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- 2026-10-05T1550 · [[Robert Lucky]]
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- 2026-10-05T1550 · [[George Lawrence]]
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- 2026-10-05T1550 · [[J. B. Rhine]]
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- 2026-10-05T1604 · [[Kit Green]]
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- 2026-10-05T1603 · [[Don Curtis]]
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- 2026-10-05T1603 · [[Mike Russo]]
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- 2026-10-05T1603 · [[Peter Crane]]
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- 2026-10-05T1603 · [[Nancy Stern]]
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- 2026-10-05T1603 · [[Ed Rogers]]
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- 2026-10-05T1603 · [[Janice Rand]]
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- 2026-10-05T1603 · [[Don Porter]]
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- 2026-10-05T1603 · [[Bill O'Donnell]]
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- 2026-10-05T1603 · [[Jim Morris]]
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- 2026-10-05T1603 · [[Peter Maris]]
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- 2026-10-05T1603 · [[Steve Holloway]]
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- 2026-10-05T1603 · [[Steve Hanson]]
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- 2026-10-05T1603 · [[Norm Everheart]]
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- 2026-10-05T1603 · [[Bud Duncan]]
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- 2026-10-05T1603 · [[Nick Clancy]]
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- 2026-10-05T1602 · [[Robert Lucky]]
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- 2026-10-05T1602 · [[George Lawrence]]
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- 2026-10-05T1602 · [[J. B. Rhine]]
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- 2026-10-05T1602 · [[Gertrude Schmeidler]]
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- 2026-10-05T1602 · [[Edwin May]]
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- 2026-10-05T1602 · [[Hella Hammid]]
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- 2026-10-05T1602 · [[Pat Price]]
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- 2026-10-05T1602 · [[Robert Lucky]]
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- 2026-10-05T1601 · [[Hella Hammid]]
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- 2026-10-05T1601 · [[Pat Price]]
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- 2026-10-05T1601 · [[J. B. Rhine]]
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- 2026-10-05T1601 · [[Edwin May]]
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- 2026-10-05T1601 · [[_NOTES_P5]]
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- 2026-10-05T1600 · [[George Lawrence]]
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- 2026-10-05T1554 · [[_FOIA_P5]]
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- 2026-10-05T1550 · [[Gertrude Schmeidler]]
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- 2026-10-05T1550 · [[Edwin May]]
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- 2026-10-05T1550 · [[Hella Hammid]]
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- 2026-10-05T1550 · [[Pat Price]]
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- 2026-10-05T1547 · [[Edmund Thompson]]
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- 2026-10-05T1547 · [[Murray Watt]]
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- 2026-10-05T1547 · [[Garrison Rapmund]]
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@ -73,28 +98,3 @@
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- 2026-10-05T1527 · [[2025 Athens High School Terrorism Case]]
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- 2026-10-05T1527 · [[Sierra Blanca, Texas]]
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- 2026-10-05T1527 · [[2026 Benson Polytechnic High School Incident]]
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- 2026-10-05T1527 · [[Walker's Flying W Ranch]]
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- 2026-10-05T1527 · [[Sky Watcher]]
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- 2026-10-05T1527 · [[Mile High Resources]]
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- 2026-10-05T1527 · [[764 Network]]
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- 2026-10-05T1527 · [[Jes Staley]]
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- 2026-10-05T1527 · [[Howard Lutnick]]
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- 2026-10-05T1527 · [[Clayton Hinchman]]
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- 2026-10-05T1527 · [[Simon Andriesz]]
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- 2026-10-05T1527 · [[Prince Andrew]]
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- 2026-10-05T1527 · [[Jake Barber]]
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- 2026-10-05T1526 · [[_FOIA_P4]]
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- 2026-10-05T1524 · [[Foreign Materiel Exploitation]]
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- 2026-10-05T1524 · [[DoD ESOP Pilot Program]]
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- 2026-10-05T1524 · [[WiSC Enterprises]]
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- 2026-10-05T1524 · [[Southern Trust Company]]
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- 2026-10-05T1524 · [[Modern Technology Solutions]]
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- 2026-10-05T1524 · [[Center for Security and Emerging Technology]]
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- 2026-10-05T1524 · [[Cantor Fitzgerald]]
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- 2026-10-05T1524 · [[BGC Group]]
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- 2026-10-05T1524 · [[Argent Trust Company]]
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- 2026-10-05T1524 · [[Apogee Engineering]]
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- 2026-10-05T1524 · [[Missile and Space Intelligence Center]]
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- 2026-10-05T1524 · [[Foreign Technology Division]]
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- 2026-10-05T1524 · [[David Stern (business adviser)]]
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- 2026-10-05T1524 · [[Bud Cramer]]
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@ -1,17 +1,19 @@
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---
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category: "Psychics & Remote Viewers"
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category: "Intelligence & Government"
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tags:
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- Pseudonym
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- Psi
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- Person
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- RemoteViewer
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- Military
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- Stargate
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summary: "Army civilian photo-interpreter and early member of the Gondola Wish (later Grill Flame) remote viewing unit."
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summary: "Pseudonym used by Jim Schnabel in Remote Viewers (1997) for an Army civilian photo-interpreter in the Gondola Wish remote viewing unit."
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---
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Bud Duncan is a pseudonym [[Jim Schnabel]] used in *Remote Viewers* (1997) for an Army civilian photo-interpreter in the Gondola Wish remote viewing unit; the book's list of pseudonyms includes the name.[^2]
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[[Bud Duncan]] was an Army civilian photo-interpreter and an early member of the [[Stargate Project|Gondola Wish]] (later Grill Flame) remote viewing unit. He was one of the four Army civilians in the initial group of candidates selected by [[Frederick Atwater|Skip Atwater]] and [[Murray Watt|Scotty Watt]].[^1]
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In Schnabel's account, [[Bud Duncan]] was an Army civilian photo-interpreter and an early member of the [[Stargate Project|Gondola Wish]] (later Grill Flame) remote viewing unit. He was one of the four Army civilians in the initial group of candidates selected by [[Frederick Atwater|Skip Atwater]] and [[Murray Watt|Scotty Watt]].[^1]
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---
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[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997.
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[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997.
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[^2]: Jim Schnabel, *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies* (New York: Dell, 1997), "Pseudonyms": "The following names mentioned in the text are pseudonyms," https://archive.org/details/jim-schnabel-remote-viewers-the-secret-history-of-americas-psychic-spies_2.
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@ -38,6 +38,6 @@ The review of Jonathan Margolis's *The Secret Life of Uri Geller* in *Lobster* s
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### Footnotes
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[^1]: Rudy Havenstein, "Dr. Green and the Goblins of Langley," Substack, July 11, 2025, https://rudy.substack.com/p/dr-green-and-the-goblins-of-langley, quoting *Grey Lodge Occult Review* 1, no. 5.
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[^1]: Rudy Havenstein, "Dr. Green and the Goblins of Langley," Substack, July 11, 2025, https://rudy.substack.com/p/dr-green-and-the-goblins-of-langley, quoting *Grey Lodge Occult Review* 1, no. 5. Schnabel's own list of pseudonyms in *Remote Viewers* (Dell, 1997), "Pseudonyms," includes Richard Kennett, Peter Crane, Don Curtis and Mike Russo: https://archive.org/details/jim-schnabel-remote-viewers-the-secret-history-of-americas-psychic-spies_2.
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[^2]: Jim Schnabel, *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies* (Dell, 1997), as excerpted at the Havenstein URL above. Sole source for the passages so cited.
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[^3]: *Lobster* 67 (2014), review of Jonathan Margolis, *The Secret Life of Uri Geller: CIA Masterspy?* (Watkins, 2013), https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/lob67-higher-strangeness.pdf. Sole source for the "Don Gregory" rendering.
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@ -136,7 +136,7 @@ An April 15, 1993 transcript of a call between [[Ronald Pandolfi]] and [[C. B. S
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[^1]: Puthoff, Harold E. Letter to Christopher Green, CIA, June 27, 1972. CIA FOIA Reading Room, cia.gov/readingroom. CIA document CIA-RDP96-00791R000200030006-8 (released). Kripal, Jeffrey J. *Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion*. University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. 381-385.
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[^2]: Jacobsen, Annie. *Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis*. Little, Brown and Company, 2017.
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[^3]: Cook, Nick. "The Light Beyond The Mountains (Chapter 22: UFO Medico)." *Rogue Icons*, January 6, 2025, https://nickcook.substack.com/p/the-light-beyond-the-mountains-500.
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[^3]: Cook, Nick. "The Light Beyond The Mountains (Chapter 22: UFO Medico)." *Rogue Icons*, January 6, 2025, https://nickcook.substack.com/p/the-light-beyond-the-mountains-500. Schnabel's own list of pseudonyms in *Remote Viewers* (Dell, 1997), "Pseudonyms," includes Richard Kennett: https://archive.org/details/jim-schnabel-remote-viewers-the-secret-history-of-americas-psychic-spies_2.
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[^4]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies*. Dell, 1997.
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[^5]: CIA-RDP79-00999A000200010023-0, https://archive.org/download/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp79-00999a000200010023-0/cia-rdp79-00999a000200010023-0_djvu.txt.
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[^6]: Green, Christopher Canfield. *Curriculum Vita*, November 20, 2007 (sections: General Motors North American Operations Research and Development Center, 3/85 to 9/93; Research and Development Center, 10/93 to 6/98; Research and Development and Planning, 7/98 to 11/99; Public Policy Center and GM Asia Pacific, 11/99 to 2/03; Central Intelligence Agency, 1969 to March 1985; External Medical/Scientific Boards and Activities). https://anomalyarchives.org/wp-content/uploads/DrGreen_Article.pdf The CV's account of his own career; sole source for the passages so cited.
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@ -1,14 +1,16 @@
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---
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category: "Intelligence & Government"
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tags:
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- Pseudonym
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- Person
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- Stargate
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- CIA
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- RemoteViewer
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summary: "Nick Clancy was a CIA officer whose job for several years had been to conduct technical penetrations of embassies in Africa, southern Europe, and the Middle East."
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summary: "Pseudonym used by Jim Schnabel in Remote Viewers (1997) for a CIA technical penetration officer."
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---
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Nick Clancy is a pseudonym [[Jim Schnabel]] used in *Remote Viewers* (1997) for a CIA technical penetration officer; the book's list of pseudonyms includes the name.[^2]
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Nick Clancy was a [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] officer whose job for several years had been to conduct technical penetrations of embassies in Africa, southern Europe, and the [[Middle East]]. He worked closely with [[Kenneth A. Kress|Ken Kress]] and was involved in the testing of [[Pat Price]]'s remote viewing abilities.[^1]
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In Schnabel's account, Nick Clancy was a [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] officer whose job for several years had been to conduct technical penetrations of embassies in Africa, southern Europe, and the [[Middle East]]. He worked closely with [[Kenneth A. Kress|Ken Kress]] and was involved in the testing of [[Pat Price]]'s remote viewing abilities.[^1]
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Clancy was present during Price's three preliminary tests for Staff D, designed to assess Price's suitability for a high-stakes operation involving a Chinese Embassy basement. He witnessed Price's remarkable accuracy in describing the layout of the Chinese Embassy in Africa, including details like a poorly lit hallway that Clancy himself had experienced during an operation. He was so shaken by Price's accuracy that he described the evening as an "eight-martini evening."[^1]
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@ -16,4 +18,5 @@ However, Clancy also witnessed Price's temporal displacement during a remote vie
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---
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[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997.
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[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997.
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[^2]: Jim Schnabel, *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies* (New York: Dell, 1997), "Pseudonyms": "The following names mentioned in the text are pseudonyms," https://archive.org/details/jim-schnabel-remote-viewers-the-secret-history-of-americas-psychic-spies_2.
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@ -1,14 +1,17 @@
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---
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category: "Intelligence & Government"
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tags:
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- Pseudonym
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- Person
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- Stargate
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- CIA
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- RemoteViewer
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- SRI
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summary: "Norm Everheart was a CIA technical operations specialist with nearly a quarter-century of service by the mid-1970s, who served as the chief coordinator for Grill Flame taskings from the CIA's Operations Directorate."
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summary: "Pseudonym used by Jim Schnabel in Remote Viewers (1997) for a CIA technical operations specialist."
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---
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Norm Everheart was a [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] technical operations specialist with nearly a quarter-century of service by the mid-1970s. In 1950, at the age of twenty, he was recruited by the fledgling intelligence agency as a television engineer and sent to Greece as a clandestine radio operator. He subsequently worked in the Agency's Office of Communications and the Technical Services Division (TSD), which later became the Office of Technical Service (OTS). His last posting before becoming a coordinator for Grill Flame was chief of OTS's regional tech base in Athens.[^1]
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Norm Everheart is a pseudonym [[Jim Schnabel]] used in *Remote Viewers* (1997) for a CIA technical operations specialist; the book's list of pseudonyms includes the name.[^2]
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In Schnabel's account, Norm Everheart was a [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] technical operations specialist with nearly a quarter-century of service by the mid-1970s. In 1950, at the age of twenty, he was recruited by the fledgling intelligence agency as a television engineer and sent to Greece as a clandestine radio operator. He subsequently worked in the Agency's Office of Communications and the Technical Services Division (TSD), which later became the Office of Technical Service (OTS). His last posting before becoming a coordinator for Grill Flame was chief of OTS's regional tech base in Athens.[^1]
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In late 1974 or early 1975, Everheart was appointed liaison to "Staff D" (later the Office of SIGINT Operations), an office specializing in small-scale signals intelligence collection. It was in this role that he was introduced to the remote viewing program by [[Kenneth A. Kress|Ken Kress]], who had initiated [[Stanford Research Institute]] (SRI)'s first psi research contract. Everheart, initially unfamiliar with remote viewing, was urged to consider how it might benefit Staff D operations, particularly through the abilities of [[Pat Price]].[^1]
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@ -19,3 +22,4 @@ He was involved in several notable remote viewing operations. In one, he tasked
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---
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[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997.
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[^2]: Jim Schnabel, *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies* (New York: Dell, 1997), "Pseudonyms": "The following names mentioned in the text are pseudonyms," https://archive.org/details/jim-schnabel-remote-viewers-the-secret-history-of-americas-psychic-spies_2.
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@ -45,7 +45,7 @@ Schnabel states that the matter ended after Russo complained of a telephone call
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### Footnotes
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[^1]: Rudy Havenstein, "Dr. Green and the Goblins of Langley," Substack, July 11, 2025, https://rudy.substack.com/p/dr-green-and-the-goblins-of-langley, quoting *Grey Lodge Occult Review* 1, no. 5: "The names Richard Kennett, Peter Crane, Mike Russo and Don Kurtis which appear below are pseudonyms employed by Mr. Schnabel."
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[^1]: Rudy Havenstein, "Dr. Green and the Goblins of Langley," Substack, July 11, 2025, https://rudy.substack.com/p/dr-green-and-the-goblins-of-langley, quoting *Grey Lodge Occult Review* 1, no. 5: "The names Richard Kennett, Peter Crane, Mike Russo and Don Kurtis which appear below are pseudonyms employed by Mr. Schnabel." Schnabel's own list of pseudonyms in *Remote Viewers* (Dell, 1997), "Pseudonyms," includes Richard Kennett, Peter Crane, Don Curtis and Mike Russo: https://archive.org/details/jim-schnabel-remote-viewers-the-secret-history-of-americas-psychic-spies_2.
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[^2]: Charles Panati, ed., *The Geller Papers* (Houghton Mifflin, 1976), introduction, https://urigeller.com/scientific-paranormal/the-geller-papers/introduction/; Uri Geller and Guy Lyon Playfair, *The Geller Effect* (Jonathan Cape, 1986).
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[^3]: Jim Schnabel, *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies* (New York: Dell, 1997), chapter on Kennett and Livermore, as excerpted at https://rudy.substack.com/p/dr-green-and-the-goblins-of-langley. Sole source for the passages so cited; Schnabel uses pseudonyms for the Livermore physicists.
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[^4]: Annie Jacobsen, *Phenomena* (Little, Brown, 2017).
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@ -1,55 +1,144 @@
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---
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created: 2026-05-17
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updated: 2026-09-22
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title: Edwin May
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aliases:
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- Edwin May
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- Edwin C. May
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category: "Scientists & Researchers"
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tags:
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- Person
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- SRI
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- Stargate
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- CIA
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- SAIC
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- PSI
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- Stargate
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- GrillFlame
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- CognitiveSciencesLaboratory
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- AnomalousCognition
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- DIA
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- Physics
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- PSI
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- 1980s
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- 1990s
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category: "Scientists & Researchers"
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summary: "Particle physicist who succeeded Puthoff as principal investigator of the remote-viewing research at SRI in 1985, moved it to SAIC in 1991, and chose the ten experiments the 1995 AIR panel reviewed."
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alias:
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- Edwin May
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- Edwin C. May
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- Ed May
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- Dr. Edwin C. May
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- Dr. May
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summary: "Nuclear physicist who joined SRI's psychoenergetics work in 1976, ran it from 1985, moved it to SAIC in 1991, and chose the ten experiments the 1995 AIR panel reviewed."
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location: "Palo Alto, California"
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relations:
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- type: employed_by
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with: "[[Stanford Research Institute]]"
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start: 1976
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end: 1990
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role: "consultant to the psychoenergetics program 1976 to 1979, senior research physicist 1979 to 1985, program manager of the cognitive sciences program 1985 to 1990"
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fn: 4
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- type: employed_by
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with: "[[Science Applications International Corporation]]"
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start: 1991
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end: 1996
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role: "director of the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory"
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fn: 4
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- type: head_of
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with: "[[Cognitive Sciences Laboratory]]"
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start: 1991
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end: 1996
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role: "director"
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fn: 4
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- type: contractor_to
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with: "[[Defense Intelligence Agency]]"
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start: 1991
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end: 1995
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role: "principal investigator under contracts MDA908-91-C-0037 and MDA908-93-C-0004 as described in the sole-source justification"
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fn: 12
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- type: contractor_to
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with: "[[Army Medical Research and Development Command]]"
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start: 1985-10-07
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end: 1990-09-30
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role: "principal investigator under contract DAMD17-85-C-5130, Research and Application of Psychoenergetics"
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fn: 10
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- type: contractor_to
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with: "[[Office of Research and Development (CIA)]]"
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start: 1995-04
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end: 1995-11-28
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role: "administrative and consultative support to the Star Gate review under a small contract to SAIC; resigned on the day the AIR report was released"
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fn: 20
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- type: founded
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with: "[[Laboratories for Fundamental Research]]"
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start: 1996
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fn: 22
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created: 2026-05-17
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updated: 2026-10-05
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---
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Edwin C. May is a particle physicist who served as principal investigator of the U.S. government's remote viewing research program from 1985, succeeding [[Hal Puthoff]] at [[Stanford Research Institute]], and who moved the program to [[Science Applications International Corporation|SAIC]] in 1991 when SRI withdrew from the contract. He directed the program through its final phase until the CIA's 1995 termination and commissioned the [[American Institutes for Research]] evaluation that recommended the program's end. Of the government program's principal investigators, May was the most scientifically rigorous in design and the most cautious about operational claims, treating the research as an ongoing scientific investigation rather than an established intelligence capability.
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Edwin C. May is a physicist with a Ph.D. from the [[University of Pittsburgh]] (1968) who joined the [[Stanford Research Institute]] (SRI) psychoenergetics program as a consultant in 1976, became its program manager in 1985, and in 1991 became director of the [[Cognitive Sciences Laboratory]] of [[Science Applications International Corporation]] (SAIC), where the work continued under [[Defense Intelligence Agency]] contracts until the [[Central Intelligence Agency]] took custody of the program in 1995. He chose the ten experiments reviewed by the [[American Institutes for Research]] (AIR) in 1995 and in 1996 founded the [[Laboratories for Fundamental Research]].[^1][^2]
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### Background and SRI Entry
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### Education and early work
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May completed a Ph.D. in nuclear and particle physics from the University of Pittsburgh and had a background in experimental physics research before joining the SRI remote viewing program in 1976. He worked initially as a research scientist under Puthoff and [[Russell Targ]], contributing to experimental design and data analysis while the program was in its most active CIA-funded phase. His experimental physics background gave him a different methodological orientation than Puthoff, who had trained as an electrical engineer and was more willing to accept operational application of early-phase research results.
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A resume of September 1994 gives his education as a B.S. in physics from the [[University of Rochester]] (1962) and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Pittsburgh (1968), with a dissertation, "Nuclear Reaction Studies via the (p,pn) Reaction on Light Nuclei and the (d,pn) Reaction on Medium to Heavy Nuclei," under B. L. Cohen. It lists a postdoctoral fellowship at the [[University of California, Davis]] (1968 to 1971), a physics instructorship at [[City College of San Francisco]] (1972 to 1976), and consulting for [[Digital Pathways]], Inc. of [[Mountain View, California|Mountain View]] (1972 to 1979), for the [[Psychophysical Research Laboratories]] in [[Princeton, New Jersey]] (1972 to 1976) and for the [[Biofeedback Institute of San Francisco]] (1973 to 1979), and states that he had been involved in anomalous mental phenomena research "since 1972," after "over 12 years experience in experimental nuclear physics research." It records an Outstanding Achievement Award in Parapsychology from the [[Parapsychological Association]] in 1994.[^3]
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### Principal Investigator (1985-1995)
|
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In an interview of May 12, 1996, May said that he knew nothing of psi during his physics education, drifted after becoming "uninterested in experimental, low-energy nuclear physics," met [[Charles Honorton]] and other parapsychologists, spent nine months in [[India]] on a search for evidence of "anything out of the ordinary" and failed to find any, and then saw "more psi than I had ever seen in India" while working with Honorton at [[Maimonides Medical Center]].[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
When Puthoff left SRI in 1985, May assumed the principal investigator role for the government research contract. He shifted the program's emphasis toward rigorous experimental methodology, imposing tighter statistical standards and more controlled experimental protocols than had been standard under the SRI program's earlier phases.
|
||||
### SRI, 1976 to 1985
|
||||
|
||||
In 1991, SRI withdrew from the remote viewing research contract. May negotiated the transfer of the contract to SAIC, relocating the research to the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory within SAIC's structure. Under his direction, the SAIC phase was conducted with careful attention to experimental controls and protocol documentation, reflecting May's view that the field's credibility depended on methodological rigor rather than operational demonstrations.
|
||||
The resume lists him as consultant to SRI's psychoenergetics program from 1976 to 1979 and senior research physicist from 1979 to 1985.[^4] His name appears as an author on SRI's final report to the [[Naval Electronic Systems Command]], *Sensing of Remote EM Sources (Physiological Correlates),* covering November 1975 to October 1976 under contract N00039-76-C-0077, with [[Russell Targ]], [[Hal Puthoff]], and [[David Galin]] and [[Robert Ornstein]] of the [[Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute]] in [[San Francisco]], addressed to [[James Foote]] of the Navy command.[^5] [[Jim Schnabel]] wrote that he "was a physicist who had been brought into the program in 1976," that "he struggled to set up his own contractual fiefdoms at SRI," and that in trying to fund one of his projects he fell out with [[Ingo Swann]], who later said, "I regret to this day that I didn't look at Ed May's horoscope first."[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### AIR Evaluation and Termination
|
||||
SRI's final report of October 1978, *Advanced Threat Technique Assessment* (SRI Project 5309, April 18, 1977 to April 15, 1978), lists May as a consultant author with Puthoff, Targ and Swann; it was classified by DIA.[^7] For the Defense Intelligence Agency under contract MDA903-81-C-0292 (a number later replaced, by modification P00002, with MDA908-81-C-0004), SRI delivered his reports *Electronic System Perturbation Techniques* (September 30, 1980, with [[Beverly Humphrey]] and [[G. Scott Hubbard]]) and *Countermeasures: A Survey and Evaluation* (January 1982, with Hubbard); under MDA908-82-C-0034 the *Free World Psychoenergetics Research Survey* (November 1983, with Humphrey).[^8] For the Department of the Army's [[United States Army Intelligence and Security Command|Intelligence and Security Command]] at [[Fort Meade]], SRI's *[[Center Lane]]-3* report of December 1984, *Personnel Identification and Selection,* was written by May and [[David Saunders]] and addressed to a Lt. Col. [[Brian Buzby]].[^8]
|
||||
|
||||
When the CIA, which had taken custody of the program from the DIA in 1995 at the direction of Congress, contracted the American Institutes for Research in June 1995 to evaluate it ([[1995 AIR evaluation of Star Gate]]), May, as principal investigator, was asked "to list those studies which he believes provide the strongest evidence" and every unique study since the 1988 [[National Research Council]] report. His memorandum of July 25, 1995, listed ten SAIC experiments, among them "Entropy II" (90 trials, effect size 0.550, p = 9.1 × 10^-8), "ERD AC Behavior" (70 trials, 0.303), "Remote observation" (48 trials, 0.361), and "AC with binary coding" (40 trials, −0.067). [[Jessica Utts]] took them, with the 1988 analysis of the SRI database, as establishing that "psychic functioning has been well established"; [[Ray Hyman]] agreed the effects were "too large and consistent to be dismissed as statistical flukes" but held that ten experiments from one laboratory could not establish a phenomenon. May told the panel that "approximately 20 percent of the information supplied by a viewer is accurate," and AIR noted that throughout the experiments "only one judge, apparently the Principal Investigator, was used in assessing matches." The report of September 29, 1995, recommended against continuing the operational program. May's commentary in the *Journal of Parapsychology* the next year described the review as the result of "a Congressionally Directed Activity" and gave the report's public release as November 28, 1995.[^1]
|
||||
Reports prepared for the Defense Intelligence Agency under contract DAMD17-83-C-3106 include *QRT Tasking* (November 1984, covering October 1983 to October 1984, by Puthoff, May and Humphrey), *Data Base Management* (December 1984, by May), *Photon Production (Chinese Replication)* (May 1985, by Hubbard and May) and *An Automated RV Evaluation Procedure* (May 1985, by May, Humphrey and Puthoff). His own final report, *Enhanced Human Performance Investigations* (SRI Project 7408, December 1988, covering November 1983 to October 1985, prepared for the contracting officer [[Jean V. Smith]] and classified by the [[Army Medical Research and Development Command]]), states that "during FY 1985 a total of $1,240 K was allocated to contract DAMD17-83-C-3106 for the psychoenergetic investigation and review."[^9]
|
||||
|
||||
The CIA's chronology of the transfer records for February 28, 1995: "CIA met with DIA principal investigator at SAIC, Dr. Ed May. All-day technical exchange." An ORD memorandum for the record of April 20, 1995, its author redacted, states that "Ed May of SAIC called this morning and volunteered to send me unsolicited information he had obtained from a 'remote viewer' named 'Joe' relating to the [[Oklahoma City bombing|Oklahoma City Bombing]]," that ORD had no means of "tasking or disseminating this type of information," that May asked for a law-enforcement contact and, told to send it to his former contracting officer's representative at DIA, "said they didn't get along"; given an FBI number that evening, "he asked if this would be a 'cold call' because he didn't want to sound like a 'lunatic,'" and "agreed reluctantly" to call. The Director of Research and Development's covering memorandum to the [[Counterterrorist Center]] the same day: "We attach no credibility to this information, and currently have no way to evaluate it. We have asked Dr. Ed May of SAIC to forward this information to you directly. Please direct any questions regarding how the information was acquired to Dr. May. He has been the primary contract investigator in this area, and we have not completed our evaluation of his past efforts."[^2]
|
||||
### Principal investigator, 1985 to 1990
|
||||
|
||||
### The 1996 Commentary
|
||||
In 1985 the Army's Surgeon General's research office began a five-year program, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, in its own later description, "established close ties with this R/D effort to ensure that applications research would be adequately pursued." The contract was DAMD17-85-C-5130, "Research and Application of Psychoenergetics," for the period October 7, 1985 to September 30, 1990, to SRI under proposals ESU 84-246 Rev-2 of April 15, 1985 and ESU-246 of September 16, 1985. It names "Edwin C. May, Ph.D." as principal investigator, with an estimated 1,848 hours in the first twelve months, and requires approval of the contracting officer to change him. It also directs the contractor to "attempt to duplicate significant foreign research" to help the intelligence community judge foreign capability. A military interdepartmental purchase request in the same file runs from the Defense Intelligence Agency to Jean V. Smith, SGRD-ACQ, at the Army Medical Research and Development Command at [[Fort Detrick]], Maryland, providing funds for general phenomenological research and development at SRI International. The DIA description adds that when Army funding "might not be available to carry through to the end of the five year period" in 1987, "additional funding was sought by DIA and acquired through funding transfer action by the [[House Appropriations Committee]]."[^9][^10]
|
||||
|
||||
May "was asked by the CIA to provide administrative support, technical documents, and briefings on an as-needed basis for the review," under a small contract to SAIC, from which he resigned on November 28, 1995, the day the report was released. His commentary in the *Journal of Parapsychology* argued that "there is compelling evidence that the CIA set the outcome with regard to intelligence usage before the evaluation had begun," by "limiting the research and operations data sets to exclude positive findings, by purposefully not interviewing historically significant participants, by ignoring previous extensive Department of Defense program reviews, and by using the questionable National Research Council's investigation of parapsychology as the starting point." He noted that AIR's president, [[David Goslin]], had also overseen the NRC's 1988 report; that of the seventeen members of the SRI and SAIC oversight committees and review board "only one was contacted by the CIA"; that his memorandum of June 6, 1995, "the existence of anomalous mental phenomena cannot be statistically determined from the results of a single laboratory," was "ignored by fiat"; and that a Senate staff member told him the CIA's briefing to Congress gave eight bullet points to Hyman's conclusions and four to Utts's. He quoted Jessica Utts's letter of December 19, 1995: "I was explicitly asked by AIR staff NOT to mention the NRC report in my review!" and "we were shown very little of the 'operational' remote-viewing work"; and [[Robert Rosenthal]] on the NRC's 1988 request that he omit his ganzfeld section, "censorship did not occur." He quoted [[Joe McMoneagle]]'s 1984 Legion of Merit citation, "more than 200 missions, addressing over 150 essential elements of information," reported "at the highest echelons," and traced a line from ARPA's George Lawrence and Hyman being refused access at SRI in 1974, through Lawrence's commissioning of the NRC study in 1985, to Goslin's AIR review. Of the program's last years: a 1993 attempt to move it to the CIA "found no willing recipient," the last DIA officer "had little knowledge of the program," and "the program was in shambles." "I am forced to conclude that either the AIR investigators were not competent to conduct a proper review of such a complex program, a view to which I do not subscribe, or they knew exactly what they were doing: They wanted to demonstrate that AC lacked usefulness for intelligence operations. They did so by construction rather than by careful analysis." On *Nightline* that November he said: "I think about 15% of our data, over 1500 separate remote viewing trials, are of such a quality that you might think they were sketched," and, after [[Robert Gates]] said the work was "better done on the outside": "I couldn't agree with Director Gates more."[^3]
|
||||
His final report of December 1988 for the Army Medical Research and Development Command, *Meta-Analysis of Forced-Choice Precognition Experiments,* written with Honorton, [[Diane Ferrari]] and [[George Hansen]] of the Psychophysical Research Laboratories, names the contract DAMD17-85-C-5130 and a contracting officer's technical representative, [[Peter J. McNelis]].[^11] On September 8, 1989 May, as director of the Cognitive Sciences Program at SRI International, wrote to Jean Smith at the Army's medical research command asking that three of ten paragraphs be removed from the program's security classification guide. He stated that "all the experimental data, results, theories and protocols collected or developed under contract DAMD 17-85-C-5130 are not inconsistent with what is generally available in the open literature," and that the meta-analysis task for fiscal 1989 had found that "our quantitative measures are statistically inseparable from those resulting from experiments conducted in open laboratories."[^11]
|
||||
|
||||
### Post-STARGATE Research
|
||||
### SAIC, 1991 to 1995
|
||||
|
||||
After the STAR GATE program's termination, May founded the Laboratories for Fundamental Research (LFR) in Palo Alto, California, a private research organization continuing anomalous cognition research. He published extensively in scientific journals on experimental parapsychology, focusing on statistical analysis of remote viewing data and theoretical frameworks for understanding what physical mechanism might account for the observed effects. He proposed "decision augmentation theory" (DAT) as a framework for interpreting the statistical patterns in remote viewing data without requiring conventional psychic transmission.
|
||||
The resume lists him as program manager of the Cognitive Sciences Program at SRI from 1985 to 1990 and director of SAIC's Cognitive Sciences Laboratory from 1991, which "currently employs over twenty full or part-time researchers from a variety of disciplines."[^4] In 1996 May said that he had "presided over 70% of the projects's $20M funding and been responsible for over 85% of the data collected under US Government contracts," that "the CIA started the government's secret work at SRI in 1972" and put in "approximately $250,000" of a program of more than $20 million over 24 years, and that he "shifted the project to another defense contractor" in 1991.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
May continued to serve as a consultant on anomalous cognition research for academic and government-adjacent projects after STAR GATE's termination, representing continuity between the government-funded program and the subsequent private research that drew on the government program's methodological legacy.
|
||||
The Defense Intelligence Agency's contracting file for the SAIC contracts describes the funding. A DIA description of 1992 says that in 1983 "a report with project findings was sent to congressional intelligence and appropriation committees" which "affirmed the existence of remote viewing phenomenon" and was endorsed by a science panel; that follow-on research support "was provided to DIA by Congressional action for FY91," with DIA "identified as the executive agent"; and that "additional R&D funding was received by DIA in the FY 92 Defense Authorization Act." The file names the existing DIA contract MDA908-91-C-0037; it contains a justification for a new $1,450,000 contract under purchase request 330/025Z/92, out of $1,850,000 available "for this Congressional Directed Program" (the remainder for a modification to the existing contract), and a modification, P00001, to contract MDA908-93-C-0004 that corrected a reference from MDA908-92-C-0037 to MDA908-91-C-0037. The [[Virginia Contracting Activity]]'s justification for other than full and open competition cites the authority "Only one Responsible Source." It states that the earlier "bulk of this prior R&D effort was provided by the Department of the Army's [[Office of the Surgeon General (United States Army)|Surgeon General Office]] (SGRD) in 1985" with "Dr. Edwin May as the principle researcher and program manager" at SRI, who "has since joined" SAIC "and has taken his extensive data base and key research assistants with him." It describes him as "regarded as the leading U.S. investigator in this phenomenological area," states that "an extensive classified data base ... has co-mingled with both government and proprietary data," and adds a second SAIC physicist, a Dr. Angelo, with "over 10 years of involvement in this field." A later justification of the same kind, for a modification to the action that produced MDA908-93-C-0004, repeats that restricting the procurement to one source is needed "due to national security considerations," and that the contractor "has been instrumental in establishing all necessary foreign links for this modification."[^12]
|
||||
|
||||
SAIC's technical proposal of August 27, 1992, by May and [[Wanda L. W. Luke]], "Phenomenological Research and Analysis," answered solicitation MDA908-92-R-0164 from the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory at 1010 El Camino Real, [[Menlo Park]].[^13] A memorandum of May 31, 1995 on the laboratory's letterhead gives its address as 330 Cowper Street, Suite 200, [[Palo Alto]].[^14]
|
||||
|
||||
### AIR evaluation and termination
|
||||
|
||||
When the CIA, which had taken custody of the program from the DIA in 1995 at the direction of [[Congress]], contracted the American Institutes for Research in June 1995 to evaluate it ([[1995 AIR evaluation of Star Gate]]), May, as principal investigator, was asked "to list those studies which he believes provide the strongest evidence" and every unique study since the 1988 [[National Research Council]] report. His memorandum of July 25, 1995, listed ten SAIC experiments, among them "Entropy II" (90 trials, effect size 0.550, p = 9.1 × 10^-8), "ERD AC Behavior" (70 trials, 0.303), "Remote observation" (48 trials, 0.361), and "AC with binary coding" (40 trials, -0.067). [[Jessica Utts]] took them, with the 1988 analysis of the SRI database, as establishing that "psychic functioning has been well established"; [[Ray Hyman]] agreed the effects were "too large and consistent to be dismissed as statistical flukes" but held that ten experiments from one laboratory could not establish a phenomenon. May told the panel that "approximately 20 percent of the information supplied by a viewer is accurate," and AIR noted that throughout the experiments "only one judge, apparently the Principal Investigator, was used in assessing matches." The report of September 29, 1995, recommended against continuing the operational program. May's commentary in the *[[Journal of Parapsychology]]* the next year described the review as the result of "a Congressionally Directed Activity" and gave the report's public release as November 28, 1995.[^15]
|
||||
|
||||
The CIA's chronology of the transfer records for February 28, 1995: "CIA met with DIA principal investigator at SAIC, Dr. Ed May. All-day technical exchange." An Office of Research and Development memorandum for the record of April 20, 1995, its author redacted, states that "Ed May of SAIC called this morning and volunteered to send me unsolicited information he had obtained from a 'remote viewer' named 'Joe' relating to the [[Oklahoma City bombing|Oklahoma City Bombing]]," that ORD had no means of "tasking or disseminating this type of information," that May asked for a law-enforcement contact and, told to send it to his former contracting officer's representative at DIA, "said they didn't get along"; given an FBI number that evening, "he asked if this would be a 'cold call' because he didn't want to sound like a 'lunatic,'" and "agreed reluctantly" to call. The Director of Research and Development's covering memorandum to the [[Counterterrorist Center]] the same day: "We attach no credibility to this information, and currently have no way to evaluate it. We have asked Dr. Ed May of SAIC to forward this information to you directly. Please direct any questions regarding how the information was acquired to Dr. May. He has been the primary contract investigator in this area, and we have not completed our evaluation of his past efforts."[^16]
|
||||
|
||||
A draft ORD memorandum of April 17, 1995, from the Emerging Programs Group, sought funds from the Director's reserve for "administrative and consultative work by Ed May of SAIC during the Star Gate review," stating that "there will be no substantive research funded or executed."[^17] An ORD memorandum for the record of April 11, 1995, records that all contractor reports at the Star Gate facility had been compiled on two annotated bibliographies, one for SRI and one for SAIC, that all additional or duplicate copies of contractor reports at the facility "were destroyed," and drafts a letter to May under his contract asking for an unclassified annotated bibliography of reports by May 15, 1995 and classified copies by July 1, 1995, noting that "the NRC Blue Ribbon Panel will be able to review unclassified documents only."[^18]
|
||||
|
||||
### Publicity letters, 1995
|
||||
|
||||
In a letter of May 13, 1995 to an officer at the CIA's Rosslyn, Virginia office (name redacted), on SAIC letterhead, May summarized a video tape of the project's television publicity. He wrote that the program "was started in 1972 with Dr. Hal Puthoff; Mr. Russ Targ joined a year later, and Dr. May joined in 1976," that Hammid and Price, "both now deceased," were viewers, and that Hammid "was a long-time friend of Russ." He wrote that an on-site representative "from [[Jack Vorona]]'s shop" had asked that Targ and the viewer [[Keith Harary]] be removed from the project, and that the publicity came "shortly after Russ, Keith and Hella left in 1982." Of an episode of *[[Nightline]]* of about 1983 he noted a discussion of "a CIA 1952 report"; of a *[[NOVA]]* program of about 1983, "The Case of ESP," that it included footage of [[J. B. Rhine]] and that [[Gertrude Schmeidler]] "shows the sheep/goat effect in which 'believers' score better than do 'skeptics.'" Of Ray Hyman he wrote that "Ray was not given access to our records in part because he is on record as saying there is no evidence that could get him to change his mind." Of a 1992 television segment on a group called PSI-Teck, he described attending a marketing meeting in [[Santa Clara]] where the group presented itself as former intelligence officers, identifying himself in the question period as the project director since 1985 and the author of many of the SRI reports being cited, and said that what they ascribed to the research "bore no resemblance, at all, to what they were claiming."[^19]
|
||||
|
||||
In a memorandum of May 31, 1995, he wrote that "Mr. James Schnabel" was preparing a piece for [[Channel 4]] in Britain on CIA's [[Project Scanate]] and the Army's remote viewing unit, covering "details of its organization and its predecessors, specifics of some of the live missions, which agencies had used the service, and who were the major players," that Schnabel had listed five retired program members and some current ones, and that "it is my impression that Schnabel and Channel 4 are interested in an exposé and have garnered full cooperation of past project personnel." The memorandum states that this "raises once again the question of the veracity of past agreements between project personnel and the government."[^14]
|
||||
|
||||
### The 1996 commentary
|
||||
|
||||
May "was asked by the CIA to provide administrative support, technical documents, and briefings on an as-needed basis for the review," under a small contract to SAIC, from which he resigned on November 28, 1995, the day the report was released. His commentary in the *Journal of Parapsychology* argued that "there is compelling evidence that the CIA set the outcome with regard to intelligence usage before the evaluation had begun," by "limiting the research and operations data sets to exclude positive findings, by purposefully not interviewing historically significant participants, by ignoring previous extensive Department of Defense program reviews, and by using the questionable National Research Council's investigation of parapsychology as the starting point." He noted that AIR's president, [[David Goslin]], had also overseen the NRC's 1988 report; that of the seventeen members of the SRI and SAIC oversight committees and review board "only one was contacted by the CIA"; that his memorandum of June 6, 1995, "the existence of anomalous mental phenomena cannot be statistically determined from the results of a single laboratory," was "ignored by fiat"; and that a [[Senate]] staff member told him the CIA's briefing to Congress gave eight bullet points to Hyman's conclusions and four to Utts's. He quoted Jessica Utts's letter of December 19, 1995: "I was explicitly asked by AIR staff NOT to mention the NRC report in my review!" and "we were shown very little of the 'operational' remote-viewing work"; and [[Robert Rosenthal]] on the NRC's 1988 request that he omit his ganzfeld section, "censorship did not occur." He quoted [[Joe McMoneagle]]'s 1984 [[Legion of Merit]] citation, "more than 200 missions, addressing over 150 essential elements of information," reported "at the highest echelons," and traced a line from ARPA's [[George Lawrence]] and Hyman being refused access at SRI in 1974, through Lawrence's commissioning of the NRC study in 1985, to Goslin's AIR review. Of the program's last years: a 1993 attempt to move it to the CIA "found no willing recipient," the last DIA officer "had little knowledge of the program," and "the program was in shambles." "I am forced to conclude that either the AIR investigators were not competent to conduct a proper review of such a complex program, a view to which I do not subscribe, or they knew exactly what they were doing: They wanted to demonstrate that AC lacked usefulness for intelligence operations. They did so by construction rather than by careful analysis." On *Nightline* that November he said: "I think about 15% of our data, over 1500 separate remote viewing trials, are of such a quality that you might think they were sketched," and, after [[Robert Gates]] said the work was "better done on the outside": "I couldn't agree with Director Gates more."[^20]
|
||||
|
||||
### After 1995
|
||||
|
||||
In the interview of May 1996 he said that "in 1996 we moved the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory from SAIC to the Laboratories for Fundamental Research (LFR)," "a formal California Corporation that, among other things, will be conducting psi research," then seeking funding with proposals pending.[^21][^22] He said that Decision Augmentation Theory "resulted from a carefully conducted RNG study we did for the Army in 1979," on which "we spent over $250,000 on that single experiment," with Beverly Humphrey and Jessica Utts as colleagues "from the beginning" and [[James Spottiswoode]] joining "much later." The model, he said, "holds that since ESP is real, that it would be very unlikely that we would not integrate that additional, albeit weak and unreliable, into the normal decision processes."[^21]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Mumford, Michael D., Andrew M. Rose, and David A. Goslin. *An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications.* American Institutes for Research, September 29, 1995, pp. 2-3, 3-18, 3-67, 5-2. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB438/docs/doc_57.pdf May, Edwin C. "The American Institutes for Research Review of the Department of Defense's STAR GATE Program: A Commentary," *Journal of Parapsychology,* vol. 60, no. 1, 1996, pp. 3-23, abstract only.
|
||||
[^2]: "Star Gate Transfer Chronology: 1995," memorandum for the record, undated, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200190017-9. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. Memorandum for the record and memorandum for CTC from the Director, Research and Development, "Star Gate Program Issues," April 20, 1995, CIA-RDP96-00791R000100030036-6. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^3]: May, Edwin C. "The American Institutes for Research Review of the Department of Defense's STAR GATE Program: A Commentary," *Journal of Parapsychology,* vol. 60, no. 1, March 1996, pp. 3-23. The letter of December 19, 1995, is printed at pp. 15-17 as Utts's reply to May's e-mail of December 17, checked against the page images. "Psychic Spies: Cold War Whimsy or Secret Weapon?," ABC News *Nightline,* November 28, 1995, Radio TV Reports transcript for the CIA Public Affairs Staff, CIA-RDP99-01448R000402140001-7, read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room.
|
||||
[^1]: Mumford, Michael D., Andrew M. Rose, and David A. Goslin. *An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications.* American Institutes for Research, September 29, 1995, pp. 2-3, 3-18, 3-67, 5-2. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB438/docs/doc_57.pdf May, Edwin C. "The American Institutes for Research Review of the Department of Defense's STAR GATE Program: A Commentary," *Journal of Parapsychology,* vol. 60, no. 1, 1996, pp. 3-23.
|
||||
[^2]: "Edwin May Interview," conducted May 12, 1996, Fourmilab (Random PK Project). https://www.fourmilab.ch/rpkp/may.html
|
||||
[^3]: "Edwin C. May, Ph.D., Director, Cognitive Sciences Laboratory," SAIC resume dated September 1994, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200190063-8. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^4]: Resume, September 1994, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200190063-8 (employment history, 1976 to date).
|
||||
[^5]: Targ, Russell, Edwin May, and Harold Puthoff, with David Galin and Robert Ornstein. *Sensing of Remote EM Sources (Physiological Correlates),* final report to the Naval Electronic Systems Command, contract N00039-76-C-0077, period November 1975 to October 1976, SRI International, CIA-RDP96-00788R001300350001-0. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^6]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies.* New York: Dell, 1997, chapter on the SRI program's internal conflicts, read in the archive.org full-text copy, https://archive.org/details/jim-schnabel-remote-viewers-the-secret-history-of-americas-psychic-spies_2
|
||||
[^7]: Puthoff, Harold E., Russell Targ, Edwin C. May and Ingo Swann. *Advanced Threat Technique Assessment,* final report, October 1978, SRI Project 5309, CIA-RDP96-00788R001300040001-4 and CIA-RDP96-00791R000200270001-7. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^8]: May, Edwin C., Beverly S. Humphrey, and G. Scott Hubbard. *Electronic System Perturbation Techniques,* final report, September 30, 1980, SRI Project 8585, CIA-RDP96-00788R001300210001-5. Hubbard, G. Scott, and Edwin C. May. *Countermeasures: A Survey and Evaluation,* final report, January 1982, contract MDA903-81-C-0292, CIA-RDP96-00788R001300260001-0. Humphrey, Beverly S., and Edwin C. May. *Free World Psychoenergetics Research Survey,* final report, November 1983, contract MDA908-82-C-0034, CIA-RDP96-00788R001800130001-9. Saunders, David, and Edwin C. May. *Personnel Identification and Selection,* Center Lane-3 final report, December 1984, CIA-RDP96-00788R001800230001-8. Modification P00002, "New Contract No. MDA908-81-C-0004," CIA-RDP96-00788R001500110012-2 and CIA-RDP96-00788R001500110014-0. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^9]: Puthoff, Harold E., Edwin C. May, and Beverly S. Humphrey. *QRT Tasking,* final report, November 1984, contract DAMD17-83-C-3106, CIA-RDP96-00788R001800220001-9; May, Edwin C. *Data Base Management,* December 1984, CIA-RDP96-00788R001800250001-6; Hubbard and May, *Photon Production (Chinese Replication),* May 1985, CIA-RDP96-00792R000400310001-9; May, Humphrey and Puthoff, *An Automated RV Evaluation Procedure,* May 1985, CIA-RDP96-00789R003800310001-6; May, Edwin C., *Enhanced Human Performance Investigations,* final report, SRI Project 7408, December 1988, CIA-RDP96-00789R002200390001-5. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^10]: Contract DAMD17-85-C-5130, "Research and Application of Psychoenergetics," sections B and C, CIA-RDP96-00789R003000400005-0; military interdepartmental purchase request from the Defense Intelligence Agency to the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command, CIA-RDP96-00789R003000400001-4; DIA statement of work and background, CIA-RDP96-00789R003000460008-1. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^11]: May, Edwin C., Charles Honorton, Diane B. Ferrari, and George Hansen. *Meta-Analysis of Forced-Choice Precognition Experiments,* final report, objective 1, task 1, December 1988, covering July 31, 1987 to September 30, 1988, contract DAMD17-85-C-5130, CIA-RDP96-00789R002200410001-2. May, Edwin C., letter to Jean Smith, HQ USAMRDC, Fort Detrick, September 8, 1989, CIA-RDP96-00789R002600170003-3 and -170004-2. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^12]: Defense Intelligence Agency, Uniform Contract Format, sections B, C, F and H, and "Justification and Approval for Other Than Full and Open Competition," Virginia Contracting Activity, purchase request 330/025Z/92, dated February 10, 1992 in the acquisition package, CIA-RDP96-00789R003000460008-1 (and companion copies -460007-2, -460003-6 and -460005-4, the last two being modification P00001 to MDA908-93-C-0004); second justification and approval, purchase request 330/0262/93, CIA-RDP96-00789R003000200009-8. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^13]: May, Edwin C., and Wanda L. W. Luke. *Phenomenological Research and Analysis,* technical proposal, Science Applications International Corporation, Cognitive Sciences Laboratory, August 27, 1992, response to RFP MDA908-92-R-0164, CIA-RDP96-00789R003100200001-5. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^14]: May, Edwin C., memorandum "Publicity and British TV," May 31, 1995, on Cognitive Sciences Laboratory letterhead, 330 Cowper Street, Suite 200, Palo Alto, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200190068-3. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^15]: Mumford, Rose and Goslin, *An Evaluation of Remote Viewing,* September 29, 1995, pp. 2-3, 3-18, 3-67, 5-2; May, "The American Institutes for Research Review," *Journal of Parapsychology,* vol. 60, no. 1, 1996, pp. 3-23, abstract.
|
||||
[^16]: "Star Gate Transfer Chronology: 1995," memorandum for the record, undated, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200190017-9. Memorandum for the record and memorandum for CTC from the Director, Research and Development, "Star Gate Program Issues," April 20, 1995, CIA-RDP96-00791R000100030036-6. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^17]: Draft memorandum, Emerging Programs Group, ORD, to the Director of Research and Development, "Tasking of Edwin C. May of SAIC to facilitate government program review," April 17, 1995, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200190057-5. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^18]: Memorandum for the record, "Status of Contractor Reports and Annotated Bibliographies," April 11, 1995, with draft letter to Dr. Edwin May, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200170009-0. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^19]: May, Edwin C., letter to a CIA officer, Rosslyn, Virginia, on his opinions of network television broadcasts about remote viewing, May 13, 1995, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200190060-1. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^20]: May, Edwin C. "The American Institutes for Research Review of the Department of Defense's STAR GATE Program: A Commentary," *Journal of Parapsychology,* vol. 60, no. 1, March 1996, pp. 3-23. The letter of December 19, 1995, is printed at pp. 15-17 as Utts's reply to May's e-mail of December 17, checked against the page images. "Psychic Spies: Cold War Whimsy or Secret Weapon?," ABC News *Nightline,* November 28, 1995, Radio TV Reports transcript for the CIA Public Affairs Staff, CIA-RDP99-01448R000402140001-7, read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room.
|
||||
[^21]: "Edwin May Interview," May 12, 1996, Fourmilab. https://www.fourmilab.ch/rpkp/may.html
|
||||
[^22]: Same interview; May himself dates the move of the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory to the Laboratories for Fundamental Research to 1996.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -1,18 +1,92 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
aliases:
|
||||
- George Lawrence
|
||||
category: "Intelligence & Government"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Person
|
||||
- Skeptic
|
||||
summary: "George Lawrence was an ARPA project manager who, along with two civilian psychologists, Robert Van de Castle and Ray Hyman, traveled to SRI to test Uri Geller's purported psychic abilities."
|
||||
- ARPA
|
||||
- DARPA
|
||||
- ArmyResearchInstitute
|
||||
- Psychologist
|
||||
- UriGeller
|
||||
- SRI
|
||||
- NationalResearchCouncil
|
||||
- Biofeedback
|
||||
- PSI
|
||||
- 1970s
|
||||
- 1980s
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- George Lawrence
|
||||
- George H. Lawrence
|
||||
- Dr. George Lawrence
|
||||
- G. H. Lawrence
|
||||
summary: "ARPA projects manager who joined Ray Hyman and Robert Van de Castle at SRI's Uri Geller experiments on December 8, 1972, and later monitored the NRC's 1988 performance-techniques study for the Army Research Institute."
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Advanced Research Projects Agency]]"
|
||||
start: 1972
|
||||
role: "projects manager; arranged the visit to SRI on December 8, 1972 with consultants Hyman and Van de Castle"
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: investigated
|
||||
with: "[[Stanford Research Institute]]"
|
||||
start: 1972-12-08
|
||||
role: "visited the Uri Geller experiments with Ray Hyman and Robert Van de Castle to advise on ARPA funding"
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences]]"
|
||||
start: 1984
|
||||
role: "author of Technical Report 658 in 1984; project monitor and liaison to the NRC Committee on Techniques for the Enhancement of Human Performance"
|
||||
fn: 4
|
||||
- type: participant_in
|
||||
with: "[[National Research Council Committee on Techniques for the Enhancement of Human Performance]]"
|
||||
start: 1985
|
||||
end: 1988
|
||||
role: "Army Research Institute project monitor"
|
||||
fn: 4
|
||||
created: 2026-05-17
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-05
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
George Lawrence was an [[DARPA]] project manager who, along with two civilian psychologists, [[Robert Van de Castle]] and [[Ray Hyman]], traveled to [[Stanford Research Institute|SRI]] to test [[Uri Geller]]'s purported psychic abilities. Their conclusion, later reported in *Time* magazine, was that anyone who believed in Geller's powers was falling for the "ridiculous"[^1].
|
||||
George H. Lawrence was a psychologist and a projects manager at the [[Advanced Research Projects Agency]] (ARPA) of the [[Department of Defense]] in the early 1970s. He visited the [[Stanford Research Institute]] (SRI) on December 8, 1972, with his consultants [[Ray Hyman]] and [[Robert Van de Castle]], to see the work of [[Hal Puthoff]] and [[Russell Targ]] with [[Uri Geller]],[^1] and *[[Time]]* of March 12, 1973 reported that neither he nor Hyman was impressed.[^2] According to a CIA note of February 28, 1973, the magazine's science editor named him as the source of a skeptical article, which Lawrence denied.[^3] By 1984 he was a staff member of the [[U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences]], and from 1985 to 1988 he served as its project monitor for the [[National Research Council]] committee whose report on techniques for enhancing human performance included a chapter on parapsychology.[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
Lawrence expressed concern that [[Hal Puthoff]] and [[Russell Targ]]'s "own experimental bias in favor of successful outcomes is undermining their objectivity in properly controlled experimental procedures." He opined that Puthoff and Targ were guilty of the same three claims [[Martin Gardner]] had leveled against [[J. B. Rhine]]'s research: loose laboratory controls, skewing of data, and the premise that the attitude of the scientists could negatively influence the subject[^1].
|
||||
### The visit of December 8, 1972
|
||||
|
||||
Lawrence told *Time* editor [[Leon Jaroff]] that Geller was a "charlatan" and encouraged the magazine to write an exposé. This unauthorized communication with a reporter was a violation of his security clearance, leading to an investigation by the [[Central Intelligence Agency]]. Despite Lawrence's denial of having talked to *Time*, Jaroff insisted otherwise[^1].
|
||||
Hyman, writing in *[[The Humanist]]* in 1977, described the visit as that of "a visiting team to ascertain if Targ and Puthoff had sufficient evidence and an adequate case to justify the Advanced Research Projects Agency [funding] their research on Uri Geller." He said Geller "sent everyone out of the room except George Lawrence and myself," had Lawrence place his hands on two envelopes containing a drawing by Van de Castle and a magazine picture, and tried to obtain an impression without result; and that after lunch Geller again tried "while all alone with George."[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
*Mind-Reach* (1977), by Targ and Puthoff, records the same visit as "a privileged, confidential visit requested by George Lawrence, at that time a projects manager for the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)." Lawrence arrived with his two consultants, Hyman and Van de Castle, during Geller's stay; "their stated aim was to determine whether anything in our study would be of interest to ARPA." Targ and Puthoff wrote that they declined to let the visitors watch an experiment in progress, offered instead that they conduct experiments of their own with Geller, and that Van de Castle concluded from one of them that Geller was "an interesting subject for further study" while "Hyman and Lawrence were not impressed." The authors included Lawrence, Hyman, [[Martin Gardner]], [[James Randi]] and [[Joe Hanlon]] in a chapter called "The Loyal Opposition."[^5][^6]
|
||||
|
||||
*Time* of March 12, 1973 reported that "news of the unusual activity at [[Menlo Park]] reached the Department of Defense," that Lawrence "was accompanied to SRI by Robert Van de Castle," and that "neither Lawrence nor Hyman was impressed." It described Geller asking Lawrence to write a number between one and ten on a pad while covering his own eyes with his hands, Hyman seeing Geller's open eyes through his fingers, and, later, Geller causing a compass needle to turn about five degrees, Lawrence moving his body and vibrating the floor to deflect the needle more, and Targ insisting on examining "the DOD man" for hidden magnets, "(He did not.)"[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### The CIA record, January and February 1973
|
||||
|
||||
An Office of Research and Development memorandum of January 24, 1973, ORD-413-73, by an officer whose name is redacted, reports on a film of the Geller experiments shown at SRI on January 23 by Targ and Puthoff. It states that "on the basis of meetings I have attended at ARPA, whose Drs. [[Austin Kibler]] and George Lawrence have been to SRI to observe Geller, Puthoff and Targ in action, there is serious doubt that Geller's accomplishment transcends the range of activities of a skillful magician can perform and much concern that Puthoff's and Targ's own experimental bias in favor of successful outcomes is undermining their objectivity in designing properly controlled experimental procedures." The writer added that he had observed no unorthodox behavior by Puthoff or Targ at the briefing that "could serve to corroborate ARPA's judgment," and, of the idea of testing Geller on previously unseen blueprints, that "Dr. Lawrence reported that Geller balked at reproducing anything more complex than a simple line drawing."[^7]
|
||||
|
||||
A note of February 28, 1973, "More Geller Business," records that the science editor of *Time*, "a Mr. Jareff," had told SRI's public information officer that the issue of Monday, March 5 would carry an article tending to discredit Geller; that "Jareff says that the source of the article was Dr. George Lawrence of ARPA, and apparently the article identifies Lawrence as the source"; and that "Lawrence, on the other hand, denies having talked to TIME" while "Jareff says this is nonsense, Lawrence has talked to TIME lots of times." The note says Lawrence "felt Geller was a charlatan based on the die-calling experiment," his reasoning being that Geller was "influencing the die so that it came up with the face that he wished," and that the writer expected the article, which "does not give any indication of Agency interest," to complicate dealing with Geller and [[Ingo Swann]].[^3] A CIA memorandum of February 2, 1973 on the paranormal, in its paragraph on the subject it calls "G," an Israeli who had been an army magician, says he "had one bad brush with Mr LAWRENCE of ARPA whom he perceived (perhaps not without reason) as being hostile."[^8]
|
||||
|
||||
[[Annie Jacobsen]], in *Phenomena* (2017), wrote that the conclusion of Hyman, Lawrence and Van de Castle, reported in *Time*, was that anyone who believed in Geller's powers was falling for the "ridiculous"; that Lawrence expressed concern that Puthoff and Targ's "own experimental bias in favor of successful outcomes is undermining their objectivity in properly controlled experimental procedures," and that they were guilty of the three charges Gardner had made against [[J. B. Rhine]]: loose laboratory controls, skewing of data, and the premise that the attitude of the scientists could influence the subject; and that Lawrence told the *Time* editor [[Leon Jaroff]] that Geller was a "charlatan" and urged an exposé, which she described as an unauthorized contact with a reporter in violation of his security clearance and the subject of a CIA investigation, although Lawrence denied having spoken to *Time* and Jaroff insisted that he had.[^9]
|
||||
|
||||
*Time* returned to the visit in its cover story of March 4, 1974, "Boom Times on the Psychic Frontier," which said that "assigned by the Department of Defense to report on the wondrous happenings at S.R.I., Hyman, accompanied by George Lawrence, DoD projects manager for the Advanced Research Projects Agency, caught Geller in some outright deceptions."[^10]
|
||||
|
||||
### Later accounts
|
||||
|
||||
A staff study prepared for the Army's [[Center Lane]] program in 1983 includes an article by Dr. [[Roger A. Beaumont]], "On the Strategic Potential of ESP," which says that "in 1972, the [[Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency]] sent a team to evaluate Stanford Research Institute's claimed results with spoon-bender Geller. The team was headed by Dr. George Lawrence, a psychologist who is open-minded on the subject of parapsychology," and that "the team's report was totally negative."[^11] A [[Defense Intelligence College]] thesis of 1992 by Captain [[Michael Zarbo]], citing [[Ronald McRae]]'s *[[Mind Wars]]* (1984), states that "DARPA's director, Dr. George Lawrence, was ordered by his superiors to find something to satisfy Congressional demands to match purported Soviet efforts in the field."[^11]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Army Research Institute
|
||||
|
||||
A technical report of 1984, *Biofeedback and Performance: An Update* (Technical Report 658), by G. H. Lawrence was issued by the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences in [[Alexandria, Virginia]]; he had earlier written a review of biofeedback and performance with L. C. Johnson in *Biofeedback: Theory and Research* ([[Academic Press]], 1977). The NRC report *Enhancing Human Performance: Issues, Theories, and Techniques* (1988) cites both, and its preface states that "definition and guidance for the committee's task came primarily from [[Edgar M. Johnson]], director of the Army Research Institute," and that "administrative and technical liaison was ably provided by project monitor George Lawrence, who worked closely with the committee in its various activities."[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
A memorandum of January 31, 1995, ORD-0143-95, from the CIA's Director of Research and Development to the Associate Deputy Director for Military Affairs, asking for liaison with the Army Research Institute in the review of the [[Defense Intelligence Agency]]'s Star Gate program, states: "The original requester of the 1985 ARI study was Edgar M. Johnson, Technical Director of ARI. George Lawrence served as the ARI liaison to the NRC Committee on Techniques for the Enhancement of Human Performance. We would like to contact these two individuals directly."[^12] [[Edwin May]]'s commentary of 1996 on the [[American Institutes for Research]] review traced the sequence from the 1972 visit, in which Hyman and Lawrence were refused access to an experiment in progress, through Lawrence's commissioning of the NRC study in 1985, to the AIR evaluation.[^13]
|
||||
|
||||
### 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]: Hyman, Ray. "Psychics and Scientists: 'Mind-Reach' and Remote Viewing." *The Humanist,* May/June 1977, pp. 16-20 and following (visit of December 8, 1972), CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080037-4. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^2]: "The Magician and the Think Tank," *Time,* March 12, 1973, as held in CIA-RDP96-00787R000400100023-4. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^3]: Note for the record, "More Geller Business," February 28, 1973, CIA-RDP96-00787R000400070022-9. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^4]: Druckman, Daniel, and John A. Swets, eds. *Enhancing Human Performance: Issues, Theories, and Techniques.* Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1988, preface and references (Lawrence, G. H., *Biofeedback and Performance: An Update,* Technical Report 658, U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, Alexandria, Virginia, 1984; Lawrence and Johnson, 1977), read in ERIC document ED296127, archive.org, and in the CIA Reading Room copy CIA-RDP96-00791R000200320001-1.
|
||||
[^5]: Targ, Russell, and Harold Puthoff. *Mind-Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Abilities.* New York: Delacorte Press, 1977, chapter on the critics and the account of the ARPA visit, read in the archive.org full-text copy of the 2005 reprint, https://archive.org/details/mind-reach-scientists-look-at-psychic-abilities-2005-russell-targ-harold-e.-puth
|
||||
[^6]: Hyman, "Psychics and Scientists," *The Humanist,* May/June 1977, describing Targ and Puthoff's chapter "The Loyal Opposition" as naming Randi, Gardner, Joe Hanlon, George Lawrence and Hyman. CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080037-4.
|
||||
[^7]: Memorandum for C/IP&A/ORD, "Briefing by Stanford Research Institute," ORD-413-73, January 24, 1973, CIA-RDP96-00787R000400070029-2. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^8]: Memorandum for the record, "Paranormal Phenomena: Further Developments / Reflections / Suggestions," February 2, 1973, CIA-RDP96-00787R000400070025-6. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^9]: Jacobsen, Annie. *Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis.* Little, Brown and Company, 2017.
|
||||
[^10]: "Boom Times on the Psychic Frontier," *Time,* cover story, March 4, 1974, as held in CIA-RDP96-00787R000100030002-8. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^11]: Beaumont, Roger A. "On the Strategic Potential of ESP," in the 1983 Center Lane staff study, CIA-RDP96-00788R001700360003-3. Zarbo, Michael E. *Remote Viewing: Parapsychological Potential for Intelligence Collection?,* master's thesis, Defense Intelligence College, November 1992, CIA-RDP96-00789R002600250001-6. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^12]: Memorandum, Director of Research and Development to the Associate Deputy Director for Military Affairs, "Request for Military Liaison Support," ORD-0143-95, January 31, 1995, CIA-RDP96-00791R000100140001-2 and CIA-RDP96-00791R000100140004-9. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^13]: May, Edwin C. "The American Institutes for Research Review of the Department of Defense's STAR GATE Program: A Commentary," *Journal of Parapsychology,* vol. 60, no. 1, 1996, pp. 3-23.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -1,56 +1,102 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
created: 2026-05-17
|
||||
updated: 2026-09-22
|
||||
title: Hella Hammid
|
||||
aliases:
|
||||
- Hella Hammid
|
||||
category: "Psychics & Remote Viewers"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Person
|
||||
- RemoteViewer
|
||||
- SRI
|
||||
- Stargate
|
||||
- GrillFlame
|
||||
- Photographer
|
||||
- ProjectDeepQuest
|
||||
- PSI
|
||||
- 1970s
|
||||
- 1980s
|
||||
category: "Psychics & Remote Viewers"
|
||||
summary: "Hella Hammid was a German-American professional photographer who became one of the Stanford Research Institute's primary remote viewing subjects alongside Ingo Swann, demonstrating statistically significant results in CIA-funded experiments under Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ from 1974 onward."
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- Hella Hammid
|
||||
- Hella Heyman
|
||||
- Mrs. Hammid
|
||||
- H.H.
|
||||
- S4
|
||||
summary: "Los Angeles photographer, a principal SRI learner subject from 1974 (S4 in the 1976 Proceedings paper), a viewer in Project Deep Quest in 1977, and interviewed by the Army's Grill Flame group in 1979."
|
||||
born: 1921-07-15
|
||||
died: 1992-05-01
|
||||
location: "Los Angeles, California"
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: participant_in
|
||||
with: "[[Stargate Project]]"
|
||||
start: 1974
|
||||
role: "SRI subject H.H. from early 1974"
|
||||
fn: 4
|
||||
- type: participant_in
|
||||
with: "[[Project Deep Quest]]"
|
||||
start: 1977-07
|
||||
role: "viewer aboard the submersible Taurus, according to Schnabel"
|
||||
fn: 13
|
||||
- type: participant_in
|
||||
with: "[[Grill Flame]]"
|
||||
start: 1979
|
||||
role: "met the AMSAA core group at SRI on August 21 and 22, 1979"
|
||||
fn: 15
|
||||
created: 2026-05-17
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-05
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Hella Hammid (July 15, 1921 - May 1, 1992) was a German-American professional photographer based in [[Los Angeles, California|Los Angeles]] who became one of the [[Stanford Research Institute|SRI]]'s most extensively tested remote viewing subjects during the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]]-funded research program directed by [[Hal Puthoff]] and Russell Targ from the early 1970s onward. Unlike [[Ingo Swann]] and [[Pat Price]], who brought backgrounds claiming psychic ability, Hammid entered the SRI program as an ordinary person whose experimental results proved unexpectedly consistent, making her an important test case for the hypothesis that anomalous perception was not limited to self-identified psychics.[^1]
|
||||
Hella Hammid (July 15, 1921 to May 1, 1992) was a photographer who worked in [[Los Angeles, California|Los Angeles]] and the subject known as H.H. and S4 in the [[Stanford Research Institute]] (SRI) remote viewing reports of 1974 and 1976. She published in [[Life]], [[Ebony]] and [[The New York Times]], and had photographs in books including *The Family of Man*. She took part in [[Project Deep Quest]] in 1977 and met the Army's [[Grill Flame]] core group at SRI in 1979.[^1][^2] [[Russell Targ]] wrote in a tribute that he met her in 1961 in New York, that the CIA sponsors in 1974 wanted an inexperienced control subject, and that in her ten years with the program she became "our most reliable viewer."[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### SRI Remote Viewing Experiments
|
||||
### Photography
|
||||
|
||||
Puthoff and Targ began working with Hammid after establishing the initial remote viewing protocol with Swann. Her participation addressed a key question about the SRI research: whether the remote viewing phenomenon was specific to individuals with claimed psychic abilities or whether it could be demonstrated in ordinary subjects with no prior psychic claims.
|
||||
Maya Deren's brochure for her films lists "Technical assistance: Hella Heyman, [[Alexander Hammid]]" for *At Land* (1944) and "Photographed by Hella Heyman" for *Ritual in Transfigured Time*.[^1] Targ's tribute states that she was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1921 and "lived most of her adult life in New York and Los Angeles."[^3] Her obituary tribute in *The Sun* in August 1992, by the magazine's editor [[Sy Safransky]], states that she was born in [[Germany]] and educated in [[France]], [[England]] and the United States; that she was a freelance photographer for *[[Life (magazine)|Life]]*, *Ebony* and *The New York Times* and taught photography at the [[University of California, Los Angeles|UCLA]]; that she photographed [[Anaïs Nin]] and [[Benjamin Spock]]; and that her photographs were included in books including *The Family of Man*. She had written in her contributor notes that she "lives in a treehouse in California."[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
Hammid was a subject in the formal SRI remote viewing experiments described in Puthoff and Targ's 1976 paper in *Proceedings of the IEEE*, which presented results from a series of experiments conducted under controlled conditions with independent judges evaluating the correspondence between subjects' descriptions and target locations. Her results contributed to the statistical case for anomalous information transfer that the SRI team presented to CIA and Defense Department sponsors as evidence of a genuine, reproducible phenomenon.
|
||||
### SRI, 1974
|
||||
|
||||
The SRI protocol for Hammid and other subjects involved an outbound experimenter who traveled to a randomly selected location within thirty minutes' driving distance. The subject remained at SRI with Puthoff or Targ and attempted to describe the target location through spontaneous description and drawing. Independent judges matched the descriptions to the target locations blind, without knowing which description came from which trial.[^1]
|
||||
SRI's first progress report of March 12, 1974, records "a preliminary remote viewing pilot experiment" with "a subject (H.H.) previously screened by the EEG correlates experiment": "The target chosen at random was a small red clapboard schoolhouse structure with a bell steeple on top in a miniature golf course. The subject's response was that she saw a red clapboard structure with a steeple that seemed to be artificial as in a movie set." An outside reviewer noted that of six subjects in the EEG work, "one of the six subjects, HH, showed a consistent alpha blocking effort. Therefore, this subject was studied further and most of the data recorded is based on HH's performance."[^4] [[Jim Schnabel]] wrote that she arrived in 1974, "was not steeped in psi experiences as Swann and Price had been," and that of the six receivers in the EEG work only hers changed when the sender was stimulated, with slightly depressed alpha and slightly enhanced beta rhythms.[^5]
|
||||
|
||||
[[David Marks]] wrote in 1982 that of the six transcripts of her series shown to him by the SRI judge [[Arthur Hastings]], "four of the six Hammid transcripts actually carried dates" and "one transcript even carried the name of the associated target"; he listed twenty-four cues ("This is the 18th of September," "Russell Targ has gone to the remote site," "Hal has gone to a second target," "Hella has made a drawing of Hal's first location") from which a judge in [[New Zealand]], using no descriptive material, matched the transcripts better than Hastings had, and reported that Hastings had received three target lists, one randomized and two not. Targ and Puthoff's own account of her had been that she was "a friend: 'I (R.T.) had known Hella for more than a dozen years.'"[^2]
|
||||
Targ and [[Hal Puthoff]] described her in the *[[Nature (journal)|Nature]]* paper of October 18, 1974 and in later SRI reports as one of "two of our subjects (H.H. and P.P.)," the other being [[Pat Price]], who "had not considered themselves to have unusual perceptual ability before their participation."[^6] Targ and Puthoff's account in the 1976 *[[Proceedings of the IEEE]]* paper calls her "a gifted professional photographer" who "was selected for this series on the basis of her successful performance as a percipient in the EEG experiment described earlier" and who "had no previous experience with apparent paranormal functioning," and records that she had "no strong feelings about the likelihood of her ability to succeed in this task." The paper contrasts her with [[Ingo Swann]], who "had come to our laboratory fresh from a lengthy and apparently successful series of experiments with Dr. [[Gertrude Schmeidler]] at [[City College of New York]]," and with Price, who "felt that he used his remote viewing ability in his everyday life." It describes her series as a nine-experiment replication of the series with Price, the first replication attempted, in which she described a pedestrian overpass target as "a kind of trough up in the air" and drew nested squares at the bottom of the page, and described a barn-like structure with slatted sides, a pitched roof and "light and dark bars on the wall."[^7]
|
||||
|
||||
### The 1974 Record
|
||||
[[David Marks]] wrote in 1982 that of the six transcripts of her series shown to him by the SRI judge [[Arthur Hastings]], "four of the six Hammid transcripts actually carried dates" and "one transcript even carried the name of the associated target"; he listed twenty-four cues ("This is the 18th of September," "Russell Targ has gone to the remote site," "Hal has gone to a second target," "Hella has made a drawing of Hal's first location") from which a judge in [[New Zealand]], using no descriptive material, matched the transcripts better than Hastings had, and reported that Hastings had received three target lists, one randomized and two not. Targ and Puthoff's own account of her had been that she was "a friend: 'I (R.T.) had known Hella for more than a dozen years.'"[^8]
|
||||
|
||||
SRI's first progress report of March 1974 records "a preliminary remote viewing pilot experiment" with "a subject (H.H.) previously screened by the EEG correlates experiment": "The target chosen at random was a small red clapboard schoolhouse structure with a bell steeple on top in a miniature golf course. The subject's response was that she saw a red clapboard structure with a steeple that seemed to be artificial as in a movie set." An outside reviewer noted that of six subjects in the EEG work, "one of the six subjects, HH, showed a consistent alpha blocking effort. Therefore, this subject was studied further and most of the data recorded is based on HH's performance." A CIA officer who observed her in 1974 wrote: "Hella is very alert and outgoing; although not insightful. She is very concerned with her performance. Her aim seems to be pleasing the experimenters rather than proving anything to herself." "She does very badly on absolute size estimates. She does very well on indicating lighting conditions, including the presence of steady or pulsing lights. She does not often describe colors, but is very accurate when she does." "There can be no question that Hella can repeatably, although not reliably, produce information not available through normal means." Set to describe an electric typewriter on which the officer had typed for ten minutes, she missed, while [[Russell Targ]], who had been questioning her throughout, "gave a nearly perfect account of the target." Called in by a police lieutenant named Konar, who "had exhausted all available leads" in the murder of a young woman in the [[Stanford University|Stanford]] chapel, she "gave details of the crime location, described the victim and her assailant, indicated the exact location of the fatal wound, alluded to the ritualistic tone of the crime, and traced the victim's movements before the crime as well as the relocation of the body afterwards," the only known error being earrings; Konar wrote SRI a letter and followed her leads; but "none of the data that Hella generated, that has been verified, was unknown to Lt. Konar at the time of this experiment. Therefore, it is possible that Hella received all of her information from the Lt., by some unknown means." The same officer warned that if funding lapsed Puthoff and Targ "will publish everything they have generated," including "their association with unreliable subjects." A cassette of September 19, 1974, is catalogued "Tape 'N' Text Editor and Drill Press, Beacon Russell Targ, Viewer Hella Hammid."[^3]
|
||||
Schnabel wrote that in the series of nine outbound trials the judge matched five transcripts correctly and ranked her four other transcripts second, and that on one day she told Targ the site before it had been selected by random-number generator, which led Puthoff and Targ to adopt a protocol with ten sealed sites in which she described the target in advance and the target was then chosen by calculator; blind judging matched all four of her transcripts to their targets. Schnabel added that "Hella Hammid was the queen of remote viewers when it came to film canisters."[^9]
|
||||
|
||||
### Project Deep Quest
|
||||
### The 1974 observer's report
|
||||
|
||||
Hammid participated in [[Project Deep Quest]] in the summer of 1977, a unique experiment testing whether remote viewing could be performed under extreme environmental conditions. The experiment, conducted in the [[Pacific Ocean]] near Catalina Island, used the deep-sea research submersible *Taurus I*.
|
||||
A CIA officer who observed her in 1974, his name redacted in the released memoranda, wrote: "Hella is very alert and outgoing; although not insightful. She is very concerned with her performance. Her aim seems to be pleasing the experimenters rather than proving anything to herself." "She does very badly on absolute size estimates. She does very well on indicating lighting conditions, including the presence of steady or pulsing lights. She does not often describe colors, but is very accurate when she does." "There can be no question that Hella can repeatably, although not reliably, produce information not available through normal means." Set to describe an electric typewriter on which the officer had typed for ten minutes, she missed, while Targ, who had been questioning her throughout, "gave a nearly perfect account of the target." She had talked, "without provocation," about "the 'two men from DOD'" who had made her "tense" on a previous visit.[^10]
|
||||
|
||||
In one part of the experiment, Hammid worked with Ingo Swann to attempt to identify the locations of previously unidentified seafloor shipwrecks, using maps and dowsing-style intuitive technique. Both subjects independently marked a single location; when the *Taurus I* investigated, the submersible found an uncharted wreck.
|
||||
During the same visit she was called in by a police lieutenant, [[Walt Konar]], who "had exhausted all available leads" in the murder of a young woman in the [[Stanford University|Stanford]] chapel some weeks before. She "gave details of the crime location, described the victim and her assailant, indicated the exact location of the fatal wound, alluded to the ritualistic tone of the crime, and traced the victim's movements before the crime as well as the relocation of the body afterwards," the only known error being earrings; Konar wrote SRI a letter and followed her leads. The officer noted that "none of the data that Hella generated, that has been verified, was unknown to Lt. Konar at the time of this experiment. Therefore, it is possible that Hella received all of her information from the Lt., by some unknown means." He warned that if funding lapsed Puthoff and Targ "will publish everything they have generated," including "their association with unreliable subjects." A cassette of September 19, 1974, is catalogued "Tape 'N' Text Editor and Drill Press, Beacon Russell Targ, Viewer Hella Hammid."[^10]
|
||||
|
||||
In the Air Force's classified component of the experiment, Hammid was sealed inside the *Taurus I* submersible at 500 feet depth, 375 miles from a land-based target she had not been told about. She was given a set of six sealed envelopes and asked to identify which contained a photograph corresponding to a location on land where Puthoff and [[Dale Graff]] were serving as a beacon. Her selection matched the correct target.[^1]
|
||||
A separate undated memorandum for the record by an officer of the CIA's [[Office of Technical Service]], "Operational Use of Paranormals in Police Activities," reports that "two paranormal subjects being tested at Stanford Research Institute" had produced impressive data on two police cases, the [[Patty Hearst]] kidnapping and a Stanford student homicide, and that an OTS officer had witnessed the sessions in the second.[^11]
|
||||
|
||||
### CIA Handler Relationship
|
||||
### Project Deep Quest, July 1977
|
||||
|
||||
Hammid's work was part of the SRI research program funded through the CIA beginning in 1972. The CIA's liaison to the SRI program, [[Kit Green]] of the CIA's Life Sciences Division, oversaw the program in its early years and would have been aware of Hammid's results as they were reported to the agency. Her participation alongside Pat Price and Ingo Swann in the early SRI experiments was cited in the classified reports that Green and his successors used to justify continued CIA funding for the program.
|
||||
SRI's report of October 1978, *Advanced Threat Technique Assessment*, covering April 18, 1977 to April 15, 1978 for the [[Defense Intelligence Agency]], describes a submersible experiment in July 1977 near [[Santa Catalina Island]] using the *Taurus*, a five-man vehicle made by International Hydrodynamics Company Ltd. of Canada and made available to SRI by [[Stephan Schwartz]] of the [[Philosophical Research Society]] of Los Angeles, who had arranged its use for an underwater archaeology experiment. Six messages were each assigned a Bay Area site; a team went to the site and stayed fifteen minutes while a subject aboard the submersible, "500 miles away," described the team's location and then chose the target from a list and noted the attached message. Four trials were planned. The first was aborted for failure to follow the dive schedule. In the second, on July 16, 1977, at 170 metres in 340 metres of water, the subject began, "A very tall looming object. A very, very huge tall tree and a lot of space behind them. There almost feels like there is a drop-off or a palisade or a cliff behind them"; the target was a giant oak on a hilltop in [[Portola Valley]] and the message "Rendezvous at Pickup Point Three" was correctly obtained. The third was aborted for lack of synchronization. In the fourth, with the submersible on the bottom in 78 metres, the subject described "flat stone flooring, walls, small pool, reddish stone walk, large doors," and the target was a shopping mall in [[Mountain View]]. The report does not name the subjects.[^12]
|
||||
|
||||
Hammid was not herself a CIA employee or contractor; she was a civilian research subject who participated in experiments conducted under institutional protocols at SRI.[^1]
|
||||
Schnabel identified the viewers as Hammid, in the first successful trial at "550 feet beneath the Pacific," and Ingo Swann in the second, with Hammid suffering from seasickness; that the experiments were conducted for the Air Force contract of [[Dale Graff]]; and that Schwartz, a former Navy officer, had persuaded the two to serve as his viewers in a search for undiscovered shipwrecks, finding "some debris that suggested they had hit the right wreck."[^13] [[Annie Jacobsen]], in *Phenomena*, wrote that Hammid and Swann each marked a single location on maps and that the submersible found an uncharted wreck, and that Hammid was sealed in the submersible at 500 feet, 375 miles from a target she had not been told about, with Puthoff and Dale Graff acting as the beacon, and chose from six sealed envelopes the photograph matching the target.[^14]
|
||||
|
||||
### Grill Flame, 1979
|
||||
|
||||
A memorandum for the record of September 19, 1979, by the Special Activities Office of the [[Army Materiel Systems Analysis Activity]] (AMSAA), reports that the four members of the AMSAA Grill Flame core group visited SRI on August 21 and 22, 1979 "for discussions with the SRI staff and Hella Hammid." It states that she "has participated in the SRI remote viewing (RV) program for the past 5-6 years," that she "originally participated in SRI's RV program as a 'control subject,' basically as a personal favor to Russ Targ, whom she'd known for several years," and that she "is in no way an absolute believer." She told them she had spent three weeks in [[Egypt]] with Stephan Schwartz using a procedure that was "basically coordinate RV in time instead of space," given a site and a date to view such as 200 BC, and had not yet received feedback; and that she and Targ had attended a two-day out-of-body experience seminar led by [[Robert Monroe]] at [[Esalen Institute|Esalen]] during which she slept throughout. The group recorded that she "views lying down with her eyes closed" and draws each impression as it comes, "a compulsive doodler," that she "works practically exclusively with Russ Targ as her interviewer," and that "she did all of the box RV sessions," a 4 by 4 grid of sixteen bins. A separate part of the memorandum records that [[Manfred Gale]] met Puthoff and Targ that morning on the [[Army Science Board]]'s criticism of their evaluation procedure.[^15]
|
||||
|
||||
### Later training
|
||||
|
||||
Schnabel wrote that Hammid and [[Gary Langford]] were trainees of Ingo Swann's coordinate method, that in May 1980 Swann gave them the coordinates of the erupting [[Mount St. Helens]], and that Swann often told of a target he gave Hammid, a precipice over the [[Khyber Pass]], in which the kinesthetic sense of the site was so strong that her hand "went sharply down, off the paper, and off the table." Schnabel also described a clash between Hammid and the SRI subject [[Keith Harary]], who in his own opinion thought she had begun to see herself as a superpsychic.[^16]
|
||||
|
||||
Hammid died at home in Los Angeles on May 1, 1992. In her last letter to Safransky she wrote, "I have looked death squarely in the face most of last year. I have cancer but am fighting it with everything I've got."[^17]
|
||||
|
||||
### 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. Puthoff, Harold E., and Russell Targ. "A Perceptual Channel for Information Transfer over Kilometer Distances: Historical Perspective and Recent Research." *Proceedings of the IEEE* 64, no. 3 (March 1976): 329-354 (the primary published SRI remote viewing experimental results).
|
||||
[^2]: Marks, David F. "Remote Viewing Revisited." *Skeptical Inquirer,* vol. 6, no. 4, Summer 1982, pp. 18-29. https://cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1982/07/22165420/p20.pdf Snyder, Harry L., and Arlene G. Snyder. *Summary and Critical Evaluation of Research in Remote Viewing,* Report RV-79-1, final technical report, contract 77F104420, Systemetrics, Inc., Blacksburg, Virginia, June 1, 1979, parts 1 and 2, CIA-RDP96-00791R000100440001-9 and CIA-RDP96-00787R000100260003-2. The sponsor of the contract is not named in the report. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^3]: Puthoff, Harold E. *Perceptual Augmentation Techniques,* progress report no. 1, March 12, 1974, SRI Project 3183, CIA-RDP96-00787R000100010001-1. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. "Review of Perceptual Augmentation Techniques," unsigned review of SRI progress reports 1 to 3, c. August 1974, CIA-RDP96-00787R000200230001-6. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. "Experiments with Hella Hammid," CIA memoranda of 1974 with an officer's trip report of November 1974, author's name redacted, CIA-RDP96-00787R000200070006-9 and CIA-RDP96-00787R000200070002-3; cassette catalogue card of September 19, 1974, CIA-RDP79-00999A000400040013-3. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^1]: *Maya Deren Films* (brochure, undated; the credits name a Hella Heyman and an Alexander Hammid), Cinema 16 and Art in Cinema materials, Vogel collection (identifier Vogel_MCHC81-068_B07_F026_DerenFilms), archive.org, https://archive.org/details/Vogel_MCHC81-068_B07_F026_DerenFilms
|
||||
[^2]: Safransky, Sy. "Hella Hammid." *The Sun,* issue 200, August 1992. https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/200/hella-hammid
|
||||
[^3]: Targ, Russell, "A Tribute to Hella Hammid: The First Woman Remote Viewer," as reproduced on her Find a Grave memorial. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/129802432/hella-hammid The tribute is quoted for what Targ states; it does not mention the name Heyman.
|
||||
[^4]: Puthoff, Harold E. *Perceptual Augmentation Techniques,* progress report no. 1, March 12, 1974, SRI Project 3183, CIA-RDP96-00787R000100010001-1. "Review of Perceptual Augmentation Techniques," unsigned review of SRI progress reports 1 to 3, c. August 1974, CIA-RDP96-00787R000200230001-6. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^5]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies.* New York: Dell, 1997, chapter on the early SRI work, read in the archive.org full-text copy, https://archive.org/details/jim-schnabel-remote-viewers-the-secret-history-of-americas-psychic-spies_2
|
||||
[^6]: Targ, Russell, and Harold Puthoff. "Information Transmission under Conditions of Sensory Shielding," *Nature,* vol. 251, October 18, 1974, pp. 602-607, read in the CIA Reading Room copy CIA-RDP96-00787R000100220001-8 on archive.org.
|
||||
[^7]: Puthoff, Harold E., and Russell Targ. "A Perceptual Channel for Information Transfer over Kilometer Distances: Historical Perspective and Recent Research." *Proceedings of the IEEE* 64, no. 3 (March 1976): 329-354, section on learner subject S4, read in the SRI report copy CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6 and in the CIA Reading Room copy CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080046-4, archive.org mirror of the STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^8]: Marks, David F. "Remote Viewing Revisited." *Skeptical Inquirer,* vol. 6, no. 4, Summer 1982, pp. 18-29. https://cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1982/07/22165420/p20.pdf Snyder, Harry L., and Arlene G. Snyder. *Summary and Critical Evaluation of Research in Remote Viewing,* Report RV-79-1, final technical report, contract 77F104420, Systemetrics, Inc., Blacksburg, Virginia, June 1, 1979, parts 1 and 2, CIA-RDP96-00791R000100440001-9 and CIA-RDP96-00787R000100260003-2. The sponsor of the contract is not named in the report. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^9]: Schnabel, *Remote Viewers,* 1997, chapters on the SRI work. Schnabel's figures are his own account of the judging and of Puthoff's protocol and differ from the sum-of-ranks tables in the Proceedings paper cited above.
|
||||
[^10]: "Experiments with Hella Hammid," CIA memoranda of 1974 with an officer's trip report of November 1974, author's name redacted, CIA-RDP96-00787R000200070006-9 and CIA-RDP96-00787R000200070002-3; "Objective Assessment of SRI Visit," CIA-RDP96-00787R000700090008-0; cassette catalogue card of September 19, 1974, CIA-RDP79-00999A000400040013-3. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. The warning about "unreliable subjects" is in the same officer's assessment of SRI, CIA-RDP96-00787R000700090008-0.
|
||||
[^11]: Memorandum for the record, "Operational Use of Paranormals in Police Activities," undated, author redacted, Office of Technical Service, CIA-RDP96-00787R000200130013-4. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^12]: Puthoff, Harold E., Russell Targ, Edwin C. May and Ingo Swann. *Advanced Threat Technique Assessment,* final report, October 1978, covering April 18, 1977 to April 15, 1978, SRI Project 5309, 132 pp., classified by DIA (OT), CIA-RDP96-00788R001300040001-4 and CIA-RDP96-00791R000200270001-7, the submersible section and figures 10 to 13. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^13]: Schnabel, *Remote Viewers,* 1997, chapter on the Deep Quest experiments.
|
||||
[^14]: Jacobsen, Annie. *Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis.* Little, Brown and Company, 2017.
|
||||
[^15]: Special Activities Office, U.S. Army Materiel Systems Analysis Activity, memorandum for record, "Visit of AMSAA GRILL FLAME Participants to SRI, 21-22 August 1979," DRXSY-DS, September 19, 1979, CIA-RDP96-00788R002000240011-3. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^16]: Schnabel, *Remote Viewers,* 1997, chapters on Swann's training program and on SRI's internal politics.
|
||||
[^17]: Safransky, "Hella Hammid," *The Sun,* August 1992.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -1,18 +1,20 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Intelligence & Government"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Pseudonym
|
||||
- Psi
|
||||
- Person
|
||||
- RemoteViewer
|
||||
- Stargate
|
||||
summary: "Morris worked with Norm Everheart, who tasked Ken Bell and Mel Riley to remote-view the KGB agent."
|
||||
summary: "Pseudonym used by Jim Schnabel in Remote Viewers (1997) for a CIA officer who worked with the person he calls Norm Everheart."
|
||||
---
|
||||
Jim Morris is a pseudonym [[Jim Schnabel]] used in *Remote Viewers* (1997) for a CIA officer who worked with the person he calls Norm Everheart; the book's list of pseudonyms includes the name.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
[[Jim Morris]] was a [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] counterintelligence officer. He sought assistance from the [[Stargate Project|Grill Flame]] psychics for a case involving a [[KGB]] "illegal" (a deep-cover officer) who had been arrested in South Africa. The KGB agent was not cooperating with interrogations, and Morris hoped the remote viewers could provide information on how the agent was decoding his messages.[^1]
|
||||
In Schnabel's account, [[Jim Morris]] was a [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] counterintelligence officer. He sought assistance from the [[Stargate Project|Grill Flame]] psychics for a case involving a [[KGB]] "illegal" (a deep-cover officer) who had been arrested in South Africa. The KGB agent was not cooperating with interrogations, and Morris hoped the remote viewers could provide information on how the agent was decoding his messages.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
Morris worked with [[Norm Everheart]], who tasked [[Ken Bell]] and [[Mel Riley]] to remote-view the KGB agent. Bell's "telepathic interrogation" revealed details about the agent's family and a hidden pocket calculator, which was later confirmed to have been used for coding messages. Morris confirmed the accuracy of the remote viewers' descriptions, including the agent's upstairs room, gray clothes, and the presence of two interrogators. This successful operation helped close the case.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997.
|
||||
[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997.
|
||||
[^2]: Jim Schnabel, *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies* (New York: Dell, 1997), "Pseudonyms": "The following names mentioned in the text are pseudonyms," https://archive.org/details/jim-schnabel-remote-viewers-the-secret-history-of-americas-psychic-spies_2.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -1,20 +1,22 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Intelligence & Government"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Pseudonym
|
||||
- Psi
|
||||
- Person
|
||||
- RemoteViewer
|
||||
- Military
|
||||
- SRI
|
||||
- Soviet
|
||||
summary: "Peter Maris was a CIA physicist who, along with Ken Kress, an engineer from the Office of Technical Service (OTS), tasked Pat Price with remote viewing the mysterious Soviet military research facility at Semipalatinsk (URDF-3)."
|
||||
summary: "Pseudonym used by Jim Schnabel in Remote Viewers (1997) for a CIA physicist who worked with Ken Kress."
|
||||
---
|
||||
Peter Maris is a pseudonym [[Jim Schnabel]] used in *Remote Viewers* (1997) for a CIA physicist who worked with Ken Kress; the book's list of pseudonyms includes the name.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
Peter Maris was a [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] physicist who, along with [[Kenneth A. Kress|Ken Kress]], an engineer from the Office of Technical Service (OTS), tasked [[Pat Price]] with remote viewing the mysterious Soviet military research facility at Semipalatinsk (URDF-3). Maris and Kress were the CIA officials who brought in the coordinates for the site, which was also known as P-NUTS (probable nuclear underground test site) by Air Force intelligence. They knew little about the facility, only that it was a "research facility."[^1]
|
||||
In Schnabel's account, Peter Maris was a [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] physicist who, along with [[Kenneth A. Kress|Ken Kress]], an engineer from the Office of Technical Service (OTS), tasked [[Pat Price]] with remote viewing the mysterious Soviet military research facility at Semipalatinsk (URDF-3). Maris and Kress were the CIA officials who brought in the coordinates for the site, which was also known as P-NUTS (probable nuclear underground test site) by Air Force intelligence. They knew little about the facility, only that it was a "research facility."[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
Maris was present during Price's remote viewing sessions of Semipalatinsk, where Price described a large gantry crane, the construction of large metal spheres, and unique welding techniques. Initially, Maris and Kress were unsure what to make of Price's descriptions, but they later confirmed the existence of the crane and the spheres through satellite photography. The accuracy of Price's remote viewing, particularly his description of the crane, was so impressive that it helped secure funding for SRI's psi research for several years.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997.
|
||||
[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997.
|
||||
[^2]: Jim Schnabel, *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies* (New York: Dell, 1997), "Pseudonyms": "The following names mentioned in the text are pseudonyms," https://archive.org/details/jim-schnabel-remote-viewers-the-secret-history-of-americas-psychic-spies_2.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -2,22 +2,91 @@
|
|||
category: "Scientists & Researchers"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Person
|
||||
- Skeptic
|
||||
summary: "Bell Labs engineer and editor of the Proceedings of the IEEE who published Targ and Puthoff's 1976 remote-viewing paper and ran his own inconclusive trials."
|
||||
- BellLabs
|
||||
- IEEE
|
||||
- Engineer
|
||||
- Editor
|
||||
- SRI
|
||||
- RemoteViewing
|
||||
- GrillFlame
|
||||
- PSI
|
||||
- 1970s
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- Robert Lucky
|
||||
- Robert W. Lucky
|
||||
- R. W. Lucky
|
||||
- Bob Lucky
|
||||
- Dr. Lucky
|
||||
summary: "Bell Labs engineer who edited the Proceedings of the IEEE when it published Puthoff and Targ's 1976 remote viewing paper, wrote its editorial, ran six Bell trials in 1975, and called the results ambiguous."
|
||||
born: 1936-01-09
|
||||
died: 2022-03-10
|
||||
location: "Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA"
|
||||
updated: 2026-09-22
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Bell Labs]]"
|
||||
start: 1961
|
||||
end: 1992
|
||||
role: "engineer at Holmdel, New Jersey; executive director of the Communications Sciences Research Division from 1982"
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Bellcore]]"
|
||||
start: 1992
|
||||
role: "corporate vice-president of applied research"
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: member_of
|
||||
with: "[[IEEE]]"
|
||||
role: "editor of the Proceedings of the IEEE in 1976; later vice-president for publications and executive vice-president"
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: head_of
|
||||
with: "[[U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board]]"
|
||||
start: 1986
|
||||
end: 1989
|
||||
role: "chairman"
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
created: 2026-05-17
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-05
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Robert W. Lucky was born in [[Pittsburgh]] on January 9, 1936, and died on March 10, 2022. An engineer at [[Bell Labs]] in [[Holmdel]], [[New Jersey]], he was editor of the *Proceedings of the [[IEEE]]* when it published [[Hal Puthoff]] and [[Russell Targ]]'s "A Perceptual Channel for Information Transfer over Kilometer Distances" in March 1976, and wrote the editorial that accompanied it. Copies of his correspondence with a CIA officer and of a CIA memorandum citing his laboratory's replication of the [[Stanford Research Institute|SRI]] experiments are held in the CIA's STARGATE collection.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
[[Robert Lucky]] was a [[Bell Labs]] scientist and the editor of the prestigious *Proceedings of the IEEE* electrical engineering society journal. He initially hesitated to publish [[Hal Puthoff]] and [[Russell Targ]]'s paper on remote viewing in 1976. However, after Puthoff and Targ visited Bell Labs to answer questions from skeptical scientists, Lucky was impressed.[^1]
|
||||
### Career
|
||||
|
||||
He eventually conducted some of his own informal remote viewing experiments and became convinced of its reality, stating, "Psychic stuff is really not much more far-fetched than some of the physics behind the laser." His decision to publish the paper in a respected scientific journal contributed to the growing, albeit controversial, recognition of remote viewing within the scientific community.[^1]
|
||||
The history center of the IEEE records that Lucky took a B.S. in electrical engineering at [[Purdue University]] in 1957 and an M.S. and Ph.D. in 1959 and 1961, joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel in 1961 to study digital transmission over telephone lines, became executive director of the Communications Sciences Research Division in 1982, and in 1992 left to be corporate vice-president of applied research at [[Bellcore]] in [[Red Bank]]. It states that he served on the IEEE Board of Directors as vice-president for publications and as executive vice-president, as president of the [[IEEE Communications Society]], as editor of several journals including the *Proceedings of the IEEE,* and as chairman of the [[U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board|Scientific Advisory Board of the United States Air Force]] from 1986 to 1989, and that he was a member of the [[National Academy of Engineering]].[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
The Army's [[Grill Flame Scientific Evaluation Committee]] visited him at Bell Labs in Holmdel on September 8, 1979, and recorded a different account: "At Bell we spoke with Dr. Robert Lucky, the man who probably started the whole (serious) PSI debate. He did this during his tenure as editor of the IEEE Journal 'Proceedings', by publishing the now famous Targ and Puthoff article." "Bell has no on-going PSI research and given conservative management's feelings against the subject, never will." "Dr. Lucky believes that SRI does not have a bona fide scientific approach. He feels that good research is necessary, but should be carried out by a group of fully qualified scientists and engineers, with very tight experimental protocols." "In 1975, Dr. Lucky attempted a series of six RV tests, following the SRI protocol. Using in-house Bell volunteers, the tests were for the most part failures. But, enough correlations of Subject transcript to actual target were present in one or two trials, that he calls the whole thing ambiguous. He concluded that the issue should be pursued further, but Bell's management called it quits." "Lucky commented that he once proposed to Targ and Puthoff that they allow a 'debugger' like [[James Randi|Randy the Magician]] to watch an SRI RV session. They refused on the grounds that no one believes them anyhow, and did not feel that permitting an extremely vocal critic to intrude into their lives/work would accomplish anything." He held that "legitimate, scientific research should be going on, but the best approach is to do it openly, perhaps with a sponsor like NSF."[^2]
|
||||
Documents of 1976 give his positions variously as head of the Advanced Data Communications Department at Bell Labs, Holmdel (SRI's letter of March 19, 1976), as "Vice Chairman of the IEEE Publications Board and Division Director at Bell Laboratories" (a CIA memorandum of February 1976), and as head of Transmission Terminal Systems in the Research Department (his own letterhead of June 10, 1976).[^2][^3][^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### Publication of the paper, 1976
|
||||
|
||||
[[Jim Schnabel]] wrote that Lucky "had initially been inclined to turn the paper down," that after Puthoff and Targ visited Bell Labs "to answer questions from skeptical scientists, Lucky was more impressed," that he "eventually tried some of his own informal remote-viewing experiments, and decided that remote viewing was probably for real," and that a journalist would one day quote him as saying, "Psychic stuff is really not much more far-fetched than some of the physics behind the laser." Schnabel's note gives Puthoff as his source for Lucky.[^5] Targ and Puthoff's note to the 2005 reprint of *Mind-Reach* states that "before the paper was accepted for publication, the editor, Robert W. Lucky, had us make a presentation to the engineering staff of Bell Laboratories to gauge reaction (it was positive!)," and that one reviewer had said "This is the kind of thing that I would not believe in, even if it existed!"[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
The editorial introducing the paper, as quoted in the program of the IEEE International Conference on Cybernetics and Society held in Washington in September 1977 (which announced a Puthoff and Targ presentation, "A Scientific Look at ESP"), reads in part: "In a series of experiments carried out at Stanford Research Institute, both experienced subjects and inexperienced volunteers were able to describe scenes being viewed at unknown remote locations by other members of the experimental team, sometimes with great accuracy, and always under carefully designed experimental protocol... We realize that many of our readers will think this an ill-considered decision (to publish this paper), as did one of the engineers we consulted who said, 'This is the kind of thing that I would not believe in even if it existed.'... We believe that the authors have been careful and sincere in the design and reporting of this experiment. Their work deserves scientific consideration and objective criticism... In any event, the paper itself may be the most readable ever published in this journal, and few readers will finish without wondering for at least a moment if indeed ESP might be possible after all."[^7]
|
||||
|
||||
### The CIA and SRI files, 1976
|
||||
|
||||
An [[Office of Technical Service]] memorandum for the record, OTS/CB Memo #76-18 of February 4, 1976, forwarding SRI's final report on the CIA-sponsored work, states that "the unclassified portion of the SRI investigation is to be published in the IEEE Proceedings in March 1976," that "the acceptance by this prestigious journal, is a significant indicator of interest in this field within the scientific community," and that "a number of laboratories, including that of Dr. R. W. Lucky, Vice Chairman of the IEEE Publications Board and Division Director at Bell Laboratories, have successfully replicated the SRI remote viewing tasks." It records that the [[United States Department of the Navy|Department of the Navy]], the [[Office of Naval Research]] and the [[Naval Electronics System Command]] had independently decided to support SRI. Copies of the memorandum went to the Director of Research and Development on February 20, 1976.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
On March 19, 1976, Puthoff wrote to Dr. F. W. [[Niedenführ]] of the [[Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency]] about [[James Randi]]'s book *The Magic of Uri Geller,* in which Niedenführ's letter to Randi appeared as an appendix. Puthoff's letter states that the March *Proceedings* paper "details the results obtained in over 50 experiments with nine subjects," that "the editorial accompanying the paper was written by Dr. R. W. Lucky, editor of the journal and also head of the Advanced Data Communications Department at Bell Labs, Holmdel," and that "we understand that as part of the review process a group at Bell independently replicated our experiment and obtained results similar to ours. Three other Labs have also replicated the experiment."[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
A professor in the department of psychology and sociology of a Philadelphia college wrote to Lucky as editor on April 26, 1976 that the authors had followed "the traditional stratagems of the parapsychologists" and not the experimental method of manipulating independent variables, and so fell short of resolving the question under unambiguous conditions.[^8] On June 10, 1976 Lucky, writing from Holmdel as head of Transmission Terminal Systems in the Research Department, wrote to a CIA officer whose name is redacted: "I would like to thank you for the exceptional dinner which your prepared during my visit to Washington last month. I enjoyed the company of all the guests which had taken the trouble to come. I think you have a fine crew with many diversified interests." He enclosed a copy of a letter from the editor of the Russian edition of the *Proceedings,* who felt "the references to Russian work in this paper are seriously incomplete and outdated" and wished to change the paper in translation, which Lucky called "the only time they have ever proposed changing a paper in translation," and a letter by a correspondent named [[Calkins]], "typical of a number of other letters critical of the work because of the lack of proper controls." He ended: "Make of these what you will."[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
SRI's final report of October 1978 for the [[Defense Intelligence Agency]], *Advanced Threat Technique Assessment,* lists among its references "R. Lucky, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Holmdel, N.J. (private communication)."[^9]
|
||||
|
||||
### Bell trials of 1975 and the Grill Flame visit, 1979
|
||||
|
||||
The Army's [[Grill Flame Scientific Evaluation Committee]], chaired by [[Manfred Gale]], visited him at Bell Labs in Holmdel on September 8, 1979 and recorded: "At Bell we spoke with Dr. Robert Lucky, the man who probably started the whole (serious) PSI debate. He did this during his tenure as editor of the IEEE Journal 'Proceedings', by publishing the now famous Targ and Puthoff article." "Bell has no on-going PSI research and given conservative management's feelings against the subject, never will." "Dr. Lucky believes that SRI does not have a bona fide scientific approach. He feels that good research is necessary, but should be carried out by a group of fully qualified scientists and engineers, with very tight experimental protocols." "He considers the Targ & Puthoff IEEE piece a very important forward step, but underlines that to be credible the procedures they describe must be replicated by many other people and organizations." "In 1975, Dr. Lucky attempted a series of six RV tests, following the SRI protocol. Using in-house Bell volunteers, the tests were for the most part failures. But, enough correlations of Subject transcript to actual target were present in one or two trials, that he calls the whole thing ambiguous. He concluded that the issue should be pursued further, but Bell's management called it quits."[^10]
|
||||
|
||||
The committee also recorded that "Lucky commented that he once proposed to Targ and Puthoff that they allow a 'debugger' like [[James Randi|Randy the Magician]] to watch an SRI RV session. They refused on the grounds that no one believes them anyhow, and did not feel that permitting an extremely vocal critic to intrude into their lives/work would accomplish anything"; that he "described the extremely poor treatment given by the news media to PSI research," and "since he was once chastised by his superiors, based on a fabricated story in one of the sensationalist journals, he no longer talks to reporters"; and that he held that "legitimate, scientific research should be going on, but the best approach is to do it openly, perhaps with a sponsor like NSF. Peer review would be an important part of the process." The committee's schedule of visits lists "8 Sep, [[Princeton University]] & Bell Labs, Holmdel, NJ, [[Dean Jahn]] & Dr. Lucky."[^11]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997.
|
||||
[^2]: *Report by the Grill Flame Scientific Evaluation Committee,* December 1979, Manfred Gale, chairman, CIA-RDP96-00788R001300120001-5. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. The pages on Bell Labs belong to an annex whose heading is withheld from the released copy.
|
||||
[^1]: "Robert W. Lucky," Engineering and Technology History Wiki, IEEE History Center. https://ethw.org/Robert_W._Lucky
|
||||
[^2]: OTS/CB Memo #76-18, "Stanford Research Institute (SRI) Investigation into Parapsychology," February 4, 1976, CIA-RDP96-00791R000100460001-7, CIA-RDP96-00787R000200090006-7 and CIA-RDP96-00787R000700020003-2; memorandum for the Director of Research and Development, "Stanford Research Institute Parapsychology Research," February 20, 1976, CIA-RDP96-00787R000700090012-5. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^3]: Puthoff, Harold E., letter to Dr. F. W. Niedenfuhr, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, March 19, 1976, CIA-RDP96-00787R000500240020-1. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^4]: Lucky, R. W., Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, New Jersey, letter of June 10, 1976, CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080042-8. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^5]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies.* New York: Dell, 1997, chapter on the SRI work and its notes, read in the archive.org full-text copy, https://archive.org/details/jim-schnabel-remote-viewers-the-secret-history-of-americas-psychic-spies_2
|
||||
[^6]: Targ, Russell, and Harold Puthoff. *Mind-Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Abilities.* 2005 reprint, note 9 to the added afterword, read in the archive.org full-text copy, https://archive.org/details/mind-reach-scientists-look-at-psychic-abilities-2005-russell-targ-harold-e.-puth
|
||||
[^7]: Program, IEEE International Conference on Cybernetics and Society, sponsored by the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society and the IEEE Washington Section, Washington, D.C., September 19-21, 1977, quoting Lucky's editorial in *Proceedings of the IEEE,* vol. 64, no. 3, March 1976, CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080010-3. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^8]: Letter to Mr. Robert W. Lucky, Editor, *Proceedings of the IEEE,* April 26, 1976, from a faculty member of the Department of Psychology and Sociology, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Philadelphia (telephone area code 215; name partly illegible in the released copy), CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080043-7. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^9]: Puthoff, Harold E., Russell Targ, Edwin C. May and Ingo Swann. *Advanced Threat Technique Assessment,* final report, October 1978, SRI Project 5309, reference list, CIA-RDP96-00788R001300040001-4 and CIA-RDP96-00791R000200270001-7. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^10]: *Report by the Grill Flame Scientific Evaluation Committee,* December 1979, Manfred Gale, chairman, CIA-RDP96-00788R001300120001-5 and CIA-RDP96-00788R001300120002-4. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. The pages on Bell Labs belong to an annex whose heading is withheld from the released copy; the second copy contains subparagraphs d, g and h that are not quoted in the first.
|
||||
[^11]: Same report, annex 2, "Committee Visits and Discussions," CIA-RDP96-00788R001300120002-4 and CIA-RDP96-00788R001300120001-5.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -1,19 +1,21 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Psychics & Remote Viewers"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Pseudonym
|
||||
- Psi
|
||||
- Person
|
||||
- RemoteViewer
|
||||
- Military
|
||||
- Stargate
|
||||
summary: "Hanson was known to 'cool down' before a remote viewing session by reading Bible verses."
|
||||
summary: "Pseudonym used by Jim Schnabel in Remote Viewers (1997) for a remote viewer."
|
||||
---
|
||||
Steve Hanson is a pseudonym [[Jim Schnabel]] used in *Remote Viewers* (1997) for a remote viewer; the book's list of pseudonyms includes the name.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
[[Steve Hanson]] was an Army civilian photo-interpreter and an early member of the [[Stargate Project|Gondola Wish]] (later Grill Flame) remote viewing unit. He was a devout Christian and one of the four Army civilians in the initial group of candidates selected by [[Frederick Atwater|Skip Atwater]] and [[Murray Watt|Scotty Watt]].[^1]
|
||||
In Schnabel's account, [[Steve Hanson]] was an Army civilian photo-interpreter and an early member of the [[Stargate Project|Gondola Wish]] (later Grill Flame) remote viewing unit. He was a devout Christian and one of the four Army civilians in the initial group of candidates selected by [[Frederick Atwater|Skip Atwater]] and [[Murray Watt|Scotty Watt]].[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
Hanson was known to "cool down" before a remote viewing session by reading Bible verses. However, he eventually faded from the remote viewing scene, as he had problems relaxing into the groove of remote viewing itself, often yanking himself out of the "zone" with worries about whether he was doing it correctly.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997.
|
||||
[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997.
|
||||
[^2]: Jim Schnabel, *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies* (New York: Dell, 1997), "Pseudonyms": "The following names mentioned in the text are pseudonyms," https://archive.org/details/jim-schnabel-remote-viewers-the-secret-history-of-americas-psychic-spies_2.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -1,17 +1,19 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Psychics & Remote Viewers"
|
||||
category: "Intelligence & Government"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Pseudonym
|
||||
- Psi
|
||||
- Person
|
||||
- RemoteViewer
|
||||
- Military
|
||||
- Stargate
|
||||
summary: "Army civilian photo-interpreter and one of the original four candidates selected for the Gondola Wish remote viewing unit in the Stargate Project."
|
||||
summary: "Pseudonym used by Jim Schnabel in Remote Viewers (1997) for an Army civilian photo-interpreter selected for the Gondola Wish unit."
|
||||
---
|
||||
Steve Holloway is a pseudonym [[Jim Schnabel]] used in *Remote Viewers* (1997) for an Army civilian photo-interpreter selected for the Gondola Wish unit; the book's list of pseudonyms includes the name.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
[[Steve Holloway]] was an Army civilian photo-interpreter and an early member of the [[Stargate Project|Gondola Wish]] (later Grill Flame) remote viewing unit. He was one of the four Army civilians in the initial group of candidates selected by [[Frederick Atwater|Skip Atwater]] and [[Murray Watt|Scotty Watt]].[^1]
|
||||
In Schnabel's account, [[Steve Holloway]] was an Army civilian photo-interpreter and an early member of the [[Stargate Project|Gondola Wish]] (later Grill Flame) remote viewing unit. He was one of the four Army civilians in the initial group of candidates selected by [[Frederick Atwater|Skip Atwater]] and [[Murray Watt|Scotty Watt]].[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997.
|
||||
[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997.
|
||||
[^2]: Jim Schnabel, *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies* (New York: Dell, 1997), "Pseudonyms": "The following names mentioned in the text are pseudonyms," https://archive.org/details/jim-schnabel-remote-viewers-the-secret-history-of-americas-psychic-spies_2.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -1,6 +1,7 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Intelligence & Government"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Pseudonym
|
||||
- Psi
|
||||
- Person
|
||||
- Stargate
|
||||
|
|
@ -8,14 +9,15 @@ tags:
|
|||
- Military
|
||||
- RemoteViewer
|
||||
- NSA
|
||||
summary: "This incident, where Ingo Swann and Pat Price accurately described the NSA facility despite being given coordinates for O'Donnell's cabin, became known as the Sugar Grove incident."
|
||||
summary: "Pseudonym used by Jim Schnabel in Remote Viewers (1997) for the CIA officer who supplied the Sugar Grove coordinates."
|
||||
---
|
||||
Bill O'Donnell is a pseudonym [[Jim Schnabel]] used in *Remote Viewers* (1997) for the CIA officer who supplied the Sugar Grove coordinates; the book's list of pseudonyms includes the name.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
[[Bill O'Donnell]] was a [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] officer. In May 1973, he inadvertently provided the coordinates for a secret [[NSA]] facility near Sugar Grove, [[West Virginia]], to [[Kit Green]]. Green had asked O'Donnell for coordinates of a place on the East Coast that, if a drawing or photograph were shown later, O'Donnell would be able to confirm. O'Donnell, unaware of the true purpose, provided the precise coordinates of his summer cabin, which happened to be near the highly classified NSA site.[^1]
|
||||
In Schnabel's account, [[Bill O'Donnell]] was a [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] officer. In May 1973, he inadvertently provided the coordinates for a secret [[NSA]] facility near Sugar Grove, [[West Virginia]], to [[Kit Green]]. Green had asked O'Donnell for coordinates of a place on the East Coast that, if a drawing or photograph were shown later, O'Donnell would be able to confirm. O'Donnell, unaware of the true purpose, provided the precise coordinates of his summer cabin, which happened to be near the highly classified NSA site.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
This incident, where [[Ingo Swann]] and [[Pat Price]] accurately described the NSA facility despite being given coordinates for O'Donnell's cabin, became known as the Sugar Grove incident. It led to a hostile security investigation, as the psychics' remote viewing data was accurate enough to suggest a massive leakage of top-secret information. O'Donnell initially dismissed the psychics' descriptions as "bullshit" because they didn't match his cabin, but later realized the true implications when Green discovered the secret military installation nearby.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997.
|
||||
[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997.
|
||||
[^2]: Jim Schnabel, *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies* (New York: Dell, 1997), "Pseudonyms": "The following names mentioned in the text are pseudonyms," https://archive.org/details/jim-schnabel-remote-viewers-the-secret-history-of-americas-psychic-spies_2.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -1,15 +1,17 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Intelligence & Government"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Pseudonym
|
||||
- Person
|
||||
- Stargate
|
||||
- CIA
|
||||
- Military
|
||||
- RemoteViewer
|
||||
summary: "Don Porter was an official with INSCOM at Arlington Hall."
|
||||
summary: "Pseudonym used by Jim Schnabel in Remote Viewers (1997) for an INSCOM official at Arlington Hall."
|
||||
---
|
||||
Don Porter is a pseudonym [[Jim Schnabel]] used in *Remote Viewers* (1997) for an INSCOM official at Arlington Hall; the book's list of pseudonyms includes the name.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
Don Porter was an official with [[United States Army Intelligence and Security Command|INSCOM]] at Arlington Hall. He tasked the [[Stargate Project|Grill Flame]] remote viewers with precognitive missions, seeking to gain intelligence on future events.[^1]
|
||||
In Schnabel's account, Don Porter was an official with [[United States Army Intelligence and Security Command|INSCOM]] at Arlington Hall. He tasked the [[Stargate Project|Grill Flame]] remote viewers with precognitive missions, seeking to gain intelligence on future events.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
In one notable instance, Porter asked [[Frederick Atwater|Skip Atwater]] to have his remote viewers predict the outcome of secret talks between military and civilian officials from North and South Korea, to be held in a farmhouse in the demilitarized zone. Porter wanted to know the North Korean delegates' negotiating strategies and how far they could be pushed.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -17,4 +19,5 @@ Despite [[Joe McMoneagle]]'s theory that the random responses from the remote vi
|
|||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997.
|
||||
[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997.
|
||||
[^2]: Jim Schnabel, *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies* (New York: Dell, 1997), "Pseudonyms": "The following names mentioned in the text are pseudonyms," https://archive.org/details/jim-schnabel-remote-viewers-the-secret-history-of-americas-psychic-spies_2.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -1,14 +1,16 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Intelligence & Government"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Pseudonym
|
||||
- Person
|
||||
- Stargate
|
||||
- CIA
|
||||
- RemoteViewer
|
||||
summary: "Ed Rogers was the chief of Staff D (later known as the Office of SIGINT Operations) at the CIA, an office specializing in small-scale signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection."
|
||||
summary: "Pseudonym used by Jim Schnabel in Remote Viewers (1997) for the chief of the CIA's Staff D."
|
||||
---
|
||||
Ed Rogers is a pseudonym [[Jim Schnabel]] used in *Remote Viewers* (1997) for the chief of the CIA's Staff D; the book's list of pseudonyms includes the name.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
Ed Rogers was the chief of Staff D (later known as the Office of SIGINT Operations) at the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]], an office specializing in small-scale signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection. He was a key figure in the internal debates within the CIA regarding the use of psychic intelligence, or [[PSI-INT]].[^1]
|
||||
In Schnabel's account, Ed Rogers was the chief of Staff D (later known as the Office of SIGINT Operations) at the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]], an office specializing in small-scale signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection. He was a key figure in the internal debates within the CIA regarding the use of psychic intelligence, or [[PSI-INT]].[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
Rogers was highly skeptical of incorporating psychic data into high-stakes operations, primarily due to what he termed the "giggle factor" - the fear of ridicule and operational compromise if it became widely known that his office was consulting psychics. This skepticism was evident when [[Norm Everheart]] proposed using [[Pat Price]]'s remote viewing abilities to confirm the layout of a Chinese Embassy basement.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -16,4 +18,5 @@ Despite Price's impressive performance in three preliminary tests, accurately de
|
|||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997.
|
||||
[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997.
|
||||
[^2]: Jim Schnabel, *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies* (New York: Dell, 1997), "Pseudonyms": "The following names mentioned in the text are pseudonyms," https://archive.org/details/jim-schnabel-remote-viewers-the-secret-history-of-americas-psychic-spies_2.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -1,23 +1,112 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
aliases:
|
||||
- Gertrude Schmeidler
|
||||
- Dr. Gertrude Schmeidler
|
||||
category: "Scientists & Researchers"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Person
|
||||
- Skeptic
|
||||
summary: "Gertrude Schmeidler was an experimental psychologist with a PhD from Harvard University."
|
||||
born: 1912-06-15
|
||||
- Parapsychologist
|
||||
- Psychologist
|
||||
- SheepGoatEffect
|
||||
- CityCollege
|
||||
- ASPR
|
||||
- Psychokinesis
|
||||
- IngoSwann
|
||||
- PSI
|
||||
- 1940s
|
||||
- 1970s
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- Gertrude Schmeidler
|
||||
- Gertrude Raffel Schmeidler
|
||||
- Gertrude R. Schmeidler
|
||||
- G. R. Schmeidler
|
||||
- Dr. Gertrude Schmeidler
|
||||
- Gertrude Raffel
|
||||
summary: "Experimental psychologist at City College of New York whose card-guessing experiments of 1942 to 1945 produced the sheep and goat classification of subjects, and who tested Ingo Swann's psychokinesis on thermistors in 1971 to 1973."
|
||||
born: 1912-07-15
|
||||
died: 2009-03-09
|
||||
location: "USA"
|
||||
location: "New York, New York"
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[City College of New York]]"
|
||||
start: 1945
|
||||
role: "psychologist, later professor and professor emerita of psychology"
|
||||
fn: 2
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Harvard University]]"
|
||||
start: 1942
|
||||
end: 1944
|
||||
role: "research associate, working under Gardner Murphy and funded by the Richard Hodgson Fund"
|
||||
fn: 2
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[American Society for Psychical Research]]"
|
||||
start: 1945
|
||||
end: 1946
|
||||
role: "research officer"
|
||||
fn: 2
|
||||
- type: member_of
|
||||
with: "[[Parapsychological Association]]"
|
||||
start: 1957
|
||||
role: "charter member; vice-president 1958 and 1960; president 1959"
|
||||
fn: 2
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[Parapsychology Foundation]]"
|
||||
start: 1955
|
||||
end: 1959
|
||||
role: "research grant to Schmeidler"
|
||||
fn: 2
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
created: 2026-05-17
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-05
|
||||
---
|
||||
Gertrude Schmeidler was an experimental psychologist with a PhD from [[Harvard University]]. In 1942, she conducted an experiment on anomalous mental phenomena with psychology students at [[City University of New York]]. Her analysis of the data led her to coin the terms "sheep" and "goats" to categorize individuals based on their beliefs about [[Extrasensory Perception|ESP]] and [[Psychokinesis|PK]][^1].
|
||||
|
||||
"Sheep" referred to individuals who were confident about the possible reality of ESP and PK, while "goats" referred to those who doubted the existence of any so-called anomalous mental phenomena. This explicit difference between believers and disbelievers has existed in the upper echelons of the U.S. military and intelligence communities since [[World War II]][^1].
|
||||
Gertrude Raffel Schmeidler was born on July 15, 1912, in [[Long Branch]], New Jersey, and died on March 9, 2009. She was an experimental psychologist at the [[City College of New York]] (CCNY) with a doctorate from [[Radcliffe College]] and [[Harvard University]], who ran card-guessing experiments in the 1940s in which subjects were classed by their stated attitude to extrasensory perception as "sheep" or "goats," and in 1971 to 1973 tested the psychokinetic abilities of [[Ingo Swann]] on temperature recorders. Her papers are held at [[Duke University]] with those of the [[Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory]].[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
Schmeidler's work is referenced by skeptics like [[Martin Gardner]], who noted that psychic researchers often claimed that psychics were negatively impacted by the presence of "goats" (nonbelievers). [[J. B. Rhine]], for example, stated that "The subtlest influences seem to disturb the operation of these [psychic] abilities... If the scientist is a disbeliever it will upset the delicate operation of the subject’s [psychic] abilities"[^1].
|
||||
### Education and early career
|
||||
|
||||
[[Ingo Swann]] also conducted [[Psychokinesis|psychokinesis]] experiments for Gertrude Schmeidler at the [[City College of New York]], which he referenced when communicating with [[Hal Puthoff]] about investigating the boundary between the physics of the animate and inanimate[^1].
|
||||
A reference entry drawn from [[Helene Pleasants]]'s *Biographical Dictionary of Parapsychology* (1964) and from Arthur and Joyce Berger's *Encyclopedia of Parapsychology and Psychical Research* (1991) states that she took a B.A. magna cum laude at [[Smith College]] in 1932, an M.A. at [[Clark University]] in 1933, and a Ph.D. at Radcliffe College and Harvard in 1935; that she first met parapsychology through a just-published copy of [[J. B. Rhine]]'s *Extra-Sensory Perception* in 1934 and took a course in psychical research with [[Gardner Murphy]] before completing her degree; that she taught at [[Monmouth College]] in Long Branch, New Jersey (1935 to 1937), was a research associate at Harvard (1942 to 1944) and a research officer of the [[American Society for Psychical Research]] (1945 to 1946), and began a long tenure at the City College of New York in 1945; that she was a charter member of the [[Parapsychological Association]], elected vice-president in 1958 and 1960 and president in 1959; and that she received a research grant from the [[Parapsychology Foundation]] for 1955 to 1959. Her books listed there include *ESP and Personality Patterns* (with [[Robert A. McConnell]], [[Yale University Press]], 1958), *ESP in Relation to Rorschach Test Evaluation* (Parapsychology Foundation, 1960), *Extrasensory Perception* ([[Atherton Press]], 1969), *Parapsychology: Its Relation to Physics, Biology, Psychology, and Psychiatry* ([[Scarecrow Press]], 1976) and *Parapsychology and Psychology: Matches and Mismatches* ([[McFarland]], 1988).[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
The Duke finding aid to her papers calls Murphy "Schmeidler's mentor and the person who first interested her in psychical research," and describes the collection as consisting chiefly of research data gathered "through her work with students and colleagues as an experimental psychologist and parapsychologist" at City College.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### The sheep and goats, 1942 to 1945
|
||||
|
||||
Schmeidler's first report, "Predicting Good and Bad Scores in a Clairvoyance Experiment: A Preliminary Report," appeared in the *[[Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research]]* in July 1943 (vol. 37, pp. 103 to 110), and "A Final Report" in October 1943 (pp. 210 to 221). The final report states that the experiment "was conducted for Dr. Gardner Murphy, and made possible by moneys available to him from the [[Richard Hodgson Fund|Hodgson Fund]] of Harvard University," and that his advice "determined the topic of the research."[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
The report describes the design. Subjects used standard ESP cards, 25 to a deck, with five hits expected by chance. Each was asked whether he had experienced telepathy, premonitions or crossed letters, or at least heard of such experiences, and then: "When that happens (or when you hear or read about it) is your first reaction, 'Oh, it was just a coincidence,' or do you first think, 'How interesting!' and then, 'Maybe it was a coincidence.'" Subjects who described themselves as uniformly skeptical were classed as goats, and those who admitted even a momentary "How interesting!" were classed with those who wholeheartedly embraced the ESP hypothesis, the sheep. Once classified, subjects "were exposed to a standard set of agreeable or disagreeable physical conditions." Goats made fifty successive runs without knowledge of their scores, were not offered cigarettes or candy, were signalled by "a rather raucous buzzer," filled out sheets on which many runs were crowded together, and sat in a "dark room" with no windows and battered furniture. Sheep were shown their score after each run and encouraged to discuss the procedure, were limited to ten runs a session, could stop when they pleased, were offered cigarettes and sometimes candy, were signalled by a small light, received a new record sheet for each run, and sat in "a reasonably pleasant office." The report states that it was predicted that sheep "would on the whole score better than five" and that goats "would make scores at the level of chance or lower."[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
Three series were run, repeated, in the report's words, until the difference "either became non-significant or became unmistakably significant," with a criterion of a probability of one in a thousand. In the first series the open-minded subjects made 129 decks with a deviation of +56 (mean 5.43) and the subjects who expected chance scores 200 decks with a deviation of -10 (mean 4.95); the second series gave +33 over 127 decks (5.26) against -12 over 175 decks (4.93); and the third +31 over 133 decks (5.23). Combined, the open-minded subjects made 389 decks with a deviation of +120, a mean of 5.308, a critical ratio of 3.04 and a probability of .001, and the experiment was closed. Schmeidler drew the conclusion that "subjects who hope to score above chance in card-guessing tend to do so when tested under agreeable conditions; but that subjects who expect only chance scores and are tested under disagreeable conditions will tend to score at or below chance." She wrote that negative results "are to be expected if subjects are skeptical and bored, or uncooperative for some other reason, such as a too formal approach on the part of the experimenter." A footnote records that two subjects tested beyond the planned number, and one who presented himself after the third series, were discarded.[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
[[Annie Jacobsen]] wrote in *Phenomena* (2017) that Schmeidler conducted an experiment in 1942 with psychology students at the City University of New York, coined the terms "sheep" and "goats" from her analysis of the data, and that sheep were those confident of the possible reality of ESP and psychokinesis and goats those who doubted it. Jacobsen added that "this explicit difference between believers and disbelievers has existed in the upper echelons of the U.S. military and intelligence communities since World War II."[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
A review of 1958 for the Parapsychology Foundation, a copy of which is in the CIA's STARGATE collection, by [[Gordon L. Mangan]] of [[Victoria University of Wellington]] collated published attempts to repeat the finding and reported that "in 5 out of 6 cases, the sheep had higher ESP scores than the goats," while noting that "Schmeidler herself changed the criterion" of classification as her experiments progressed; in the series of 1943 subjects "were merely questioned as to their attitude to psychic phenomena in general."[^5] The Duke finding aid lists sheep and goat inspection records for 1950 and 1951 and ESP record sheets from August 1941 to 1951, and notes later work on the series by [[Murray Melnick]] and [[Christopher Scott]].[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
Jacobsen also reported that [[Martin Gardner]] noted that psychic researchers often held that psychics were harmed by the presence of "goats," quoting Rhine: "The subtlest influences seem to disturb the operation of these [psychic] abilities... If the scientist is a disbeliever it will upset the delicate operation of the subject's [psychic] abilities."[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
### Eileen Garrett, Duke and Rhine
|
||||
|
||||
The Duke finding aid lists correspondence with the medium [[Eileen Garrett]], president of the Parapsychology Foundation, for 1953 to 1955, and proxy sittings with Garrett and with the medium [[Caroline Chapman]] whose results for Garrett were never published; correspondence with [[J. G. Pratt]] of the Duke laboratory about the Chapman sittings in the mid-1950s; with [[Betty Humphrey]], who worked in the Duke laboratory in the late 1940s and early 1950s; and with [[Charles E. Ozanne]] for 1953 to 1956. It states that "there is scattered correspondence between Schmeidler and J. B. and [[Louisa Rhine]], but not a substantial amount."[^1] The finding aid of the Parapsychology Laboratory records lists Schmeidler among the correspondents of Rhine from the postwar period.[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
### Ingo Swann and the thermistors, 1971 to 1973
|
||||
|
||||
The Duke finding aid lists Swann among the correspondents "who studied PK (psychokinesis) effects on temperature" and states that Schmeidler "collaborated with Swann" and co-authored journal articles from the research.[^1] Her paper "PK effects upon continuously recorded temperature" appeared in the *Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research* in 1973 (vol. 67, p. 325).[^7] In their paper in the *Proceedings of the IEEE* in March 1976, [[Hal Puthoff]] and [[Russell Targ]] wrote that Swann "had come to our laboratory fresh from a lengthy and apparently successful series of experiments with Dr. Gertrude Schmeidler at City College of New York."[^8] Jacobsen wrote that Swann cited the City College experiments in writing to Puthoff about investigating the boundary between the physics of the animate and the inanimate.[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
In the *[[Princeton Alumni Weekly]]* of December 4, 1978, [[Robert G. Jahn]] of [[Princeton University]] wrote that he and an undergraduate, [[Carol Kay Curry]], "chose to replicate an experiment using thermistors that was performed by Gertrude Schmeidler and the psychic Ingo Swann at the City University of New York a few years ago": two thermistors in vacuum bottles, tied into a balanced electrical bridge, with the subject attempting to make one reading rise or fall relative to the other.[^9]
|
||||
|
||||
### In the files of the STARGATE program
|
||||
|
||||
An unsigned paper in the CIA's STARGATE collection, "The World of the Supra-Sensory," undated but citing events as late as 1965, names "Dr. Gertrude Schneidler [sic], City College, New York" among "the better known individuals" associated with J. B. Rhine's group and the Parapsychological Association, alongside [[Carroll B. Nash]] of St. Joseph's College in Philadelphia, [[John Freeman]] of the Institute of Parapsychology in Durham, [[Sally Feather]], Robert A. McConnell of the University of Pittsburgh, [[Montague Ullman]], [[Rhea White]] and "Dr. Lawrence Cusler" of City College.[^10]
|
||||
|
||||
SRI's *Free World Psychoenergetics Research Survey* of November 1983, by [[Beverly Humphrey]] and [[Edwin May]] for the [[Defense Intelligence Agency]] under contract MDA908-82-C-0034, lists Schmeidler's "Moods and ESP Scores in Group Testing" (July 1972) among its entries.[^11] An SRI final report of December 1988 on enhanced human performance investigations cites Schmeidler (1984) among "many excellent examples" of descriptive literature reviews in parapsychology.[^12] In a letter of May 13, 1995 to a CIA officer, May described a *[[NOVA]]* program of about 1983, "The Case of ESP," in which "Dr. Gertrude Schmeidler shows the sheep/goat effect in which 'believers' score better than do 'skeptics,'" and called the result "some of the strongest evidence (in the clear) for an anomaly in the field to that date."[^13]
|
||||
|
||||
### 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]: Guide to the Gertrude Raffel Schmeidler Papers, 1943-1983, RL.01147, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University (30.8 linear feet, about 24,000 items), read in the Wayback Machine capture of September 5, 2019 of https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/findingaids/schmeid/
|
||||
[^2]: "Schmeidler, Gertrude Raffel (1912-)," *Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology* (Gale), citing Berger and Berger, *The Encyclopedia of Parapsychology and Psychical Research* (New York: Paragon House, 1991), and Pleasants, ed., *Biographical Dictionary of Parapsychology* (New York: Helix Press, 1964). https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/schmeidler-gertrude-raffel-1912
|
||||
[^3]: Schmeidler, Gertrude Raffel. "Predicting Good and Bad Scores in a Clairvoyance Experiment: A Final Report." *Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research,* vol. 37, no. 4, October 1943, pp. 210-221, with reference to the preliminary report, vol. 37, July 1943, pp. 103-110. Read in the archive.org scan https://archive.org/details/sim_journal-of-the-american-society-for-psychical-research_1943-10_37_4
|
||||
[^4]: Jacobsen, Annie. *Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis.* Little, Brown and Company, 2017.
|
||||
[^5]: Mangan, Gordon L. *A Review of Published Research on the Relationship of Some Personality Variables to ESP Scoring Level,* Parapsychological Monographs no. 1, Parapsychology Foundation, 1958, CIA-RDP96-00787R000400100014-4. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^6]: Guide to the Parapsychology Laboratory Records, 1893-1984, RL.00992, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University, scope note on postwar correspondents, read in the Wayback Machine capture of 2019 of https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/findingaids/paralab/
|
||||
[^7]: Schmeidler, G. R. "PK effects upon continuously recorded temperature." *Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research,* vol. 67, 1973, p. 325, as cited in Jahn, Robert G., "Psychic Process, Energy Transfer, and Things That Go Bump in the Night," *Princeton Alumni Weekly,* December 4, 1978, CIA-RDP96-00787R000500380004-4, and in Puthoff and Targ's 1976 *Proceedings* paper, reference 56.
|
||||
[^8]: Puthoff, Harold E., and Russell Targ. "A Perceptual Channel for Information Transfer over Kilometer Distances: Historical Perspective and Recent Research." *Proceedings of the IEEE* 64, no. 3 (March 1976), section on learner subject S4, read in CIA-RDP96-00787R000500020001-6, archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^9]: Jahn, Robert G. "Psychic Process, Energy Transfer, and Things That Go Bump in the Night," *Princeton Alumni Weekly,* special report, December 4, 1978, CIA-RDP96-00787R000500380004-4. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^10]: "The World of the Supra-Sensory," unsigned and undated paper, CIA-RDP96-00787R000400040032-1. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^11]: Humphrey, Beverly S., and Edwin C. May. *Free World Psychoenergetics Research Survey,* final report, November 1983, contract MDA908-82-C-0034, CIA-RDP96-00788R001800130001-9. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^12]: *Enhanced Human Performance Investigations,* SRI final report, December 1988 (period November 1983 to October 1985), CIA-RDP96-00789R002200400001-3. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^13]: May, Edwin C., letter to a CIA officer, May 13, 1995, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200190060-1. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -2,22 +2,114 @@
|
|||
category: "Scientists & Researchers"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Person
|
||||
- Skeptic
|
||||
summary: "American botanist who founded the parapsychology lab at Duke University and is considered a father of modern parapsychology."
|
||||
- Parapsychologist
|
||||
- Botanist
|
||||
- Duke
|
||||
- ParapsychologyLaboratory
|
||||
- ESP
|
||||
- ONR
|
||||
- ArmyERDL
|
||||
- Founder
|
||||
- 1930s
|
||||
- 1950s
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- J. B. Rhine
|
||||
- Joseph Banks Rhine
|
||||
- Joseph B. Rhine
|
||||
- Joseph Rhine
|
||||
- Dr. J. B. Rhine
|
||||
- Dr. Rhine
|
||||
summary: "Botanist turned Duke psychologist who ran the university's Parapsychology Laboratory from 1930, founded the Journal of Parapsychology, and took Army (1951 to 1953) and Navy (1953 to 1959) research money for animal ESP work."
|
||||
born: 1895-09-29
|
||||
died: 1980-02-20
|
||||
location: "Waterloo, Pennsylvania"
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Duke University]]"
|
||||
start: 1927
|
||||
end: 1965
|
||||
role: "research assistant 1927, assistant professor of psychology 1929, professor 1937, retired from teaching 1950 and from the faculty 1965"
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: founded
|
||||
with: "[[Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory]]"
|
||||
start: 1935
|
||||
role: "laboratory established within the psychology department in 1935; Rhine's ESP experiments at Duke began in fall 1930"
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: founded
|
||||
with: "[[Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man]]"
|
||||
start: 1962
|
||||
role: "established in Durham with Rhine as director; the Parapsychology Laboratory moved to it as the Institute for Parapsychology in August 1965"
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: founded
|
||||
with: "[[Journal of Parapsychology]]"
|
||||
start: 1937
|
||||
role: "with William McDougall; published by Duke University Press from 1937"
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: contractor_to
|
||||
with: "[[U.S. Army]]"
|
||||
start: 1951-12
|
||||
end: 1953
|
||||
role: "Engineer Research and Development Laboratories, Fort Belvoir, contract DA-44-009 eng-1039, mine-detecting dogs"
|
||||
fn: 2
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[Office of Naval Research]]"
|
||||
start: 1953
|
||||
end: 1959
|
||||
role: "ONR contract NR 160-244 with Duke University, under which J. G. Pratt's pigeon homing research at the Parapsychology Laboratory was done"
|
||||
fn: 4
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
- type: funded
|
||||
with: "[[Rockefeller Foundation]]"
|
||||
start: 1950
|
||||
end: 1954
|
||||
role: "grant to the Parapsychology Laboratory"
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
reverse: true
|
||||
created: 2026-05-17
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-05
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Joseph Banks Rhine, known as J. B. Rhine (1895–1980), was an American botanist who founded the parapsychology lab at [[Duke University]]. He is considered one of the fathers of modern [[Parapsychology|parapsychology]][^1].
|
||||
Joseph Banks Rhine was born in [[Waterloo, Pennsylvania|Waterloo]], [[Pennsylvania]], on September 29, 1895, and died in [[Hillsborough, North Carolina|Hillsborough]], [[North Carolina]], on February 20, 1980. With a doctorate in botany from the [[University of Chicago]], he began card-guessing experiments for extrasensory perception at [[Duke University]] in the fall of 1930, was professor of psychology there from 1937, and was the central figure of the [[Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory]], established within the psychology department in 1935 and closed at Duke in August 1965 when it moved to his [[Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man]] as the Institute for Parapsychology. The laboratory's records note that most of its money came from private benefactors and, for work directed by his colleague [[J. G. Pratt]], from the [[Office of Naval Research]] between 1953 and 1959.[^1] A contract of 1951 to 1953 with the Army's [[Engineer Research and Development Laboratories]] at [[Fort Belvoir]] paid for his work on dogs that detected buried landmines.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
Rhine sought to bring scientific rigor to the study of psychic phenomena, moving away from the theatricality of séance mediums and focusing on controlled experiments with quantifiable results. His work at the [[Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory]] in the 1930s and 1940s, which involved card-guessing and dice-throwing tests, helped to establish parapsychology as an academic discipline[^1]. He first popularized [[Extrasensory Perception|ESP]] in the 1920s, and his work became so fashionable that by the 1940s, it was included in the Psychology 101 course at [[Harvard University]][^1].
|
||||
### Education and Duke
|
||||
|
||||
However, Rhine's research faced significant criticism from skeptics like [[Martin Gardner]], who, in his 1952 book *Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science*, dedicated a chapter to debunking Rhine's work, concluding it was the product of "an enormous self-deception"[^1]. Gardner criticized Rhine's research for loose laboratory controls, skewing of data, and the premise that the attitude of the scientist could negatively influence the subject or psychic. Rhine himself stated that "The subtlest influences seem to disturb the operation of these [psychic] abilities... If the scientist is a disbeliever it will upset the delicate operation of the subject’s [psychic] abilities"[^1].
|
||||
The finding aid to the Parapsychology Laboratory records gives his chronology: service in the [[United States Marine Corps]] from 1917 to 1919; marriage to [[Louisa Ellen Weckesser]] in April 1920; a B.S. (1922), M.S. (1923) and Ph.D. (1925) in biology at the University of Chicago, both Rhines holding doctorates in botany; a research fellowship in plant physiology at the [[Boyce Thompson Institute]] in [[Yonkers, New York|Yonkers]] (1923 to 1924); an instructorship in botany at [[West Virginia University]] (1924 to 1926); the study of philosophy at [[Harvard University]] (1926 to 1927); and in the fall of 1927 a move to Duke on behalf of [[John F. Thomas]], as research assistant to Thomas and [[William McDougall]] (1927 to 1929), then instructor in philosophy and psychology (1928 to 1929), assistant professor of psychology (1929) and professor (1937). The finding aid states that "the first ESP experiments conducted at Duke (1930)" are undocumented. In 1937 he founded the *[[Journal of Parapsychology]]* with McDougall, published by [[Duke University Press]], and he retired from teaching in 1950. The laboratory chronology in the same finding aid dates psychokinesis research from 1934, the Parapsychology Laboratory from 1935 (with a McDougall Research Fund), its move out of the psychology department in 1947, and the founding of the [[Parapsychological Association]] "at Duke under auspices of Parapsychology Laboratory" in 1957.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
Despite public skepticism, Rhine was involved in numerous classified ESP research programs with the [[Department of Defense]]. In 1952, the [[U.S. Army]] initiated a secret program with Rhine's laboratory involving ESP and animals, exploring whether dogs could locate land mines underwater and studying the homing phenomenon in pigeons. He also conducted experiments to determine if humans could communicate telepathically with cats[^1].
|
||||
The same finding aid records that the original research was conducted under McDougall, chairman of the psychology department, with the support of Duke's president [[W. P. Few]]; that support weakened after McDougall died in 1938 and Few in 1940; that Rhine tried from the early 1940s to have an institute for parapsychology established at Duke without success; that in 1962 university support for work on a smaller scale was considered, and "the decision to leave Duke" was part of the reason for Pratt's resignation in 1963; and that Rhine established the [[Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man]] in Durham in 1962, retired from the Duke faculty in 1965, and in 1979 was elected president of the [[Society for Psychical Research]]. Rhine raised the possibility of reaffiliation with Duke as late as 1979 with its president, [[Terry Sanford]].[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
In 1974, one of Rhine's assistants, [[Walter Levy]], was caught cheating in an experiment involving rats, which became a scandal and fodder for skeptics[^1].
|
||||
### Publicity and funding
|
||||
|
||||
*Extra-Sensory Perception* (1934) brought him international attention, according to the finding aid; in the fall of 1937 a series of ESP experiments sponsored by the [[Zenith Radio Corporation]] was broadcast while *[[New Frontiers of the Mind]]* was chosen as a main selection by the [[Book of the Month Club]], the first manufactured ESP cards were produced and offered to Zenith listeners and Book of the Month Club members, and the *Journal of Parapsychology* began to be issued by Duke University Press. The finding aid names early critics, [[R. R. Willoughby]] and J. L. Kennedy among them, and records *Extra-Sensory Perception after Sixty Years* (1940), written with Pratt, [[Burke Smith]], [[Charles E. Stuart]] and [[J. A. Greenwood]], as an attempt to answer them.[^1] [[Annie Jacobsen]] wrote in *Phenomena* that Rhine first popularized ESP in the 1920s, that his work became so fashionable that by the 1940s it was included in the Psychology 101 course at Harvard, and that [[Martin Gardner]], in *[[Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science]]* (1952), devoted a chapter to Rhine's work and concluded that it was the product of "an enormous self-deception," criticizing loose laboratory controls, skewing of data and the premise that the attitude of the scientist could affect the subject.[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
According to the finding aid, the laboratory "was supported by Duke to some extent," but "most of its funding came from private sources," with benefactors including [[Ellen A. Wood]], [[Florence Anspacher]], [[Marie Higby Avery]], [[Henry W. Belk]], [[W. P. Bentley]], [[Frances Bolton]], [[Chester F. Carlson]], [[Eileen Garrett]], [[Gertrude Maurin]], [[O. K. Merritt]], [[Charles E. Ozanne]] and [[W. Clement Stone]], "many of these persons" being "more interested in the question of spirit survival than they were in the experimental problems the laboratory investigated." It adds that the laboratory "also received grants from private foundations and government agencies, notably the [[Rockefeller Foundation]] (1950-54) and the Office of Naval Research (1953-59), the latter for research on homing pigeons conducted under Pratt's direction." Rhine's correspondents after 1935 listed in the finding aid include [[Warren Weaver]], [[George Estabrooks]], [[Timothy Leary]], [[Aldous Huxley]], [[Carl Jung]], [[Margaret Mead]] and [[Henry Margenau]], and, after the war, [[Gertrude Schmeidler]], [[Karlis Osis]], [[Charles Honorton]], [[Stanley Krippner]], [[Ian Stevenson]], [[Charles Tart]], [[Milan Ryzl]] and the Soviet researcher [[E. K. Naumov]].[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Army and the mine-detecting dogs, 1951 to 1953
|
||||
|
||||
The historian Robert Kirk, writing from the Rhine papers and the Zuckerman archive, reports that in late 1951 the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Laboratories at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, began an investigation of mine-detecting dogs in which the American team was Rhine, the Duke anatomist [[Joseph E. Markee]] and the biochemist [[Luman F. Ney]] of the [[Stanford Research Institute]]. The work, under Army contract DA-44-009 eng-1039, was "premised on the capacity of dogs to detect landmines through extrasensory perception (ESP)." Rhine built model minefields on a sandy California beach, with mines in raked trenches and the field under a shallow layer of seawater, and found that dogs showed an initially high ability followed by a decline "to the point that success rates fell below that expected by chance," the pattern Rhine took as the mark of ESP. The British scientist [[Solly Zuckerman]] visited the American team in April 1952, returned with "a resoundingly positive view" of the experiments, and wrote that he had learned from Rhine "how to avoid the pitfall of self-deception." In a grant renewal request of 1953, Rhine said overcoming the decline effect would require support over "a matter of some years," and that the factor was of "importance to a military power who first acquired understanding of it." The Army laboratory shifted its support to a mechanical approach and Rhine's funding ceased in 1953; his final report to the commanding officer at Fort Belvoir is dated July 10, 1953. Kirk's note records that all records of the contract "were returned to the Engineer Research and Development Laboratories (Fort Belvoir, Virginia) and destroyed in 1969 after declassification," that Rhine overspent the grant and was reproved by Duke's vice-president [[Paul Gross]] on February 7, 1952, and that Rhine's support of Pratt "proved lucrative in that it led to a decade of further funding by the Office of Naval Research."[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
Jacobsen wrote in *Phenomena* that in 1952 the Army started a secret program with Rhine's laboratory on ESP and animals, exploring whether dogs could find land mines underwater and studying the homing of pigeons, and that Rhine also experimented on whether humans could communicate telepathically with cats. Rhine returned to the subject in "Location of Hidden Objects by a Man-Dog Team," *Journal of Parapsychology* (1971), written in the context of the Vietnam war, which Kirk cites for Rhine's conclusion that "it was perhaps the team and not either man or dog alone that produced such results."[^3][^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Navy and the pigeons, 1953 to 1959
|
||||
|
||||
Pratt, who had served in the U.S. Navy from 1942 to 1946, ran the pigeon homing studies. The finding aid lists "ONR records, 1953-1961" and "ONR contract" files in the financial papers, correspondence files headed "General: ONR" for each year from 1953 to 1957, homing records and writings for 1951 to 1958, and the "Wayland pigeon project" of 1953 to 1956.[^1] Pratt's paper in the *[[Journal of Experimental Biology]]* of March 1955, "Homing Orientation in Pigeons in Relation to Opportunity to Observe the Sun Before Release," states: "These experiments were aided by a contract between the Office of Naval Research, Department of the Navy, Washington, and Duke University, NR 160-244 and by a grant of funds from the Rockefeller Foundation to the Parapsychology Laboratory of Duke University," with travel for [[R. H. Thouless]] paid by the [[Fulbright Commission]] and releases made from state forestry look-out towers in North Carolina and Virginia. A paper of February 24, 1956 in *[[Science (journal)|Science]]* by [[Gustav Kramer]], Pratt and [[Ursula von St. Paul]], "Directional Differences in Pigeon Homing," states that "these experiments were conducted under contract NR 160-244 between the Office of Naval Research, Department of the Navy, Washington, and Duke University," Pratt's affiliation being the Parapsychology Laboratory and von St. Paul's the [[Max Planck Institute for Marine Biology]].[^4][^5] Kirk adds that the zoologist [[Donald Griffin]]'s parallel study of pigeon homing was also funded by the Office of Naval Research, with copies of Griffin's reports and correspondence with Pratt in the laboratory's records.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### In the CIA's files
|
||||
|
||||
An unsigned paper, "The World of the Supra-Sensory," held in the CIA's STARGATE collection and undated but citing events as late as 1965, describes "the Duke complex" as "probably the best known ESP research center in the world." Its author, who describes himself as a behavior scientist and a member of a legitimate ESP organization, wrote that the laboratory "served as a training ground for many of the parapsychologists throughout the world," that Rhine "has been perhaps more prominent than may have been in the best interest of ESP," and that "his influence has encompassed research methodology and funding allocation more than might be customary." It states that Rhine's laboratory "was and is influential in other parts of the world because of its scholarship and fellowship funds"; that Milan Ryzl of [[Prague]] "has been supported by funds from Duke for three years" and "has kept Dr. Rhine briefed (by letter) on ESP research in some of the Iron Curtain countries"; that [[Soji Otani]], an assistant professor of psychology at the [[Japanese Defense Academy]], spent a year at Duke; and that Pratt, who had worked with Rhine for 25 years, had visited Ryzl twice in Prague and made two trips to [[Russia]] to discuss ESP with Professor [[Leonid Vasiliev|Vasiliev]]. It names Schmeidler of City College of New York among "the better known individuals" associated with the Rhine group and the Parapsychological Association.[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
The Time cover story of March 4, 1974, "Boom Times on the Psychic Frontier," placed Rhine at his Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man in [[Durham, North Carolina|Durham]], "the grand old man of paranormal studies" who "still keeps watch on test animals for precognitive powers."[^7] SRI's article in the *Proceedings of the IEEE* in March 1976, held in the same collection, cites *New Frontiers of the Mind,* *Extra-Sensory Perception after Sixty Years* and Rhine's 1974 article "A new case of experimenter unreliability," and states that "parapsychological researchers themselves recently exposed fraud in their own laboratory when they encountered it."[^8]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Levy affair, 1974
|
||||
|
||||
The finding aid chronology records that [[Helmut Schmidt (parapsychologist)|Helmut Schmidt]] became director of the Institute for Parapsychology in 1971 to 1972, that [[Walter Levy]], called Jay Levy, was director in 1973 to 1974, that Rhine resumed the directorship in 1975, and that K. R. Rao became director in 1977.[^1] Rhine published "A New Case of Experimenter Unreliability" in the *Journal of Parapsychology,* vol. 38, June 1974, pp. 215-225, the article Puthoff and Targ cite for their statement that parapsychologists "recently exposed fraud in their own laboratory."[^8] Jacobsen wrote that one of Rhine's assistants, Levy, was caught cheating in an experiment involving rats, a scandal that became fodder for skeptics.[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### 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]: Guide to the Parapsychology Laboratory Records, 1893-1984, RL.00992, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University (340 linear feet, about 250,000 items), collection overview, chronology of J. B. Rhine and J. G. Pratt, scope notes, and container lists (Box 524, ONR records 1953-1961; Box 658 to 662, General: ONR; Box 669 and 670, Rockefeller Foundation grant, ONR contract; Box 705, Pratt homing records). Read in the Wayback Machine capture of 2019 of https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/findingaids/paralab/ (the current finding aid is at https://archives.lib.duke.edu/catalog/paralab).
|
||||
[^2]: Kirk, Robert G. W. "In Dogs We Trust? Intersubjectivity, Response-Able Relations, and the Making of Mine Detector Dogs." *Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences,* vol. 50, no. 1, December 2013, pp. 1-36, section "Joseph B. Rhine: Working with Minedogs in a Shared World" and notes, citing the Zuckerman Archive, University of East Anglia (SZ/CSA/188: Rhine to the Commanding Officer, ERDL, Fort Belvoir, July 10, 1953; Goff to Zuckerman, July 9, 1952), the Joseph E. Markee Papers (Duke Medical Center Archives, Box 2, folder 27), and the Records of the Parapsychology Laboratory, Duke (Box 132, Administration Folder; Box 524). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3908362/
|
||||
[^3]: Jacobsen, Annie. *Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis.* Little, Brown and Company, 2017.
|
||||
[^4]: Pratt, J. G. "Homing Orientation in Pigeons in Relation to Opportunity to Observe the Sun Before Release." *Journal of Experimental Biology,* vol. 32, no. 1, March 1955, pp. 140-157, footnote to the title, read in the archive.org scan of the issue, https://archive.org/details/journal-of-experimental-biology_1955-03_32_1
|
||||
[^5]: Kramer, Gustav, J. G. Pratt, and Ursula von St. Paul. "Directional Differences in Pigeon Homing." *Science,* vol. 123, no. 3191, February 24, 1956, pp. 329-331, note 1, read in the archive.org scan of the issue, https://archive.org/details/sim_science_1956-02-24_123_3191
|
||||
[^6]: "The World of the Supra-Sensory," unsigned and undated paper, CIA-RDP96-00787R000400040032-1. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^7]: "Boom Times on the Psychic Frontier," *Time,* March 4, 1974, as held in CIA-RDP96-00787R000100030002-8. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^8]: Puthoff, Harold E., and Russell Targ. "A Perceptual Channel for Information Transfer over Kilometer Distances: Historical Perspective and Recent Research." *Proceedings of the IEEE* 64, no. 3 (March 1976), pp. 329-354, introduction and references 9 to 14, read in the CIA Reading Room copy CIA-RDP81B00401R002600010013-2, archive.org. The article cited is Rhine, J. B., "A new case of experimenter unreliability," *Journal of Parapsychology,* vol. 38, pp. 215-225, June 1974.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -1,15 +1,19 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Psychics & Remote Viewers"
|
||||
category: "Military"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Pseudonym
|
||||
- Psi
|
||||
- Person
|
||||
- RemoteViewer
|
||||
- Military
|
||||
- Stargate
|
||||
summary: "Army captain selected for the Gondola Wish/Grill Flame remote viewing unit at INSCOM Fort Meade."
|
||||
summary: "Pseudonym used by Jim Schnabel in Remote Viewers (1997) for an Army captain selected for the Gondola Wish and Grill Flame unit."
|
||||
---
|
||||
[[Janice Rand]] was an Army captain who worked in one of the [[United States Army Intelligence and Security Command|INSCOM]] offices at [[Fort Meade]]. She was among the initial group of ten or eleven candidates selected by [[Frederick Atwater|Skip Atwater]] and [[Murray Watt|Scotty Watt]] for the experimental [[Stargate Project|Gondola Wish]] (later Grill Flame) remote viewing unit.[^1]
|
||||
Janice Rand is a pseudonym [[Jim Schnabel]] used in *Remote Viewers* (1997) for an Army captain selected for the Gondola Wish and Grill Flame unit; the book's list of pseudonyms includes the name.[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
In Schnabel's account, [[Janice Rand]] was an Army captain who worked in one of the [[United States Army Intelligence and Security Command|INSCOM]] offices at [[Fort Meade]]. She was among the initial group of ten or eleven candidates selected by [[Frederick Atwater|Skip Atwater]] and [[Murray Watt|Scotty Watt]] for the experimental [[Stargate Project|Gondola Wish]] (later Grill Flame) remote viewing unit.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997.
|
||||
[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997.
|
||||
[^2]: Jim Schnabel, *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies* (New York: Dell, 1997), "Pseudonyms": "The following names mentioned in the text are pseudonyms," https://archive.org/details/jim-schnabel-remote-viewers-the-secret-history-of-americas-psychic-spies_2.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -39,7 +39,7 @@ The situation "eventually resolved itself, after Russo complained about a teleph
|
|||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Rudy Havenstein, "Dr. Green and the Goblins of Langley," Substack, July 11, 2025, https://rudy.substack.com/p/dr-green-and-the-goblins-of-langley, quoting *Grey Lodge Occult Review* 1, no. 5.
|
||||
[^1]: Rudy Havenstein, "Dr. Green and the Goblins of Langley," Substack, July 11, 2025, https://rudy.substack.com/p/dr-green-and-the-goblins-of-langley, quoting *Grey Lodge Occult Review* 1, no. 5. Schnabel's own list of pseudonyms in *Remote Viewers* (Dell, 1997), "Pseudonyms," includes Richard Kennett, Peter Crane, Don Curtis and Mike Russo: https://archive.org/details/jim-schnabel-remote-viewers-the-secret-history-of-americas-psychic-spies_2.
|
||||
[^2]: Jim Schnabel, *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies* (Dell, 1997), as excerpted at the Havenstein URL above. Sole source for the passages so cited.
|
||||
[^3]: Annie Jacobsen, *Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis* (Little, Brown, 2017), quoting Christopher Green; as quoted at https://schwabstack.substack.com/p/spies-of-the-superspectral-order.
|
||||
[^4]: CIA-RDP79-00999A000200010023-0, https://archive.org/download/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp79-00999a000200010023-0/cia-rdp79-00999a000200010023-0_djvu.txt.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -1,15 +1,18 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
category: "Psychics & Remote Viewers"
|
||||
category: "Intelligence & Government"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- Pseudonym
|
||||
- Psi
|
||||
- Person
|
||||
- RemoteViewer
|
||||
- Military
|
||||
- Stargate
|
||||
summary: "Stern was present during the intense and monotonous remote viewing taskings related to the Iran hostage crisis (1979-1981)."
|
||||
summary: "Pseudonym used by Jim Schnabel in Remote Viewers (1997) for a member of the Fort Meade unit during the Iran hostage taskings."
|
||||
updated: 2026-09-22
|
||||
---
|
||||
[[Nancy Stern]] was an Army civilian photo-interpreter and one of the original members of the [[Stargate Project|Gondola Wish]] (later Grill Flame) remote viewing unit. She was among the initial group of ten or eleven candidates selected by [[Frederick Atwater|Skip Atwater]] and [[Murray Watt|Scotty Watt]] for the experimental program, with a heavy emphasis on photo-interpreters due to their visual skills.[^1]
|
||||
Nancy Stern is a pseudonym [[Jim Schnabel]] used in *Remote Viewers* (1997) for a member of the Fort Meade unit during the Iran hostage taskings; the book's list of pseudonyms includes the name.[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
In Schnabel's account, [[Nancy Stern]] was an Army civilian photo-interpreter and one of the original members of the [[Stargate Project|Gondola Wish]] (later Grill Flame) remote viewing unit. She was among the initial group of ten or eleven candidates selected by [[Frederick Atwater|Skip Atwater]] and [[Murray Watt|Scotty Watt]] for the experimental program, with a heavy emphasis on photo-interpreters due to their visual skills.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
Stern was present during the intense and monotonous remote viewing taskings related to the Iran hostage crisis (1979-1981). After the failed hostage rescue mission in April 1980, she became emotionally distraught, crying and expressing anger at the debacle, and subsequently left the unit. Her departure, along with that of [[Fernand Gauvin|Fern Gauvin]], highlighted the psychological toll of the relentless remote viewing operations.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -19,3 +22,4 @@ The released CIA collection on the program carries no legible mention of a Nancy
|
|||
|
||||
[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997.
|
||||
[^2]: Grill Flame security agreements, volunteer consent statements, participant counseling statements, "Information About Remote Viewing for Participants" forms, and DIA Sun Streak access forms, 1977 to 1988, CIA-RDP96-00789R002100150005-8 to R002100150079-7; names as printed in the item titles, the signature lines being largely illegible in OCR. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. The archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection, about 13,000 items under the identifiers cia-rdp96-*, searched by title and OCR text.
|
||||
[^3]: Jim Schnabel, *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies* (New York: Dell, 1997), "Pseudonyms": "The following names mentioned in the text are pseudonyms," https://archive.org/details/jim-schnabel-remote-viewers-the-secret-history-of-americas-psychic-spies_2.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -1,71 +1,155 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
created: 2026-05-17
|
||||
updated: 2026-09-22
|
||||
title: Pat Price
|
||||
aliases:
|
||||
- Pat Price
|
||||
- Patrick Price
|
||||
category: "Psychics & Remote Viewers"
|
||||
tags:
|
||||
- KeyFigure
|
||||
- Person
|
||||
- RemoteViewer
|
||||
- SRI
|
||||
- Stargate
|
||||
- SCANATE
|
||||
- CIA
|
||||
- OTS
|
||||
- Burbank
|
||||
- Scientology
|
||||
- PSI
|
||||
- 1970s
|
||||
category: "Psychics & Remote Viewers"
|
||||
summary: "Former Burbank police commissioner and SRI subject S1 whose 1973 West Virginia and Urals readings the CIA called substantially correct, whose Semipalatinsk session Los Alamos judged unsuccessful, and who died in 1975."
|
||||
alias:
|
||||
- Pat Price
|
||||
- Patrick Price
|
||||
- Patrick H. Price
|
||||
- Patrick Harold Price
|
||||
- Mr. Price
|
||||
- S1
|
||||
summary: "Former Burbank councilman and police commissioner who served as SRI subject S1 from 1973, whose East Coast and Urals readings the sponsor called substantially correct, and who died in Las Vegas on July 14, 1975."
|
||||
born: 1918-12-08
|
||||
died: 1975-07-14
|
||||
location: "Burbank, California"
|
||||
relations:
|
||||
- type: employed_by
|
||||
with: "[[Burbank City Council]]"
|
||||
start: 1950
|
||||
end: 1953
|
||||
role: "councilman"
|
||||
fn: 1
|
||||
- type: participant_in
|
||||
with: "[[Stargate Project]]"
|
||||
start: 1973-06
|
||||
end: 1975-07
|
||||
role: "SRI subject S1, then personal services contractor to the CIA Office of Technical Service"
|
||||
fn: 6
|
||||
- type: contractor_to
|
||||
with: "[[Office of Technical Service]]"
|
||||
start: 1975
|
||||
end: 1975-07
|
||||
role: "personal services contract for remote viewing tasks"
|
||||
fn: 16
|
||||
- type: member_of
|
||||
with: "[[Scientology]]"
|
||||
role: "deeply involved until his death, per Schnabel"
|
||||
fn: 5
|
||||
- type: reported_to
|
||||
with: "[[Kenneth A. Kress]]"
|
||||
start: 1974
|
||||
end: 1975
|
||||
role: "Kress was the CIA project officer for the SRI work and for the personal services contract, according to Kress and to Schnabel"
|
||||
fn: 16
|
||||
created: 2026-05-17
|
||||
updated: 2026-10-05
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Pat Price (December 8, 1918 - July 14, 1975) was a retired law enforcement official from Burbank, California, who joined the [[Stanford Research Institute]] remote viewing program in 1973 and produced results that the program's principal investigators, [[Hal Puthoff]] and [[Russell Targ]], considered the most operationally significant of the SRI period. His remote viewing sessions targeting a classified Soviet research facility at [[Semipalatinsk]] and a classified [[National Security Agency|NSA]] signals intelligence installation at Sugar Grove, [[West Virginia]], were assessed as substantially accurate against independent intelligence sources and contributed substantially to congressional and agency briefings used to justify continued program funding. He died in [[Las Vegas]] in July 1975 at age 56 of a reported heart attack, under circumstances that some program participants considered suspicious.
|
||||
Patrick Harold Price was born on December 8, 1918, and died in [[Las Vegas]] on July 14, 1975. A Patrick Price sat on the [[Burbank City Council]] in 1950-1953 according to the city's photograph archive, and [[Hal Puthoff]] and [[Russell Targ]] later described the remote viewer as a former police commissioner and vice-mayor of [[Burbank, California|Burbank]]. He was subject S1 in the [[Stanford Research Institute]] (SRI) work for the [[Central Intelligence Agency]] from June 1973 until the autumn of 1974. He then worked under a personal services contract for the CIA's [[Office of Technical Service]] until his death.[^1]
|
||||
|
||||
### Background and Law Enforcement Career
|
||||
### Burbank and earlier life
|
||||
|
||||
Price was born December 8, 1918, and spent his career in law enforcement in Burbank, California, where he eventually served as a police commissioner and reached the rank of undersheriff. During his law enforcement career, he claimed to use psychic impressions as an investigative tool, sitting in police dispatch offices attempting to perceive locations of criminals and using spontaneously received information to generate investigative leads. He retired from law enforcement and by the early 1970s was living near Lake Tahoe, operating a small building contractor business. He was a member of the [[Church of Scientology]], as were [[Ingo Swann]] and, for a period, Puthoff. The CIA's internal program assessments noted the Scientology affiliations of the program's principal figures.
|
||||
[[Burbank Public Library]]'s Burbank in Focus archive holds a city-council photograph captioned "Patrick Price, Council 1950-1953."[^1] A [[Los Angeles, California|Los Angeles]] newspaper of April 30, 1952, as quoted by the writer [[Chris Carosa]], reported that the newly elected councilman Patrick Price, "previously silent in the investigation of organized crime in Burbank," criticized the [[Burbank Citizens Crime Prevention Committee]] in council session, saying that 28 of its 29 members were board members or officers of the [[Burbank Chamber of Commerce]].[^2]
|
||||
|
||||
### SRI Experiments and Semipalatinsk (1973-1974)
|
||||
Puthoff and Targ's book *[[Mind-Reach]]* (1977) introduced him as "an ex-police commissioner and vice-mayor of Burbank, a maverick president of a [[West Virginia]] coal company, and an Irishman." In their account Price telephoned Puthoff from [[Lake Tahoe]] in 1973 and said that "as police commissioner I used my abilities to track down suspects," and that after one case in which a clear mental picture proved true he began to wonder whether "all this psychic stuff I had put down for years might not have something to it."[^3] The CIA's own project officer, [[Kenneth A. Kress]], wrote in 1977 that Price "had no military or intelligence background."[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
Price introduced himself to Puthoff after attending a lecture and began informal remote viewing sessions at SRI in 1973. His early results were sufficiently consistent that he rapidly became the program's primary subject. Unlike Swann, who had developed theoretical frameworks for understanding anomalous cognition, Price treated remote viewing tasks with what Puthoff described as the practical matter-of-factness of a detective.
|
||||
[[Jim Schnabel]] wrote in 1997 that Price had been a local councilman in Burbank who "briefly served as the town's police commissioner," that he believed information about criminals' hiding places came to him spontaneously, and that he sometimes sat in the police dispatcher's office trying to receive impressions of those places. Schnabel described him at the time of his first call as a semi-retired man in his fifties at Lake Tahoe with a small building-contractor business who also raised Christmas trees to sell in the Bay Area, and wrote that Puthoff and [[Ingo Swann]] had run into him in late 1972 selling Christmas trees from a lot in [[Mountain View, California|Mountain View]]. In a footnote Schnabel added that Price had also been a gold prospector in [[Alaska]], a student pilot in [[World War II]], the manager of an equipment-packing plant at [[Lockheed Aircraft Company|Lockheed]], and a security guard at the [[Lockheed Skunk Works]] during the development of the U-2. Schnabel also wrote that Price believed he could change the weather and make traffic lights change, that his soul had once belonged to the colonial orator [[Patrick Henry]], and that an alien civilization kept bases on the moon and Mars and beneath oceans and mountains, one of the largest at [[Mount Hayes]] in Alaska.[^5]
|
||||
|
||||
The most operationally significant of his SRI sessions targeted the Soviet research facility designated URDF-3 near Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan, assigned by CIA officer Peter Maris. Price described a large gantry crane structure on rails, construction of large spherical metal objects he estimated at approximately 60 feet in diameter, and a novel welding technique being applied to their assembly - a method he termed "flux-welding." The CIA subsequently evaluated these descriptions against classified satellite photography and assessed them as substantially accurate, including dimensional details of the structures that could not have been derived from available open-source information about the facility. The Semipalatinsk session became the program's most-cited operational result in subsequent briefings to congressional oversight and DIA sponsors.
|
||||
Schnabel wrote that Price "up to his death, had been deeply involved in [[Scientology]]," that Puthoff had known him through a Scientology course in Los Angeles, and that the later coal-company position in West Virginia had Scientology connections: a senior officer of the company, who believed Scientological techniques had cured him of a serious illness, had heard of Price on "the Scientology grapevine."[^5]
|
||||
|
||||
The second major session was a remote viewing of the NSA signals intelligence facility at Sugar Grove, West Virginia, conducted when CIA officer [[Bill O'Donnell]] inadvertently provided Price and Swann with the facility's geographic coordinates as a targeting exercise. Price's and Swann's descriptions included internal organizational details and reference to NSA cryptographers working at the site. The accuracy of the descriptions triggered an NSA security investigation into whether remote viewing, if genuine, represented a vulnerability for classified installations.
|
||||
### June 1973: the first coordinates
|
||||
|
||||
Price also demonstrated precognitive results during SRI experiments: he described the Redwood City Marina and its boats five minutes before Puthoff and a colleague arrived at the target location, and he described a water-treatment facility with elevated water tanks at Rinconada Park that had existed at the site decades before his session.
|
||||
*Mind-Reach* gives the first test in Puthoff's words. On an impulse he read Price the coordinates of the East Coast site that Swann was then targeting, at 5 p.m. on June 1, 1973. On the morning of June 4 he received Price's written response, dated June 2: five pages beginning with a view of the area from 1,500 feet and ending with a tour through building interiors, with descriptions of equipment, names from desks, and a list of about a dozen labels on file folders in a locked cabinet.[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
### The Documents
|
||||
SRI's report on the SCANATE project introduces him without a surname: "As a backup test, the coordinates were given to a second subject who appears to possess similar ability in casual testing, although with perhaps a lower signal-to-noise ratio. Since the second subject, a businessman, wishes to remain anonymous for the time being, he shall be referred to simply as Pat." Given the West Virginia coordinates by telephone on June 1, 1973, he wrote his answer at Lake Tahoe the next day: a mountain of about 4,996 feet, "a battleground in civil war," a monument to "the battle of Lynchburg," and "large underground storage areas" that "looks like former missile site, bases for launchers still there, but area now houses record storage area, microfilm, file cabinets. Personnel, Army 5th Corps engineers. M/Sgt. Long on desk placard on grey steel desk. Personnel, Army Signal Corps." A later session gave "papers labeled: Flytrap / Minerva," a cabinet "labeled: Operation Pool," folders "Cueball / 14 Ball / 4 Ball / 8 Ball / Rackup," a site name that "vaguely seems like Hayfork or Haystack," and three officers' names. He then "volunteered that he scanned the other side of the globe for a Bloc equivalent, and found one in the Urals," at 65°00'57"N 59°59'59"E: "Elevation, 6200 ft. Scrubby brush, tundra-type ground hummocks," an underground site with "doorways of steel of the roll-up type," "unusually high ratio of women to men, at least at night," helipads, light rail into the mountain, and thirty miles north "a radar installation with one large (165 ft) dish and two small fast-track dishes." The 1975 final report, which codes him S1, states that "the two reports for the West Virginia Site, and the report for the Urals Site were verified by personnel in the sponsor organization as being substantially correct," the coordinates having come from "the OSI group responsible for threat analysis."[^6]
|
||||
|
||||
SRI's SCANATE report introduces him without a surname: "As a backup test, the coordinates were given to a second subject who appears to possess similar ability in casual testing, although with perhaps a lower signal-to-noise ratio. Since the second subject, a businessman, wishes to remain anonymous for the time being, he shall be referred to simply as Pat." Given the West Virginia coordinates by telephone on June 1, 1973, he wrote his answer at Lake Tahoe the next day: a mountain of about 4,996 feet, "a battleground in civil war," a monument to "the battle of Lynchburg," and "large underground storage areas" that "looks like former missile site, bases for launchers still there, but area now houses record storage area, microfilm, file cabinets. Personnel, Army 5th Corps engineers. M/Sgt. Long on desk placard on grey steel desk. Personnel, Army Signal Corps." A later session gave "papers labeled: Flytrap / Minerva," a cabinet "labeled: Operation Pool," folders "Cueball / 14 Ball / 4 Ball / 8 Ball / Rackup," a site name "vaguely seems like Hayfork or Haystack," and three officers' names. He then "volunteered that he scanned the other side of the globe for a Bloc equivalent, and found one in the Urals," at 65°00'57"N, 59°59'59"E: "Elevation, 6200 ft. Scrubby brush, tundra-type ground hummocks," an underground site with "doorways of steel of the roll-up type," "unusually high ratio of women to men, at least at night," helipads, light rail into the mountain, and thirty miles north "a radar installation with one large (165 ft) dish and two small fast-track dishes." The 1975 final report, which codes him S1, states that "the two reports for the West Virginia Site, and the report for the Urals Site were verified by personnel in the sponsor organization as being substantially correct," the coordinates having come from "the OSI group responsible for threat analysis." He was the subject of its magnetometer series, thirteen ten-trial runs at four metres giving p = 0.004, and of its Costa Rica series, in which twelve daily descriptions by him, a second subject, and once an SRI experimenter gave five matches to Puthoff's travels (p = 0.02).[^1]
|
||||
Kress gave a different weighting of the same episode in his 1977 article for the CIA's journal *[[Studies in Intelligence]]*. In his account an officer of the CIA's [[Office of Scientific Intelligence]] passed only geographic coordinates of a vacation property in the eastern United States to the SRI physicists, who passed them to two subjects, one of them Price; both "talked about a military-like facility," and the correlation of the two descriptions led the officer to drive to the site, where he found a sensitive government installation a few miles from the vacation property. Price, asked for the interior, "provided a list of project titles associated with current and past activities including one of extreme sensitivity" and the codename of the site; "other information concerning the physical layout of the site was accurate. Some information, such as the names of the people at the site, proved incorrect." Kress's summary was that "the evaluation was, as usual, mixed."[^7]
|
||||
|
||||
The Semipalatinsk experiment ran in three phases "under direct control of the COTR": Phase I with coordinates and the words "R&D test facility" only, Phase II after "the subject being made 'witting' (of the client) by client representatives who introduced themselves to the subject," and Phase III "the generation of unverifiable data concerning the Semipalatinsk site not available to the client, but of operational interest nonetheless," over two weeks. The Los Alamos analyst who reviewed the tapes of July 9 to 15, 1974, found that on the first day he "successfully evaded drawing a perimeter of the area even though he was asked to do this twice" and produced a 500-foot antenna, a swimming pool "for underwater testing," an array of telephone poles, and an airstrip that did not exist; that on the second "Price supplied the most positive evidence yet for the remote-viewing experiment with his sketch of the rail-mounted gantry crane. It seems inconceivable to imagine how he could have drawn such a likeness to the actual crane at URDF-3 unless: 1) he actually saw it through remote viewing, or 2) he was informed of what to draw by someone knowledgeable of URDF-3," adding, "I only mention this second possibility because the experiment was not controlled to discount the possibility that Price could talk to other people, such as the Disinformation Section of the KGB"; that on the third, shown the surface features of the underground Building 1, he said "No, that's a concrete apron, and there's nothing subterranean right in that particular area," which "was his most negative evidence yet"; and on the fourth admitted "he had been trying to force-fit a space-oriented situation to the target location." The conclusion: "I consider Price's remote-viewing experiment of URDF-3 to be unsuccessful. I recommend that the tapes be considered for use with the psychological stress evaluator." An outside reviewer of the SRI progress reports in 1974, under the heading "Remote Viewing by Mr. Price," wrote that "one cannot determine whether he was aware of the nine sites or had visited them prior to the experiment," and closed: "one still has the feeling that the prevailing philosophy is to 'prove' the existence of an information channel." When OTS briefed the House intelligence committee in November 1977 it left with the staff "a brief article on Mr. Pat Price."[^2]
|
||||
Schnabel's account of the origin of the coordinates uses two pseudonyms: "[[Richard Kennett]]," an analyst in the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence, asked a colleague he calls "[[Bill O'Donnell]]" for coordinates of a place on the East Coast that O'Donnell could later recognize from a drawing or photograph, and telephoned the figures to Puthoff. Schnabel identified the target as the [[Naval Security Group Activity]] base at [[Sugar Grove]], [[West Virginia]]. He added that he could find no record, in the Army, Air Force or Marines, of the three officers Price had named, that the coordinates actually given to Swann and Price described a place about ten miles southwest of Sugar Grove on Bullpasture Mountain in [[Virginia]], and that Swann had told him the names, project code words and coordinates in SRI's reports were later changed to protect the site, which Puthoff denied.[^8] The Snyders' evaluation of 1979 added: "It is alleged, although unverified by the authors, that Price had once worked for the organization that had control over that particular site."[^9] Kress's 1977 article, by contrast, says Price "had no military or intelligence background."[^4]
|
||||
|
||||
[[David Marks]] and [[Richard Kammann]] of the [[University of Otago]] argued in Nature in August 1978 that the judging of his nine-trial series depended on "multiple extraneous cues which were available in the original unedited transcripts," such as "Nothing like having three successes behind you" in the fourth, and on a target list given to the judge "in the correct order"; Puthoff, Targ and [[Charles Tart]] answered with a rejudging of edited transcripts in which "seven of the nine were correctly matched," and Puthoff conceded in 1980 that the list had been "inadvertently (through an error) given in the same order." The Snyders' evaluation of 1979 added: "It is alleged, although unverified by the authors, that Price had once worked for the organization that had control over that particular site" in West Virginia.[^3]
|
||||
### SRI sessions, 1973 and 1974
|
||||
|
||||
### CIA Direct Work (1974-1975)
|
||||
The CIA's STARGATE collection holds transcripts of sessions of the autumn of 1973. On October 4, 1973, [[Hugh Crane]], Price and Targ sat in a room at SRI while Puthoff and Price's wife Ann went to a second site for the day; on October 24 Price, [[Dean Brown]] and Targ sat in the shielded room in Building 30 while Bart Cox, Puthoff, [[Judy Schmickley]] and [[Phyllis Cole]] travelled; on October 26 Price and Targ sat in a shielded room on the second floor while Puthoff and [[Dick Honey]] travelled.[^10]
|
||||
|
||||
In the autumn of 1974, Price left SRI and began working directly for the CIA outside the SRI institutional framework, including a period attempting to identify coal deposits in Huntington, West Virginia, using psychic methods for a commercial client. He also undertook CIA-tasked remote viewing sessions to attempt to confirm locations of foreign intelligence facilities. He passed initial CIA verification tests, accurately describing embassy layouts and interior details that were confirmed against classified records.
|
||||
The final report of 1975 records that he was the subject of its magnetometer series, thirteen ten-trial runs at four metres giving p = 0.004, and of its [[Costa Rica]] series, in which twelve daily descriptions by him, a second subject, and once an SRI experimenter gave five matches to Puthoff's travels (p = 0.02).[^6] The [[Nature (journal)|Nature]] paper of October 18, 1974 reported his nine double-blind trials against Bay Area sites, six matched by a plurality of five judges, with Price in a double-walled copper-screen Faraday cage in experiments 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 and 9, and gave him, with [[Hella Hammid]], as one of "two of our subjects (H.H. and P.P.)" who "had not considered themselves to have unusual perceptual ability before their participation."[^11] Schnabel recounted that in session four [[Bart Cox]], the division chief, changed the protocol so that he and Puthoff drove by a pseudorandom turning rule, that Price described a boat jetty on the bay before the outbound pair reached the [[Redwood City, California|Redwood City]] Marina some five minutes later, and that in the final session Price described the two pools at [[Rinconada Park]] in [[Palo Alto]] accurately but added a water-treatment plant with two elevated water tanks; Targ later read in Palo Alto's centennial annual report that a municipal waterworks had been built on the site in 1913, with a photograph of a tower with two tanks near the place Price had placed them.[^12]
|
||||
|
||||
The *Nature* paper of October 1974 reported his nine double-blind trials against Bay Area sites, six matched by a plurality of five judges, and gave him, with Hella Hammid, as one of "two of our subjects (H.H. and P.P.)" who "had not considered themselves to have unusual perceptual ability before their participation." Targ's memoir of 1996 quotes his words on July 10, 1974: "I am lying on my back on the roof of a two or three story brick building. It's a sunny day. The sun feels good. There's the most amazing thing. There's a giant gantry crane moving back and forth over my head," and his description of "a giant, 'sixty-foot diameter metal sphere'" assembled from "thick metal gores," which Targ set beside an *Aviation Week* report of May 2, 1977, of Soviet steel gores for "a large sphere estimated to be about 18 meters (57.8 feet) in diameter." In August 1977 [[Stansfield Turner]] told reporters that the agency "had found a man who could 'see' what was going on anywhere in the world," dropped in 1975: "He died, and we haven't heard from him since."[^4]
|
||||
[[David Marks]] and [[Richard Kammann]] of the [[University of Otago]] argued in Nature in August 1978 that the judging of his nine-trial series depended on "multiple extraneous cues which were available in the original unedited transcripts," such as "Nothing like having three successes behind you" in the fourth, and on a target list given to the judge "in the correct order." Puthoff, Targ and [[Charles Tart]] answered with a rejudging of edited transcripts in which "seven of the nine were correctly matched," and Puthoff conceded in 1980 that the list had been "inadvertently (through an error) given in the same order."[^13]
|
||||
|
||||
### Death and Disputed Circumstances
|
||||
### The Hearst kidnapping and the police memorandum
|
||||
|
||||
Price died in Las Vegas, Nevada, on July 14, 1975, at age 56. The official cause of death was a heart attack. He had no known prior history of cardiac disease. Puthoff was contacted and traveled to Las Vegas to manage the program's interests in the aftermath. He found that Price's personal suitcase, which Price habitually carried and which contained his remote viewing notes and CIA-associated materials, had disappeared before Puthoff's arrival.
|
||||
Schnabel wrote that on Tuesday, February 5, 1974, the day after [[Patty Hearst]] was taken, [[Berkeley Police Department|Berkeley police]] asked SRI for help through Puthoff's branch chief [[Earle Jones]]; that Price and Puthoff met the police at her apartment; that Price said at once the kidnapping was political and not for money; and that from police mug-shot books Price chose three men, naming one "Lobo," whom the police later connected to the [[Symbionese Liberation Army]] ([[William Wolfe]]). Price continued to work on the case, Schnabel wrote, until police killed members of the group in Los Angeles in May.[^14]
|
||||
|
||||
Within the SRI program, Puthoff and other participants considered Price's death - a healthy 56-year-old with no cardiac history, working for the CIA, suitcase missing - as warranting further inquiry. Price's family disputed the cardiac diagnosis. The CIA conducted an internal review. No evidence of foul play was established and no formal investigation outside the CIA's internal inquiry was conducted. The circumstances have remained unresolved.
|
||||
An undated memorandum for the record in the CIA's files, headed "Operational Use of Paranormals in Police Activities," by an officer of the Office of Technical Service whose name is redacted, reports that two paranormal subjects tested at SRI "have produced impressive data on explicit police cases," the Hearst kidnapping and a Stanford student homicide. It states that "even the appearance of CIA involvement with domestic police operations is a political explosive association," which had kept the writer from verifying the SRI claims directly. Of the Hearst case it states that "the night after the kidnapping and before any publicity occurred, Mr. Price's help was solicited by the Alameda police," that he "provided a significant amount of data, including identification of people later proven to be involved," and that the interaction was taped by Puthoff and Targ and verified by the group leader at SRI, Earle Jones.[^15]
|
||||
|
||||
Price's death substantially changed the program's operational character. As the most effective subject for intelligence-relevant remote viewing to that point, his loss redirected the program toward developing trained remote viewers from the Army's own personnel rather than relying on a small number of naturally gifted civilians. The structured Coordinate Remote Viewing protocol that Swann subsequently developed for Army training was in part a response to the program's inability to identify another subject with Price's consistency.
|
||||
### Semipalatinsk, 1974
|
||||
|
||||
### Assessment
|
||||
Kress, the CIA's project officer for the jointly funded [[Office of Research and Development (CIA)|Office of Research and Development]] and Office of Technical Service program begun in February 1974, described the Semipalatinsk test in his 1977 article. He and his branch chief briefed Targ and Puthoff in a motel so that neither would know the target; Price was given the coordinates, a world atlas page marked with the approximate location, and told only that it was a Soviet research and development test site. Overnight he produced a drawing and said it was a "damned big crane" because he saw a person walk by who came only to the axles of its wheels. When Price was made witting, Kress tested him by asking in front of Targ and Puthoff whether he knew him: "Yes. Name? Ken Kress. Occupation? Works for CIA," which Kress noted was meaningful because he was then a covert employee. Asked why he had not seen four derricks that Kress's older data showed, Price closed his eyes and said "I didn't see them because they are not there any more"; a reconnaissance check weeks later showed two partly disassembled and all four visible. Kress wrote that "in general, most of Price's data were wrong or could not be evaluated," that two analysts, a photo interpreter and a nuclear analyst at [[Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory|Los Alamos]], agreed the crane was accurate, and that "as proof of remote viewing, the data are at best inconclusive."[^16]
|
||||
|
||||
Within the government's remote viewing program, Price's Semipalatinsk session was the most frequently cited evidence for anomalous information transfer with intelligence value. Ray Hyman, who evaluated the program critically in the 1995 [[American Institutes for Research|AIR]] assessment, acknowledged the Semipalatinsk result as the program's strongest single case while arguing that alternative explanations - including access to open-source information about the facility that participants did not recall using - could not be definitively ruled out without complete documentation that had not been preserved.
|
||||
The target was designated URDF-3, "unidentified R&D facility number 3," in the Semipalatinsk test area of [[Kazakhstan]], and the coordinates were brought to SRI by Kress and a physicist Schnabel calls "[[Peter Maris]]," a pseudonym; Schnabel placed a briefing of the CIA's [[John McMahon]] and [[Carl Duckett]] by Puthoff and Targ a month before.[^17] A memorandum of August 5, 1974 recorded that photographs from the [[National Photographic Interpretation Center]] "apparently do not support Price's remarks about the derricks, water tower, etc.," although a preliminary examination suggested possible nearby ambiguous hits.[^18]
|
||||
|
||||
The experiment ran in three phases "under direct control of the COTR": Phase I with coordinates and the words "R&D test facility" only, Phase II after "the subject being made 'witting' (of the client) by client representatives who introduced themselves to the subject," and Phase III "the generation of unverifiable data concerning the Semipalatinsk site not available to the client, but of operational interest nonetheless," over two weeks. The Los Alamos analyst who reviewed the tapes of July 9 to 15, 1974, found that on the first day he "successfully evaded drawing a perimeter of the area even though he was asked to do this twice" and produced a 500-foot antenna, a swimming pool "for underwater testing," an array of telephone poles, and an airstrip that did not exist; that on the second "Price supplied the most positive evidence yet for the remote-viewing experiment with his sketch of the rail-mounted gantry crane. It seems inconceivable to imagine how he could have drawn such a likeness to the actual crane at URDF-3 unless: 1) he actually saw it through remote viewing, or 2) he was informed of what to draw by someone knowledgeable of URDF-3," adding, "I only mention this second possibility because the experiment was not controlled to discount the possibility that Price could talk to other people, such as the Disinformation Section of the [[KGB]]"; that on the third, shown the surface features of the underground Building 1, he said "No, that's a concrete apron, and there's nothing subterranean right in that particular area," which "was his most negative evidence yet"; and on the fourth admitted "he had been trying to force-fit a space-oriented situation to the target location." The conclusion: "I consider Price's remote-viewing experiment of URDF-3 to be unsuccessful. I recommend that the tapes be considered for use with the psychological stress evaluator."[^19]
|
||||
|
||||
Targ's memoir of 1996 quotes his words on July 10, 1974: "I am lying on my back on the roof of a two or three story brick building. It's a sunny day. The sun feels good. There's the most amazing thing. There's a giant gantry crane moving back and forth over my head," and his description of "a giant, 'sixty-foot diameter metal sphere'" assembled from "thick metal gores," which Targ set beside an *[[Aviation Week]]* report of May 2, 1977, of Soviet steel gores for "a large sphere estimated to be about 18 meters (57.8 feet) in diameter."[^20] An outside reviewer of the SRI progress reports in 1974, under the heading "Remote Viewing by Mr. Price," wrote that "one cannot determine whether he was aware of the nine sites or had visited them prior to the experiment," and closed: "one still has the feeling that the prevailing philosophy is to 'prove' the existence of an information channel."[^21]
|
||||
|
||||
### Coal, embassies and the Libyan tasking, 1974 and 1975
|
||||
|
||||
Schnabel wrote that Swann returned to SRI as a consultant in the autumn of 1974, which "was to correspond with the departure of Pat Price"; that Price went to work for a coal company in [[Huntington, West Virginia]], whose president offered him his job, a salary and shares of stock, and that Price planned to find coal seams by remote viewing and to return to SRI with money to fund its program. Schnabel added that Price was also going to work directly for the CIA, and that the coal job was real and not a cover.[^22]
|
||||
|
||||
Kress's article lists the CIA activity: in a challenge from OTS management to produce "something of genuine operational significance," Price was sent against the interiors of two foreign embassies already known to audio teams that had entered them years earlier, given exterior photographs and coordinates. "In both cases, Price correctly located the coderooms," producing "the location of interior doors and colors of marble stairs and fireplaces that were accurate and specific," though "as usual, much was also vague and incorrect"; the operations officer concluded that "this technique, whatever it is, offers definite operational possibilities." Reviews within OTS and ORD followed: the ORD project officers held the research "not productive or even competent" and dropped support to SRI, and "to achieve better security, all the operations-oriented testing with the contractor was stopped, and a personal services contract with Price was started," with his testing transferred from Kress, "judged to be a positively biased advocate," to an OTS operations psychologist. A second [[Libya|Libyan]] requirement list, after a first set of coordinates described a guerrilla training site with a map-like drawing and an underwater sabotage training facility some hundreds of kilometers away, was passed to Price. "Price died of a heart attack a few days later, and the program stopped."[^16]
|
||||
|
||||
Schnabel described the origin of the embassy tests as a proposal in late 1974 or early 1975 by a Staff D liaison he calls "[[Norm Everheart]]" (a pseudonym) of the Office of Technical Service: Price would be asked to describe the basement of the Chinese Embassy in a certain foreign capital, suspected to hold its communications office, before a signals intelligence entry was mounted. The chief of Staff D, "[[Ed Rogers]]" (a pseudonym), required Price first to succeed in three tests against targets on which the Agency already had ample information. Schnabel wrote that in the first, in Price's hotel room in the [[Washington, D.C.|Washington]] area with Kress and an officer he calls "[[Nick Clancy]]" (a pseudonym), Price sketched [[Africa]], marked the location of a photographed building, which was the Chinese Embassy in a large African city, gave its distance from the ocean as 150 miles, said there were three buildings at the site, and said the photograph had been developed in a basement a mile down the road. In the second, a building in a North African capital, he described a magnificent staircase and "the most beds I've seen in any one place" and passed through an iron gate that did not exist, which Clancy later traced to the building's use as a hospital in the war years and a girls' school dormitory before them. In the third, a Chinese consular building in [[Rome]], he described the layout and a ceiling mural accurately. Everheart judged that Price had passed; Schnabel wrote that Rogers, concerned about "the giggle factor," chose not to rely on a psychic and approved a close-up technical check of the basement.[^23]
|
||||
|
||||
### Las Vegas, July 14, 1975
|
||||
|
||||
*Mind-Reach*, published two years later, recorded that "Pat Price ended his stay at SRI to accept a new challenge, a position as president of a West Virginia coal company," and noted "with sadness the death of Pat Price due to a heart attack in July, 1975."[^3]
|
||||
|
||||
Schnabel's account of the end of the trip is the fullest. In mid-July 1975 Price left Huntington on a several-week journey west, stopped in Washington, flew to [[Utah]] to see his son, and went on to Las Vegas, planning to continue to SRI and then to see his wife Ann, who lived in Los Angeles and worked as a nurse. Schnabel wrote that Price's electrocardiograms at SRI a year earlier had suggested advanced coronary artery disease, that he smoked two and a half packs a day, and that physicians at the [[Palo Alto Medical Clinic]] and CIA and SRI colleagues had tried to get him to change his habits. At the [[Stardust Hotel]] in Las Vegas, with friends he calls "Bill and Judy Alvarez" (pseudonyms), Price complained at dinner of feeling unwell and, according to a story Alvarez later told, mentioned that someone had seemed to slip something into his coffee at dinner in Washington the night before. Upstairs he called the Alvarezes, who found him in cardiac arrest; paramedics could not resuscitate him and he was declared dead in the emergency room of a local hospital.[^24]
|
||||
|
||||
Schnabel wrote that when "Richard Kennett" and others tried to find out what had happened, they learned that no autopsy had been performed, although autopsies were normal for out-of-town deaths outside hospitals; they were told that a friend of Price, not Alvarez, had arrived with a briefcase of his medical records, which with the emergency-room physician's statements led Las Vegas officials to waive the autopsy. Kennett could not identify the man with the briefcase. Schnabel recorded the rumors that followed: that the man was from the CIA, that Price had been murdered by the Soviets, that he was alive under a new identity, and that a friend had a vision in which Price's ghost said he had been poisoned. He recorded the view of those who knew of Price's heart disease that "there was no real mystery," and that a CIA official who worked with Price told him the Agency "had no connection with any of the events surrounding Price's death, including the (alleged) appearance of the mysterious man with the medical records." As late as 1994, Schnabel wrote, Targ told him: "I don't know how Pat Price died."[^24]
|
||||
|
||||
In late summer 1977, Schnabel wrote, the day after [[The Washington Post]] published an article by [[John L. Wilhelm|John Wilhelm]] on government psychic research, [[Stansfield Turner]], the Director of Central Intelligence, was asked about the subject at a meeting with reporters and, "clearly referring to Pat Price," said that the CIA had once worked with a man who seemed to have some psychic ability, whose drawings of foreign targets he had not seen were reasonably accurate but rudimentary: "he died, and we haven't heard from him since." When the Office of Technical Service briefed the [[House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence]] on November 17, 1977, it left with the staff "a brief article on Mr. Pat Price."[^25] A [[Defense Intelligence College]] thesis of 1992 quotes Turner at a breakfast for journalists in 1977 as saying the CIA "had an individual who from time to time was able to draw very elementary sketches of street scenes in foreign countries where he had never been," and that "this subject died in 1975, and we haven't heard from him since."[^26]
|
||||
|
||||
### The 1995 review
|
||||
|
||||
The American Institutes for Research report of September 29, 1995 described the Semipalatinsk work as the third reported operational success, in which "the viewer was provided with only the geographic coordinates of the site." It noted that a government official who reviewed that work had concluded "there was no way the remote viewer could have drawn the large gantry crane unless 'he actually saw it through remote viewing, or he was informed of what to draw by someone knowledgeable of [the site],'" and that the same analyst judged the experiment unsuccessful because the positive evidence "was far outweighed by the large amount of negative evidence." The report added that "there is no way to know with certainty that the subject did not speak with someone who had knowledge of the site, however unlikely that possibility may appear," and that it was unknown to what degree the results in the reports "were selectively chosen because they were correct."[^27]
|
||||
|
||||
### Footnotes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Stanford Research Institute, "Project SCANATE, Exploratory Research in Remote Viewing," 1973, CIA-RDP96-00791R000100480002-4. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. Puthoff, Harold E., and Russell Targ. *Perceptual Augmentation Techniques,* final report, part two, research report, December 1, 1975, SRI Project 3183, 153 pp., CIA-RDP96-00791R000100410001-2. The report codes its subjects; S3 and S1 are identified as Swann and Price by matching their responses to the named sessions in the SCANATE report. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. Puthoff, Harold E., and Russell Targ. *Perceptual Augmentation Techniques,* final report, part one, executive summary, SRI Project 3183, covering January 1974 to February 1975, CIA-RDP96-00791R000100420001-1. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
|
||||
[^2]: Puthoff, Harold E., and Russell Targ. *Perceptual Augmentation Techniques,* final report, part two, research report, December 1, 1975, SRI Project 3183, 153 pp., CIA-RDP96-00791R000100410001-2. The report codes its subjects; S3 and S1 are identified as Swann and Price by matching their responses to the named sessions in the SCANATE report. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. "An Analysis of a Remote Viewing Experiment of URDF-3," report of the four sessions of July 9 to 15, 1974, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200240001-0, cited by Kress as the work of Dr. Stillman of Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, December 4, 1975. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. "Review of Perceptual Augmentation Techniques," unsigned review of SRI progress reports 1 to 3, c. August 1974, CIA-RDP96-00787R000200230001-6. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. Brandwein, David S., Director, Office of Technical Service, memoranda "Stanford Research Institute Parapsychology Research," February 20, 1976 (CIA-RDP96-00787R000200020001-9), and "OTS Support to Research in Parapsychology," October 7, 1976 (CIA-RDP96-00787R000200020016-3); memorandum for the record, "Briefing for House Permanent Select Committee re OTS Involvement in ESP Research," OTS memo 287-77, November 17, 1977 (CIA-RDP96-00787R000200020020-8); memorandum for the record, "Discussions with OTS on the SRI Project," June 22, 1974 (CIA-RDP96-00787R000700110016-8). Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
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[^3]: Marks, David, and Richard Kammann. "Information transmission in remote viewing experiments." *Nature,* vol. 274, August 17, 1978, pp. 680-681, received July 2, 1977, accepted May 31, 1978. https://www.nature.com/articles/274680a0. Marks, David F. "Remote Viewing Revisited." *Skeptical Inquirer,* vol. 6, no. 4, Summer 1982, pp. 18-29. https://cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1982/07/22165420/p20.pdf Puthoff, H. E., and Russell Targ, "Information Transmission in Remote Viewing Experiments: II," and Tart, Charles T., "Reanalysis of SRI Remote Viewing Experiments," January 1979, "submitted for publication to Nature," CIA-RDP96-00787R000200090017-5; published as Tart, Puthoff and Targ, *Nature,* vol. 284, 1980, p. 191. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection. Snyder, Harry L., and Arlene G. Snyder. *Summary and Critical Evaluation of Research in Remote Viewing,* Report RV-79-1, final technical report, contract 77F104420, Systemetrics, Inc., Blacksburg, Virginia, June 1, 1979, parts 1 and 2, CIA-RDP96-00791R000100440001-9 and CIA-RDP96-00787R000100260003-2. The sponsor of the contract is not named in the report. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
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[^4]: Targ, Russell, and Harold Puthoff. "Information Transmission under Conditions of Sensory Shielding," *Nature,* vol. 251, October 18, 1974, pp. 602-607, read in the CIA Reading Room copy CIA-RDP96-00787R000100220001-8 on archive.org. Targ, Russell. "Remote Viewing at Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s: A Memoir," *Journal of Scientific Exploration,* vol. 10, no. 1, 1996, pp. 77-88, reprinted from Targ and Katra, *Mind-to-Mind* (1996); read in a Wayback Machine copy of the journal's PDF.
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[^1]: "1950-1953: Councilman - Patrick Price," photograph by Paul E. Wolfe, note on print "Patrick Price, Council 1950-1953," City Council Image Collection, identifier cco00655, Burbank Public Library, Burbank in Focus Office (physical copy held by the City Clerk's Office). https://burbankinfocus.org/islandora/object/islandora:90/ The collection record does not state that this councilman and the remote viewer are the same man; Targ and Puthoff and Schnabel both place the remote viewer's Burbank service in the same period. For the SRI period and the OTS contract see Kress, Kenneth A., "Parapsychology in Intelligence: A Personal Review and Conclusions," *Studies in Intelligence,* vol. 21, no. 4, Winter 1977, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200030040-0, read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
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[^2]: Carosa, Chris. "Patrick H. Price: Savior, Savant, or Sacrifice?," May 3, 2022, quoting "Story of Crime Questioned," Los Angeles Evening Citizen News, April 30, 1952. https://chriscarosa.com/2022/05/patrick-h-price-savior-savant-or-sacrifice/ The newspaper text is quoted from this web article.
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[^3]: Targ, Russell, and Harold Puthoff. *Mind-Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Abilities.* New York: Delacorte Press, 1977, chapter "Pat Price: A Man for All Seasons," read in the archive.org full-text copy of the 2005 reprint, https://archive.org/details/mind-reach-scientists-look-at-psychic-abilities-2005-russell-targ-harold-e.-puth
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[^4]: Kress, "Parapsychology in Intelligence," *Studies in Intelligence,* Winter 1977, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200030040-0.
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[^5]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies.* New York: Dell, 1997, chapters on the SRI work and "The Shamans," and the discussion of Scientology, read in the archive.org full-text copy, https://archive.org/details/jim-schnabel-remote-viewers-the-secret-history-of-americas-psychic-spies_2 Schnabel's own notes state that "The anecdote about Price and the police dispatcher comes from Targ 1996"; he does not give a source for the Lockheed and Alaska details. Sole source for the passages so cited.
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[^6]: Stanford Research Institute, "Project SCANATE, Exploratory Research in Remote Viewing," 1973, CIA-RDP96-00791R000100480002-4. Puthoff, Harold E., and Russell Targ. *Perceptual Augmentation Techniques,* final report, part two, research report, December 1, 1975, SRI Project 3183, CIA-RDP96-00791R000100410001-2, and part one, executive summary, covering January 1974 to February 1975, CIA-RDP96-00791R000100420001-1. The report codes its subjects; S3 and S1 are identified as Swann and Price by matching their responses to the named sessions in the SCANATE report. All read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
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[^7]: Kress, "Parapsychology in Intelligence," *Studies in Intelligence,* Winter 1977, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200030040-0, section on summer 1973.
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[^8]: Schnabel, *Remote Viewers,* 1997, chapter text and notes to the chapter on Sugar Grove; pseudonyms are listed in the book's "Pseudonyms" page (which includes Richard Kennett, Bill O'Donnell, Peter Maris, Norm Everheart, Ed Rogers, Nick Clancy and Bill and Judy Alvarez). https://archive.org/details/jim-schnabel-remote-viewers-the-secret-history-of-americas-psychic-spies_2
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[^9]: Snyder, Harry L., and Arlene G. Snyder. *Summary and Critical Evaluation of Research in Remote Viewing,* Report RV-79-1, final technical report, contract 77F104420, Systemetrics, Inc., Blacksburg, Virginia, June 1, 1979, parts 1 and 2, CIA-RDP96-00791R000100440001-9 and CIA-RDP96-00787R000100260003-2. The sponsor of the contract is not named in the report. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
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[^10]: Transcripts of remote viewing experiments with Pat Price, October 4, 1973 (CIA-RDP96-00787R000200130011-6), October 24, 1973 (CIA-RDP96-00787R000200130012-5) and October 26, 1973 (CIA-RDP96-00787R000200130010-7). Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
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[^11]: Targ, Russell, and Harold Puthoff. "Information Transmission under Conditions of Sensory Shielding," *Nature,* vol. 251, October 18, 1974, pp. 602-607, read in the CIA Reading Room copy CIA-RDP96-00787R000100220001-8 on archive.org.
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[^12]: Schnabel, *Remote Viewers,* 1997, chapter on the SRI series; his notes cite Puthoff and Targ 1973, 1975 and 1977 for the SRI side.
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[^13]: Marks, David, and Richard Kammann. "Information transmission in remote viewing experiments." *Nature,* vol. 274, August 17, 1978, pp. 680-681. https://www.nature.com/articles/274680a0 Marks, David F. "Remote Viewing Revisited." *Skeptical Inquirer,* vol. 6, no. 4, Summer 1982, pp. 18-29. https://cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1982/07/22165420/p20.pdf Puthoff, H. E., and Russell Targ, "Information Transmission in Remote Viewing Experiments: II," and Tart, Charles T., "Reanalysis of SRI Remote Viewing Experiments," January 1979, CIA-RDP96-00787R000200090017-5; published as Tart, Puthoff and Targ, *Nature,* vol. 284, 1980, p. 191. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
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[^14]: Schnabel, *Remote Viewers,* 1997, the Patricia Hearst section of the chapter on Price.
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[^15]: Memorandum for the record, "Operational Use of Paranormals in Police Activities," undated, author redacted, Office of Technical Service, CIA-RDP96-00787R000200130013-4. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
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[^16]: Kress, "Parapsychology in Intelligence," *Studies in Intelligence,* Winter 1977, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200030040-0, with footnotes there to W. T. Strand, memorandum for the Director, Office of Technical Service, "Evaluation of Data on Semipalatinsk Unidentified R&D Facility No. 3, USSR," August 20, 1974; C/AOB/OTS memorandum for the record, April 20, 1976; and Directorate of Operations memoranda of December 12, 1974, and January 14, 24, 31 and February 5, 1975 on "Perceptual Augmentation Testing" and the Libyan desk requirement.
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[^17]: Schnabel, *Remote Viewers,* 1997, chapter on the Semipalatinsk session; "Peter Maris" is on the book's pseudonym list. Schnabel's account is based on interviews and on the SRI reports.
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[^18]: Memorandum for the record, "Discussions About SRI Performance," August 5, 1974, CIA-RDP96-00787R000200200017-2. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
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[^19]: Puthoff, Harold E., and Russell Targ. *Perceptual Augmentation Techniques,* final report, part two, December 1, 1975, CIA-RDP96-00791R000100410001-2. "An Analysis of a Remote Viewing Experiment of URDF-3," report of the four sessions of July 9 to 15, 1974, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200240001-0, with other copies at CIA-RDP96-00791R000100500001-2 and CIA-RDP96-00791R000200040002-1, cited by Kress as the work of a Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory nuclear analyst and dated in one copy December 4, 1975. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
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[^20]: Targ, Russell. "Remote Viewing at Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s: A Memoir," *Journal of Scientific Exploration,* vol. 10, no. 1, 1996, pp. 77-88, read in a Wayback Machine copy of the journal's PDF.
|
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[^21]: "Review of Perceptual Augmentation Techniques," unsigned review of SRI progress reports 1 to 3, c. August 1974, CIA-RDP96-00787R000200230001-6. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
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[^22]: Schnabel, *Remote Viewers,* 1997, chapter on Swann's return and Price's departure.
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[^23]: Schnabel, *Remote Viewers,* 1997, chapter on the embassy tests; pseudonyms as listed in the book.
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[^24]: Schnabel, *Remote Viewers,* 1997, chapter "The Shamans" and its footnotes, including the footnote recording the statement by a CIA official who worked with Price. The pseudonym list in the same book includes Bill and Judy Alvarez and Richard Kennett.
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[^25]: Schnabel, *Remote Viewers,* 1997, chapter on the summer of 1977, naming Wilhelm's Washington Post article; the Wilhelm piece also survives in CIA files as "The Search for Superman," CIA-RDP96-00788R001100040006-1. Brandwein, David S., Director, Office of Technical Service, memoranda "Stanford Research Institute Parapsychology Research," February 20, 1976 (CIA-RDP96-00787R000200020001-9), and "OTS Support to Research in Parapsychology," October 7, 1976 (CIA-RDP96-00787R000200020016-3); memorandum for the record, "Briefing for House Permanent Select Committee re OTS Involvement in ESP Research," OTS memo 287-77, November 17, 1977 (CIA-RDP96-00787R000200020020-8), at which OTS left with the committee staff "a brief article on Mr. Pat Price." Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
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[^26]: Zarbo, Michael E. (Captain, U.S. Army), *Remote Viewing: Parapsychological Potential for Intelligence Collection?,* master's thesis, Defense Intelligence College, November 1992, CIA-RDP96-00789R002600250001-6, quoting Turner. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
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[^27]: Mumford, Michael D., Andrew M. Rose, and David A. Goslin. *An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications.* American Institutes for Research, September 29, 1995, chapter 3, p. 3-77 and following, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200180005-5, read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
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