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2.7 KiB
Markdown
31 lines
No EOL
2.7 KiB
Markdown
---
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created: 2025-07-22
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updated: 2026-06-12
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title: Advanced Research Projects Agency
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aliases:
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- ARPA
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tags:
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- organization
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- government
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- research
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description: The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was a U.S. government agency responsible for funding and overseeing advanced technological research, including early investigations into psychic phenomena. It is now known as DARPA.
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category: "U.S. Government"
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summary: "The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), now known as DARPA, was a U.S. government agency that funded advanced technological research including early classified investigations into psychic phenomena during the Cold War."
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start: 1958
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end: 1972
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location: "Arlington, Virginia"
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---
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The [[Advanced Research Projects Agency]] (ARPA) was a U.S. government agency responsible for funding and overseeing advanced technological research. It is now known as [[DARPA]] ([[Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency]]).[^1]
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In the early 1970s, ARPA showed interest in psychic phenomena, sending a three-man team to observe [[Uri Geller]] at [[Stanford Research Institute]] (SRI) in early 1973.[^1]
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While ARPA's corporate stance was not to pursue further investigations into Geller, one of its team members, psychologist [[Robert Van de Castle]], was reportedly impressed by Geller's abilities.[^1]
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### Long-Horizon Research and Military Psychology
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ARPA was specifically designed to sponsor projects whose results would not arrive for ten to fifteen years, providing a funding mechanism for long-horizon military science outside standard procurement budgets. Its [[Arlington, Virginia]] headquarters sat in the same building complex as the [[USARIBSS|Army Research Institute]] and other military psychological research organizations. In the psychological sciences its Cold War work concentrated on biofeedback research and early brain-weapon studies (including whether pilots' brain states could be linked to missile systems), and on the psychology of insurgent organizations, with [[Vietnam War|Vietnam]] as the primary focus. The most prominent ARPA-commissioned psychological study was the [[Rand Corporation]]'s Viet Cong motivation and morale study of the early 1960s, and ARPA also sponsored [[Project Agile]], a series of Asian military-science studies that included the [[Battelle Memorial Institute]] smell-weapons research of 1966. A 1964 classified memorandum from the Director of Defense Research and Engineering placed ARPA in an integrating role for behavioral and social science research across the service branches.[^2]
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---
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[^1]: Schnabel, Jim. *Remote Viewers*. Dell, 1997.
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[^2]: Peter Watson, *War on the Mind: The Military Uses and Abuses of Psychology*. Basic Books, 1978. |