Approved For Jelease 2000/08/08
: CIA-RDP96-00788R001-700360003-3
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“Hawker here's
^
.
convinced the dam
Commies have invented a
secret brain-washing ray
that's beamed in on
Jimmy Carter."
_
I -w-
lAntdonlnWne'i
Lvy’s imeresw
*
faet one of Ingo Swann’s.
iy to fight sub™a^ns;ratf0ns at SRI was to pinpoint
mote viewing demonstration
^ world.
e location of Soviet subm
Swann and five other SRl
Within the Paf
feet below the Pacific in-
ibjects descended some 2.
®
remote viewing on
de a tiny submetdMe to try “ tte ”
NASA
.S }
chors and parts of sunken ships.
Mind Trips lo Jupiter..
MU
th« second Navy con
^BOUT THE
gej^tif^ss^stent^the
>e briefing on
^ chart onto the screen
£££ S£*-« !Wrm“s “
lP hell is that about?
nroiected chart, the
ss&asesss*- «** “elf AHD
,or
’ ,
Jj^
C^°So5?»lB frequen-
romagnctic waves-
*
seC
*
nd. The Navy * Mer-
ries up to about 100 cycle
P
Seafarcr (formerly Pro-
i
“From what I have seen it
;
reversed himself completely-
r
tigators are con-
Z a
valid test as far
™
NSA or CIA
cerned.” The excuses range
f
fQre the c00rdl-
man “couldn’t read a map
hic subjects Zo-
nates got confused, an
Grove space communica-
omedin on the nearby S 8°
similarities toth«
lions center (which‘ 4o“^West Virginia, has puMfc
described
target, but
is in
and ls manned by
tours through it and so
s
^QT fa the subjects read
Navy, not Army, Pc
[
s0"?_2.’
ather than the coordinates,
the mind of the NSA
a sllght exaggeration.*
than a deliberate
but it was a.matter of aegre
falsehood.”
ot reSponded to requests
SE
mordwred in the history of science.
..
The Scientology Link
-
.
those in govern-
sea
, 'fd-v
S&ifhlm
a?:i
.mm
Sip5f-7;
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Mm.
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t ‘•’t
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i'v.vh
The bcienioruB; —
.
NBrrraitbatconttauM^^^jJ'JJJ unusually
ranking Scientologist and^ba^^
Scientologys
beliefs
include the
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1% v
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•
,
.
i
Toth -was detain d in Moscow by the KGB, allegedly tor
receiving ''state secrets” about parapsychology research.
The paper piv n to Toth by a scientist said to be labora-
tory chief at the Moscow Institute of Medical-Biological
Preparation* described a theory of psychic functioning
called “mitogenetic radiation" which has been discussed
publicly for years and largely discounted by others in
the field. One theory is that the Russians hope to mislead
the United States into believing that they are far ahead
in parapsychology research
so that we
will either
(1)
waste scientific resources trying to find out what they
are up to, or (2) do productive research which they then
can tap into because of our more open system of scien-
tific reporting. It is indeed a murky business.
From ESP to Voodoo
B
UT, FOR MANY YEARS, small groups within the
U.S. government have taken seriously the specula-
tions about using psychic powers for mind warfare:
• Dr. J. B. Rhine, the dean of American parapsychol-
ogy, conducted extrasensory perception .(ESP), tests for
Jbe Army as far back as 1952. In the early 1960s' a'team"
• of Air Force scientists tested junior college coeds for
ESP in an effort to develop a strict experimental method
that others might follow.
• During the Vietnam War, the Marine Corps tried
dowsing or “water- witching" as a technique to uncover
.hidden mines and tunnels in the mountainous I Corps
area west of Hue.
'
'
'
•
• The National
Institutcs..of. Health has supported a
few studFeTirTparapsychology. Funding for one of these
programs, experiments in dream telepathy at Brooklyn’s
Maimonides Hospital, now has been taken over by the
McDonnell Aerospace Foundation, founded by James
McDonnell of McDonnell Douglas Corp., one of the coun-
try's largest defense contractors.
•
Three
years
ago, NASA
paid
$80,000
to
see
if
' machines could teach ESP (they could not) and for some
pilot studies that measured brain waves during alleged
telepathic/clairvoyant communications.
* Last year, the Defense Department’s Advanced Re-
search Projects Agency (DARPA) sponsored a $145,000
contract
to determine "whether, the
Soviet-discovered
Kirlian photography really depicted the glowing “aura"
of a person’s "etberic body." The study found that Kir-
lian pictures are related to the moisture content in a per-
son’s skin, a conclusion which is scientifically interesting
but certainly not grist for occult lovers.
• One West Coast Veterans Administration
hospital
harbors secret biofeedback/telepathy experiments; an-
other VA hospital in the Midwest conducts “out of body"
investigations. Whether these are officially sanctioned
projects
6r
just
bootstrap
investigations
is
undeter-'
mined, since the investigators refuse to discuss their re-
•
search publicly.
CIA psychologists are swamped with proposals for psy-
chic studies, including one this spring which offered to
study a Trinidadian voodoo
specialist who reportedly
flattens automobile
tires — and presumably people —
merely by sticking pins in their photographs.
Ron Robertson, a security officer at .Lawrence Liver—
^more Laboratory in.California, one of the country’s pri-
"mary nuclear weapons arsenals, has acknowledged that
“some pf the [government’s) interest in psi [psychic stu-
dies] ties into classified intelligence areas, for example*
.
Jhc.security of nuclear weapons.” Robertson, who has
followed psychic developments on an official basis, seri-
ously fears that a talented psychic might trigger or dis-
able a warhead merely by psychokinetic force of mind.
“All it takes is the ability to move one-eighth of an ounce
a quarter of an inch at a distance of one fowl," he has
warned.
.
,
...
Physicists at Livermore, the University of California
and elsewhere believe that psychic functioning —
in-
cluding Robertson’s fears of nuclear sabotage by psycho-
kinesis — can be explained by electromagnetic, quan-
tum mechanics or
relativity theories. The scientists
at
Livermore have conducted psychokinetic tests with the
young Israeli stage performer, Uri Geller, all on an “in-
torimd"
basis, they
insist, According. to Robertson, the
excit
it icy*
« ;»ed
it to such an extent that they wore u*,ng
»t for i„
'diligence monitoring. They seemed to think that psy-.
chic intelligence gathering was not beyond the realm of
^
possibility,” continues Van de
Castle, addiiig quickly:
“They gave more serious weight to that possibility than I
,
would as a parapsychologist.”
“Remote Vicwm"*’
O
P
ERHAPS the CIA investigators were just better in-
formed. About the same time that Van de Castle
was being interviewed, the CIA was closely monitoring
SRI’s “remote viewing" experiments with Ingo Swann
J
.
and Pat Price. Specialists from the operational side of
the agency were brought in to attempt to confirm the
“remote viewing"' effect, and did so, according to two
sources, by testing both Swann and Price, and others,
.apart from SRI. For' example, Swann and Price were
given foreign targets to focus on, including some in Rus-
sia and .China* Though
there were frequent
misses,
enough accurate information was gleaned to please the
CIA, according, to the reports. How did the monitors
know that the information was accurate? Sometimes,
I
the answers were not known
until after the remote
viewing descriptions had been given and “ground truth*
.
-
'
checks were made by agents operating abroad.
.
Swann denies ever having worked for-the CIA, and
r*i7'' may have been unaware of the identity of the
tests’
N^jPjsponsor. “ILanybody gets the idea that there’s psychic
'\ly^arfare_going
on,
coffl'd'lerkaieaTh'tHerstreets.’’'
Swann has saidT
~~
“
"
-"T
~
The project did suffer one notable failures When an
Air Force officer was kidnapped by Turkish terrorists a |
few years back, Price and some others attempted to
“see" where he was being held captive. Acting on their
psychic
tipsters’
information,
intelligence
operatives
checked the site, but to no avail. But that did not deter
the psychic spy enthusiasts.
In a self-proclaimed “independent and somewhat criti-
cal study of extrasensory perception,” intelligence con-
•
sultant Joseph.A. .Ball
of Santa Barbara,
Calif.,
con-'
eluded in 1975 that the work at SRI. “produced maniO
festations of extrasensory perception sufficiently sharp
-
!
and clear-cut to justify serious consideration of possible
applications," that is, psychic spying.
Under a section headed "Practical Applications," Ball
writes: "No matter how gifted the. paragnost {psychic],
existing ignorance of the
basis
of paranormal phen-
omena together with the capricious and unreliable na-
ture
of the channel dictate that information derived
from this source can never stand alone and must be used
•
with caution. Extrasensory information should at best
[his emphasis] supplement normal information or guide
its collection, but should never serve in place of it” But
his point is that espionage by ESP is a reasonable expec-
tation.
SRI’s
highly
advertised
"Project
Scanate”
results
served the crucial purpose of garnering further govern-
ment funding. Legitimized by the participation of CIA
and NSA personnel in their tests, SRI’s Puthoff and Targ
.briefed "every.government agency you can name" look-
ing for^further ^pport." One that bit_was tbe.Special
“Warfare B^^^thejNa^'lJ^^mhia S^teais.Com-
.mand. The decision to fund
was*' taken largely on the
basis of an impressive briefing on "Project Scanate” by
the SRI experimenters which their CIA monitor atten-
ded.
In October, 1975, the Navy let a $50,703 contract to SRJ
for psychic sensing of remote electromagnetic sources, a
continuation
.of
earlier work supported by NASA
in
which subjects allegedly used their powers to delect re-
motely flashing
lights. Most
of ibr experiments «crr
earned
out
under
subcontract
to
Langley
Porter
Neuropsychiairic Institute in San Franroco— and were
a bust. Early in 1976. Puthoff and Targ received 126.000
in supplemental money from the Navy to see if magne-
tometers could be affected by human beings. The SRI,
researchers already had reported that some of their su
jects could indeed
affect the workings of a
shield
magnetometer.
mil" basis
they
insist. According to Robertson, the
"We have a deep and abiding interest in magnelomi
nef’
:b^l,ftn®PP96-0q7{%8l^9pb1 fJftQftgPQ.Ofe^son
Jr., technical director
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:2a60/0S/C(8^m-RDP96-0Q™8Ra(y£Q^
•
• yjV'U<
,? v.
•, •'• .i‘
>'-.
e
ujl <; t
i
...chic rcht ji i.i.'.r.- jtc intcrestou m
l: /because" many theorists believe that radiation at the
r-a, ELF frequencies is responsible for psychic commu-
nions.
.
ut the “Mind Control" labol really upset Koslov. He
terod
the SRI investigations for the Navy stopped,
.. cancelled another $35,000 in Navy funds slated for
ore remote viewing work. “We [Koslov’s emphasis] do
-t fund programs in this area," the outspoken scientist
ids. “If you ask me, ’Do you think it’s a pile of crap?’ I
, and you can quote me.” In March of this year, Koslov
ain insisted that the Navy
is “simply out of this busi-
es.
I don’t believe
it’s the function of the military to
>pport parapsychology research."
Contrary to Koslov’s assertion, the Navy still
is sup-
pling psychic research. An interdisciplinary team at
e Navy’s Electronics Laboratory Center in San Diego
•s been continuing some of the work begun at'SRI. Led
v an expert in bionics, the $100,000, two-year project
jy be cut because of tight research money. Which
is
nfortunate, since the experiments seem far better de-
igned than earlier ones elsewhere.
, This spring, SRI’s Puthoff and Targ again made the
’
>unds of Washington drumming up sponsorship. One /
b-oposal that they hoped to sell to NASA was a $100,000
rogram precognitively to predict eclipses of the four.
iajor Jovian moons by having a subject fly
. his con-
.-jousness to the giant planet to “record the actual time
f the eclipse as observed on Jupiter {SRI’s emphasis]."
-
hough SRI’s proposal claimed that "pilot studies have
een encouraging,” NASA declined.
•
The SRI investigators also sent feelers toJ5ARPA in
opes
of winning
long-term
support
for
their work,
keptics at the agency quickly flew in an outside team
t debunkers to brief engineers in the strategic and tac-
...
cal offices who were considering funding SRI’s psychic
ork.
Just three days after the debunkers presented
.dr case, DARPA spokesperson Jane Smith flatly de-
.
ied lhat the agency had any interest in psychic
re-
":arch or in Puthoff and Targ. Queried repeatedly, she
.ood on the statement from DARPA Director George K,
ieilmeier; “DARPA has not received and is not consider-
*
-ig a proposal, formal or informal, on psychic research.”
'•.eeording to one of the paid consultants who briefed
»ARPA, SRI bad proppsed
a $3.5 million program on
remote viewing."
.
.
'Scanate” or “Bullpasture?”
O
N THE SURFACE, all this government interest in
parapsychology strongly supports the “believers"
.: their heated debate with the skeptics over the reality
'f psychic functioning. Price’s apparent
hit on the
al-
leged secret military installation in their demonstration
lest for the CIA
is particularly impressive — until one
asks other government funders touting the
test, “Did
• ou ever check it out?" The answer is "no."
So on Sunday, March
13, with compass, topographic
•naps and aerial photographs in hand, I drove to an area
•ome 135 miles west southwest of Washington, the site
identified by the coordinates given in the SRI report. A
iNASA official and his two sons accompanied me. From
atl the secrecy surrounding this test we half-expected to
discover the base camp of an extraterrestrial scouting
iju-ty
or,
at the very
least, the command center for
World War III.
.
No such
luck. Just a sparse hillside, a lew flocks of
•heep, and lots of droppings. No "underground storage
ureas," no “computers, communication equipment" or
"Army Signal Corps" personnel, as reported by Price.
The only "codeword" was the name of the place, Bull-
pasture Mountain. Under the circumstances,
it seems
• hat SRI’s “Project Scanate" would be named more ap-
propriately, "Project Bulipastuie.”
WJien told of the results of our hike, James Foote, the
Navy project manager for the SRI tests, was astonished:
1 am just chagrined that we didn’t catch this.
It wasn't
.
iust SRI that told us this [the test results] but the [CIA
ant) NSA] sponsors, otherwise I wouldn’t have taken it so
much for granted
.
.
.
There's definitely some fallacy
VJi upci
•i.ig Thctau,
.nc tiigncsi
riii „
ment’s complex ladder of achievements; Pat Price, who
died two. years ago,
also was a
high-level “Operating
Thelan.” The laboratory assistant to Puthoff and Targ
during many of the Geller experiments was a Scientolo-
gist married to a “minister” of Scientology.
Some
of
the
Initial funding
for
SRI's experiments
came from a ranking Scientologist who had established
=
his Science
Unlimited
Research Foundation
"at
Hal
j
Puthoff’s suggestion," according to the foundation’s ex-
j
ecutive director at the time. Ingo Swann helped to estab-
j
lish Scientology’s “Celebrity Center" in Los Angeles, the
j
headquarters recently raided by the FBI. At the time of
-i
his original testing, Swann revealed that there are “four-
j
teen
Clears
[a
medium-high
level
of
Scientology
achievement], more than
I would suspect," working at
SRI.
The involvement of Scientologists in the tests .at SRI
partially accounts for at least two government agencies
pulling back from funding further work there. Sociolo-
gist Marcello Truzzl, one of the consultants called In last
‘March to brief DARPA on Puthoff’s and Targ’s expert-
„
ments, says letting Scientologists conduct ESP research
*
fa “l8tAgiyfig.?P9Pey.to
the Church, to do
Experimentation
into the
veracity
of~ transubstantia- ..
*tionr;~
~~~
~
;
'
“"On the other hand, some within government argue,
that
it makes sense to let Scientologists investigate the
,
• psychic claims subscribed to by members of the organi-
'
zation. But at best, this is questionable science.
Bad Drives Out Good
O
’ NE EVEN MORE, confusing possibility
is that the
SRI experimenters may to some extent be unwit-
ting participants in a deliberate put-on, a consideration
they themselves have raised. Col. Austin Kibler, director
of DARPA’s human resources division in 1973, confided
,
to one of his consulting psychologists lhat "it could be
that we are pretending to support this [psychic] work to
throw off the Russians." One ranking CIA scientist pri-
vately voiced the same
possibility just a few months
;
back.
.
.
But there is a core of dedicated believers inside sev-
, eral government agencies who are intensively reviewing
parapsychology research, weeding though the mass of
conflicting opinion, biased reports and inconclusive ex-
periments in an attempt to determine what next steps
should be taken, if any.
The authors of the CIA’s two-volume study urge “that
it is worthwhile for the United States government to in-
,
itiate aDd support systematic research in this [psychic]
'
area
.
.
.
Thus,
it
is recommended that a system in-
tegration and research planning anlaysis team be for-
(
med to evaluate research work completed, update an
overall NBIT research system model, Identify and out-
line new
areas
of
research and
organize
interdisci-
plinary meetings between different research groups so
that they are continuously updated and educated about
the state of the art.”
Those are strong recommendations for such flimsy ev-
idence, at least such flimsy public evidence. Regrettably,
most scientists operating within the mainstream refuse
to involve themselves in the contorted debates over psy-
chic phenomena. And, if they do stir themselves to opin-
ion, it
is generally formed on the basis of emotion, not
experiment. They
fear
loss
of
"legitimate”
research
grants and stigmatization for showing interest in such a
taboo subject. Thus, bad science drives out the good.
If there
is reason to believe that. psychic functioning
.performs according
to the “mind wa^’ scenarios
de-
scribed in the few classified studies that have leaked
out, public debate can help shape safeguards to insure
benign application. If there is the slightest shred of evi-
dence that psychotronic weaponry
is at
all possible,
It
should be considered biological warfare and banned in
accordance with existing agreements.
Whether psychic phenomena are nothing but hoax'
'
and laboratory artifact or the gateway to new dimen-
'
sions of human experience are questions that should be
in this Scanate report.”
pursued by the very best laboratories, basing their pub-
Several days later, Foote abruptly changed his tune.
licly reported conclusions on rigorous experiment unal-
e»A^lbf596-007^8f^CtoW©i)lS€R®0>»3»JChetoric.
-C-A-
Approved For Relea
By RANDALL SHOEMAKER
Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON— Soldiers in the not-too-
distant future may find themselves on the
sending end
or the receiving end
of
“psyehotronic” weapons.
That’s the suggestion of Lt. Col. John B.
Alexander in an article published in a re-
cent issue of Military Review, the monthly
magazine of the Army’s Command and
General Staff College.
'
In “The New Mental Battlefield,” Alex-
ander described psychotronics as the inter-
action of mind and matter.
“There are weapons systems,” he said,
“that operate on the power of the mind and
whose lethal capacity has already been
demonstrated.”
The Soviet Union and its allies are gener-
ally believed
to be well in the lead in
parapsychological
research, and the
amount of paranormal phenomena they
have verified
is voluminous, Alexander
said. He cited these examples:
• The ability to heal or cause disease can
be transmitted over distance, but while this
has been demonstrated on lower organ-
isms, flies and frogs, “the present capacity
for human death is still debated.”
• Energy emanations from the body,
reflecting changes in emotional condition,
have been widely demonstrated through
radiation field photography known as the
Kirlian effect.
• The ability to move objects mentally
has been repeatedly demonstrated under
scientifically controlled conditions.
The extent of such research in the U.S. is
not well known nor is it centrally' organ-
ized, the officer said. Because the phe-
nomena are frequently beyond explanation
in known scientific terms, they often are
discounted as nonexistent, he said.
Researchers at Stanford Research Insti-
tute
have
done
the
best
known
llkifttratlon by Garnett Sullivan
experimentation on “remote viewing,” the
ability to collect data from afar, the officer
reported. He also discussed so-called out-
of-body experiences, bending of metal by
nonphysical means, acupuncture, biofeed-
back and meditation research.
Two unclassified Defense Intelligence
Agency reports dated in 1972 and 1975 were
cited as sources of information on certain
psyehotronic weapons applications investi-
gated by the Soviets.
“Certainly, with development, these
weapons would be able to induce illness or.
death at little or no risk to the operator,”
Alexander said.. “Range may be a present
problem, but this will probably be over-
come if it has not been already.”
'
Soviet researchers have applied electro-,
magnetic
radiation
against the U.S.
Embassy in Moscow, he pointed out. Also,
he cited researchers suggestions that
extremely-low-frequency emissions “can
be used to induce depression or irritability
in a target population.”
The use of telepathic hypnosis holds
“great potential,” Alexander said, and'
other mind-to-mind thought induction tech-
niques are also being considered.
Although the officer did not specify the
extent or cost of U.S. military interest in
parapsychological research, other reports
have claimed that investment in psychic
warfare by the Pentagon has amounted to
about $6 million.
Many people in the scientific community
remain skeptical of all claims for even
partial success in psychic experimentation.
,
Among such doubters, some have suggest-
ed that reports emanating from Soviet
sources about psyehotronic accomplish-
ments are'most likely a “disinformation”
effort aimed at encouraging the U.S. to
waste money on research. And, some say
the U.S. spending may be a counter-disin-
formation ploy designed to make the Sovi-
ets nervous.
Alexander and official Army spokesmen
declined to comment on the article or any
further questions about psychic warfare
research.
Approved For Release 2000/08/08
SOURCE:
ARMY TIMES MAGAZINE, MARCH
30,
1981
CIA-RDP96-0078^00f7&tf
if*
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