Annie Jacobsen - Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government’s Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis

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.

Napoleon Bonaparte

There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isnt true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.

Sren Kierkegaard

T his is a book about scientists and psychics with top-secret clearances. It is about the U.S. governments decades-long interest in anomalous mental phenomena, including extrasensory perception (ESP), psychokinesis (PK), map dowsing, and other forms of divination, all disciplines the scientific community rejects as pseudoscience. Across recorded history these disciplines have been called magical, mystical, supernatural, and occult. Today they are called paranormal. Those who practice them have been lionized, vilified, and burned at the stake. And then, just a few years after the end of World War II, the U.S. government determined anomalous mental phenomena to be effective military and intelligence tools, and began to investigate their possible use in classified operations. This book tells the story of this postwar endeavor and its continuation into the modern era.

The real action began in 1972, when a small group of promising young scientists was approached by the Central Intelligence Agency to embark upon a research program involving psychics, or sensitives. The work took place at Stanford Research Institute, the second-largest Defense Departmentfunded independent research facility in the nation. The CIA challenged the scientists to first determine whether extrasensory perceptionthe ability to perceive things by means other than the five known sensesand psychokinesisthe ability to perturb matter with the mindcould be demonstrated and repeated in the laboratory. If so, the CIA wondered, how might these disciplines be best deployed against the enemy to win the Cold War?

The results of the CIA program were spectacular. A large body of reliable experimental evidence points to the inescapable conclusion that extrasensory perception does exist as a real phenomenon, the CIA concluded in 1975. Focusing on the results, the military and the intelligence services wanted in. This included the Navy, the Air Force, the Army (including its Intelligence and Security Command and the Development and Readiness Command), the Coast Guard, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Customs Service, the Secret Service, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Over time, numerous presidents, congressmen, and members of the National Security Council were briefed.

When a theoretical understanding of the phenomena could not be found, grave tensions arose. In the postwar age of advancing technology, science has taken an aggressively hostile attitude toward supernatural, or paranormal, beliefs. Extrasensory perception and map dowsing are just modern names for divination: the practice of seeking knowledge of the future or the unknown by supernatural means. Psychokinesis was based upon a protoscientific tradition not unlike alchemy, the fabled supposition that, using magic, man could affect matter. How could the U.S. government condone such things?

In 1942 Dr. Gertrude Schmeidler, an experimental psychologist with a PhD from Harvard, conducted an experiment on the subject of anomalous mental phenomena with psychology students at City University of New York. In her questionnaire, she explored individuals beliefs about ESP and PK. Her analysis of the data led her to create the term sheep to refer to individuals who were confident about the possible reality of ESP and PK, and goats to refer to those who doubted the existence of any so-called anomalous mental phenomena. This explicit difference, between believers and disbelievers of mental phenomena, has existed in the upper echelons of the U.S. military and intelligence communities since World War II. This book tells their story.

The sheepgoat divide also exists across America, but with a clear minority of goats. Gallup polls and Pew Research Center studies reveal that a majority of Americans alive today harbor paranormal beliefs: 73 percent say they have had a supernatural or paranormal experience, and 55 percent believe in psychic or spiritual healing. Many Americans also believe in extrasensory perception or telepathy (41 percent); believe that extraterrestrials have visited Earth (29 percent); or say theyve seen a ghost (18 percent). A minority 27 percent do not believe in anything supernatural. This group includes scientific skeptics, who are also an important part of this story.

Were the governments psychics gifted seers or skilled magicians? And are the scientists who studied them, many of whom continue to study these phenomena today, on the brink of discovery? Are they modern-day scientific revolutionaries akin to Galileo, Louis Pasteur, and Madame Curie, each of whom solved scientific mysteries that baffled scientists for millennia? Or is ESP and PK research a fools errand, nothing more?

How do scientistspeople of reasonapproach such enigmatic subject matter? And what about the psychics themselves? Who were the individuals hired by the U.S. government for these top-secret programs, and how do they explain their military and intelligence work? To research and report this book I interviewed fifty-five scientists and psychics who worked on government programs, including the core members of the original group from Stanford Research Institute and the CIA, the core group on the military side, defense scientists, former military intelligence officers and government psychics, physicists, biologists, neurophysiologists, cyberneticists, astrophysicists, a general, an admiral, a Nobel Laureate, and an Apollo astronaut. These are their stories.