One of the most fascinating books that I’ve ever read is Psychic Warrior: Inside the CIA’s Stargate Program, The True Story of a Soldier’s Espionage and Awakening (St. Martin’s Press) by Dr. David Morehouse.
It’s about the US military’s use of remote viewing - psychic travel, if you will.
The book is either the most amazing non-fiction book that I’ve ever read, or its one of the finest works of fiction and is begging to be made into a movie.
My question: Has the US military ever used “remote viewing” or “psychic espionage?”
I recommend you check out the works of Russell Targ who worked at the Stanford Research Institute and was involvd with their Remote Viewing and other psychic experiments. That should answer some of your questions.
SCANATE (U.S.) The initial name for the Central Intelligence Agency project which uses a team of psychics to gather intelligence. This program of “remote imaging” began in the early 1980s and was initially based at Fort Meade, Maryland. This group, and the intelligence it produced was later called GRILL FLAME, CENTER LANE, SUNSTREAK and STARGATE.
GRILL FLAME (U.S. 84) A team of psychics used by the Central Intelligence Agency to “remotely view” areas of interest to the United States. See SCANATE, CENTER LANE, STARGATE, and SUNSTREAK.
STARGATE (U.S.) One of a series of names for a Central Intelligence Agency program which used psychics to develop intelligence through “remote viewing.” See GRILL FLAME, CENTER LANE and SUNSTREAK.
SUNSTREAK (U.S.) The name given in the early 1990s to a team of psychics maintained by the Central Intelligence Agency to “remotely view” areas of interest to the United States. This term replaced the earlier terms CENTER LANE, GRILL FLAME and SCANATE.
From what I understand, the CIA concluded over a decade ago that there was no accountable benefit from the use of remote viewers.
You’ve got to give them credit for not rejecting the idea a priori, and testing for themselves to see if there was anything to the use of the paranormal.
…or they could have just called on James Randi for his advice.
Have some military bodies funded research into so-called remote viewing? Yes.
Have some acadmic research bodies also funded research into so-called remote viewing? Yes. Targ and Puthoff are among those who have conducted such research.
Is there any good reason or good evidence to believe that anyone has actually demonstrated a psychic gift that can be characterised as remote viewing? No.
Read the sources and the literature for the fine details.
Basically, research into this psychic stuff always come down to the same two points:
If you make the experiment rather lax, you get some hits and some results that seem to justify your grant, but you haven’t really proved anything (because the experiment is or was lax). If you run a more strictly controlled experiment, you don’t get results.
If you run enough experiments, over a long enough period of time, with enough people, then you end up with… one hell of a pile of statistics. People can then argue over the correct interpretation (and “meta-analysis”) of these stats until hell freezes over. Which is what keeps the whole circus going.
And a quick story, which you can file under 'Don’t believe everything you see in the media…". A major TV show over here (UK) flew a remote viewer over from America to do a test. I won’t name him, but he was well-known at the time for his alleged prowess in this field. Anyway, they did the test (someone else wandered off around London and the remote viewer came up with some descriptions that could be interpreted to fit his location), and the results looked spookily good enough to make a nice item for the show. Nobody bothered to point out how much latitude there was for interpretation, how sloppy the experiment was, that a single result doesn’t prove much of anything, or to see whether a control would do just as well by guessing.
Well, they flew him over a second time for a follow-up experiment. He failed completely. What did they do? They simply forgot about it and never broadcast that item. I only even know that it happened because I know the producer of the show. So when the psychic gets lucky… it gets broadcast and used as a stick to hit skeptics with. When the psychic draws a blank, that’s not good telly so it gets dropped and quietly forgotten.
Are there any documented instances of valid military intelligence (information that later checked out based on other sources) being acquired through RV?
I’m not sure of any documentation, but here’s some points of note regarding psychic claims…
Psychics make LOTS of predictions and statements. LOTS and LOTS. They then zero in on and advertise those few true “hits,” while ignoring all the misses. Whenever you hear of a psychic helping with a missing child case, what you never hear about were all the instances where the authorities were wasting time chasing all the red herrings and dead ends also provided by the psychic. So, if there actually IS a documented “hit” for military intelligence by a pyschic, it must be critically balanced by all of that psychic’s misses.
No psychic has ever held up to rigorous scientific testing. In almost all cases I’ve read about that were tested (thanks to CSICOP) the best results from a psychic were no better than what you would expect from random guessing.
In order for psychics to be useful for intelligence gathering, whether for finding missing children or spies or WMDs, they need to be reliable and accurate and be consistent with accurate information. Psychics simply do not fit that description.
One thing not to miss about the USA’s funding, and I think this is really the critical peice: the “the psychic warfare gap” :
About 1970 the CIA confirmed that the USSR was spending millions upon millions of rubles on “psychic research”**. This is why the U.S. began to fund this stuff, not because of academic research or “breakthroughs” – but because the USSR was doing it and they were afraid of being left behind.
** From this site which does a nice job (tho the owner believes fully in RV) - it also has the CIA statements linked
------QUOTE--------------
However, the Soviets were not conducting research into what the West means by “psychic research.” The term for their general concept of the research was “psychotronics.”
This was a Soviet neologism, and English has no near equivalent. So reporters glibly assumed that psychotronics and psychic stuff amounted to the same thing.
A clarification is, therefore, necessary. The nearest English equivalent is “mind (psycho) energy applications (-tronics),” with emphasis on “applications.”
The new English equivalent became “psychoenergetics,” but which term does not convey “applications.” “Applied psychoenergetics” would be more accurate.
