In this book, Annie Jacobsen dives into the evidence that the US government funded research into so-called psi phenomenon, including extrasensory perception and remote viewing.
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At first, most paranormy’s like myself get really excited because we think this points to proof that all of this exists (assuming we still need proof), but I want to point out that Annie Jacobsen makes a point of not taking a stance on either the paranormal or normal side in an effort to maintain journalistic integrity.
One interesting point which she brings up when she’s setting the stage for her book is the percentage of people who actually believe in the paranormal:
73% say they have had a supernatural or paranormal experience, and 55% believe in psychic or spiritual healing. Many Americans also believe in extrasensory perception or telepathy (41%); believe that extraterrestrials have visited the Earth (29%); or say they’ve seen a ghost (18%). A minority (27%) do not believe in anything Supernatural [and have dull, meaningless, lives]. This group includes scientific Skeptics, who are also an important part of this story.
The story begins in Nazi Germany, in May of 1941. Rudolf Hess, who is the deputy Fuhrer of the Third Reich, climbs into a fighter bomber, and flies himself all the way to Ireland, where he jumps out of his plane and parachutes into a field. His plan is to surrender and try to broker a deal with England. But surprisingly, when he lands, he was immediately arrested by the English.
What inspired this high ranking Nazi official to jump ship? I wish I could answer that it was because Rudolf Hess had recognized his boss to be a megalomaniacal psychopath, but no–from the data we can see [and, mind you, the official story will not be released until 2041] Hess made the decision to defect…because of astrology.
Allegedly, while Hess was serving a life sentence in prison, he told a buddy that he defected because he had a prophetic, supernatural, dream. This dream was inspired by the star charts constructed by his two chief astrologers.
So that’s one part of the story. The other part is that a famous witch in Britain, Sybil Leek, faked star charts. I know very little about astrology, so I’m not sure how this would work, but apparently, she created star charts which convinced Hess that he needed to defect.
The British were not above using fake astrology against the US as well. This was before the US had joined the war efforts, and the British felt in desperate need of help from the US; so they started an elaborate fake news campaign using Louis De Wohl, a high profile astrologer at the time, as their muse. De Wohl would make some interesting predictions about happenings with the Nazis, and then the British would feed fake news stories confirming the prediction to the US press. These stories could not be confirmed by the US with the Reich, so they would just get printed.
This really makes one wonder about what sorts of fakeries have been put on in today’s era to sway public opinion.
After the war was over, there was a bit of an arms race between the US and the Soviet Union. It was somewhat clear that the Nazis had created pretty advanced weapons, and the Yanks and the Commies wanted first dibs.
While that all might sound purely technological and rational, there was plenty of evidence to suggest that high ranking German officials had put a significant amount of energy, if you will, into the topic of the occult. When the Allies raided Nazi strongholds, they made off with many occult artifacts –
No one knows which side of the Soviets and Americans got what, but there was certainly a lot of posturing.
Soviets: Oh we’ve got a talisman which allows us to see in the future
US: We’ve got a guy who can bend spoons
Soviets: Oh, well we’ve got a guy who can stop your heart with his mind
US: Yeah, well we’ve got a guy who can stop your mind with his heart
Soviets: That doesn’t make sense
One concerning trend which arose in this post-war era was an interest in mind control and psychic phenomenon.
Apparently, the Russians believed that if they pointed an electromagnetic “ray gun” at an enemy, they could distort the enemy’s perception, maybe give them a case of schizophrenia or the pox, whatever.
How do we know this? Well, in 1962, the Americans were doing a routine security sweep of their embassy in Moscow. They were really looking for listening devices, but what they found were a series of multiple microwave frequencies aimed directly at the offices of the US Ambassador, and some top officials. They could even tell the building within which these signals were coming from. And, they came up with a lovely pet name for the device which was emitting this signal, “MUTS” or “Moscow Unidentified Technical Signal.”
So, in the story of what should have happened, the Americans quickly rushed the Ambassador and colleagues off of the premises in an effort to keep them safe and preserve their mental function. But as you may have guessed from the sarcasm dripping from my voice, that’s not what happened. Instead, the US State Dept decided to keep them there, and just watch what happened to them. They even took blood from the officials at the embassy, and they told them that there was a virus going around, and they wanted to test them. They code named this, the Moscow Viral Study.
Meanwhile, back in the states, they setup a faraday cage, and put monkeys in it and blasted them with these rays to see what would happen. The person in charge of this work, Richard Cesaro, was very quickly convinced that the rays would cause internal organ damage; and, possibly of most concern, Alzheimer’s disease.
Back in Moscow, the experiment continued for 2 years. And the only reason it was stopped, was because some civilian officials in the US found out about what was going on. So, finally, someone who wasn’t a sociopath put the brakes on this research.
Interestingly, there was still a debate about whether these beams were all that harmful. Dr. Samuel Koslov insisted that the beams were just fine. Later, in his journals, he wrote, “The actual physical results were non-existent, but the real psychological trauma (in this case in a group of well-educated and dedicated people) was sad and startling.”
But enough of the stories from the world of the normys. Now, we get to learn about the original bad boys of Psy: Uri Gellar, Ingo Swann, and Pat Price – no dorkier statement has ever been made.
In the early 70s, Uri Gellar was this handsome and charismatic twenty something in Israel. He claims that he started having abilities at a young age – some examples being that he could bend spoons, and watches would just stop working around him – so he seemed to have some interesting psychokinetic abilities. Some of the tricks he would perform included asking someone to pick a number between 0 and 100 thousand, and then showing them a piece of paper in his hand with that exact number on it. There was a man named Amnon Rubenstein, who was the host of a popular talk show in Israel. He claims that he was pretty skeptical of this type of stuff, but when Gellar performed this exact trick on him, he rapidly became a believer. He had Gellar perform the same trick for his entire family, and sat astonished as Gellar produced pieces of paper which had the exact number that these people were thinking in their heads.
The way Rubenstein describes this is that Gellar had this ability to plant thoughts into others minds.
Probably one of the most significant events to launch Gellar’s renown happened in the fall of 1970. He was giving a telepathy demonstration, when all of the sudden, he seemed to be overtaken with, well, basically heart attack symptoms. He even asked if there was a doctor in the house. Then, he told the audience that a historic event had just taken place or was about to, and then he said that the president of Egypt is dead or is about to die. And it turned out, he was spot on correct. This was so shocking, that Gellar really became famous in Israel after this, but then his fame just dwindled, and eventually, he was just playing at nightclubs. So, to the Israelis, Gellar was just a parlor trickster, but to the US CIA, his abilities were potentially of great value, so off to CA he went. And it was here that he met physicist Hal Puthoff at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI).
From there, Gellar was soon to become acquainted with Ingo Swann, another person with special abilities. The story of Ingo Swann should be its own podcast, but I’ll just give a little preamble about how Swann grew to renown. Basically, he volunteered as a guinea pig for the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR). One of the experiments he participated in involved him sitting in a chair, and figuring out what the contents were of a box across the room which was suspended from the ceiling. He claims that he would float out of his body and take a look at what was in the box. The results from this experiment were so astounding, that Swann became an overnight celebrity in NYC. but with the celebrity came gossip. Gossip about his sexual orientation as well as the pornography he wrote.
This didn’t sit well with Swann, so he decided to head out to Hal Puthoff’s lab at SRI, and really prove what he had. But Swann was a bit thrown off by the very first test he was put to. Puthoff took him into a room, where 9 scientists were standing, and asked him to affect the readings of a magnetometer. The output from this machine was like that classic pen drawing on paper as it scrolls by – like a lie detector. At the moment, the output was just a straight line because the machine had been set to not detect quarks, it’s primary function.
But when Swann asks where the actual machine is, he finds out that it’s 5 feet below encased in cement. He starts to get angry, how am I supposed to affect something, and I’m not even sure what it is. This is stressful because people are already laughing at him in NYC, and he really wants to prove himself. So he starts probing around below with his mind. He does something, and asks if that had any impact – it does not. He can see that two of the scientists are smirking, and this is really building the tension he feels. Then he gets an idea, and asks for some paper to draw on. He draws what he thinks is the magnetometer, and points to a part of it and asks, is that the Josephson’s junction. If so, I think I can see it quite well.”
Immediately, when he says this, the reading from the magnetometer jumps. All eyes in the room move to it. It moves a bit more, and Swann asks if that’s an effect. Puthoff asks him to repeat it once more, and he does. Everyone in the room is stunned, and two of the scientists just run out of the room. One of them is so freaked out that he hits his head on a structural support on the way out.
So it wasn’t long after this that the CIA knocked on Hal Puthoff’s door and became heavily involved in the research going on at SRI. But the CIA was skeptical, and they were going to introduce their own controls into the matter. During one session with Ingo Swann, he was again identifying objects which were hidden in a box. One of the CIA officials thought that maybe they were cheating, so he decided to introduce his own test. So he went outside and caught a live brown moth, put it in a box, and asked Swann to ID. Swann said, “I see Something small, brown, and irregular, sort of like a leaf or something that resembles it. Except that it seems very much alive, like it’s even moving.”
Sounds like a brown moth to me.
This is pretty striking evidence in my mind, but I thought for a moment, what if the CIA made the story up, in an effort to mislead the Soviets. This is a possibility, but the author did pull this story from documents which were classified at the time, so this wasn’t exactly broadcast to the media.
This is where Uri Gellar jumps back into the story. He arrives at SRI and is subjected to a battery of psychic tests from Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ for around 9 days. They report all sorts of amazing capabilities which Gellar has, but analysts from the CIA look into these results and think that Targ and Puthoff are being completely fooled by Gellar. The author doesn’t make it totally clear of any examples of tests which were affected by poor experimental conditions, she just labels what the poor experimental conditions were. This includes 1. Loose laboratory controls, 2. Skewing of data, and 3. This idea that the fact that the scientists conducting the experiment already have expectations which are affecting the results. The skewing of data is the most concerning issue listed here. I would really have liked to have seen some examples of this.
So by the summer of 1973, there was still some skepticism coming from the CIA towards SRI regarding whether they really were demonstrating psy phenomena. This was when Ingo Swann came up with an idea to use coordinates on a map. He could float his consciousness over to those coordinates, and describe what he saw. Puthoff suggested this experiment to Kit Green at the CIA, and Green agreed to it.
And, as a little introduction to who Kit Green was, he was basically there to figure out what neurophysiologic components spurred psy phenomena. But he was pretty skeptical that anything was really going on, like many others at the CIA. One day, though, he received a call from Puthoff. Now, he’s sitting in his office in the CIA where he works on highly classified projects. Puthoff tells him that he has to greenlight this work because Gellar really can see things at a distance. Green says something like, no he can’t. Puthoff has Gellar in the office with him, so he hands the phone to Gellar. Gellar then suggests that Puthoff pick a book from his shelf, and open up to a page in this book. Green flips to a page which has a cross section of a brain on it, and Green had written on this page, “Architecture of a viral infection.” over in the SRI offices, Gellar draws a pan of scrambled eggs, and says that he has the word “architecture” coming in strong. How in the world could he have known that? Now this experience opens Green’s mind up a little bit more to the idea that something real was actually going on over at SRI.
Fast forward to the first remote viewing experiment using map coordinates in May of 1973. Puthoff suggests this experiment to Green. Green then thinks that a great fraud protection scheme is to get the coordinates for the experiment from a guy down the hall who doesn’t know anything about what the experiment is. This guy, by the way, went by the name Russ, and Green didn’t even know his real name because his security clearance was so high. Russ provides coordinates, and over at the SRI, Swann is sitting in a faraday cage when he hears them. He remote views to the place. Here is his first description:
There seems to be some sort of mounds and Rolling Hills, there is a city to the north. This seems to be a strange place, somewhere like The Lawns one would find around a military base, but I get the impression that there are either some old bunkers around, or maybe this is a covered Reservoir. There must be a flagpole, some highways to the West, possibly a river over to the Far East, to the South more City.
Phenomena by Annie Jacobsen
Swann then goes home, and the next morning, he has more images which he has captured. He draws a picture of the area which is much more detailed, and he says that he gets the impression that there is something underground, and he wonders if it is a former nike base (which is a missile launch center). He describes a circular drive with a flagpole. A circular building, and then two rectangular buildings and a smaller square one. It’s very plausible, since Swann was no longer being monitored, that he could have cheated. The nature of the cheating was unclear to me, though. Could he have driven to the location and scoped it out in one night? He definitely could have looked it up on a map, but some of the detail I am skeptical he could guess.
So perhaps now, as you’re listening, you might think, well, he might have driven there overnight, and then made some guesses about the underground part…I’m still not really sure if I believe any of this. If any of you are still skeptical, listen on
I now introduce you to Pat Price. Six months before this remote viewing experiment, Pat Price was selling Puthoff a Christmas tree, and suggested that he could help with the experiments they were doing at the SRI. Puthoff listens to him and is like, “sure you can, crazy cakes.”
Well, the day after Swann provides his results, Puthoff is sitting in his office and he gets a call from Price. Now, this is around 6 months after their first encounter, and it seems so coincidental to Puthoff that Price would call him at this time, that he just gives him the coordinates as well.
The next day, Price mails in his viewing report. He includes a lot of detail, such as the weather in the sky above the site. Then, he describes a site which he thinks may be a former missile site – like what Swann had mentioned. Price then goes into even more detail:
Area now houses record storage areas, microfilm, file cabinets, as you go into underground area through aluminum roll up doors, first areas filled with records. Rooms about a hundred feet long, 4 feet wide, 20 foot ceilings.
Phenomena by Annie Jacobsen
Then Price gives a description as though he was able to get into the underground facility. He describes things like file cabinets with security locks, several bays with computers, and communications equipment. The level of detail he provides is so extensive, that Puthoff is like, “am I being punked?” He wonders if the CIA has planted this guy. He then asks Price to provide more specific information – i have no clue why. Price ends up giving him details like names and other code words he finds. He even figures out that the name of the place is Sugar Grove.
Puthoff doesn’t really know what to do with this information, but it doesn’t escape him that Price and Swann both have provided views with some common characteristics. He ends up submitting only Swann’s info to Green at the CIA. Green provides the views to Top-Secret Russ, and Russ says, “What a stupid imagery system you’re working on.” It turns out none of the detail was accurate, the circular driveway, the flagpole, everything. The site was actually only Russ’ summer cabin in West Virginia.
So Green calls Puthoff to tell him the news, and as they are hanging up, Puthoff says, “That’s too bad. The other guy saw the same thing.” He then tells Green all about Pat Price’s remote viewing experience. This doesn’t sit well with Green, so he just decides to take a trip out to West Virginia to see for himself. He gets to the site, sees the cabin, and just decides to drive up the gravel road a little further. And what does he find, but a top secret military base called the Naval Radio Station, Sugar Grove. Here’s a quote from Kit Green in the book:
The names on the folders were correct, referring to the names provided by price. The measurements of the details was correct. The location of the doors and the elevator, the number of floors, where the cabinets were located. The color of the cabinet was correct, it didn’t take judging, it didn’t take statistical processing it was all correct.
Phenomena by Annie Jacobsen
It was so correct, in fact, that the CIA security officers launched a full investigation into the possibility of a treasonous violation of the Espionage Act. Everyone was cleared of course.
So Top Secret Russ didn’t know his house was down the road from a top secret military base! That’s the coincidence of all coincidences. This makes me think there are top secret military bases just everywhere
Welcome to Tiny Town, Virginia! Population 3018. If you go down first street, you’ll find our Dairy Queen, Over on the left there, you can see our first Methodist church, oh and down that abandoned looking dirt road is a top secret military base. But make sure you don’t mention it to anyone, that would be treason, punishable by death. Make sure to stop by our visitor center.
So, I’m going to stop there. The book actually has quite a lot more fascinating detail, so if you think what I’ve covered is interesting, you might want to pick it up.
See you next time, Some bat-shit time, same bat-shit place