“Rational or irrational,” says Green, “two nuclear scientists who worked on U.S. nuclear weapons programs” at Livermore drew their own conclusion. “As far as I know, two of the Livermore scientists quit,” he says. It was the Thomas theorem in action: if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. The scientists had apparently perceived the incidents to be some kind of omen or message “that they were not supposed to work on nuclear weapons development anymore,” says Green.
The psychic research program at SRI was falling apart. Pat Price told Puthoff and Targ it was time to say good-bye. He had decided to make real-world use of his extrasensory talents, he said, and he’d been offered a stake in a West Virginia mining company searching for coal veins. His plan had always been to make a small fortune using his extrasensory abilities and then retire. What Price did not tell Puthoff and Targ, but what declassified documents reveal, was that he’d been hired away from SRI by the CIA. “To achieve better security,” states one memo, “all the operations-oriented testing with the contractor [i.e., SRI] was stopped, and a personal service contract with Price was started.” Price now worked directly for the Agency, with a personal handler in Washington, D.C. What Pat Price did for the CIA remains a mystery; these files have never been declassified despite multiple FOIA requests.
We do know that the partnership between the CIA and Price had a tragic ending. In early July 1975, Price was in Washington, meeting with his handler, when he reached out and made contact with old friends. According to both Hal Puthoff and Kit Green, Price told these friends he’d soon be spending a few days gambling in Las Vegas and suggested that they meet him there. They agreed. On July 14, Price checked into the Stardust Hotel. Later that evening, he had dinner with the two friends in the hotel restaurant. The meal was cut short when Price announced he didn’t feel well and was heading up to his room for a rest. When he didn’t return, his friends went to his room to check on him. They found him on the bed, in cardiac arrest.
Paramedics were called to the scene. EMTs tried to resuscitate him, but his heart did not respond to defibrillators. Pat Price was rushed to the emergency room, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. Kit Green says he traveled to Las Vegas to review the autopsy report.
“There was no report,” remembers Green, “because no autopsy was performed.” The coroner said a man had shown up with a briefcase full of Price’s medical records and engaged hospital officials in a discussion, then waived the autopsy requirement on the grounds that Price had died of a heart attack.
At SRI, all kinds of rumors began to spread among the scientists and the psychics, including talk that Pat Price might have been killed. Possible assassins included the KGB, the CIA, even the Church of Scientology. In 1972, the Army’s Medical Intelligence Office had warned that the KGB “was developing a way to use psychokinesis to stop the human heart.” As for the CIA, recent Church Committee congressional hearings had revealed that Agency engineers had created a “heart attack gun” capable of shooting a poison pellet into a victim whose death would appear to have been a heart attack. According to Jacques Vallée, when the FBI learned that Price was a Scientologist, the church became a suspect. “After a raid against the offices of the Church of Scientology in Los Angeles, the FBI came to believe (falsely?) that Price was used by the Scientologists as a spy against the CIA,” Vallée wrote in his journal.
In a move to disassociate itself from additional controversy, the CIA withdrew from its lead position in classified anomalous mental phenomena research. Pat Price was dead. Ingo Swann was in New York. Uri Geller was thought to be working for Mossad. The fate of the SRI program was up in the air. A Cold War chill set in. Was this the end of U.S. government phenomena programs, or a new beginning?
CHAPTER TWELVE
Submarines
The question that has bedeviled ESP practitioners and purveyors since time immemorial has always been, What is the source of anomalous mental phenomena? For thousands of years, from the ancient texts of the Assyrians circa 2400 BC, to the eighteenth-century writings of theologian and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, one answer was God, a supernatural being. Then, roughly 150 years ago, with the development of a theory to explain electromagnetic waves (formed when an electric field couples with a magnetic field), the focus turned to the electromagnetic spectrum as the possible source of ESP. The idea was that telepathy was a kind of mental radio. This gave way to new research fields.
The radio analogy was a suitable metaphor and relatively easy to comprehend. With Heinrich Hertz proving the existence of radio waves, beginning in 1886, and the sending and receiving of the first radio signal, by Guglielmo Marconi nine years later, radio waves were understood to be a way in which information could be carried across space. When radio waves strike an electrical conductor, as in a mast at a broadcasting station or an antenna on a car, the information that originated at the distant place is transformed back into its original form and received locally. In 1930 the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Upton Sinclair, an enthusiast of psychic functioning, wrote a book about telepathy experiments he had conducted with his psychic wife and called it Mental Radio. The information contained in the book, as well as the subject of ESP in general, so fascinated Albert Einstein that he wrote a preface to Mental Radio for the German edition. Over the next three decades, and with the discovery and development of radar, microwave ovens, and space communications, the idea that the electromagnetic spectrum might explain anomalous mental phenomena widened in theoretical possibility.
The electromagnetic spectrum is broad in scope, with visible light waves the only electromagnetic waves the human eye can see. At one end there are the extremely high frequency (EHF) waves, as in ultraviolet rays, X-rays, and gamma rays. In the middle range are visible light waves, infrared waves, and microwaves. At the low end of the spectrum there are radio waves and extremely low frequency (ELF) waves. The quest to locate ESP’s possible electromagnetic channel began with the process of elimination. Visible light is easily removed as a possible channel, since light waves can’t pass through objects or barriers such as a wall or a door. X-rays can also be stopped by barriers, as evidenced in the lead aprons humans must wear around medical X-ray machines.
Back in the late 1940s, to block the middle-range electromagnetic frequencies, including radio and microwave, Andrija Puharich and Jack Hammond built a Faraday cage. They placed psychics inside it and did not find degradation of what they believed was psychic functioning, thereby ruling out lower-frequency elements of the spectrum as a carrier. The only electromagnetic fields a Faraday cage doesn’t block are extremely low frequency waves, or ELF waves—waves that are literally thousands of miles long (10,000 to 100,000 kilometers). One of the only known ways to test ELF waves is in very deep water, and for that a scientist would need a submarine. Unless the scientist had access to a privately owned submarine, this meant that the U.S. Navy would have to be involved in such tests.
The submarine is one of the most technologically advanced machines in the U.S. military. Its computer technology, navigation systems, precision weapon systems, atmosphere regeneration capacity, and nuclear power systems make it a highly classified war machine. Ever on the move, submarines are the best defense against a nuclear first strike. They are the key to Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD. But American submarines must stay deeply submerged so that Soviet satellites cannot detect the heat bloom from their nuclear propulsion systems. When it’s far below the surface, a submarine is unable to receive ordinary radio signals. In the 1950s, ELF was the only known bandwidth on the electromagnetic spectrum capable of penetrating hundreds of meters of seawater. Because an ELF message is usually just one or two characters in length, the Navy can use ELF to signal a submarine to come closer to the surface, where it can receive a longer message broadcast by other means. These details remain highly classified.
As is the reality across all the military services, the overwhelming majority of Navy officials considered ESP to be quackery. But in the
early 1970s, a minority group showed interest in ESP as a possible backup means of communication in a postnuclear strike environment. Among them was a young scientist named Stephan Schwartz, who served as a special assistant for research and analysis to Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Elmo Zumwalt. It was in this capacity, starting in 1971, that Schwartz was briefed on the Navy’s telepathy studies. He also became familiar with Soviet efforts. One ESP experiment believed to have been conducted by the Russians around 1956 stood out. According to a Defense Department analysis of the test, it involved a mother rabbit, her newborn litter, a submerged Soviet submarine, and a research station on shore. A military scientist named Pavel Naumov was in charge. “Soviet scientists placed the baby rabbits aboard the submarine. They kept the mother rabbit in a laboratory on shore where they implanted electrodes in her brain. When the submarine was submerged, assistants [in the submarine] killed the [baby] rabbits one by one. At each precise moment of death the mother rabbit’s brain produced detectable and recordable reactions.”
If the results of the experiment were to be believed, then ELF might be the ESP information carrier channel. In his capacity as special assistant to Admiral Zumwalt, Schwartz considered proposing an experiment. Mindful that most in the military establishment considered ESP pseudoscience, “I waited for an opportune moment,” Schwartz explained in 2015. “While traveling in an aircraft to the Groton naval base, I found myself alone with Admiral Hyman Rickover.” Admiral Rickover was Zumwalt’s powerful colleague, a man referred to in history books as the father of the nuclear navy. “Rickover was an out-of-the-box thinker and an engineer,” which meant he might be open to the idea of ESP, Schwartz surmised. “I asked him if he would let me put a distant viewer [i.e., a psychic] aboard one of the Boomers [submarines] on its sea trials,” remembers Schwartz. “He thought about it for a while but ultimately said no, for fear the media would hear about it.”
In 1975, Schwartz left the Navy for private enterprise. His enthusiasm for psychic research had eclipsed any desire for a naval career. He accepted a fellowship with the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles, where he would research and write books about extrasensory perception. He could not have foreseen that soon he would find himself in a submerged submarine with a psychic after all.
In Menlo Park, Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ struggled to keep their psychic research program at SRI afloat. With their grant from the CIA terminated, they looked to the Navy as a potential client. By 1975, the Navy had spent roughly $125 million researching ELF. Puthoff and Targ proposed that they research the relationship, if any, between ELF and ESP. In 1976, the Naval Electronics Systems Command awarded them an $87,000 contract for “an investigation of the ability of certain individuals to perceive remote faint electromagnetic stimuli at a non-cognitive level of awareness.” To avoid drawing attention to the controversial secret work, Puthoff and Targ discreetly titled their project “Sensing of Remote EM Sources (Physiological Correlates).” But during a briefing at the Pentagon, the Navy official in charge was not so tactful. He titled the SRI project “ELF and Mind Control.” The sensational title was somehow leaked to the Washington Post.
The Post story was written by John L. Wilhelm, a skeptic and critic of all things having to do with extrasensory perception. One part of the exposé centered on the Navy’s top scientist, Samuel Koslov. In an interview with Wilhelm, Koslov said he was outraged to learn about the SRI project. “As the briefer flashed his chart onto the screen and began to speak, Koslov stormily interrupted, ‘What the hell is that about?’” wrote Wilhelm. “Among the glowing words on the projected chart, the section describing SRI’s work was labeled, ‘ELF AND MIND CONTROL.’”
Koslov insisted to Wilhelm that he had demanded that the SRI investigations stop at once, that he had canceled “$35,000 in Navy funds slated for more remote viewing work.” He was “really upset,” Koslov lamented. “We [Koslov’s emphasis] do not fund programs in this area. If you ask me, ‘Do you think it’s a pile of crap?’ I do, and you can quote me.” He assured Wilhelm that the Navy “is simply out of this business. I don’t believe it’s the function of the military to support parapsychology research.” Koslov was using semantics to conceal the truth. In the Soviet Union, parapsychology researchers grouped ESP, PK, and electromagnetic weapons together, albeit under different names. (ESP, or mental telepathy, was called “long-distance biological signal transmission”; psychokinesis was “non-ionizing, in particular electromagnetic, emissions from humans”; electromagnetic weapons were called “the generation of high-penetrating emission of non-biological origin.”) Following the unwritten rules of the Cold War arms race, which required each side to mirror the other side’s weapons systems, these seemingly disparate “technologies” were part of the same programs, at least for now. As one of the lead scientists on Project Pandora, the classified, multiservice effort to duplicate the electromagnetic weapon called the Moscow Signal, Dr. Koslov was most certainly engaged in this research. As a countermeasure to the microwave-beam weapon being aimed at U.S. embassy personnel in Moscow, Samuel Koslov worked on the ARPA-led program. Initially, scientists beamed electromagnetic signals at monkeys in an anechoic chamber. Later they beamed these signals at unwitting sailors stationed in a submarine at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard.
In 1977, when the Post article was published, Samuel Koslov had a public relations nightmare on his hands. The nefarious goings-on surrounding the Moscow Signal and Project Pandora had only recently become public. The government had succeeded in keeping the programs secret, from the discovery of the Moscow Signal in 1962 until February 1976, when the Los Angeles Times broke the story. The unraveling had begun in 1973, when a new and more powerful set of Soviet microwave beams were picked up by the CIA in Moscow. Like the original Moscow Signal, these new electromagnetic weapons were aimed at the upper floors of the embassy, where the ambassador and top intelligence officials had their offices.
Robert M. Gates, former director of Central Intelligence, revealed the details in his 1997 memoir, From the Shadows. “Because of their duration and peculiar characteristics they were regarded as posing a greater health hazard. We knew that these signals were directional microwave beams—ultra-and super-high frequency radiowaves—coming from transmitters located in the vicinity of the embassy,” Gates wrote. The CIA code-named this signal MUTS-2, the second Moscow Unidentified Technical Signal.
Two years passed. In July 1975, the CIA sent its specialist on biological and health effects of non-ionizing radiation, Donald A. Myers, to Moscow to work, in secret with State Department officials; employees were still in the dark. Only after the Soviets installed a second microwave transmitter on top of a building south of the embassy did the CIA decide to inform the U.S. ambassador and his staff. “I have been briefed on the implications that the MUTS and MUTS-2 signals are a possible cause of recent health problems of the embassy,” then CIA director William Colby wrote to the ambassador. “The increased probability of health injuries to personnel at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow [redacted] warrant our immediate attention.” The signal was getting more potent.
Finally, fourteen years after its discovery, in January 1976, U.S. ambassador Walter Stoessel was briefed on the Moscow Signal. Stoessel filed a formal protest with the Soviets and minimally informed embassy personnel about their exposure to high-powered microwave beam radiation. “Several members of the embassy staff display symptoms that are non-specific but have been reported frequently in patients chronically exposed to non-ionizing radiation,” a State Department doctor reported. Symptoms included severe headaches, inability to concentrate, and fatigue. The story was leaked to the press. “Ambassador Walter J. Stoessel Jr. had told some of the 125 members of his staff that the Russians were using microwave beams to listen in on conversations inside the embassy, and that such radiation could be harmful to their health,” reported the Los Angeles Times. Stoessel was reassigned to the U.S. embassy in Bonn, West Germany, and the State Department denied the press reports.
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One hundred U.S. embassy employees previously stationed in Moscow filed $250 million worth of lawsuits against the government for exposure related to the Moscow Signal. In response, the State Department funded a $1 million study by the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health, the same institution that had created the synthetic Moscow Signal tested against the monkeys. The study, released in November 1978, found “no convincing evidence” that any employees suffered “adverse health effects as of the time of this analysis.” According to State Department medical consultant Dr. Herbert Pollack, who advocated on behalf of the victims in a Senate subcommittee investigation, every suit was eventually withdrawn, “without a penny being paid.” In 1986, Walter Stoessel died of leukemia at the age of sixty-six. Two of the three ambassadors who had served before him and had also been subjected to the Moscow Signal also died of cancer: Charles Bohlen in 1974, age sixty-nine, and Llewellyn Thomas in 1972, age sixty-seven.
The reality of powerful electromagnetic weapons moved to the fore. Microwave and ELF weapons were now being debated in the public domain. Some scientists, like Samuel Koslov, downplayed the government’s work in this area. By acting as a source for the Washington Post article, Koslov was able to cast himself as the stalwart man of reason pitted against pseudoscientists working on dubious programs involving ELF and mind control. But it is almost impossible to accept the idea that Koslov was unaware of the ESP program until the briefing; his official title was scientific assistant to the Secretary of the Navy.
A few government scientists broke ranks and discussed the government’s shortcomings in the arena of electromagnetic weapons. They included the biologist Dr. Allan H. Frey. Since 1960, Frey had been working on classified and unclassified Defense Department contracts, including ones with the Office of Naval Research and the U.S. Army. He was one of the nation’s most dedicated researchers working to understand the effects of microwave radiation on the human body. In 1961, Frey discovered a radical new technology, later called synthetic telepathy, in which a microwave input signal allowed the brain to receive a message that it perceived to be a voice transmission but that was really a microwave beam. To Frey, living organisms were “complex electrochemical systems that evolved over billions of years in a world with a relatively simple weak magnetic field.” Much of his lifework was dedicated to figuring out the effects of electromagnetic energy on biological systems. “If one used electromagnetic energy sensors to view the world from space 100 years ago, the world would have looked quite dim. Now the world glows with electromagnetic (em)3 energy emissions,” he wrote in 1969.