Fresh start from commit 85df488cc66fa4934e54d62f1eaeffd274743b7a

10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Gerard Messadié.md

@@ -0,0 +1,19 @@
+---
+created: 2025-07-22
+updated: 2025-07-23
+title: Gérald Messadié
+tags:
+  - person
+  - author
+  - journalist
+  - Editor
+---
+
+Gérald Messadié was the editor of *Science et Vie*, a top French science journal. In February 1960, his journal published an expanded version of [[Jacques Bergier]]'s story about a secret government [[Extrasensory Perception|ESP]] program, titled "The Secret of the Nautilus"[^1].
+
+Messadié stated in an interview that his information for the article came from Bergier and "other sources," who confirmed the story on condition of anonymity. The article identified [[J. B. Rhine]] of the [[Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory]] as the civilian scientist assigned to the project, reporting a high success rate for telepathic communication[^1].
+
+Despite the [[U.S. Navy]]'s denial of the story as a hoax, Messadié's publication contributed to the widespread attention given to the alleged ESP experiments aboard the [[USS Nautilus]]. This, in turn, had significant real-world consequences, as the [[Soviet Union|Soviets]] used the news to stimulate their own [[Parapsychology|parapsychology]] research. [[Leonid L. Vasilev]], Russia's leading ESP researcher, claimed that Soviet parapsychology research was stimulated by the *Nautilus* reports[^1].
+
+## Footnotes
+[^1]: Jacobsen, Annie. *Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis*. Little, Brown and Company, 2017.