In the book, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, a 1970 cult favorite, the above quote is vaguely attributed to “Soviet Researchers”. Taken together, the quote and the attribution conjure up a picture of a group of conscientious Soviet scientists at a press conference.  But to the author of this particular government report, John D. Lamothe, then captain of the medical service corps, it is evidence of something more ominous.  In the report he prefaces the quote with a statement and a question:

And the above quote warning of the potential dangers of paranormal investigations follows.

Published in 1970 and written by Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Shroeder, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain documents the two writers visits to “official” parapsychology laboratories in the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc countries.  Hardly a scientific book, it has chapter headings like, “UFO’s and PSI, Seeking the Cosmic Messiah”, “The Telepathic Knockout”, and “A Soviet Witch Predicts”.  A good example of the tone of the book can be found in the opening pages:

The book sold well but was not taken seriously by scientists in the West.  This didn’t prevent John LaMothe from referencing it a number of times in his DIA report.  Along with this book and among the government reports and scientific papers found in the appendix can also be found the National Enquirer.

“Controlled Offensive Behavior - USSR” and another report that LaMothe co-wrote in 1977 titled “Soviet and Czechoslovakian Parapsychology Research” are clearly not the work of a skeptic.  The reports are characterized by paranoia and a desire to confirm the worst fears about psychic research in the Soviet Union and the potential for that research being utilized for military purposes.  But the two reports are indicative of Cold War fears of the time and a belief held by some that the Russians were dangerously far ahead of the United States in psychic warfare and that time and money should be dedicated to addressing this problem.   The origins of these investigations can be found in the early to mid-70’s in a branch of the CIA known as the Directorate of Science and Technology (created in the early 1960’s ostensibly to discover scientific and technical solutions to intelligence problems) but would continue well into the 1990’s under the auspices of Army intelligence and DIA.

US Navy Uses ESP on Atomic Sub!

Has the American military learned the secret of mind power?

The above headline turned up in the French magazine, Science et Vie and the quote is take from the same 1960 article which reported that the U.S. had used telepathy to communicate with the first American nuclear submarine, the Nautilus, while submerged under the Arctic icecap.  According to the report, president Eisenhower dedicated special attention to this project, which had shown a success rate higher than all the other projects involving telepathy. The article also claimed that the Navy, the Air Force, Westinghouse, General Electric, Bell Laboratories and Rand Corporation took part in the project. It was believed that the experiment was conducted to address the problem of subs being unable to communicate due to the blocking of radio frequencies in deep waters.  Because a submarine had to surface in order to expose its antennae for radio communications, there was always the danger of being seen by the enemy. The author of the article said his source was writer and hero of the World War II French Resistance Jacques Bergier.  Bergier also co-authored the sixties occult bestseller The Morning of the Magicians, a book probably read by many of the same people who read Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain.

Bergier denied he had made any such claims and the U.S. government also stated that no telepathy experiments were conducted on the Nautilus.  But this didn’t diminish the impact of the story.  The Soviet Union apparently took the article seriously and interpreted the denials as subterfuge.  Their response was to begin heavily funding parapsychology research and by the late 1960’s, the US was alarmed enough at this development to begin research of its own.  “Controlled Offensive Behavior - USSR” is one result of that research, driven first by a need to understand what the Soviets might be developing so that defensive measures could be prepared and secondly, to investigate the possibility of U.S. intelligence and military utilizing this technology for their own purposes.

This was probably not the first example of the United States government looking into the military possibilities of psychic phenomena.  There are anecdotal reports of ESP being discussed for military application during World War II and the CIA probably investigated the paranormal as early as 1961.  In 1968, the Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell independently attempted his own ESP experiment by trying to contact an individual on earth from inside his space capsule.  As fantastic as this scenario is (and Mitchell claimed his experiment was quite successful) the idea of telepathic astronauts turns up in Lamothe’s report.  He references a 1967 Soviet Maritime News report for the following quote, “Cosmonauts, when in orbit, seem to be able to communicate telepathically more easily with each other than with people on earth.”

The CIA and Scientology - a Pychic Double Whammy

In April of 1972 physicist Russell Targ from the Stanford Research Institute (SRI had close ties with Stanford University but was funded largely by government contracts) met with the CIA Office of Scientific Intelligence (part of the DS&T) to discuss the subject of the parapsychology.  Targ, whose father had been fascinated by the paranormal, claimed that he knew individuals who had witnessed and made films of Soviet research into psychokinesis, the alleged movement of objects using only mind-generated force.  Targ made these films of Soviet experiments available to the CIA for review. 

Targ’s partner, and a person who was to play a large role in CIA parapsychology experiments, was Harold Puthoff, also an SRI physicist.  Puthoff, a Scientologist (and one of many of L. Ron Hubbard’s followers working at SRI at the time), had lost interest in his teaching job at Stanford University a few years earlier and became interested in the possible existence of psychic abilities.  Targ and Puthoff were able to convince the Office of Technical Services (also part of the DS&T) to invest a little less than a thousand dollars in a paranormal research project.

In June of 1972, Puthoff invited the first test subject to SRI to demonstrate his abilities.  The man’s name was Ingo Swann (also a Scientologist), an artist who had been involved in psychic experiments at the City College of New York.  Swann, with no knowledge beforehand of where he was going, was brought to a superconducting shielded magnetometer being used in quark (high energy particle) experiments at the Stanford University Physics Department. The quark experiment required that the magnetometer be shielded as much as possible.  Nevertheless, when Swan focused his attention on it's interior, it was reported that the output signal was visibly disturbed, indicating a change in the internal magnetic field. Similar variations in the signal were recorded when Swann concentrated on the magnetometer, that had never been seen before or since.  The CIA Office of Technical Services was impressed enough by this display to fund another experiment shortly after this.

In the next test, a small live brown moth was hidden in a sealed box by Technical Services personnel and Swann was asked to describe the hidden object.  Swann reportedly stated, “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!” These kinds of anomalous results and a fear of Soviet advances would produce more funding for similar studies over the next two decades.

When looking at reports like “Controlled Offensive Behavior - USSR” the level of fear and paranoia about Soviet psychic warfare capabilities appears to have been more than enough on its own to have kept paranormal study projects funded.  It’s common war propaganda strategy to dehumanize the enemy.  But the same fear that makes this possible also makes it possible to attribute superhuman qualities to the enemy, especially in what was a closed and therefore somewhat mysterious society like the cold war Soviet Union.  That mysterious aspect fueled the imagination and paranoia of the U.S. military and intelligence personnel.

Hypnotized Superspy Double Agent

"I have more than once seen, first an object move, then a luminous cloud appear to form about it, and lastly, the cloud condense into shape and become a perfectly formed hand . . . It is not always a mere form, but sometimes appears perfectly life-like and graceful, the fingers moving and the flesh apparently as human that of any in the room.  At the wrist, or arm, it becomes hazy, and fades off into a luminous cloud.  To the touch, the hand sometimes appears icy cold and dead, at other times warm and life-like, grasping my own with the firm pressure of an old friend."

The above is also excerpted from Lamothe’s “Controlled Behavior” report and the quote comes from British scientist Sir William Crookes (1832 –1919).  Crookes, who discovered the element thallium in 1861, also had an interest in psychic phenomenon.  The quote refers to his experiment with what are called “apport” phenomena, when objects are supposedly produced out of thin air during a séance.  John Lamothe was quick to see the implications if this technique were to be developed by the Soviets.  On page 29 of this United States Defense Intelligence Agency report he expresses these fears:

The individuals who have studied these effects (real or otherwise) have suggested that since these bodies can travel unlimited distances and are able to pass through solid material (walls), they might well be used to produce instant death in military and civilian officials.  It is further conjectured that these bodies could disable military equipment or communication nets.

The report continues and takes on the tone of a paranoid rant:

. . . one is faced with the possibility that the human mind can disintegrate and reintegrate organic matter . . . Experiments show that a human body which has lost about half its weight can be reintegrated without loss of normal functions.  Since this is possible, it does not seems safe to exclude – without further investigation – the possibility that inorganic matter might undergo a similar disintegration and reintegration.

On the same page of the report he summarizes the beliefs of a director of the Southwest Hypnosis Research Center in Dallas, Texas:

Pullman states that a spy would be hypnotized, then his invisible “spirit” would be ordered to leave his body, travel across barriers of space and time to a foreign governments security facility, and there read top-secret documents and relay back their information.  Such “astral projection” already has been accomplished in laboratory settings, Pullman said, add- ing that the Russians are now probably trying to perfect it.

Running through the report is also the fear that a multiple personality might be induced through hypnotism.  In the 1962 John Frankenheimer film, The Manchurian Candidiate, American soldiers are taken across enemy lines in the Korean War and hypnotized by Chinese intelligence agents.  One soldier returns to the U.S. and is induced to commit murders by communist agents when put under a spell with a hypnotic phrase.  Based on this excerpt from page 45 of the report, Lamothe would have found this Hollywood scenario plausible:

The possibility of creating assassins through hypnotic techniques on POWs exists. . . . Most important is the conviction of innocence which the man himself has.  He would never “act guilty” and if ever accused of seeking information would act quite honestly indignant . . .

A few pages earlier in the report, Lamothe imagines such a scenario where the ultimate super spy double agent might be created through hypnosis:

One could easily secure, say, one hundred excellent hypnotic subjects of Cuban stock, living in the United States . . . and then work on these subjects.  In hypnotism, one would build up their loyalty to our country; but out of hypnotism, in the “waking” or normal state, one would do the opposite, striving to convince them that they had a genuine grievance against this country and encouraging them to engage in fifth column activities . . . Through them one would hope to be kept informed of the activities of their “friends”, this information, of course, being obtained in a trance state.

Lamothe goes on to add that these individuals might also be of some use as plants in concentration camps.   Passages like this one must be very intriguing to JFK and RFK assassination conspiracy theorists.  Theories that both Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan were manipulated through hypnosis abound in the literature, and Oswald’s constantly shifting loyalties between pro and anti-communist factions are well documented.

At the time, “Controlled Offensive Behavior - USSR”, was a classified report and it’s hard to know how it was received.  There were always plenty of skeptics within the intelligence community at the time that perceived this type of research as a waste of money and potentially embarrassing (during a time when the CIA was under investigation due to Watergate).  But there were also enough individuals who looked past the more fantastic aspects of these studies and saw it as a great risk not to investigate these possibilities and possibly give the Soviets a tremendous intelligence advantage.

Psychic Friends of the CIA

At the Stanford Research Institute in October of 1972, the CIA Office of Technical Services budgeted$50,000 for research into remote viewing (a telepathic process where an individual in a relaxed state ofmind attempts to acquire information about something from a distance) and other parapsychological phenomena.  A CIA engineer was hired to monitor the project while Targ and Puthoff continued to administer the experiments.  In the summer of 1973, a test done within this project did a lot to peak the curiosity of the CIA.

Along with Ingo Swann, a man named Pat Price - a small building contractor and former Burbank councilmen - also became a test subject in remote viewing experiments. On separate days in May of 1973, both Swann and Price were given the coordinates to a site about 3,000 miles away and asked to use their remote viewing abilities to describe what they saw.  Both gave descriptions consistent with a military base and both descriptions included more than simply the details of buildings.  Price also provided the names of documents in filing cabinets in the buildings and the names of personnel working there. The coordinates of the site had been provided by a colleague of one of the Office of Scientific Intelligence officers associated with the project.  The coordinates that this somewhat skeptical colleague had submitted corresponded to his summer cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

In spite of this, the OSI officer remained intrigued by the descriptions given and decided to see if there were any such installations in the proximity of his colleague’s vacation spot.  Just a few miles away he discovered a National Security Agency intercept site with intercepting antennae and large satellite dishes.  Not only that, but he discovered that a map sketched by Swann was accurate and the terrain was almost exactly as Price had drawn.  Even the code words given by Price were current or past active COMINT (collection of communications intelligence) code words.  While Price and Swann’s remote viewing also produced a number of inaccurate results, the OSI was intrigued with what seemed like further evidence of the potential of paranormal skills in intelligence work.

In a memo that went to the CIA detailing this experiment was documentation of a remote viewing reading that Price offered to give without being provided any coordinates.  He described a Soviet installation on an Island in the southern Indian Ocean.  When compared with satellite imagery of the site, the details he gave were reported to be exact or similar (although some of his descriptions were not verifiable through satellite imagery).

The results at first appear remarkable but a number of things made these tests suspicious.  The experiments were not conducted in a manner in which it could be verified that the subjects did not have access to outside information (Price was even allowed to go home and do some more viewing on his own).  Even more revealing is the fact that Puthoff worked for the NSA in the 1960’s, which could have explained some of the obsolete code words produced by Price.  It is also curious that at this time funding for Puthoff’s SRI laboratory was going to be terminated without support from a government agency (such as the CIA).  Nevertheless, the new directors of the Office of Technical Services and Office of Research and Development were impressed enough with the experiments to move forward.  A program was begun in February of 1974 based on the premise that these phenomena existed and with the intent to develop and utilize them.

Further tests were conducted with similar results.  The subjects would provide accurate descriptions of some sites amidst a lot of completely inaccurate information.  But due mostly to skepticism from the CIA regarding the unscientific methods of the test (as well as fear of embarrassment if the experiments became publicly known) and also to Pat Price’s death due to a heart attack, the program was shut down in 1975.  Essentially, as an experimental psychologist commissioned to do a year and half long study on the experiments concluded, whenever there were adequate controls on the experiments there were no positive results.

Spook Psychic Locates Kidnapped Colonel

The CIA ended all direct support for this kind of research in 1976 but it was picked up by others.  As late as the 1990’s the Pentagon was defending the use of psychics as a source of valuable tips.  A 1995 article in the Washington Post reported that in a Defense Intelligence Agency summary of these accomplishments it was stated that government funded psychics helped uncover a major Soviet submarine program in 1979 and provided information on key buildings in foreign countries.  A DIA supported program known as STAR GATE had as many as six remote viewers on the payroll for two decades up until the mid 1990’s.  It is known that at least $11 million dollars was spent on this program from the mid-eighties to early nineties.

Ingo Swann and Harold Puthoff turn up again in STAR GATE, this time under the auspices of Army intelligence.  The roots of STAR GATE can be found in a 1977 Army Intelligence program called GRILL FLAME.  GRILL FLAME was a collection of a few soldiers and civilians believed to have psychic abilities working out of Forte Meade, Maryland.  When in 1984 the National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council gave the program an unfavorable evaluation the Army stopped funding it.   But the project was picked up by the Defense Intelligence Agency and after existing under a number of different names became STAR GATE.  There were as many as seven full-time remote viewers in the program at its peak in the mid-1980’s and at least three psychics reportedly worked at FT Meade for the CIA from 1990 through July 1995.  These psychics were also made available to other government agencies in need of their services. Several hundred intelligence collection projects involving thousands of remote viewing sessions were conducted during this time.  Joe McMoneagle, an Army intelligence officer who says he became aware of his remote viewing abilities after a near death experience, claims to have left STAR GATE in 1984 with a Legion of Merit Award for providing information on 150 targets that were unavailable from other sources.  McMoneagle has since written two books on the subject of remote viewing.

The DIA also used psychics to attempt to discover the purpose of Soviet Radar at Dushanbe in 1987 and the Joint Staff asked them to identify the function of a suspected Libyan training facility.  The CIA, undeterred by their own previous research, attempted to utilize these same psychics for information about nuclear testing in China and the Soviet Union in 1975 and 1979.  There are other occasions when the result were astonishing.  (Once CIA official took to calling these eight martini nights as it would take that much drinking to deal with sometimes unexplainable results).  When DIA asked a psychic where a kidnapped Marine Corps Colonel was being held, a fellow hostage later confirmed that the Colonel had probably been in the exact building predicted in a South Lebanon village.  Ingo Swann turns up again, this time hired by the US Navy in 1988, supposedly correctly predicting where to find parts of sunken ships.

In 1995 the Office of Research & Development at the CIA Directorate of Science and Technology contracted the nonprofit American Institutes for Research to do an independent Review of the STAR GATE program.  AIR was hired to evaluate the value of the program to the government and to make recommendations regarding the future of the project.  Dr. Jessica Utts, a professor of statistics at UC Davis and Dr. Ray Hyman of the University of Oregon’s psychology department worked on the laboratory component of the program.  Utts had previously written articles that supported the existence of paranormal phenomenon while Hyman was more of a skeptic.  Ultimately they concluded that the, “remote viewing reports failed to produce the concrete, specific information valued in intelligence reporting”.  They also concluded that the information was inconsistent, inaccurate, and the often unscientific methodology of the tests made it difficult to gauge independent effects.  It was at this time that the Defense Department decided to shut down all funding of parapsychology projects.

It shouldn’t be surprising that US intelligence agencies investigated paranormal phenomenon during this period.  There was a curiosity and openness to this in the popular culture, especially in the 1970’s, and it had some affect on the intelligence community.  It is usually assumed that this kind of influence works the other way around, with the mysteries of the intelligence community being the subject of speculation and fictionalization in popular culture.  What happened in this case appears more reciprocal, with the two influencing each other equally.

More interesting than the veracity of these experiments is the obsessive and invasive nature of American military and intelligence that leads to hypothetical hands that can go anywhere and eyes that see into buildings so there’s nowhere to hide.   An insatiable appetite for control of the enemy drives the imagination to scenarios of multiple personality double agents created through hypnotism.   If you are convinced of the enemy’s inhumanity than you must do everything possible to fight them.  After all, if the enemy is not human, they are capable of anything – incredible savagery as well as superhuman ability.  So they must be defended against by all means necessary.