sticks, and he’d pinpoint where relics were buried. He’s so apt with this that in later life he worked for various oil companies as a consultant, dowsing on a map where they should drill for oil, charging $1 million per consultation. And since several oil companies paid it and never sued him for fraud, I’m guessing his dowsing worked there, too.
Dowsing is interesting. It’s been around FOREVER. It’s how people used to and in some areas still do, find where to dig a well for water. It was used in Vietnam. True story, and it is covered in the book. Some troops in Vietnam would use dowsing to locate tunnels. Again, I think there is science we haven’t discovered yet that explains this. Puharich believed it was extremely low frequency waves or ELF. Maybe people who successfully dowse are more sensitive to perceiving ELF.
Regardless, dowsing was used in Vietnam, and as Louis Matacia who was interviewed for this book reported “Dowsing is human intelligence. No one know why it works, only that it works in all kinds of situations, but not all the time.”
Back to Geller. The CIA wanted to work with him, and the timing was right, as General Dayan had received a petition asking him to give up his questionably legal hobby, and Geller had recently been approached by Puharich for further discourse and study. Geller was doing amazing things, the spoon bending thing being probably his most famous trick, but also concentrating on one thermometer and making the temperature rise 6-8 degrees while another thermometer right next to it stayed room temp, stopping and starting various clockworks and displaying telepathy. So Puharich made the original approach and was trying to get back in with the CIA, as his own wealthy patrons died off.
The CIA was immensely interested in Geller, but did not want anything to do with Puharich. Puharich had become a liability largely due to an extremely colorful personal life, wherein his first wife was suffering from I think it was depression, so he sent her to live with her parents, then immediately began an affair with the nanny. He divorced his first wife and then married the nanny, who would eventually leave him because of his obsessions with his work.
Anyways, the CIA didn’t want the high risk Puharich to be connected with them. But would need to pay a finders fee, basically. Also, they couldn’t be seen to pay Geller directly. Because they’re a clandestine organization, they needed to distance themselves from things like ESP and mind control. At least publicly. So they hired Geller and Puharich through an unimpeachable intermediary-- Edgar Mitchell. Astronaut and member of the Apollo 14 crew.
Mitchell was fascinated with telepathy and participated in a clandestine experiment of his own devising while on the Apollo 14 mission to the moon. NASA was not aware of this intended experiment. Each astronaut is allowed a minimal amount of personal items, and Mitchell chose as his personal items a set of Zener cards. If you’ve seen Ghostbusters you know what these are, its a set of 25 cards, each card having one symbol on them, a hollow circle, a cross, three wavy lines, a hollow square, or a five pointed star.
After lights out, Mitchell crawled into his bunk and made note of the time on earth, then stared at each Zener card in turn, making a note of which card he looked at, for how long, and what time it was on earth. On earth, psychic Olaf Johnson would be making notes of what images he received. He proceeded through the rest of his moon landing, the details of which are breathtaking to read about and included in the book, before returning safely to earth.
Where the press had a field day when they found out about it, most likely due to a leak on Johnson’s team as Mitchell didn’t say anything about it, until his crew mate made a joke about the newspaper articles and Mitchell admitted that it was true. For the record, Johnson’s predictions were about 51 correct guesses out of 200 signals Mitchell sent. So about what you’d expect for random chance.
Does this prove telepathy is not possible? Not exactly. It just says that either Johnson or Mitchell is not telepathic. Probably Johnson. Why do I say that? He’s the receiver. He’s the psychic. Plus I admire the courage of anyone willing to blast off planet earth with no absolute guarantee of return. Don’t get me wrong, NASA plans carefully and does everything humanly possible to ensure the safety of their crew. But Apollo 14 was right after the near catastrophe of Apollo 13. And as we learned when I read Bringing Columbia Home, sometimes human possibility just isn’t enough. Man proposes God Disposes.
This review is already getting too long so I’m going to jump ahead to the Remote Viewing program of the Defense Intelligence Agency, of which Joseph McMoneagle would be Remote Viewer 001. What is remote viewing?
Remote viewing is when a person attempts to gather information about hidden or distant targets. SRI...that Stanford, put together a team of Ingo Swann, Russell Targ, and Harold Puthoff, and they created the protocol which the DIA would eventually implement to create their team. The DIA recruited McMoneagle in 1978 and he would work as a remote viewer for DIA until he retired from the military in 1984, then would continue as a contractor to the program until it’s termination in 1995.
What led to the programs termination. Well….lets just say it got too popular. And I don’t mean that in a good way. I mean it in a they recruited the wrong recruits who blabbed about the top secret program after they were forced out kind of way.
Here’s what happened. Part of the training for the remote viewing program was done at the Monroe Institute, a facility located in Faber, VA where selected people would go to learn how to expand their consciousness. On taxpayer dollars of course. Monroe Institute is a nonprofit organization but that does not mean it works for free. So in the December 2, 1983 group to enter the facility was one of the newest members of the remote viewing team, Edward Dames. Dames was a former Morse code intercept operator. And he was a true believer in ESP/PK, along with UFO’s and the Akashic Records.
That’s not as out there as it may seem. The Akashic Records are...lets call them a cosmic library, containing the complete history of every soul, thought, word, emotion, and intention that has ever or will ever exist across all time. And space. Like if the multiverse is real, the Akashic Record is the Wikipedia of the multiverse. Dames believed in this. But this came out because, as they were trying to scientifically explain how remote viewing worked, The instructor kept talking about the Matrix where these things could be found, and Dames drew the parallel to the Akashic Records.
None of this is, in and of itself, a problem. Until Dames starts to move up in the organizational command and starts giving his remote viewers coordinates on Mars. This all sounds lovely, except that whatever the viewer is seeing, is completely unverifiable and unverified. It would be a different matter if the Mars rover had sent back images that matched anything the remote viewers reported.
On the other hand, it’s entirely possible the mars rover did send back such images. Because while the CIA, who eventually took over and shut down the remote viewing program, has declassified thousands of documents related to this program, many thousands more remain highly classified. Why is that significant?
The US governments classified records, under executive order 13526, are automatically declassified after 25 years from date OF ORIGINAL CLASSIFICATION. Much of Stargate, which is what the program was called at the time of shutdown in 1995, was declassified. But not all of it. If something remains classified, it’s because there’s something in that record the government is trying to protect.
So, Ed Dames. True believer. He was actually just a breath away from becoming THE guy in charge of the whole remote viewing program when the higher ups got fed up with his unverfiable martian scouting, and he was removed from the program.
So he did what most people do when removed from a job they love. He founded his own company doing remote viewing. Along with David Morehouse and Mel Riley. And Paul Smith. All remote viewers. This is not inherently wrong. Nothing wrong with starting your own company to get paid doing what you love. But when Dames talked to a reporter, and the reporter did a big news article on it in November 1991...we the people were a little miffed that our tax dollars were being thus used. The CIA took over and shut down the program. And started declassifying documents. Mostly.
There is so much more than that in the book and Jacobsen does a remarkable job building the structure for the whole picture, looking for a balanced and nuanced approach at a pretty controversial piece of American history. And there are some truly unexplained...as of yet….phenomena discussed in the book.
By far the most successful remote viewer was Angela Dellafiore, who was a civilian remote viewer and made her army handlers deeply uncomfortable, because she never hid who and what she is. She’s a psychic. Always said that. Said she was using her third eye to see things. All of this made the military deeply uncomfortable because it flies in the face of military rigor. Additionally, they were trying to bill this as a skill that anyone can be taught. If anyone can be taught how to do this, then there’s science involved, not just a gift. Also, she basically bullied her way into the program under the belief that this is where she belonged and what she was meant to be doing, skipping the chain of command which is a monstrous no-no in the military. Open door policies are a strictly civilian thing.
And to add insult to injury, she had a truly remarkable success rate, like 80% of her viewings were accurate, which is well outside statistical random chance. It’s what they called an 8-martini success rate, which was a phrase coined by Ingo Swann in the early days of the remote viewing program at SRI, meaning the data was so good that it cracks everyone’s realities. So they go out and drink 8 martini’s to recover.
Jacobsen recounts other successes, including cases of precognition that were accurate. One remote viewer predicted the kidnapping of a highly placed American, it turned out to be a general I think who was stationed in Italy. They got him back alive. Not so much a colonel who was kidnapped and killed by...Hezbollah?
She recounts a truly shameful episode of US History, that of Hsue-Shen Tsien. Tsien was born in 1911 in Shanghai and he studied engineering in China before moving to the US in 1935 on a scholarship to MIT where he earned a master’s degree, before moving to Cal-Tech to earn his PhD in 1939. He was a certified genius and leading expert on aerodynamics, jet propulsion, and rocketry, and co-founded NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He was patiently awaiting his naturalization papers when McCarthyism hit it’s stride and was eventually deported, sans citizenship, for being a communist sympathizer. He was not. What he was was pissed off that America threw him away after all he had achieved and helped her with.
When he was returned to China, he became the Father of Chinese Rocketry, giving China her first atomic bomb, hydrogen bomb, and first satellite. He also returned to popularity Qigong, which is seen as another way to focus ahead of remote viewing. So we took one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century and shipped it to an enemy state, because of McCarthyism.
Anywho...
Jacobsen does not JUST report the believers, she includes the skeptics view too, including James Randi, who was personally offended by Uri Geller’s success, and driven to create elaborate hoaxes to try and prove Geller was a fraud. She actually quite skillfully intertwines the two points, I just focused on who did what with the believers because I’m a believer. But if you are not, don’t worry, there is plenty of information in here to back up the skeptical goats beliefs too.
The battle between the sheep and goats continues. Like I said at the beginning, in this I am a sheep. I do believe. But my belief is more the middle road, where I think we just haven’t yet discovered the science that will explain it all
I really enjoyed this book, this is the second book of Annie Jacobsen’s I’ve read, the first one was last year, Operation Paperclip, and she is eminently readable, she’s good with her citations, carefully researches everything, then builds the story thoughtfully so that one topic flows easily into the next, and then loops it all back to the beginning. The US Government used taxpayer dollars to fund research into ESP for more than fifty years. They’re actually still doing it. The US Navy, as of the writing of this book in 2017, was trying to teach her sailors how to be more intuitive. Which is not such a far cry from the US Marines teaching her Marines how to dowse in Vietnam. The VA uses meditation therapy to assist with PTSD. Which skeptics say does nothing. To which I say if it helps, it’s not nothing. And the number highly support the usefulness of meditation in overall health. GO SHEEP!
