Ronald M. McRae - Mind Wars: The True Story of Government Research Into the Military Potential of Psychic Weapons

This book made available by the Internet Archive.

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR ON JOURNALISTS AND SCIENTISTS

I am not a scientist. I do read Scientific American and can understand about half of it.

Except for those who write for publications like Scientific American and Discover, few journalists even attempt to keep up with what's news in science. Few could. I fear that the half of Scientific American that I do comprehend will shrink, page by page, as newer theories and more exotic formulas expand the horizons of current knowledge.

Unfortunately, today journalists often find they need to understand those exotic formulas. Recently, Dale Van Atta, a Jack Anderson associate, obtained top secret plans to deploy the neutron bomb with U.S. troops in Koreajust the sort of coup that has made Jack Anderson's column famous. Twenty years ago, the document would have been the story. Today, even that relatively nontechnical paperit was written for professional soldiers, not physicistsneeded some interpretation. Just what does

Yield = 1.1 KT + .8 ER

mean?,* Dale wondered.

No matter what the field, science often determines the news.

*The formula expresses the explosive power (Yield) of the neutron bomb as the sum of blast (KT) and radiation (ER).

The president's economists promise "high tech" will wipe out unemployment. Buck Rogers technology dominates medical news: artificial hearts, organ transplants, gene splicing. Even a reporter on the high school beat might find his biggest story is computers in the classroom.

I personally believe reporters must specialize. Whether his beat is the economy, medicine, or the school board, a reporter must become conversant enough with the new technologies to interpret the words of the researchers for the now-bewildered public. Of course, reporters need the active cooperation of the scien-tists, and that cooperation is often not forthcoming. Scientists don't, as a rule, make good press agents. They speculate more cautiously than the press, which depends more on rumor and anonymous sources than carefully documented columns and rows of figures.

Fortunately, some scientists will cooperate, and I have been most fortunate in finding one such man. I have asked Marcello Truzzi, a distinguished sociologist and a leading authority on the so-called deviant sciences, to comment on the remarkable and sometimes bizarre new technologies I have uncovered in writing this book.

Truzzi is a rarity in the Byzantine field of psychic research, a field where conspiracy seems as common as experimentation. Truzzi is trusted. Both the parapsychologists and the skeptics universally concede Marcello Truzzi is objective and unbiased.

The responsibility for the accuracy of the facts I allege in this book is wholly my own. Professor Truzzi kindly corrected the many technical errors in my original draft, but I, and I alone, waded through that "sea of conjectures, rumors, and confusion" that, as Professor Truzzi notes in his foreword, baffles even those who work in the field. My conclusions, right or wrong, are mine.

FOREWORD BY MARCELLO TRUZZI

]VIuch that Ron McRae reveals to us in Mind Wars will strike some readers as preposterous and others as incredible but true. To some degree, both will be right. Those of us who have been attempting to monitor government interest in and involvement with parapsychology are faced with a Byzantine labyrinth of both information and disinformation, intentional misinformation put out by agencies to mislead and hide the truth. Only a few things seem certain. We know that the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union (and more recently the Chinese government) have shown serious interest in the claims of parapsychology and have sponsored research in the area. We know that much of this work has been conducted clandestinely and in conjunction with military and intelligence agencies. And we also know that there has been interest in this work expressed by some officials at the highest levels of government, including past presidents of the United States. But beyond this, there is mainly a sea of conjectures, rumors, and confusion. Most scientists, including parapsychologists, know little of these matters. Unearthing details takes the skills of an investigative reporter, and Ron McRae has dug up some quite remarkable information, much of which will surprise and shock even those who work in the field.

Those familiar with the history of clandestine operations during the Second World War are aware of the many both brilliant and outlandish intelligence ploys engaged in by our government.

Some of these involved "occult" areas. For example, the British used an astrologer to predict the sort of advice a German astrologer was reputedly giving Hitler. Since President Reagan has occasionally been reported to have a serious interest in astrology (denied by the White House), it seems likely that the Soviets have similarly sought to anticipate advice that might be given him by hiring their own astrologer. Such involvement by governments in arcane matters may be purely a practical matter and may have no deeper meaning. There are some who cynically believe that all of the U.S. government involvement with psi research is simply disinformation, misleading propaganda to make the Communists waste time and resources on such projects of their own. But there are also those at the other extreme who proclaim that the Soviets are far ahead of the West in the race for "inner space," and that these efforts constitute a clear and present danger to the vital security and military might of this country. As with most things, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.

v As we read the documents available to us, especially those still largely censored documents available via the Freedom of Information Act, and locate the occasional news stories buried in the back pages of the press, it is often impossible to conclude if we are dealing with geniuses or madmen. For example, one scheme disclosed by Ron McRae proposed that we might be able to meet a nuclear-armed missile with a new psychotronic device that could cast the threatening weapon one hundred years into our future, at which timewhen the rest of our technology had advanced to a level that might enable us to disarm itwe could deal with it properly (or presumably send it forward in time again and again until we could disarm it). Is such a science-fiction like scheme brilliant or insane? How do we judge a wild idea like this without adequate knowledge about the alleged psychotronic device and its real capabilities (if any)?

To most skeptics, all this may sound like madness, the replacement of reason with pseudoscience or Buck Rogers mythology.