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.Instead of developing better missiles or subma-rines or space-based weapons, the Ruskies were wasting precious time,money, and scientific talent on what might have been promising scriptpremises for The Outer Limits or The Twilight Zone.But that would havebeen too easy.Instead, U.S.officials took seriously the prospect of fallingbehind in an ethereal arms race.They quickly moved to counter the Sovi-ets by developing their own cadre of psychic soldiers and spies.The secretU.S.effort, conducted by a succession of government agencies under avariety of code names Scangate, Gondola Wish, Grill Flame, and finallyStargate continued for the next two decades and actually outlived theSoviet Union itself.In the process, the program defied repeated attemptsby skeptical scientists and budget watchers to terminate it, in part becauseof congressional patrons fascination with the paranormal.Even thoughno bona fide supernatural warfare techniques or extrasensory spying ca-pabilities resulted from the psychic espionage program, in the end it didprove conclusively the power of one phenomenon the human mind sDUBIOUS NOTIONS 117amazing ability to become utterly, stubbornly enthralled with an idea, nomatter how nonsensical it turns out to be. From the Incredible to the Outrageously IncredibleIn fairness, the government s pursuit of paranormal powers prob-ably doesn t rank as the wackiest top secret project ever that honorprobably belongs to  Acoustic Kitty, the CIA s ill-fated 1960s scheme touse a cat equipped with a listening device and transmitter to spy on theSoviets.(Unfortunately, the feline agent was run over by a car instead.)And unlike, say,  Curveball, the Iraqi defector whose revelations aboutwhat turned out to be nonexistent mobile biological weapons labs helpedmake the case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the psychic corps didn t haveany significant consequences in terms of U.S.national security.In truth,the 1970s effort wasn t even the first U.S.attempt to wage paranormalespionage.As former North Carolina congressman Charlie Rose (not tobe confused with the TV host of the same name) told the Charlotte Ob-server, he once attended a CIA briefing on Capitol Hill at which he wasintroduced to a psychic who had attempted to spy on former Soviet leaderNikita Khrushchev, who was premier from 1958 to 1964.The man claimedthat he had projected himself inside the Kremlin so that he could perusedocuments on Khrushchev s desk.Unfortunately, the psychic  couldn tread Russian, and it didn t do him much good, the congressman ex-plained.But the psychic espionage effort that stretched from the 1970s tothe mid-1990s definitely was the most determined and prolonged govern-ment exploration of phenomena that, in the words of a 1988 report by theNational Research Council,  range from the incredible to the outrageouslyincredible.It began in the summer of 1972, when officials from the CentralIntelligence Agency went to California to meet with H.E.Puthoff, a for-mer navy officer and government intelligence employee who had movedOOPS 118on to the Stanford Research Institute, a private think tank.Puthoff wasinvestigating a type of clairvoyance known as  remote viewing, in whicha person with psychic powers attempts to visualize something that isn tpossible to perceive with normal senses a place he or she has never vis-ited, an object hidden from view, the location and activities of a distantperson.Puthoff s research subject was a painter named Ingo Swann,whom Puthoff said had the ability to see inside pieces of machinery in thelab.By Puthoff s account, the CIA men tested Swann by quizzing himabout the contents of a small box.Swann reportedly said that it containedsomething that looked like a leaf, except that it moved.Apparently, thatwas close enough to the correct answer a small moth for the CIA.InOctober of that year, the agency gave the SRI a $50,000 contract to pursuemore research.The research team recruited more subjects who claimed to havepsychic abilities, and during the next fifteen years it conducted sometwenty-six thousand experimental trials.One such experiment took placein July 1974 at the SRI in Palo Alto, California.A psychic was given thecoordinates of a nuclear weapons research facility in Kazakhstan, then apart of the Soviet Union, and asked to use his remote viewing powers.Thesubject described a road through a river gorge leading to a series of low,cramped one-story buildings partially dug into the ground, with a five-hundred-foot antenna and an outdoor pool for underwater testing.Hementioned the proximity of a nearby village, but said the closest rail linewas about sixty miles to the north.It was a strikingly vivid description ofa place he had never actually seen.Unfortunately, it was pretty much all wrong, except for the sub-ject s mention of a rail-mounted crane on the site.Over the years, para-normal proponents have pointed to the crane as evidence that remoteviewing does sometimes produce results [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]