On any given level of scientific development our knowledge of the work remains incomplete
V.I. Lenin
Soviet military intelligence was well aware that the Parapsychology Lab at Duke University had received funds from the US Office of Naval Research in 1952, but could make nothing of it. (1) Even when the first nuclear submarine, USS Nautilus, slid down the slipway at Groton, Connecticutt, in January 1954, no use was seen for this knowledge. A band played patriotic marches, 'Mamie' Eisenhour swung a tethered magnum at the black ship, and alcoholic foam seethed over the sleek bows in a cross-fire of flash bulbs. Twelve months later SSN-571 cast off fore and aft and went under way into darkness and secrecy.
Soviet naval analysts could find no peace from that moment on. Until the advent of the Nautilus, their intelligence efforts could be steered by a set of axioms which applied to all submarines everywhere. The duration of any voyage was governed by the amount of fuel oil that could be loaded. A submarine must put into a friendly port or rendezvous with a refueling vessel at regular intervals. Only a portion of any voyage could be spent submerged, since the submarine must surface to run its engines and re-charge the motor batteries used underwater. SSN-571 changed all this. Powered by a nuclear reactor she could remain submerged for months or years. The merchantmen and trawlers which formed the eyes and ears of Soviet naval intelligence could expect no surface radar contact with the black ship, nor agents report her arrival in fueling ports.
In the summer of 1958, while the publicly-funded British Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition struggled across the polar plateau to shore-up with 'heroic' publicity Britain's feeble claim to a slice of Antarctica, the US Navy gave Top Secret orders for the implementation of Project SUNSHINE. On July 23rd - in a brazen bid to steal the PR thunder of International Geophysical Year - Nautilus departed Pearl Harbor and made for Bering Strait, a narrow seaway that took her within a few miles of the Soviet coast. At 1115 hr. on August 3rd 1958, SUNSHINE came to fruition when Commander William R. Anderson announced his ship's arrival at 90 deg. North: "For the World, Our Country and the Navy - the North Pole." If Soviet naval analysts were aware that Nautilus had made a similar voyage in September 1957, when she had crippled her periscopes while trying to push them up through the ice, they said nothing. Their concerns were elsewhere. No longer would the Americans have to fly over the Pole from Thule Air Base in Greenland to menace the Motherland. Atomic weapons could be fired from a submarine lurking beneath the sea ice within spitting distance of Russia's northern shore. Hidden from every kind of surveillance under the floes, the need for radio communication must be her weakest link. Communication with submarines had always been problematic, but how did the Americans manage it while traveling beneath the ice, where transponder buoys couldn't be sent to the surface to act as radio relays to mission control? And how could the Soviet Navy hope to impose its will on enemy submarines hiding in silence - perhaps for years - beneath the ice where hunter-killers with side-scan sonar couldn't venture? So many pieces were missing from the strategic jigsaw that Soviet analysts were prepared to clutch even at straws when they were offered. And that's just what they did:
In 1959, the French magazine Constellation published a feature called "Thought Transmission - Weapon of War," which claimed that telepathy experiments had been conducted aboard the Nautilus during her trans-polar voyage. When this was followed in February 1960, by a more detailed treatment by Gerald Messadié in "Science et vie," (2) Soviet analysts set to work. Here is a summary of the material reported in the French press:
1. A rigidly-controlled telepathy experiment on the pattern of J.B. Rhine's card-calling ESP trials was said to have started aboard the Nautilus on July 25th 1958, and run for a period of 16 days. Since Nautilus was at the North Pole on August 3rd, this meant that the main part of the experiment had been conducted under the Arctic pack ice. The experiment was 'successful,' which meant that telepathy could convey information through pack ice, sea water and the steel hull of a submarine like nothing known on earth.
2. The 'sender' of the telepathic messages was said to have been a student called 'Smith' of Duke University, Durham, NC, where J.B. Rhine had his Parapsychology Laboratory. During the 16 days of the experiment, 'Smith' was located at the Westinghouse Laboratory, at Friendship, Maryland. The 'receiver', a navy lieutenant called 'Jones,' took take down his 'visual impressions' of the Zener card symbols sent by 'Smith' in a private cabin aboard the Nautilus 3. The officer in charge of the project was said to be one Colonel William H. Bowers, director of the Biological Department of the Air Force research institute.
4. According to the French media, President Eisenhour had received a report from the Rand Corporation in Los Angeles recommending that telepathy experiments be conducted with an especial view to communicating with submarines beneath the Arctic ice, where they were otherwise uncontactable
5. Responding to the French magazine reports, US Navy press officers denied the experiments had taken place, or that the Navy had ever been involved in telepathy experiments.
What would a Soviet naval analyst have made of this material?
A: An initial check of the open American literature routinely collected and translated into Russian would have lead him to the New York Daily Herald of November 8th, 1958, where it was reported that Westinghouse Electric Co. - a major defence contractor - had begun to study ESP using specially designed apparatus, a story that was repeated in the Newsletter of the Parapsychology Foundation of Jan-Feb 1959.
B: The experimental techniques, including the use of a card-shuffling randomizing machine at the 'sending' end, were unmistakably those developed by J.B. Rhine at his Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University, and published in numerous variations in the Journal of Parapsychology.
C: The US Navy's denial of involvement in telepathy experiments was untrue, since the small print on various papers published by Rhine's Journal acknowledged receipt of funding from the Office of Naval Research.
D: The ESP scores reported for the Nautilus experiment were much higher than the 'significant' results reported by Rhine and his co-workers in the Journal
The discrepancies presented here - the denial of Navy involvement in telepathy experiments and the exaggeration of results - would not have seemed incongruous to a Soviet intelligence officer weaned on government denial and inflated productivity figures. The difficulty in accepting the story at face value didn't depend on small details - which might simply have been misreported - but centred on the question of how any single source could have provided all the information reported in the French media. On the one hand, a source close to President Eisenhour wouldn't have bothered with nuts and bolts details of the experiment, and on the other, a low level source connected with the implementation of the project wouldn't have been privy to presidential dealings with the RAND corporation. Any scientific experiment performed aboard the Nautilus would automatically have been classified as Top Secret, yet here we have a string of names and government agencies who are all said to have been involved in it. Investigative journalism of Top Secret military projects was as impossible in the United States during the 1950s as it was in the USSR, so Soviet analysts must have wondered how normally compartmentalized information came to be amalgamated into a single source, if not by design. Certainly, it had the hallmarks typical of a CIA disinformation operation: (a) the story did contain some verifiable information touching on classified projects, but this was already available in the open literature, was trivial, out of date, or otherwise compromised. (b) The story was floated in a major newspaper outside the United States. (c) The mechanism by which the foreign news organizations obtained the story was impossible to establish. (d) The configuration of story elements suggests the pattern of organized deception routinely employed by Western intelligence agencies to draw attention away from classified projects - for example, during WW II the British government had floated stories about night fighter pilots eating prodigious quantities of carrots to enhance their night vision, in order to conceal the fact that night fighters were now equipped with radar that could see in the dark. Viewed from this perspective, Soviet analysts must have suspected that the telepathy story was an attempt to draw attention away from some new American method of detecting Soviet submarines, the hydrophone belts then being laid across the North Atlantic, new electronic surveillance equipment aboard the U-2 spy plane, or the latest defector-in-place providing the US with information about Soviet submarine movements.
Despite the obvious weaknesses in the Nautilus story, the Soviets decided to take it seriously. Their numerous spies throughout the western scientific and intelligence communities may have given them an inkling that the Nautilus story had a long, weird, and secret pedigree that leant weight to its general thesis even if the tale - in this particular telling - was false:
George Hober Estabrooks (b. 1895) was a founding father of American parapsychology. His early statistical experiments with telepathy ( 3) in the 1920s laid the foundations on which J.B. Rhine was to build his famous career in the following decades. 'Esty' Estabrooks had been a Rhodes Scholar who took his Ph.D. at Harvard under Gardner Murphy, an influential parapsychologist who would later become president of the American Society for Psychical Research. In 1939 Estabrooks was a psychology professor at Colgate College at Hamilton, Upper State New York, where his main interests were hypnosis and psychical research. As war loomed, Estabrooks tried to interest the US intelligence community in the military applications of hypnosis and psychical research. His personal papers, unresearched and unpublished, fill 17 boxes at Colgate College, which has preserved the very document needed to enlarge our knowledge of the Nautilus affair: On July 12 1939, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote the following letter on FBI notepaper:
Dear Dr. Estabrooks,
permit me to acknowledge receipt of your letters of June 19th and 27th and July 6th, 1939. I read with great interest your hypothesis concerning the sinking of submarines. I realize of course that you are only suggesting things that could conceivably happen upon the basis of your experiments and the experiments of others and that you are not suggesting that such a situation did occur in any of the recent submarine disasters... Yours truly, J. Edgar Hoover."
To put Hoover's letter in context, here's the data on 'recent submarine disasters' of the late 1930s:
1938: USS Snapper (SS-185) flooded through main induction valve during an emergency dive. She took on water but managed to recover.
May 23, 1939: USS Squalus (SS-192) sank during sea trials. 26 out of 59 hands lost. During salvage investigations, rags were found to have prevented the main induction valve from closing.
So: Sabotage was suspected! Estabrooks had warned Hoover that "loyal" Americans, unwittingly hypnotized by Nazi agents, could have sabotaged the submarines on the activation of a post-hypnotic suggestion, perhaps even years after the original hypnosis. A hypnotically conditioned saboteur would have no conscious idea that he was a traitor, nor any conscious memory of his treasonous acts. Believing himself to be innocent, he would be immune to all normal methods of interrogation. The only method of breaching hypnotic amnesia was by re-hypnotizing the subject, for which purpose 'Esty' would place himself at the disposal of the intelligence community. After Pearl Harbor, Estabrooks worked as an advisor on the offensive uses of hypnosis and parapsychology to the War Department. (4) He gave presentations and seminars for FBI and service psychological warfare staff, enjoyed continuing correspondence with J. Edgar Hoover, and tried to sell his idea to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Estabrooks conceded that further research was necessary before he could be absolutely certain that a hypnotized subject would commit murder at the suggestion of the hypnotist. Reluctant to proceed with such an experiment without higher approval, Estabrooks looked to OSS to relieve him of personal responsibility: "Any 'accidents' that might occur during the experiments will simply be charged to profit and loss, a very trifling portion of that enormous wastage in human life which is part and parcel of war." (5) Despite this cold-blooded promotion, Estabrooks' ideas were never taken as seriously as he hoped, perhaps because he believed in human survival of bodily death - in a word, he was a spiritualist. ( 6) Years later, during the Cold War, the CIA would find a use even for this, (see Chapter 7 'Dealings with the Dead') but for the time being, Estabrooks was a shade too weird to be taken seriously. In 1945, at the war's end, he teamed up with ghost writer Richard Lockridge (b.1898) to publicize his ideas in the form of a novel. (7) "Death in the Mind" begins with a series of treacherous acts committed by loyal Americans against their own side. A submarine commander torpedoes an American battleship, and even the glamorous heroine starts behaving unpatriotically out of character. Secret Agent Johnny Evans discovers that German agents have been hypnotizing American citizens and conditioning them to obey the Nazi will. Evans first devises effective counter-measures, and then turns the tables on the Nazis by using hypnosis as a weapon against them. When the heroine has moral qualms and tells Evans that 'doing things to people's minds... is a loathsome way to fight', Johnny shares her bed but not her ethical doubt. He launches a hypnotic offensive against the Germans "to tamper with their minds; Make them traitors; Make them work for us."
The day had not yet come when Estabrooks' 'terminal experiments' would be welcomed with open arms by the CIA. We'll leave Secret Agent Johnny Evans to sort out the Nazis, while Estabrooks moves forward to 1959 and the Cold War against Communism. Still at Colgate College, and still in regular contact with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, (8) he is now a senior consultant on hypnotic mind control and parapsychology to the CIA. Under Project MKULTRA, the Johnny Evans concept is taken so seriously that more than $10,000,000 is spent on mind control research in the decade 1953-1963. On October 15th 1959, just eighteen days after the end of Soviet premier Nikita Kruschev's good-will mission to the United States, "intentional sabotage" was alleged to have been found in the electrical system of the Nautilus. The sabotage of the Nautilus - today a floating public shrine to its own memory - was something akin to twisting the crown jewels out of shape, and must have delighted those who felt the Kruschev visit had made too favourable an impression on the American people. The telepathy story was shortly to break in the French press, and the submarine was lying in Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, Kittery, Maine, undergoing her first complete overhaul, when the evil communist plot is supposed to have occurred. A list of suspects would have to include not only the skeleton crew assigned to the ship during her re-fit, but also the fitters and technicians who replaced the reactor's second fuel core. The risk that the saboteur might subsequently be able to destroy the vessel or even turn its nuclear weapons against the United States was a possibility too terrible to contemplate. The search for the perpetrator would have to go far beyond any normal FBI investigation, deep into the unconscious terrain charted by Estabrooks. A Soviet intelligence analyst, perceiving these elements in the background of the Nautilus story, and recalling that Estabrooks was as well-known as a telepathy researcher as he was a theorist of hypnotism, would certainly have decided to delve deeper.
Many years after the fact, J.G. Pratt, a CIA contractor as we shall see, would describe the Nautilus telepathy story as 'a hoax' (9) without troubling to say how he formed this opinion. Since the French reports contained rather more fine detail about obscure research in a foreign country than a 'hoaxing' journalist would be likely to put together in the 1950s, I'll conjecture that the story was floated by the CIA for the following advantages (a) To afford deceptive protection for the growing fields of hydrophones planted across the North Atlantic, by providing an alternative explanation of how the Americans always seemed to know where to look for Soviet submarines (b) To conceal the emerging Very Low Frequency (VLF) radio technology, which made it possible to send messages to a submarine under water. They had done it by telepathy! (c) To play upon the perceived 'superstitious peasant' characteristics of the Russians creating fear and paranoia, as was done later with phony UFOs projected over China. (d) To tie up Soviet scientific resources in useless research.
The truth of the matter may never be known, but wait for the irony in the tail of this chapter!
Despite the obvious weakness of the Nautilus news story, the Russians decided to act. The editors of "Znaniye-Sila" were pumped up, and an article by Gleb Anfilov asked what Soviet science was doing to meet the American telepathic threat. (10) Parapsychology had not fared well in the USSR, and the official "Bol'shaya sovetskaya entsiklopediya" of 1956 described telepathy as an "anti-scientific idealist fiction." (11) There being no 'parapsychologists' as such, the whole matter was placed in the hands of Dr. Leonid L. Vasil'yev, (1891- 1966) who in Pratt's version of the story, is supposed to have received the Nautilus press clippings from a parapsychologist called Kherumain at the Institut Metapsychique International (IMI) France. (This claim is quite unnecessary to explain the development of Soviet interest in the story, since the Soviet naval attache in Paris would have routinely forwarded ALL press clippings related to nuclear submarines to Moscow.)
Vasil'yev concluded that the American "experiments showed it was possible to communicate by telepathy through sea water and the metal hull of a submarine." (12) Professor Vasil'yev was Chairman of Physiology at Leningrad University, and a holder of the Lenin Prize. He was also the leading - and perhaps only - Soviet authority on telepathy, which he viewed from the Marxist position of dialectical materialism. As such, he rejected 'Extra-Sensory Perception' and "any other superstitious notions of the soul like those pushed in capitalist countries by rabid idealists..." (13) He advised his comrades that "Although parapsychology doesn't fit well with what has already been established in science, dialectical materialists should not dismiss it, or ignore it, out of hand. If we reject sustained experimental verification of these phenomena, we re-arm the idealists and so assist them in deepening the roots of superstition." (14)
The opening insults in this political posturing began on the American side in 1947, when parapsychologist Joseph Banks Rhine (1895-1980) summed up the telepathy research he took over from Estabrooks by claiming that "Materialism had been successfully challenged." (15) "War plans," he wrote, "and crafty designs of any kind, anywhere in the world, could be watched and revealed... Every secret weapon and scheming strategy would be subject to exposure... So far the uses of ESP considered have been defensive ones. But the contribution of reliable psi capacities to more positive goals would equal its protective value." (16) This battle cry took quite some time before it reached the hearts and wallets of the fund-holders for whom it was undoubtedly intended. Like Estabrooks, Rhine would have to wait for the CIA's obsession with mind control experiments to develop before the golden goose would lay its eggs on his laboratory bench. The 1949 show trial of Josef Cardinal Mindszenty in Hungary is suggested by John Marks as the beginning of this obsession. "With a glazed look in his eyes, Mindszenty confessed to crimes of treason he apparently did not commit... (This) and a string of postwar trials in other Eastern European countries seemed staged, eerie, and unreal. CIA men felt they had to know how the Communists had rendered the defendants zombie-like... a memo speculated that the communist authorities had used hypnosis." (17)
A funding proposal dated Jan 7, 1952 is the first document I have been able to locate which links Rhine and his co-workers to the CIA.
"There are two main lines of research that hold specific promise and need further development with a view to application in the intelligence project... The two special projects on investigation that ought to be pushed in the interest of the project under discussion are, first, the search for and development of exceptionally gifted individuals who can approximate perfect success in ESP test performance, and, second, in the statistical concentration of scattered ESP performance so as to enable an ultimately perfect reliability of application...
"We have something definite to go in each case, and it is with this is mind that we are inclined to make a serious effort to push the research in the direction of reliable application to the practical problem of intelligence..."
"It will be seen that if a subject under controlled test conditions can identify the order of a deck of cards several hundred yards away in another building, or can 'identify' the thought of another person several hundred miles away, the adaptation to the practical requirements for obtaining secret information should not give serious difficulty....
"If we were to undertake to push this research as far and as fast as we can reasonably do in the direction of practical application to the problems of intelligence, it would be necessary to be exceedingly careful about thorough cloaking of the undertaking. I should not want anyone here in the Parapsychology Laboratory except Louisa E. Rhine and Jospeh G. Pratt to know about it. We are all three cleared for security purposes to the level of 'Secret.' I would perhaps feel bound to have confidential discussion on the matter with J.A Greenwood and T.N.E. Greville. Funds necessary for the support of the work would understandably carry no identification and raise no questions... "The total salary requirement for these five people would be between $22,500 and $25,000. In order to take advantage of mechanical aid in the statistical work, (Rhine either means calculating machines, or the card-shuffling and dice-throwing randomizing machines which had to be specially built - VP) and such other matters as traveling expenses, it would be advisable to add $5,000 as a conservative estimate. I think $30,000 would be well spent on the first year...
"I might add that, while the Russians have both officially and through their leading psychologists disapproved of our kind of work, as they would have to do because of the philosophy of Marxian materialism, I have seen at least one reference to the fact that they have done experiments on our lines, giving a materialist interpretation. If you can give me any information on this, I would appreciate it. Sometime we might discuss what the Nazis undertook to do... J.B. Rhine, January 7th, 1952." (18)
In the wake of the Nautilus affair, the Soviet "materialists" re-read Rhine's published work, and found their eyes opened wide to American intentions for ESP: "War plans, and crafty designs of any kind, anywhere in the world, could be watched and revealed." So there it was! Rhine was shamelessly prostituting his research to the US imperialist war mongers! When the Soviet call to action led to a symposium at Leningrad in 1960, Professor Vasil'yev told his comrades that "The discovery of the energy behind telepathy will be as important as the discovery of atomic energy!" Needless to say, the direction research would take was almost a foregone conclusion, since ideas of 'soul,' 'spirit,' and 'extra-sensory perception,' had been politically excluded in advance. A telepathy laboratory under Vasil'yev's direction was set up almost overnight at the Institute of Physiology in the Biology Department at Leningrad University to investigate those possibilities that were left. Soviet scientists were naturally aware that only radio waves of Very Low Frequency could penetrate sea water to be picked up by submarines, but reception inside a submarine, a sealed metal container, was a different matter. It was quickly established that telepathic subjects could still function inside a metal enclosure known as a Faraday Cage, which, for practical purposes, excludes all radio waves except those of Extra Low Frequency (ELF) - waves even longer than the VLF band used in normal communication with submarines. Since, as Rhine pointed out in his funding proposal to the CIA, the communist philosophy "compelled" the Soviet scientists to believe that telepathy was mediated by electromagnetic waves - of which only the Extra Low Frequencies could penetrate submarines and Faraday Cages - they were forced to embrace what has since become known as "the ELF hypothesis." Thus Soviet telepathy research was almost immediately taken out of the hands of psychologists and redefined as a problem of radio engineering, 'hard' applied science that readily attracted funds and military interest.
In June 1962, the Tourist Department of the KGB approved an entry visa to Czechoslavakia for Dr. Joseph Gaither Pratt (b. 1910) Rhine's chief collaborator with 'Secret' clearance. Dr. Milan Ryzl, in Prague, had reported 'highly significant ESP results obtained by a subject (Pavel Stepanek) who had been trained through hypnosis.' Pratt's mission in Czechoslavakia was to find out "whether the control the subject had achieved over his ESP ability would enable him to demonstrate it before a visiting investigator."(19)
Stepanek was indeed able to 'demonstrate ESP on demand,' but whether the US Office of Naval Research who paid Pratt's traveling expenses (20) felt their money was well spent is unknown. Others watching the Ryzl-Pratt experiments certainly thought so. Subsequent Soviet attempts to telepathically manipulate hypnotically prepared subjects standing in as submariners must rate as classics of Cold War endeavour. On May 31st, 1966, subjects were hypnotized by Dr. V.L. Raykov, and placed inside a Faraday Cage to simulate the electromagnetic shielding provided by the hull of a submarine. The hypnotized subjects were then awoken at an arbitrary time by "a mental order" from Dr. Raykov, who was outside the shield in a separate room. (21) The probability of the subject awakening within a few moments of Raykov's 'mental order' was compared with the probability that he would have awoken at that time anyway, and the chance of random coincidence was worked out as lying between 1 in 100,000 and 1 in 100,000,000. Putting two and two together, we see the Soviets attempting to fulfill the Estabrooks scenario. A previously hypnotized subject aboard a submarine is given a post-hypnotic suggestion to perform a certain action when 'activated' by a telepathic command from elsewhere. He might then photograph secret material, tamper with nuclear weapons, make 'mistakes' with reactor controls, murder the captain, or anything else the hypnotist had previously suggested to him. It was a bold attempt to take the American nightmare of the 'Manchurian Candidate' one step further by adding telepathic remote control.
A thorough investigation of long distance telepathy formed the second element of Soviet strategy. While American researchers used the abstract symbols on Zener Cards in their ESP tests, Soviet experimenters never lost sight of their primary purpose. The objects to be transmitted were specially chosen by a commission. In Leningrad, biophysicists Yuri. I. Kamenskiy, and A.I. Monin took turns in sending images of the chosen objects to Karl Nikolayev, a professional actor, 600 km. away in Moscow. In the first series on April 21st, 1966, the objects included a screwdriver. In the Moscow-Novosibirsk trials (3000km) on April 27th, 1966, a steel spring was selected, (22) and for the second Leningrad-Moscow series on January 27th, 1967, one of the objects was a pair of dividers, used at sea for taking position information from navigational charts - such as those used in a 1960s submarine. When Monin pricked his fingers with the dividers in Leningrad, Karl Nikolayev in Moscow was able to report the following: "Metallic sheen, thin, chrome-plated rod - smooth surface - the rod is split - a pair of thin scissors or dividers." (23) The five objects were 'transmitted' for 4-5 minutes each at times arbitrarily selected in Leningrad. Nonetheless, Nikolayev, in Moscow, was able to record the start and stop of each transmission with an error less than one minute. True to its time, the experiment contained a hidden Cold War twist. In the same Leningrad building as Monin and Kamenskiy, but on a different floor, V.A. Milodan was to act as a telepathic eavesdropper and intercept the out-going messages to Moscow. He not only identified two of the five objects, but was able to correctly record the beginning and end of each telepathy transmission within an accuracy of one minute.
Further experiments by the Bioinformation Department of the Moscow Section of the Science-Technical Society of Radio Engineering and Telecommunications focused on sending code groups from Moscow to Tomsk, a distance of 3000 km. A statistical communication system was devised so that no single error could corrupt the message. A meaning based on Morse Code was given to each of seven images to be transmitted in a series. If the image of a comb predominated in a series, that represented a dash, while the image of a drinking glass denoted a dot. Over a period of four days, with one transmission a day, the word TEET (24) was successfully received in Tomsk. It was the first telepathic transmission of a cipher group in human history. Telepathic communication with submerged submarines was now possible.
If the Nautilus story had begun as a CIA hoax to tie up Soviet scientific resources in a midden of nonsense, it was a hoax that misfired on its perpetrators, forcing them to repeat the very experiments they had first fobbed off on the Russians. By the early 1970s, Soviet paranormal research had advanced so far beyond the days of card-shuffling machines - where it had more or less stayed in the United States - that the DIA became gravely concerned, and warned that paranormal attacks might be 'targeted against the US or allied personnel in nuclear missile silos... by telepathic means... The potential applications of focusing mental influences on an enemy through hypnotic telepathy surely have occurred to the Soviets." (25) Concluding in true 'missile gap' style that "Soviet knowledge in this area is superior to that of the US," the DIA report lead - via Congressional concern - to a sudden resurrection of the scattered and erratic paranormal research performed under MKULTRA. Following the Soviet example, the core research was largely taken out of the hands of parapsychologists and given to physicists and radio engineers as a problem of applied science.
In 1976, a physicist at the USAF Foreign Technology Division decided to replicate the 'Soviet submarine experiments' (sic) and test the "materialist" hypothesis that telepathy was mediated by ELF waves. Dale Graff seems to have had a more than professional interest in his subject, as he taught parapsychology at a local community college in his spare time, and ran an informal Remote Viewing group at Wright-Patterson AFB where he was stationed. In late 1976, Graff awarded a contract to Puthoff's Radio Physics Laboratory at SRI, where the research was fitted in around the Remote Viewing studies conducted there for the CIA and other defense/intelligence clients since 1973. Use of a submarine was obtained through the help of Stephan Schwartz, (26) a former naval officer, who is now a research associate of Edwin May's Cognitive Sciences Laboratory, a sometime CIA parapsychology contractor. In July 1977, nineteen years after the Nautilus thrust her black snout through the ice at the North Pole, the US intelligence community conducted its own submarine telepathy trials. We might conclude that the experiment hadn't been done before, but for the sad fact that parapsychology is the only science that never advances. Each new generation of parapsychologists finds the conclusions of its predecessors so unsound and unbelievable that the house of cards must be built afresh from the bottom. This time a new variable was introduced into the experiment. There was no publicity.
Author's Note: The investigation of government agencies who tell lies on a daily basis is fraught with difficulty, and our knowledge of their activities is always flawed and incomplete. Readers able to supplement or correct this account of the Nautilus affair by reference to primary documents and sources are urged to contact me by email at vaughanpurvis@usa.net. Full acknowledgment will be given in any subsequent revised edition.
http://www.netcomuk.co.uk/~vpurvis/paranormal.html
UK Copyright Vaughan Purvis 1997
Section 77 UK Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 Moral Rights asserted.
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