Recently, the American intelligence services have declassified a number of documents. It turns out that the Department of Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) during the Cold War found evidence of supersensory perception, telepathy and far-sightedness. And even used this to obtain intelligence information, on the basis of which real military operations were planned. "Lenta.ru" decided to discard prejudices and impartially evaluate the results achieved by the intelligence officers.
Sun Streak Project
The source of the publication, the US National Security Archives pleases fans of the "X-Files": in addition to the RUMO, at least several other intelligence agencies of the country conducted similar studies. Studied not only psychokinesis (the ability to move objects of the physical world by an effort of will), but also telepathy and extrasensory perception at a distance.
Moreover, the latter was even brought to practical use in the interests of intelligence.
According to the documents, the Pentagon's work in this area began in the 1970s (the Stargate project). It was attended by Harold E. Puthoff and Russel Targ. Both are real physicists, with significant scientific achievements in their fields. They were also interested in parapsychology.
As stated in the RUMO review, in the 1970s, it was possible to obtain data on some Soviet objects at the Semipalatinsk test site, previously unknown to the American military, but later confirmed by agent and technical intelligence.
Unfortunately, these objects are apparently still considered functional, which is why their description in the document has been blacked out. Apparently, we are talking about URDF-3: a complex associated with the development of Soviet nuclear rocket engines for space exploration.
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To the military's credit, it should be noted that they wondered about the reliability of the data obtained by extrasensory means. For example, on September 4, 1979, the US Army Intelligence and Security Administration tried to test the effectiveness of long-term vision, using its operators to search for the missing US Navy aircraft. The psychic pointed to an area that closely coincided with the real crash site ("within 24 kilometers"). After that, starting in 1979, the project acquired the status of an active one and became, as it was then considered, an actual means of obtaining intelligence information.
RUMO headquarters
Photo: Defense Intelligence Agency.
What came of this in practice? In 1990, the RUMO claimed that this type of reconnaissance was "successfully used" to solve seven problems. Among them are not only the study of inaccessible objects, such as the aforementioned Semipalatinsk, but also "separation of nuclear targets from non-nuclear", scientific and technical intelligence and current forecasting of possible military operations. Such a list would definitely indicate that
psychic intelligence was interpreted by the DIA as a very real and effective form of research into vital targets and objects that are fundamental to military planning.
There is such a profession
Unfortunately, the document does not elaborate on the methods of psychic intelligence, limiting itself to indicating that deep physical relaxation and increased mental focus (meditation) are necessary for successful vision.
Intelligence came through the interaction of two people: a visionary and an "interviewer". The second was to name the place and time that the visionary was to explore. After that he expounded his "impressions, feelings and sensations" from the studied object. The visionary should carefully avoid value judgments, giving only "objective" information that the interviewer wrote down. Intelligence professionals were involved in the analytical interpretation of the recorded data.
Then, when the intelligence agency processed the information received, the visionary was informed about how successful he was in the given mission. As stated in the DIA review, "this helped him successfully participate in subsequent operations." What is true: In psychology experiments, this is called "giving clues to future" predictions."
At first glance, the project seems somewhat extravagant. It's one thing for a movie, where Agent Cooper from Twin Peaks uses Tibetan techniques to find the killer, and another for real American special services. By the way, the DIA review mentions that the foresight reports were drawn up on the basis of requests from various intelligence agencies not associated with the Office itself, and the list of such services included the CIA and a number of other departments.
Obscurantist successes
There is practically no information about the specific results of the work of visionaries. However, it is known that they were one of the sources used in the preparation of the air strikes against Tripoli on April 15, 1986.
Then, based on the data of all types of intelligence, the main blow of the American Air Force was inflicted on Bab al-Aziziya, where the residence of Muammar Gaddafi was located. The colonel was indeed there, but thanks to the warning he left the residence just before the strike.
It is unlikely that the honor of discovering Kadaffi should be attributed solely to the psychic capabilities of the RUMO. After all, it is common for state leaders to be in their residence. Again, there is no evidence that psychics were forbidden to watch the news, read books or newspapers. They may well have learned about where Kadaffi is, and in a less psychic way.
Another source associated with visionaries is a June 1988 CIA document on the Lebanese hostage crisis.
The visionary, designated 079, spoke about the whereabouts and prospects for the release of Terry Waite, special envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Terry Anderson, an American journalist. They were held by Lebanese militants. The American special services had no specific information about them either from open sources or from intelligence officers on the ground.
Aftermath of the American bombing of Libya (April 15, 1986).
Photo: Merliac / Redman / AP.
The visionary reported that Waite was being held alone, and Anderson was being held with another hostage. Indeed, Waite was being held in solitary confinement at the time. However, the correct instructions of the psychic are limited to this. He said that Waite is doing well, although he suffered from asthma, aggravated by a lack of medication.
Farseer-079 tried himself as a clairvoyant. He predicted Waite and Anderson's release that same summer of 1988. Both were released by the militants only in the 1990s.
Science and pseudoscience
In fact, all work in the Stargate and Sun Streak projects was based on the work of two scientists - Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ, who worked with the research center at Stanford University, SRI International. By the way, it was SRI who acted as a civilian contractor for law enforcement agencies in the study of vision. Therefore, even without having full access to the DIA and CIA papers, it is easy to find out how scientifically sound the psychic intelligence methodology was.
Russell Tar
Photo: Patricia Targ / Public domain.
In 1974, these two authors published an article in Nature (in Letters), and in 1976 in Proceedings of the IEEE, highly respected and authoritative publications. Both jobs provided them with scientific respectability in the eyes of those accustomed to respecting the scientific journal system but not familiar with its bottlenecks. After these two publications, SRI International's business was well off.
In 1980, psychologist David Marks published a book describing his experiments to replicate the results of Puthoff and Targ. As you might guess, the experiments turned out to be irreproducible. He later expressed this in the same Nature. Marx faced Puthoff's reluctance to provide complete records of the experiments, but was able to obtain them through the courts. It turned out that
In experiments on vision, psychics were inadvertently given information that allowed them to guess what the correct answer to the question asked should be.
The most interesting thing is that despite the correctness of the objections of Marx and his co-authors, no conclusions were drawn. If in the CIA and DIA someone read the letters in Nature, they didn’t show it, and American airstrikes were still inflicted on the prompts of psychics.
The guard is tired
The trouble came to the far-sighted, where they did not expect: the CIA, after many years of absorbing invaluable information obtained by supernatural means, suspected something and in the mid-1990s ordered an independent study of the effectiveness of the RUMO program.
The result questioned both the very existence of the paranormal phenomena that were used in intelligence work, and their ability to give any specific and sufficiently accurate information suitable for special services. In 1995, work on projects like Sun Streak was discontinued. This time, some rivalry among the multiple US intelligence agencies has been beneficial.
Cybernetics, Telepathy and Related Issues
It is clear that practical intelligence activities were supposed to promptly push those who analyze the instructions of the far-sighted people to the idea of their failure. How did it happen that such ineffective measures were taken seriously for decades?
One of the reasons is the specificity of the era: the second half of the 20th century was characterized by extremely rapid scientific and technological progress, when yesterday's science fiction turned into everyday reality before our very eyes. Of course, technical progress is one thing, and psychics are quite another, but this is not so obvious to everyone.
Another American project for using psychics is Star Gate.
Unfortunately, the military and intelligence officers do not always completely separate scientifically sound statements from scientific ones. Most of them will not be able to tell offhand why quantum chromodynamics is real, but the wave genome is not. This is why Richard Helms, the future head of the CIA, pointed out in 1963 that his organization should continue to investigate "these esoteric activities." The motivation was simple: the Soviet preoccupation with "cybernetics, telepathy, hypnosis and the like … could mean more behind them than we previously thought."
A man who for a long time headed the largest intelligence service in the world seriously believed that cybernetics and telepathy are concepts of the same series. Is it any wonder that Langley sponsored their own Psychic Battle?
Not only in the West
The use of anti-scientific concepts by the military and intelligence services is not at all the prerogative of the United States. In the USSR, until 1988, a closed research program was conducted to study the so-called torsion fields - the concept of Akimov and Shipov (now academicians of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences). It was only by the very end of the Soviet period that it was qualified as pseudoscientific, and work in this direction completely stopped.
And today the overwhelming majority of military and intelligence officers do not know why the "colors" of quarks are scientific, but a photon containing four quanta is not. You have to rely on scientists. Again, the application of the peer-review system for scientific articles in such closed areas as espionage and advanced weapons systems is still very difficult.
Is it possible to somehow save the employees of the defense-offensive departments from paranormal-pseudoscientific concepts? There are certain reserves here. First of all, this is an increase in the general educational level of middle and senior managers: it is almost certainly possible to ensure that they, unlike the former director of the CIA, can still understand the difference between cybernetics and telepathy.
Author: Alexander Berezin.
