The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Jacques Bergier.md

aliases	category	tags	summary	born	died	location	relations	updated
Jacques Bergier	Authors & Journalists	Person Journalist Author	Jacques Bergier was a journalist, former French resistance spy, and author with strong ties to the intelligence community and an interest in the supernatural.	1912-08-21	1978-11-23	Odessa, Ukraine	type with start role fn participant_in The Nautilus (Telepathy Project) 1959 author of the Constellation article of December 1959 and co-author of Le Matin des magiciens 2	2026-10-08

Jacques Bergier was a journalist, former French resistance spy, and author with strong ties to the intelligence community and an interest in the supernatural. He is known for bringing secret government Extrasensory Perception programs to public attention¹.

In December 1959, Bergier published an article in the French magazine Constellation titled "La transmission de pensée, arme de guerre" (thought transfer, weapon of war). The article reported that ESP tests had been conducted aboard the The Nautilus, the world's first nuclear-powered submarine. The purpose of the experiment was to determine if long-distance telepathic communication could be achieved through barriers like thousands of miles of seawater, thick polar ice, and the metal walls of a submarine¹.

According to Bergier, the ESP experiment involved simple sender-receiver trials using Zener Cards. He identified William H. Bowers, director of the Biological Department of the Air Force Research Institute, as the man overseeing the joint-service ESP experiment. Bergier's story claimed that the sender and receiver communicated telepathically over a sixteen-day period; Bergier and Louis Pauwels give July 25, 1959 as the date the submarine embarked and August 10, 1959 as its return to Groton.¹

In Le Matin des magiciens, Bergier and Pauwels wrote that the Rand Corporation laid a report before Dwight D. Eisenhower at the beginning of 1957 proposing telepathic communication with submarines, and listed parapsychology laboratories at Rand, Westinghouse Electric Corporation, General Electric, Bell Telephone and Redstone Arsenal. A footnote in the passage cites a Rand Corporation report of August 31, 1958.²

An expanded version of his story, "The Secret of the Nautilus," was published in France's top science journal, Science et Vie, in February 1960. While no authors were identified, editor Gerard Messadie stated, according to Annie Jacobsen, that multiple sources had confirmed the story; Martin Ebon recorded in 1980 that Messadié named Bergier as his source. J. B. Rhine of the Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory was identified as the civilian scientist assigned to the project, with reports of "about 75% of the telepathic tries are said to have been successful"¹.

The Soviets used the news story to their strategic advantage, with Leonid Vasiliev, Russia's leading ESP researcher, claiming that Soviet parapsychology research was stimulated by the Nautilus reports¹.

In 1963 the Sunday supplement This Week printed excerpts of the book as "The Great Nautilus ESP Hoax" and, according to the Parapsychology Foundation, reported that Bergier and Pauwels admitted they "had elaborated on reports they had heard, but not verified" and had "given the submarine a name."³ Ebon, who visited Messadié in 1980, wrote that Bergier concocted the story, quotes a New York Times obituary of November 24, 1978 describing Bergier as a part-time consultant for French intelligence after the war, and quotes Messadié as saying that Bergier claimed to have extracted the information from intelligence sources.⁴ Jim Schnabel wrote that Bergier "apparently had connections to French intelligence services."⁵ In 1992 the Soviet defense newspaper Trud named Bergier as the author of the French article that had caused considerable commotion in December 1959.⁶

Publications

• "La transmission de pensée, arme de guerre" (Constellation, December 1959)
• Morning of the Magicians (co-authored with Louis Pauwels)

Footnotes

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1. Jacobsen, Annie. Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. Little, Brown and Company, 2017. ↩︎

2. Pauwels, Louis, and Jacques Bergier. Le Matin des magiciens, abridged and annotated university edition prepared by Yvonne Lenard with Monica Faulkner (Harper and Row, 1967), pp. 136-141. Annie Jacobsen, Phenomena (Little, Brown and Company, 2017), dates the sixteen-day period from July 25, 1958. ↩︎

3. Newsletter of the Parapsychology Foundation, "Nautilus Hoax Exposed," vol. 10, no. 6, November-December 1963, citing This Week, September 8, 1963. NSA-RDP96X00790R000100040002-2, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/nsa-rdp96x00790r000100040002-2. ↩︎

4. Ebon, Martin. Psychic Warfare: Threat or Illusion? McGraw-Hill, 1983, chapter 3, pp. 29-31. ↩︎

5. Schnabel, Jim. Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies. Dell, 1997, pp. 90-93. ↩︎

6. Trud, April 10, 1992, no. 61, FBIS translation, CIA-RDP96-00792R000500610010-5, https://cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00792r000500610010-5. ↩︎