vault backup: 2026-10-05 16:16:44
This commit is contained in:
parent
018702f589
commit
58718f3ec9
24 changed files with 778 additions and 202 deletions
|
|
@ -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.
|
||||
[^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.
|
||||
[^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.
|
||||
[^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.
|
||||
[^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.
|
||||
[^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
|
||||
[^4]: Kress, "Parapsychology in Intelligence," *Studies in Intelligence,* Winter 1977, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200030040-0.
|
||||
[^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.
|
||||
[^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.
|
||||
[^7]: Kress, "Parapsychology in Intelligence," *Studies in Intelligence,* Winter 1977, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200030040-0, section on summer 1973.
|
||||
[^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
|
||||
[^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.
|
||||
[^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.
|
||||
[^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.
|
||||
[^12]: Schnabel, *Remote Viewers,* 1997, chapter on the SRI series; his notes cite Puthoff and Targ 1973, 1975 and 1977 for the SRI side.
|
||||
[^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.
|
||||
[^14]: Schnabel, *Remote Viewers,* 1997, the Patricia Hearst section of the chapter on Price.
|
||||
[^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.
|
||||
[^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.
|
||||
[^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.
|
||||
[^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.
|
||||
[^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.
|
||||
[^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.
|
||||
[^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.
|
||||
[^22]: Schnabel, *Remote Viewers,* 1997, chapter on Swann's return and Price's departure.
|
||||
[^23]: Schnabel, *Remote Viewers,* 1997, chapter on the embassy tests; pseudonyms as listed in the book.
|
||||
[^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.
|
||||
[^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.
|
||||
[^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.
|
||||
[^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.
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
Loading…
Add table
Add a link
Reference in a new issue