The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Gerard Messadie.md

category	tags	summary	born	died	aliases	relations	updated
Authors & Journalists	Person	Gérald Messadié was the editor of *Science et Vie*, a top French science journal.	1931	2018	Gérald Messadié Gerald Messadie	type with start role fn participant_in The Nautilus (Telepathy Project) 1960 author of the Science et Vie article of February 1960 1	2026-10-08

Gérald Messadié was the editor of Science et Vie, a top French science journal. In February 1960, his journal published an expanded version of Jacques Bergier's story about a secret government Extrasensory Perception program, which Martin Ebon, Jim Schnabel and the Parapsychology Foundation title "The Secret of the Nautilus"; the 1972 DIA report and Ostrander and Schroeder cite it as "Du Nautilus," and I. V. Tsykunov as "Une étrange expérience à bord du «Nautilus»," issue no. 509, pages 30 to 35.¹

Martin Ebon visited Messadié in his Paris office in the summer of 1980. He wrote that Messadié's view was then that the whole thing was probably a hoax, that he regretted having published it, and that he had assumed his source was beyond question. According to Ebon, Messadié named Jacques Bergier, editorial adviser to the magazine, as that source, and recalled that when Bergier said "in a most affirmative tone that the U.S. Navy had engaged in telepathic research aboard the Nautilus," he and the editor-in-chief of the time, Daniel Vincendon, "did not resist his authority." Messadié is quoted as saying that Bergier "was sometimes prone to elaborations that verged on pranks, not to say hoaxes."² The Parapsychology Foundation reported in 1963 that Science et Vie had received no report of the experiment from its regular New York correspondent or from Science Service and that its editors had not disclosed their source.³ Jim Schnabel wrote that Messadié "would admit that he had probably been fooled."⁴ I. V. Tsykunov gives his years as 1931 to 2018 and writes that he edited the magazine for 25 years.⁵

According to Annie Jacobsen, Messadié stated in an interview that his information for the article came from Bergier and "other sources," who confirmed the story on condition of anonymity. The article identified J. B. Rhine of the Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory as the civilian scientist assigned to the project, reporting a high success rate for telepathic communication¹.

The U.S. Navy denied the reports. Messadié's publication drew wide attention to the reported ESP experiments aboard the The Nautilus, and the Soviet Union used the news to stimulate their own Parapsychology research. Leonid Vasiliev, Russia's leading ESP researcher, claimed that Soviet parapsychology research was stimulated by the Nautilus reports¹.

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

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

5. Tsykunov, I. V. "От фантазии к реальности: как история «Наутилуса» открыла гонку сверхъестественных вооружений между СССР и США" [From fantasy to reality: how the story of the Nautilus opened the race for supernatural weapons between the USSR and the USA]. Aliter, no. 20 (2023), pp. 34-55. https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/ot-fantazii-k-realnosti-kak-istoriya-nautilusa-otkryla-gonku-sverhestestvennyh-vooruzheniy-mezhdu-sssr-i-ssha. ↩︎