3 KiB
| created | updated | title | tags | description | category | summary | start | location | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025-07-22 | 2026-10-08 | The Nautilus |
|
The USS Nautilus (SSN-571) was the world's first operational nuclear-powered submarine. It became the subject of French magazine accounts of telepathy experiments that the Navy denied and Soviet psi researchers cited. | Esoteric & Historical Concept | The USS Nautilus (SSN-571) was the world's first operational nuclear-powered submarine, launched in 1954, named in French magazine accounts of 1959 and 1960 of telepathy experiments, which the Navy denied and Soviet psi researchers cited. | 1954 | United States |
The USS Nautilus (SSN-571) was the world's first operational nuclear-powered submarine, launched by the United States in 1954. It gained notoriety in the context of psychic research due to French magazine accounts published in 1959 and 1960 (The Nautilus (Telepathy Project)).1
In February 1960, the French magazine Science et Vie published an article titled "The Secret of the Nautilus," written by Gerard Messadie and allegedly sourced by Jacques Bergier. The article stated that the U.S. government had used telepathy to communicate with the Nautilus crew while the submarine was submerged beneath the Arctic ice cap.1
The account first appeared in a December 1959 article by Bergier in Constellation and in his book with Louis Pauwels, Le Matin des magiciens, which names the captain as William R. Anderson and gives July 25, 1959 as the date the Nautilus embarked.2 Anderson, by then retired, told This Week in 1963 that the report was "completely false" and that on July 24, 1959, the date the authors alleged, the ship was "high and dry in dock at Portsmouth, N. H., undergoing her first major overhaul."3 The Navy's history of the ship states that in May 1959 the Nautilus entered Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine, for her first complete overhaul, completed in August 1960.4
Schnabel wrote that despite official American denials the Soviet Union believed the story, which served as a stimulus for the expansion of its own parapsychology research, and that at a Moscow conference in 1968 the Soviet parapsychologist Eduard Naumov announced that the Red Navy had replicated the entire Nautilus experiment with one of its own submarines.1
Footnotes
-
Schnabel, Jim. Remote Viewers. Dell, 1997. ↩︎
-
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. ↩︎
-
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. ↩︎
-
"History of USS NAUTILUS (SSN 571)," Submarine Force Library and Museum, Naval History and Heritage Command. https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/museums/subforce/about-us/history.html ↩︎