- Jacobsen, Annie.
Phenomena.
New York: Little, Brown, 2017.
ISBN 978-0-316-34936-9.
-
At the end of World War II, it was clear that science and technology
would be central to competition among nations in the postwar
era. The development of nuclear weapons, German deployment of the
first operational ballistic missile, and the introduction of jet
propelled aircraft pointed the way to a technology-driven arms
race, and both the U.S. and the Soviet Union scrambled to lay hands on
the secret super-weapon programs of the defeated Nazi regime. On
the U.S. side, the
Alsos Mission
not only sought information on
German nuclear and missile programs, but also came across even
more bizarre projects, such as those undertaken by Berlin's
Ahnenerbe Institute,
founded in 1935 by SS leader Heinrich Himmler. Investigating
the institute's headquarters in a Berlin suburb,
Samuel Goudsmit, chief scientist of Alsos, found what he
described as “Remnants of weird Teutonic symbols and
rites … a corner with a pit of ashes in which I found
the skull of an infant.” What was going on? Had the Nazis
attempted to weaponise black magic? And, to the ever-practical
military mind, did it work?
In the years after the war, the intelligence community and
military services in both the U.S. and Soviet Union would become
involved in the realm of the paranormal, funding research and
operational programs based upon purported psychic powers for
which mainstream science had no explanation. Both superpowers
were not only seeking super powers for their spies and soldiers,
but also looking over their shoulders afraid the other would
steal a jump on them in exploiting these supposed powers of
mind. “We can't risk a ‘woo-woo gap’
with the adversary!”
Set aside for a moment (as did most of the agencies funding this
research) the question of just how these mental powers were
supposed to work. If they did, in fact, exist and if they could
be harnessed and reliably employed, they would confer a
tremendous strategic advantage on their possessor. Consider:
psychic spies could project their consciousness out of body and
penetrate the most secure military installations; telepaths
could read the minds of diplomats during negotiations or perhaps
even plant thoughts and influence their judgement; telekinesis
might be able to disrupt the guidance systems of
intercontinental missiles or space launchers; and psychic
assassins could undetectably kill by stopping the hearts of
their victims remotely by projecting malign mental energy in
their direction.
All of this may seem absurd on its face, but work on all of
these phenomena and more was funded, between 1952 and 1995,
by agencies of the U.S. government including the U.S. Army,
Air Force, Navy, the CIA, NSA, DIA, and ARPA/DARPA, expending
tens of millions of dollars. Between 1978 and 1995 the
Defense Department maintained an operational psychic espionage
program under various names, using
“remote
viewing” to provide information on intelligence targets
for clients including the Secret Service, Customs Service,
Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Coast Guard.
What is remote viewing? Experiments in parapsychology
laboratories usually employ a protocol called
“outbounder-beacon”, where a researcher travels to a
location selected randomly from a set of targets and observes
the locale while a subject in the laboratory, usually isolated
from sensory input which might provide clues, attempts to
describe, either in words or by a drawing, what the outbounder
is observing. At the conclusion of the experiment, the
subject's description is compared with pictures of the targets
by an independent judge (unaware of which was the outbounder's
destination), who selects the one which is the closest match to
the subject's description. If each experiment picked the
outbounder's destination from a set of five targets, you'd
expect from chance alone that in an ensemble of experiments the
remote viewer's perception would match the actual target around
20% of the time. Experiments conducted in the 1970s at the
Stanford Research Institute (and subsequently the target of
intense criticism by skeptics) claimed in excess of 65% accuracy
by talented remote viewers.
While outbounder-beacon experiments were used to train and test
candidate remote viewers, operational military remote viewing
as conducted by the
Stargate Project
(and under assorted other code names over the years), was quite
different. Usually the procedure involved “coordinate
remote viewing”. The viewer would simply be handed a slip
of paper containing the latitude and longitude of the target and
then, relaxing and clearing his or her mind, would attempt to describe
what was there. In other sessions, the viewer might be handed a
sealed envelope containing a satellite reconnaissance photograph.
The results were sometimes stunning. In 1979, a KH-9 spy satellite
photographed a huge building which had been constructed at
Severodvinsk Naval Base in the Soviet arctic. Analysts thought
the Soviets might be building their first aircraft carrier inside
the secret facility.
Joe McMoneagle,
an Army warrant office and Vietnam veteran who was assigned to the
Stargate Project as its first remote viewer, was given the target
in the form of an envelope with the satellite photo sealed inside.
Concentrating on the target, he noted “There's some kind
of a ship. Some kind of a vessel. I'm getting a very, very
strong impression of props [propellers]”. Then, “I'm
seeing fins…. They look like shark fins.” He
continued, “I'm seeing what looks like part of a submarine
in this building.” The entire transcript was forty-seven
pages long.
McMoneagle's report was passed on to the National Security
Council, which dismissed it because it didn't make any sense for
the Soviets to build a huge submarine in a building located one
hundred metres from the water. McMoneagle had described a canal
between the building and the shore, but the satellite imagery
showed no such structure. Then, four months later, in January
1980, another KH-9 pass showed a large submarine at a dock at
Severodvinsk, along with a canal between the mystery building
and the sea, which had been constructed in the interim. This was
the prototype of the new
Typhoon class
ballistic missile submarine, which was a complete surprise to
Western analysts, but not Joe McMoneagle. This is what was referred
to as an “eight martini result”. When McMoneagle retired
in 1984, he was awarded the Legion of Merit for exceptionally
meritorious service in the field of human intelligence.
A decade later the U.S. Customs Service approached the remote
viewing unit for assistance in tracking down a rogue agent accused
of taking bribes from cocaine smugglers in Florida. He had
been on the run for two years, and appeared on the FBI's Most
Wanted List. He was believed to be in Florida or somewhere
in the Caribbean. Self-taught remote viewer Angela Dellafiora
concentrated on the case and immediately said, “He's in
Lowell, Wyoming.” Wyoming? There was no reason for him
to be in such a place. Further, there was no town named Lowell
in the state. Agents looked through an atlas and found there
was, however, a Lovell, Wyoming. Dellafiora said, “Well,
that's probably it.” Several weeks later, she was asked to
work the case again. Her notes include, “If you don't get
him now you'll lose him. He's moving from Lowell.” She
added that he was “at or near a campground that had a large
boulder at its entrance”, and that she “sensed an old
Indian burial ground is located nearby.”. After being
spotted by a park ranger, the fugitive was apprehended at a
campground next to an Indian burial ground, about
fifty miles from Lovell, Wyoming, where he had been a few weeks
before. Martinis all around.
A total of 417 operational sessions were run in 1989 and 1990
for the counter-narcotics mission; 52% were judged as producing
results of intelligence value while 47% were of no value. Still,
what was produced was considered of sufficient value that the
customers kept coming back.
Most of this work and its products were classified, in part to
protect the program from ridicule by journalists and politicians.
Those running the projects were afraid of being accused of dabbling
in the occult, so they endorsed an Army doctrine that remote
viewing, like any other military occupational specialty, was a
normal human facility which could be taught to anybody with a
suitable training process, and a
curriculum was developed to
introduce new people to the program. This was despite abundant
evidence that the ability to remote view, if it exists at all,
is a rare trait some people acquire at birth, and cannot be
taught to randomly selected individuals any more than they can be
trained to become musical composers or chess grand masters.
Under a similar shroud of secrecy, paranormal research for
military applications appears to have been pursued in the
Soviet Union and China. From time to time information would
leak out into the open literature, such as the Soviet experiments
with
Ninel Kulagina.
In China,
H. S. Tsien
(Qian Xuesen),
a co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the United States
who, after being stripped of his security clearance and moving
to mainland China in 1955, led the Chinese nuclear weapons and
missile programs, became a vocal and powerful advocate of
research into the paranormal which, in accordance with Chinese
Communist doctrine, was called “Extraordinary Human Body
Functioning” (EHBF), and linked to the concept of
qi, an energy field
which is one of the foundations of traditional Chinese medicine
and martial arts. It is likely this work continues today in
China.
The U.S. remote viewing program came to an end in June 1995,
when the CIA ordered the Defense Intelligence Agency to
shut down the Stargate project. Many documents relating to
the project have since been declassified but, oddly for a
program which many claimed produced no useful results, others
remain secret to this day. The paranormal continues to
appeal to some in the military. In 2014, the Office of Naval
Research launched a
four year project
funded with US$ 3.85 million to investigate premonitions,
intuition, and hunches—what the press release called
“Spidey sense”. In the 1950s, during a
conversation between physicist Wolfgang Pauli and psychiatrist
Carl Jung about psychic phenomena, Jung remarked, “As
is only to be expected, every conceivable kind of attempt has
been made to explain away these results, which seem to border
on the miraculous and frankly impossible. But all such attempts
come to grief on the facts, and the facts refuse so far to be
argued out of existence.” A quarter century later in 1975,
a CIA report concluded “A large body of reliable experimental
evidence points to the inescapable conclusion that extrasensory
perception does exist as a real phenomenon.”
To those who have had psychic experiences, there is no doubt of
the reality of the phenomena. But research into them or, even
more shockingly, attempts to apply them to practical ends, runs
squarely into a paradigm of modern science which puts theory ahead
of observation and experiment. A 1986 report by the U.S. Army
said that its research had “succeeded in documenting
general anomalies worthy of scientific interest,“ but that
“in the absence of a confirmed paranormal
theory…paranormality could be rejected a priori.”
When the remote viewing program was cancelled in 1995, a review
of its work stated that “a statistically significant
effect has been observed in the laboratory…[but] the
laboratory studies do not provide evidence regarding the sources
or origins of the phenomenon.” In other words, experimental
results can be discarded if there isn't a theory upon which to
hang them, and there is no general theory of paranormal phenomena.
Heck, they could have asked me.
One wonders where many currently mature fields of science would be
today had this standard been applied during their formative
phases: rejecting experimental results due to lack of a theory
to explain them.
High-temperature
superconductivity was discovered in 1986 and won the Nobel
Prize in 1987, and still today there is no theory that explains how
it works. Perhaps it is only because it is so easily demonstrated
with a desktop experiment that it, too, has not been relegated to
the realm of “fringe science”.
This book provides a comprehensive history of the postwar involvement
of the military and intelligence communities with the paranormal,
focusing on the United States. The author takes a neutral stance:
both believers and skeptics are given their say. One notes a
consistent tension between scientists who reject the phenomena
because “it can't possibly work” and intelligence
officers who couldn't care less about how it works as long as it is
providing them useful results.
The author has conducted interviews with many of the principals
still alive, and documented the programs with original sources,
many obtained by her under the Freedom of Information Act.
Extensive end notes and source citations are included. I wish
I could be more confident in the accuracy of the text, however.
Chapter 7 relates astronaut Edgar Mitchell's Apollo 14 mission
to the Moon, during which he conducted, on his own initiative,
some unauthorised ESP experiments. But most of the chapter is
about the mission itself, and it is riddled with errors, all of
which could be corrected with no more research than consulting
Wikipedia pages about the mission and the Apollo program.
When you read something you know about and discover much of it
is wrong, you have to guard against what Michael Crichton called
the
Gell-Mann
amnesia effect: turning the page and assuming what you
read there, about which you have no personal knowledge, is to be
trusted. When dealing with spooky topics and programs conducted
in secret, one should be doubly cautious. The copy editing is only
of fair quality, and the
Kindle edition has no index (the print
edition does have an index).
Napoléon Bonaparte said, “There are but two powers
in the world, the sword and the mind. In the long run, the
sword is always beaten by the mind.” The decades of
secret paranormal research were an attempt to apply this statement
literally, and provide a fascinating look inside a secret world
where nothing was dismissed as absurd if it might provide an
edge over the adversary. Almost nobody knew about this work at
the time. One wonders what is going on today.
May 2017 