The_Info_Web/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/GOVERNMENT/USA/Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.md

created	updated	title	aliases	tags	category	summary	start	location
2026-05-15	2026-10-08	Walter Reed Army Institute of Research	Walter Reed Army Institute of Research WRAIR	Organization Military Research PSI MoscowSignal ColdWar 1950s 1960s	U.S. Government	The Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) is the Army's principal biomedical laboratory, where Project Pandora irradiated primates at the Forest Glen Section and to which DARPA transferred Pandora's assets in 1970.	1893-01-01	Silver Spring, Maryland

The Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) is a biomedical research laboratory of the U.S. Army. It was involved in classified research related to the Moscow Signal and Project Pandora during the Cold War¹.

An elaborate facility was constructed inside WRAIR, specifically at its Forest Glen Section, where scientists from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory irradiated primates with microwave beams. This research aimed to duplicate the effects of the Moscow Signal, an Electromagnetic Weapons believed to be aimed at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow by the Soviet Union¹.

Richard S. Cesaro of DARPA, who was in charge of Project Pandora, became convinced that these microwave beams adversely affected the internal organs of primates, including the brain, and could lead to conditions like Alzheimer's Disease¹.

Later, in the 1990s, David Morehouse was transferred to the psychiatric ward at Womack Army Hospital at Fort Bragg, after a period at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington for psychiatric evaluation. The Walter Reed Army Medical Center Sanity Board concluded that Morehouse did not have a severe mental disease or defect, but rather major depression and alcohol abuse¹.

Transfer of Project Pandora, 1970

A DARPA letter of September 15, 1977 to Senator Warren G. Magnuson states that "Project Pandora was terminated by DARPA in March 1970 and all assets were transferred to Walter Reed Army Institute for Research (WRAIR) for disposition," that "there has been no DARPA interest in the work being carried on at WRAIR" since, and that the agency has no knowledge whether the data collected at Walter Reed were destroyed. The letter gives the total cost of Pandora as $4,615,000 and states that a detailed breakout of the costs of "the Walter Reed facilities" is not available.²

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. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, letter to Senator Warren G. Magnuson, September 15, 1977, National Security Archive. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/rhwvuj-tzy4b/14.pdf ↩︎