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---
aliases:
- John L. Wilhelm
category: "Skeptics & Critics"
category: "Authors & Journalists"
tags:
- Person
- Skeptic
summary: "Wilhelm's exposé centered on the U.S."
- Journalist
- Time
- SRI
- UriGeller
- Parapsychology
- HPSCI
- Documentary
alias:
- John L. Wilhelm
- John Wilhelm
- John Lenhart Wilhelm III
- John Lenhart Wilhelm
- Wilhelm
summary: "Time science correspondent whose 1976 book The Search for Superman and August 7, 1977 Washington Post article on psychic spying drew a CIA memorandum in 1974 and a House intelligence committee briefing in 1977."
location: "Washington, D.C."
relations:
- type: employed_by
with: "[[Time]]"
start: 1961
role: "reporter, then National Science Correspondent; listed on the March 4, 1974 Time masthead and described by the CIA on April 16, 1974 as a former Time reporter"
fn: 1
- type: investigated
with: "[[Stanford Research Institute]]"
start: 1974-04
role: "wrote to SRI president Charles Anderson in 1974 requesting interviews with Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ; CIA records the request"
fn: 2
- type: subject_of
with: "[[House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence]]"
start: 1977-11-16
role: "his August 7, 1977 Washington Post article occasioned a committee staff briefing by the CIA Office of Technical Service"
fn: 8
- type: employed_by
with: "[[Science 80]]"
role: "managing editor, after Time"
fn: 11
created: 2026-05-15
updated: 2026-10-05
---
John L. Wilhelm was a journalist and a skeptic of [[Extrasensory Perception|ESP]] and other anomalous mental phenomena. He is known for his *Washington Post* article, "Psychic Spying? The [[Central Intelligence Agency]], the [[Pentagon]] and the Russians Probe the Military Potential of [[Parapsychology]]," published on August 7, 1977[^1].
John Lenhart Wilhelm III graduated from [[Princeton University]] in 1959, served as an aviation intelligence officer in the [[U.S. Navy]] (planning bombing raids during the Cuban Missile Crisis, according to his obituary), and joined [[Time]] in 1961. At Time he became National Science Correspondent and reported on manned and unmanned space flights, the Vietnam War battle of Hamburger Hill, the 1968 B-52 crash at [[Thule Air Base]] in Greenland, the Kent State shootings, the [[Pentagon Papers]] and the arrest of [[Daniel Ellsberg]], and wrote the magazine's first cover story on environmental pollution.[^1] His name appears among the correspondents on the masthead of the March 4, 1974 issue of Time, which carried the cover story "Boom Times on the Psychic Frontier" by [[Stefan Kanfer]].[^2]
Wilhelm's exposé centered on the [[U.S. Navy]]'s top scientist, [[Samuel Koslov]], who publicly expressed outrage about the [[Stanford Research Institute|SRI]] project on ESP, claiming he had demanded its cessation. Koslov told Wilhelm, "If you ask me, ‘Do you think it’s a pile of crap?’ I do, and you can quote me." Wilhelm's article highlighted the public relations nightmare faced by Koslov, especially as the nefarious details surrounding the [[Moscow Signal]] and [[Project Pandora]] had only recently become public[^1].
### Request to interview SRI, 1974
A memorandum for the record dated April 16, 1974, in the [[Central Intelligence Agency]] STARGATE collection, is headed "Request for Information about Stanford Research Institute (SRI) Paranormal Research Project by Mr. Wilhelm former Time Reporter." It records that Wilhelm had written to [[Charles Anderson]], president of the [[Stanford Research Institute]], asking permission to interview [[Harold Puthoff]] and [[Russell Targ]], and that Wilhelm "desires to write a true positive story of the activities at SRI to obviate the previous biased public accounts." Puthoff had telephoned the CIA to report the request and to ask its opinion. The memorandum states that "it was mutually agreed that since publication of certain portions of the work is imminent, refusal to see Mr. Whilhelm would only delay such interviews which will become more frequent in the future," and that the SRI investigators "will grant the interview and confine the discussions to the innocuous portions of their studies."[^3]
### The Search for Superman, 1976
Wilhelm's book *The Search for Superman: An Extraordinary Journey of Psychic Exploration* was published by Pocket Books in 1976.[^4] An outline of it kept in the CIA collection among SRI miscellaneous papers lists as its characters [[Uri Geller]], [[Andrija Puharich]], [[Hannah Shtrang]] and [[Shipi Shtrang]], [[Ingo Swann]], [[Pat Price]], [[J. B. Rhine]], [[Edgar Mitchell]] and Adrienne Puthoff (the "ring incident"), gives the purpose of the book as presenting "the facts as best they can be determined in the controversial psychic experiments carried out over the past several years by SRI," and notes that "assistance by SRI was given grudgingly, if at all" and that Wilhelm was "not allowed to witness any of their psychic tests." The same outline names [[George Lawrence]] of the [[Advanced Research Projects Agency]] and [[Robert Van de Castle]] on the "loose" Geller experiments.[^5]
The British weekly *[[New Scientist]]* reviewed the book's treatment of the 1974 *Nature* paper by Targ and Puthoff. [[Joseph Hanlon]] wrote that "in his book, Wilhelm comes close to accusing Targ and Puthoff of dishonesty": Wilhelm alleged that in three of the thirteen picture-drawing trials Geller passed but a drawing was nonetheless included, that in one of these, a horse drawn against a camel target, "apparently Targ and Puthoff themselves may have helped select one of Uri's many drawings that best fit the target," that Puthoff told Geller whether a target was a geometric picture or an object, and that Shipi Shtrang and Jean Mayo were present at sessions, so that Geller's "SRI experiments tended to be more like full-blown stage performances than private experiments."[^6]
In the *Humanist* review of Targ and Puthoff's *Mind-Reach*, [[Ray Hyman]] quoted Wilhelm's book on Hyman himself: "He has a personal belief structure that seemingly would suffer least if psychic phenomena became accepted as a scientific reality." Hyman cited the passage to argue that his criticisms of Targ and Puthoff were not dogmatic fanaticism.[^7]
### "Psychic Spying?" and the House committee, 1977
On August 7, 1977 the [[Washington Post]] published Wilhelm's article "Psychic Spying? The CIA, the Pentagon and the Russians Probe the Military Potential of Parapsychology."[^8] [[Annie Jacobsen]] reports that the article centered on [[Samuel Koslov]], described there as the Navy's top scientist, who publicly expressed outrage about the SRI work on extrasensory perception and said he had demanded that it stop. According to Jacobsen, Koslov told Wilhelm: "If you ask me, 'Do you think it's a pile of crap?' I do, and you can quote me," and the article appeared when the details of the [[Moscow Signal]] and [[Project Pandora]] had only recently become public.[^9]
A CIA memorandum of November 17, 1977 (OTS/BAB Memo 287-77) records that "the Committee's interest was occasioned by the article 'Psychic Spying' which appeared in the Parade Section of the Washington Post on 7 August 1977." In response to a request from the [[House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence]], the Director of the [[Office of Technical Service]], David Brandwein, and other OTS officers briefed committee staff, among them Michael O'Neil and Pat Long, from about 1000 to 1100 hours on November 16, 1977, in the committee's offices. The staffers "asked very pertinent questions and were given frank and in-depth replies" to a short oral history of OTS work in the field dating to 1961. An OTS officer was asked to find out whether any other agency component was sponsoring ESP research. OTS left with the committee a written outline of its ESP work (classified SECRET), the IEEE article covering the unclassified portions of the SRI work, and a brief article on Pat Price; the committee declined additional information.[^10]
### Later career and death
After Time, Wilhelm was managing editor of the American Association for the Advancement of Science magazine *Science 80*, then a freelance science writer, with an early profile of [[Stephen Hawking]] among his pieces. He became a television producer, and was Emmy-nominated as executive producer of the [[PBS]] documentary *Comet Halley*, narrated by [[James Earl Jones]]. His other productions included *Planet Earth*, *My Heart, Your Heart* with [[Jim Lehrer]], *Two Cheers for the CIA*, and *Triumph at Carville: A Tale of Leprosy in America*, the last co-produced with his wife, Sally Squires Wilhelm. The obituary was published by the [[Association of Former Intelligence Officers]], of which he was a longtime member. He died at his home in Washington, D.C. on August 21, 2025, aged 87, of pancreatic cancer.[^11]
### 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.
[^1]: "John Wilhelm, Longtime AFIO Member and Journalist," obituary, Association of Former Intelligence Officers, October 17, 2025. https://www.afio.com/obituaries/2025/10/17/john-wilhelm-longtime-afio-member-and-journalist/
[^2]: "Boom Times on the Psychic Frontier," *Time,* March 4, 1974, cover story, with the issue's Publisher's Letter (which names Associate Editor Stefan Kanfer as writer of the cover story) and masthead, CIA-RDP96-00787R000700030001-3. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection: https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00787r000700030001-3
[^3]: Memorandum for the Record, "Request for Information about Stanford Research Institute (SRI) Paranormal Research Project by Mr. Wilhelm former Time Reporter," April 16, 1974, CIA-RDP96-00787R000200200023-5 (a second copy is CIA-RDP96-00787R000700090018-9). Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
[^4]: Wilhelm, John. *The Search for Superman: An Extraordinary Journey of Psychic Exploration.* Pocket Books, 1976; publication year and publisher as given in Hanlon, Joseph, "Spoon-bending science," *New Scientist,* 1977, CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080018-5, and in the AFIO obituary cited above.
[^5]: "The Search for Superman by John L. Wilhelm," typed outline, in "1978-80 SRI Misc. Papers," CIA-RDP96-00788R001100040006-1. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
[^6]: Hanlon, Joseph. "Spoon-bending science," *New Scientist,* 1977, CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080018-5. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
[^7]: Hyman, Ray. "Psychics and Scientists: 'Mind-Reach' and Remote Viewing," review of Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, *Mind-Reach* (Delacorte, 1977), CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080037-4. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
[^8]: Wilhelm, John L. "Psychic Spying? The Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon and the Russians Probe the Military Potential of Parapsychology," *Washington Post,* August 7, 1977 (title and date as given in Jacobsen and in the CIA memorandum cited at note 10).
[^9]: Jacobsen, Annie. *Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis.* Little, Brown and Company, 2017. Sole source for the passages so cited (Koslov's statements).
[^10]: OTS/BAB Memo 287-77, "Briefing for House Permanent Select Committee re OTS Involvement in ESP Research," November 17, 1977, CIA-RDP96-00787R000200020020-8 and sanitized copy CIA-RDP96-00787R000500170001-0. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
[^11]: "John Wilhelm, Longtime AFIO Member and Journalist," Association of Former Intelligence Officers, October 17, 2025. https://www.afio.com/obituaries/2025/10/17/john-wilhelm-longtime-afio-member-and-journalist/