Phenomena Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2017 by Anne M. Jacobsen

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  First ebook edition: March 2017

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  ISBN 978-0-316-34936-9

  E3-20170216-JV-PC

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  PART I

  THE EARLY DAYS Chapter One: The Supernatural

  Chapter Two: The Puharich Theory

  Chapter Three: Skeptics, Charlatans, and the U.S. Army

  Chapter Four: Quasi Science

  Chapter Five: The Soviet Threat

  PART II

  THE CIA YEARS Chapter Six: The Enigma of Uri Geller

  Chapter Seven: The Man on the Moon

  Chapter Eight: The Physicist and the Psychic

  Chapter Nine: Skeptics versus CIA

  Chapter Ten: Remote Viewing

  Chapter Eleven: The Unconscious

  Chapter Twelve: Submarines

  PART III

  THE DEFENSE DEPARTMENT YEARS Chapter Thirteen: Paraphysics

  Chapter Fourteen: Psychic Soldiers

  Chapter Fifteen: Qigong and the Mystery of H. S. Tsien

  Chapter Sixteen: Killers and Kidnappers

  Chapter Seventeen: Consciousness

  Chapter Eighteen: Psychic Training

  Chapter Nineteen: The Woman with the Third Eye

  Chapter Twenty: The End of an Era

  Chapter Twenty-One: Hostages and Drugs

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Downfall

  PART IV

  THE MODERN ERA Chapter Twenty-Three: Intuition, Premonition, and Synthetic Telepathy

  Chapter Twenty-Four: The Scientists and the Skeptics

  Chapter Twenty-Five: The Psychic and the Astronaut

  Acknowledgments

  Photos

  About the Author

  Also by Annie Jacobsen

  Notes

  List of Interviews and Written Correspondence

  Bibliography

  Newsletters

  For Kevin, Finley, and Jett

  There are but two powers in the world, the sword and the mind. In the long run the sword is always beaten by the mind.

  —Napoleon Bonaparte

  There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.

  —Søren Kierkegaard

  Prologue

  This is a book about scientists and psychics with top-secret clearances. It is about the U.S. government’s decades-long interest in anomalous mental phenomena, including extrasensory perception (ESP), psychokinesis (PK), map dowsing, and other forms of divination, all disciplines the scientific community rejects as pseudoscience. Across recorded history these disciplines have been called magical, mystical, supernatural, and occult. Today they are called paranormal. Those who practice them have been lionized, vilified, and burned at the stake. And then, just a few years after the end of World War II, the U.S. government determined anomalous mental phenomena to be effective military and intelligence tools, and began to investigate their possible use in classified operations. This book tells the story of this postwar endeavor and its continuation into the modern era.

  The real action began in 1972, when a small group of promising young scientists was approached by the Central Intelligence Agency to embark upon a research program involving psychics, or “sensitives.” The work took place at Stanford Research Institute, the second-largest Defense Department–funded independent research facility in the nation. The CIA challenged the scientists to first determine whether extrasensory perception—the ability to perceive things by means other than the five known senses—and psychokinesis—the ability to perturb matter with the mind—could be demonstrated and repeated in the laboratory. If so, the CIA wondered, how might these disciplines be best deployed against the enemy to win the Cold War?

  The results of the CIA program were spectacular. “A large body of reliable experimental evidence points to the inescapable conclusion that extrasensory perception does exist as a real phenomenon,” the CIA concluded in 1975. Focusing on the results, the military and the intelligence services wanted in. This included the Navy, the Air Force, the Army (including its Intelligence and Security Command and the Development and Readiness Command), the Coast Guard, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Customs Service, the Secret Service, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Over time, numerous presidents, congressmen, and members of the National Security Council were briefed.

  When a theoretical understanding of the phenomena could not be found, grave tensions arose. In the postwar age of advancing technology, science has taken an aggressively hostile attitude toward supernatural, or paranormal, beliefs. Extrasensory perception and map dowsing are just modern names for divination: the practice of seeking knowledge of the future or the unknown by supernatural means. Psychokinesis was based upon a protoscientific tradition not unlike alchemy, the fabled supposition that, using magic, man could affect matter. How could the U.S. government condone such things?

  In 1942 Dr. Gertrude Schmeidler, an experimental psychologist with a PhD from Harvard, conducted an experiment on the subject of anomalous mental phenomena with psychology students at City University of New York. In her questionnaire, she explored individuals’ beliefs about ESP and PK. Her analysis of the data led her to create the term “sheep” to refer to individuals who were confident about the possible reality of ESP and PK, and “goats” to refer to those who doubted the existence of any so-called anomalous mental phenomena. This explicit difference, between believers and disbelievers of mental phenomena, has existed in the upper echelons of the U.S. military and intelligence communities since World War II. This book tells their story.

  The sheep–goat divide also exists across America, but with a clear minority of goats. Gallup polls and Pew Research Center studies reveal that a majority of Americans alive today harbor paranormal beliefs: 73 percent say they have had a supernatural or paranormal experience, and 55 percent believe in psychic or spiritual healing. Many Americans also believe in extrasensory perception or telepathy (41 percent); believe that extraterrestrials have visited Earth (29 percent); or say they’ve seen a ghost (18 percent). A minority 27 percent do not believe in anything supernatural. This group includes scientific skeptics, who are also an important part of this story.

  Were the government’s psychics gifted seers or skilled magicians? And are the scientists who studied them, many of whom continue to study these phenomena today, on the brink of disco
very? Are they modern-day scientific revolutionaries akin to Galileo, Louis Pasteur, and Madame Curie, each of whom solved scientific mysteries that baffled scientists for millennia? Or is ESP and PK research a fool’s errand, nothing more?

  How do scientists—people of reason—approach such enigmatic subject matter? And what about the psychics themselves? Who were the individuals hired by the U.S. government for these top-secret programs, and how do they explain their military and intelligence work? To research and report this book I interviewed fifty-five scientists and psychics who worked on government programs, including the core members of the original group from Stanford Research Institute and the CIA, the core group on the military side, defense scientists, former military intelligence officers and government psychics, physicists, biologists, neurophysiologists, cyberneticists, astrophysicists, a general, an admiral, a Nobel Laureate, and an Apollo astronaut. These are their stories.

  PART I

  THE EARLY DAYS

  The cause is hidden; the effect is visible to all.

  —Ovid

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Supernatural

  supernatural: unable to be explained by science or the laws of nature; of, relating to, or seeming to come from magic, a god, etc.

  —Merriam-Webster dictionary

  It was May 10, 1941, a day during World War II remembered in the history books for its bizarre links to the supernatural. Rudolf Hess, the deputy führer of the Third Reich, woke up in his villa in the Munich suburb of Harlaching and, on the advice of his astrologer, chose this day to make his secret move. The six planets were in Taurus and the moon would be full, the star chart allegedly said. Hess ate breakfast, had a brief conversation with his wife, and asked his driver to take him to the Messerschmitt aircraft facility in Augsburg. Shortly before 6:00 p.m., he climbed into a Bf 110 fighter-bomber and flew north. Flying low so as to avoid radar, Hess made his way down the Rhine River, across the Dutch coast, out over the North Sea and toward Scotland. Roughly five and a half hours after taking off, he bailed out of his aircraft and parachuted into a field at Floors Farm, near Eaglesham, a village south of Glasgow.

  His intention, Hess later said, was to make his way to Dungavel Castle and barter an alliance with England using as an intermediary the Duke of Hamilton. Instead, the deputy führer of the Third Reich was arrested and taken into custody. The interrogation that followed remains classified by British intelligence until 2041, but stories and theories about what really happened abound. Had Hitler’s obsessively loyal second-in-command really betrayed the Nazi cause on the advice of an astrologer? Or had British intelligence constructed an elaborate web of deception to catch Hess, using his belief in the supernatural as bait?

  Years later, while serving a life sentence in Spandau prison, Hess allegedly revealed his motivation to Albert Speer, the Reich’s former minister of Armaments and War Production. “Hess assured me in all seriousness that the idea had been inspired in him in a dream by supernatural forces,” Speer wrote in Inside the Third Reich. Two of Hess’s personal astrologers, Karl Krafft and Ernst Schulte-Strathaus, were reported to have constructed the star charts that aided Hess in believing the tenth of May to be cosmically suited for his rogue flight.

  But there exists another version of the story, one that was revealed by the British Broadcasting Corporation in 2002. “Britain’s most famous witch,” a woman by the name of Sybil Leek, had been recruited by British intelligence “to provide phony horoscopes for the Germans who believed in Astrology,” according to the BBC. “She apparently wrote a chart which convinced the Nazi Rudolf Hess to fly to England, where he was captured.” In other words, Leek’s star charts were instruments of black propaganda inserted into the deputy führer’s inner circle to influence his behavior and help foster certain beliefs. “Mum stayed silent about the Hess affair all her life,” says her son, Julian Leek, a Florida resident. “It’s still officially classified and the individual who revealed the story [in 2002] has moved to South America and [apparently] doesn’t answer email.”

  To the Third Reich, Rudolf Hess’s rogue flight was a supreme embarrassment. Adolf Hitler declared Hess legally insane and responded with Special Action Hess, the mass arrest of more than 600 astrologers, fortune-tellers, clairvoyants, faith healers, and other German practitioners of the supernatural or the occult. Artifacts of divination, including tarot cards, scrying mirrors, and crystal balls, were confiscated, as were entire libraries of mystical texts. “The circulation of all occult literature was forbidden,” wrote Wilhelm Wulff, an astrologer ensnared in Special Action Hess. A decree was issued making it illegal to “predict future events, the divination of the present or the past, and all other forms of revelation not based on natural processes of perception… to include the reading of cards, the casting of horoscopes, the explanation of stars and the interpretation of omens and dreams.” Practitioners of magic, including Wulff, were interrogated by agents of the Gestapo and many were sent to concentration camps.

  Meanwhile, inside the Third Reich, reliance upon the occult continued—not on the orders of Adolf Hitler but because Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-SS and the man Time magazine called “the Police Chief of Nazi Europe,” relied upon the supernatural as a power source himself. At least one account suggests Hitler was embarrassed by Himmler’s belief system.

  “What nonsense!” the Führer told Albert Speer, as recounted in Inside the Third Reich. “Here we have at last reached an age that has left all mysticism behind it, and now he [Himmler] wants to start that all over again. We might just as well have stayed with the church.”

  In a postwar account by Wilhelm Wulff, Himmler’s personal astrologer, astrology was “privilegium singulorum. It is not for the broad masses.” For the Reich to control the war message, explained Wulff, powerful belief systems that lay outside the Nazi creed needed to be curtailed. But not entirely. The Nazis’ head of foreign intelligence, SS-Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg, made an important point to Wulff about the power of mystical belief systems. They were “a suitable vehicle for the propagation of political concepts and for the political control of a nation,” Schellenberg said, meaning astrology could be used for great effect in a propaganda campaign.

  The same kind of manipulation was occurring in the United States. In the summer of 1941, a German-born Hungarian named Louis de Wohl was preparing for a speech at the annual convention of the American Federation of Scientific Astrologers, in Cleveland, Ohio. De Wohl, a plump, bespectacled British citizen, was one of the highest-profile astrologers in the Western world. His admirers in London included Lord Halifax, who was Britain’s Foreign Secretary, and the Duke of Alba, the ambassador from Spain. In honor of the astrology convention that year, the Cleveland News profiled de Wohl on its front page under the banner “Astrology has too many quacks.” De Wohl’s mission in America was to remove the occult stigma from stargazing and to elevate it into the realm of “astro-philosophy,” he said.

  War was raging across Europe, and in de Wohl’s syndicated American column, “Stars Foretell,” emphasis was always on the Nazi threat. “Hitler’s chief jackal is moving into the house of violence,” he predicted, “Seer Sees plot to Kill Hitler.” Starting in June 1941, just one month after the Hess affair, de Wohl’s predictions became unusually specific, and things he predicted started to come true. “A strong collaborator of Hitler who is neither German nor a Nazi will go violently insane,” he foretold. “He will be in South or Central America, probably near the Caribbean Sea.” Three days later, U.S. newswires reported that the Vichy High Commissioner of the French West Indies, Admiral Georges Robert, had gone crazy and had to be restrained by staff. The New York Post reported that newspaper editors across America “besieged de Wohl with requests for exclusive stories.”

  As de Wohl’s popularity escalated to meteoric heights, the Federal Communications Commission made a bold move. In August 1941 it lifted its long-standing ban against astrologers and aired an exclusive interview with the man hailed “The Mo
dern Nostradamus.” Then, for the first time in U.S. history, an astrologer was filmed for a U.S. newsreel. “On August 28, Pathé News released the newsreels’ first plunge into prophecy with a nation-wide audience of 39,000,000 sitting as judge jury and witness,” declared a press release issued by de Wohl’s manager. Except none of it was true. De Wohl’s successful American career was a product of British intelligence, and his so-called manager was none other than the spymaster Sir William Stephenson, a man whom Winston Churchill famously called Intrepid. SS-Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg was correct when he stated that astrology was a vehicle for the propagation of political concepts.

  Louis de Wohl was a committed astrologer but he also worked for British intelligence through its operational arm in America, the British Security Coordination Office. According to de Wohl’s declassified intelligence file, his columns, the interviews, and the predictions were all part of an elaborate black propaganda campaign designed “to organize American public opinion in favor to aid Britain.” Even the American Federation of Scientific Astrologers and its 1941 convention had been fabricated by MI6. The way it worked was masterful: the British spy agency first fed information to de Wohl, which he would write up in his column, “Stars Foretell.” The British spy agency then fed the bogus information to the U.S. press, which—unable to fact-check with the Reich—the press would report as real. For example, the Vichy High Commissioner of the French West Indies never went insane.

  According to the CIA’s Office of the Historian, de Wohl’s handler worked with U.S. spy chief Colonel William Donovan to coordinate and “oversee U.S. intelligence collection and analysis efforts,” this before the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA, even existed. British intelligence believed England needed America to join the war in Europe in order for the Allied forces to beat the Nazis. De Wohl’s phony predictions were intended to help sway public opinion away from the prevailing U.S. isolationist views. The ruse was effective. In one declassified memo, Stephenson wrote of de Wohl, “An ever-growing audience [is] becoming convinced of his supernatural powers.”