Not much attention was paid by the public to what seemed like an anecdotal article by the AP. Major Karen Jansen could not be reached for comment. But at the Pentagon, the fallout was tremendous. “General Clapper could not go anywhere without being hounded about the psychic spying program,” remembers Alexander. Lieutenant General James Clapper was director of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the time.
In June 1993, after sixteen consecutive years leading much of the research and operations in government ESP and PK programs, Dale Graff retired. His efforts made him the longest-serving civilian scientist in the program’s history. He left a sinking ship. With Graff gone, the speed of the unraveling was swift. News surfaced that Ed Dames and David Morehouse were collaborating with a former Texas newspaper reporter named Jim Marrs to write an exposé about the still-classified remote-viewing program. But before a draft of the book was completed, Dames and Morehouse were preparing to sue each other.
“Without Dale Graff, the program really took a downward turn,” recalls Angela Dellafiora. Graff’s replacement, Al Girard, “thought the unit was totally out of control,” she says. “He was the kind of government official who wore a three-piece suit to work,” and it seemed as if “he had inherited something that was way beyond his comfort level.”
Then, one day in the winter of 1994, a phone call came in from the Pentagon. David Morehouse was being court-martialed by the Army. The military charges against him were serious, and included adultery, sodomy, assault, theft of Army property, and conduct unbecoming an officer. Morehouse was being investigated by the Intelligence and Security Command as well as by the Army Criminal Investigation Division and the Defense Investigative Services. He was facing jail time. Dellafiora was asked to accompany Al Girard to the Pentagon to meet with Morehouse’s lawyer. “The situation came out of left field,” Dellafiora recalls. “Morehouse was with the psychic program for a short time. He came and went. Why we were getting dragged into this, nobody knew at the time. Al Girard didn’t know Morehouse from the man on the moon. I went along as a character witness because I’d worked alongside him.”
After his two-year service with the remote-viewing unit at Fort Meade, Morehouse had returned to school at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. As part of a master’s program, he wrote a thesis on nonlethal weapons, including the use of remote viewing as an intelligence collection tool. Upon graduation, Morehouse received high praise from the Deputy Commandant. “Major Morehouse is the smartest and most dynamic of the three Executive Officers I have had in the last twenty-four months,” wrote Brigadier General William M. Steele, in June 1992. “None has worked harder and pushed for excellence with his zeal. He is truly one of a kind. Everyone Dave Morehouse comes into contact with is a better soldier because of his intense professionalism.” Morehouse was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and it was there that the troubles arose. He was accused of having had an affair with the wife of his driver, an enlisted man, and having stolen government computer equipment and given it to his married paramour. When Angela Dellafiora was summoned to the Pentagon for a matter related to David Morehouse it was unclear to her what Morehouse’s legal troubles had to do with remote viewing. The crimes he was being accused of occurred more than three years after he’d left the program.
Angela Dellafiora recalls the meeting at the Pentagon. “The lawyer told us that what it boiled down to was the defense was going to take the position that remote viewing had made David Morehouse crazy,” she says. Some months later, Dellafiora accompanied Girard to a preliminary court-martial hearing at Fort Bragg. She had been called as an expert witness on the DIA’s remote-viewing program.
“The entire situation was absurd,” she recalls. “Here I was, testifying on the DIA’s [behalf]. Here I was, psychic, [remembering back] to when people accused me of being crazy because I said I was psychic and that I had a third eye. Here was Morehouse, saying he’d gone crazy because the Army made him a psychic. This was his defense [as to] why he’d slept with another man’s wife and stolen government computer equipment. It felt like some kind of comedy” of errors, she says. An extravagant, improbable farce.
The Army did not accept Morehouse’s contention that remote viewing had made him crazy, and the judge ordered the court-martial proceedings to commence. In early April 1994, Morehouse checked into Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. He told doctors there that evil demons possessed him, a result of working in the remote-viewing unit at the Intelligence and Security Command, he said. He was assigned to Ward 54, the inpatient psychiatric facility. In June, Paul Smith received a call from Debbie Morehouse, David’s wife, whom he knew from the Mormon church they both attended.
“She asked me to visit Dave at Walter Reed,” Smith recalls. “Since I was now a bishop’s counselor in my local Mormon congregation, she was hoping I could offer advice about how the church might be able to help her and her family in their time of crisis.” Smith traveled to Walter Reed. On June 6, he met Debbie in the hospital waiting room, and together they walked down the corridor to David Morehouse’s hospital room. Debbie told Smith that her husband was preparing to do an interview with 60 Minutes in which he would say that the DIA’s remote-viewing program at Fort Meade had made him crazy. “Howard Rosenberg, one of the 60 Minutes staff had already been to Walter Reed to interview Dave,” Smith recalls. “Dave was arranging to be released from the hospital for a day of leave so 60 Minutes reporters could interview him in depth.”
Smith recalls thinking this was a “very bad idea.” The remote-viewing unit was a Special Access Program that was highly classified, and revealing anything about it could be a violation of the Espionage Act of 1917. The entire situation struck Smith as tragic and he recalls being unnerved by how terrible his old friend looked: “wearing a hospital gown… unshaven and with a caged look in his eyes. He admitted to the affair, calling it a stupid mistake. He said he was being unfairly persecuted.… He described ‘evil spirits’ that beset him ‘all the time.’” But the crux of the matter, says Smith, was that “he wanted me to testify that remote viewing had caused the mental problems he was manifesting. He hoped that if he were diagnosed as mentally ill, traceable to a military-related cause, he would be granted a medical retirement rather than being sent to the military prison at Fort Leavenworth.” Smith told Morehouse he could not do that. “Since no one else from the unit had ever gone crazy,” Smith explained in 2015, “it seemed unlikely that if Dave really was having mental problems, that remote viewing caused it.”
In late June, David Morehouse was transferred from the psychiatric facility at Walter Reed to the psychiatric ward at Womack Army Hospital at Fort Bragg, where the court-martial was to proceed elsewhere on base. Prior to transfer, the Walter Reed Army Medical Center Sanity Board concluded, “it is the opinion of the sanity board that Maj. Morehouse did not have a severe mental disease of defect,” and that his “clinical psychiatric diagnoses are: major depression,” and “alcohol abuse, episodic, in remission.”
60 Minutes decided not to air the show it was working on. Because the DIA remote-viewing program was still classified, America’s oldest and most-watched TV newsmagazine could find no other sources to corroborate that the program even existed. “No one would talk about it on the record,” 60 Minutes producer Howard Rosenberg later recalled, “and the principal promoter of the story [i.e., David Morehouse], and of the program, was of questionable credibility and seemed to me to have multiple agendas.”
The Morehouse saga ended in January 1995, when he proposed resigning his commission in lieu of being tried before the court-martial. His proposal was accepted “in the best interests of the Army,” and he was discharged from the service “Under Other than Honorable Conditions.”
Congress ordered an evaluation of the Star Gate program by an outside research firm, and the CIA was put in charge as custodian. The Agency hired the American Institutes for Research to conduct a review of Star Gate and an inv
estigation into government’s decades-long research into ESP and its potential for intelligence use. Most of the work in psychokinesis was left out of the report. The results were presented in two documents totaling 232 pages. “Studies of paranormal phenomena have nearly always been associated with controversy,” the researchers warned, and described how the U.S. government’s efforts were no different. “Conceptually, remote viewing would seem to have tremendous potential utility for the intelligence community,” it was noted, but after comprehensive review, the analysts found only “a compelling argument against continuation of the research program within the intelligence community.” The reason was a restatement of what had been said all along. Although laboratory studies demonstrated “the existence of a paranormal phenomenon, remote viewing,” in the absence of evidence regarding “the sources or origins of the phenomenon,” there was no rationale for continuance. “The remote viewing phenomenon has no real value for intelligence operations,” the researchers wrote. “One must question whether any further applications can be justified.”
It was a curious situation. The researchers were given less than two months to review nearly a quarter of a century’s worth of work. One of the team leaders on the report was the psychologist Ray Hyman, a founding member of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and a critic of the government’s psychic research ever since he had investigated Uri Geller on behalf of the Advanced Research Projects Agency back in 1972. Because the time was so limited, the researchers did not examine any of the research or reports done at SRI in the 1970s. It was later revealed that the American Institutes for Research based its evaluation on roughly forty sessions conducted in 1994 and 1995 by three randomly chosen remote viewers.
On June 31, 1995, the CIA ordered DIA to cease all Star Gate operations. Angela Dellafiora’s last task for the Psychoenergetic Phenomena program was to travel to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to box up the documents for the National Archives. In October, CIA declassified 262 documents related to the psychic research programs, some dating back to 1972. Starting in the year 2000, the CIA began to declassify and release tens of thousands of additional documents; an untold number remain inaccessible.
Five months after the original CIA order, on November 28, 1995, a Nightline exposé made the Star Gate program public. Ted Koppel interviewed the DIA’s Dale Graff and the CIA’s Robert Gates on national television. Graff defended the integrity of the programs. Gates downplayed the significance of it all. Koppel also interviewed customs agent William Green, who confirmed the amazing story of how one DIA psychic, an unnamed woman, had located one of the FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitives, Charles Frank Jordan, thereby bringing closure to what had been an otherwise futile two-year manhunt.
The story generated additional press in local and international news reports. The general tenor was skeptical and satirical. Former DIA director General James Clapper told reporters that he and his three predecessors had all tried to kill the program. “It just didn’t feel appropriate for DIA to be doing anything like that,” he said. “It was just too far out at the leading edge of technology to maintain very well as an ongoing intelligence activity. But we got directions [from Congress] every year in our appropriation and specific language to sustain the operation.” After a few months in the spotlight, the public’s interest in what was generally referred to as the government’s psychic spy program seemed to wane. But it was interesting that General Clapper categorized the Defense Department’s ESP and PK research as “leading edge technology,” not leading edge parapsychology.
The year 1995 marked the end of another era when Andrija Puharich died tragically—alone, impoverished, and under threat of eviction from the North Carolina estate of his last benefactor, R. J. Reynolds. Reynolds, heir to the tobacco fortune, had died seven months before, and Puharich refused to leave the 1,000-acre estate, Devotion, where he’d been living—as a scientist in residence. The once-brilliant medical doctor and research pioneer whose Puharich Theory had set the CIA and the Defense Department’s psychic research programs in motion in the early 1950s had somehow lost his way. To the end, Puharich wrote papers in service of his theory that extraterrestrials were trying to send messages to humans through psychic people, and that extremely low frequency, or ELF, waves were responsible for the sicknesses of the age.
Surrounded by filth and feral cats, early one evening in the winter of 1995 Puharich fell down a set of stairs to his death. He was seventy-six. According to the Winston-Salem Journal, he had been suffering from dementia, kidney failure, and the onset of gangrene in one leg.
And so, the twentieth-century chapter on secret U.S. government research into extrasensory perception and psychokinesis came to a close. The scientists and psychics went their separate ways. For some, the quest to understand the phenomena continued to be an epic pursuit. For others it remained an affliction, like a curse.
Members of the scientific skeptics community saw victory in the program’s exposure, cancellation, and subsequent ridicule. But for a growing number of Americans, the revelation that the government was keenly interested in anomalous mental phenomena renewed its appeal. With the increasing popularity of late night talk radio shows like Art Bell’s Area 2000, and the growth of the Internet, paranormal topics gained new traction and evolved.
But what of the military and intelligence communities? Efforts to use prophecy, prediction, and extrasensory perception for military gain is as old as civilization itself. To see the future, to know the unknowable, has been an ageless obsession. It is as controversial in the modern era as it was in 585 BC, when Greek tribes fought the First Sacred War over who would control the Oracle at Delphi. Regular people and world leaders alike have coveted esoteric knowledge since time immemorial. Would the U.S. government begin the twenty-first century any differently?
Will modern technology unravel the mystery of anomalous mental phenomena once and for all, or will the search be forever unresolved, like Nietzsche’s eternal return?
PART IV
THE MODERN ERA
What is past is prologue.
—William Shakespeare
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Intuition, Premonition, and Synthetic Telepathy
Are ESP and PK real? Back in the early 1950s, when the U.S. government’s postwar research into them was just beginning to take off, the Nobel Laureate Wolfgang Pauli and the psychiatrist Carl Jung had a lively conversation about the phenomena. The two men were discussing a paper that had recently been written by physicist Robert A. McConnell called “ESP—Fact or Fancy?” Jung remarked to Pauli how some age-old mysteries never change. “As is only to be expected,” Jung said, “every conceivable kind of attempt has been made to explain away these results, which seem to border on the miraculous and frankly impossible. But all such attempts come to grief on the facts, and the facts refuse so far to be argued out of existence.” The physicist and the psychiatrist could have been having this conversation in 2017.
For seven decades, the CIA and the Department of Defense have been actively conducting research on anomalous mental phenomena. “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, “albeit characterized by rarity and lack of reliability.” The Agency ultimately canceled its program: “There exists no satisfactory theoretical understanding of these phenomena. Present theories, of which there are many, are both speculative and unsubstantiated.” Without a theory, the CIA was left with hypothesis, or conjecture.
A decade later, in 1986, the Army concluded similarly that its ESP and PK researchers and program managers had “succeeded in documenting general anomalies worthy of scientific interest,” but that “in the absence of confirmed paranormal theory… paranormality could be rejected a priori.” Still, laboratory research operations continued. But in 1995, a joint CIA/Defense Department–sponsored review of the government’s ESP and PK programs resu
lted in the programs’ cancellation based on this same paradox. Although “a statistically significant effect [of the phenomena] has been observed in the laboratory… the laboratory studies do not provide evidence regarding the sources or origins of the phenomenon.” “Remote viewing is vague and ambiguous,” the scientific reviewers of the CIA/Defense Department programs wrote, “making it difficult, if not impossible, for the technique to yield information of sufficient quality and accuracy.” No source, no origins, no general theory.
Carl Jung had something important to say about this notion of possibility versus impossibility. “The so-called possibility of such events is of no importance whatever, for the criterion of what is possible in any age is derived from that age’s rational assumptions.” What was possible in the early 1950s, when the CIA and the Defense Department began its ESP and PK research, is light-years from what is possible today. Today’s Defense Department programs in anomalous mental phenomena research leverage modern technology. They exist in research domains involving cognition, perception, and the human brain and have been retooled and rebranded as distinctly twenty-first-century pursuits. They fall under the rubric of anomalous human cognition, and the research is being conducted not by parapsychologists but by neurophysiologists, neurobiologists, information technologists, computer engineers, and other scientists whose areas of research did not exist as such in the 1950s. These professions have been made possible by the advent of certain technologies and the astonishing speed of technology’s advance.
In the late 1940s, when Dr. Andrija Puharich first began researching ESP for the Department of Defense, home radio technology was just twenty years old. Thirty years later, in 1976, NASA landed a spacecraft on Mars. Ten years after that, high-temperature superconductivity was discovered, opening the way for order-of-magnitude increases in faster, more efficient computer technology that could record, produce, and analyze information. In 1998 automated DNA sequencing was patented. In 2009, NASA launched the Kepler space observatory to survey the Milky Way galaxy and discover Earth-sized planets orbiting other stars. All this technology is the product of the human brain. We live in an age totally transformed by the human brain, and yet humans and their brains are still relatively the same. Outer space is now known to humans in ways unimaginable in the 1950s. Inner space is still lodged in the dark ages. What consciousness is, and how it works in the brain, remain as puzzling to scientists today as chemistry was to early man.