There presently exists a huge gap between where researchers are on a hypothesis for anomalous mental phenomena and where the science needs to be for them to move toward general theory. But it took more than a thousand years for man to move from the hypothesis that the Sun, not Earth, was the center of our solar system to the general theory of Copernican heliocentrism. Will modern technology allow for more interest in scientific research into the paranormal, or will the stigma prevail? If the stigma regarding ESP and PK research were removed from the world of science, what might be uncovered?
In 2014, the Office of Naval Research embarked on a four-year, $3.85 million research program to explore the phenomena it calls premonition and intuition, or “Spidey sense,” for sailors and Marines. “We have to understand what gives rise to this so-called ‘sixth sense,’ says Peter Squire, a program officer in ONR’s Expeditionary Maneuver Warfare and Combating Terrorism department. Today’s Navy scientists place less emphasis on trying to understand the phenomena theoretically and more on using technology to examine the mysterious process, which Navy scientists assure the public is not based on superstition. “If the researchers understand the process, there may be ways to accelerate it—and possibly spread the powers of intuition throughout military units,” says Dr. Squire. The Pentagon’s focus is to maximize the power of the sixth sense for operational use. “If we can characterize this intuitive decision-making process and model it, then the hope is to accelerate the acquisition of these skills,” says Lieutenant Commander Brent Olde of ONR’s Warfighter Performance Department for Human and Bio-engineered Systems. “[Are] there ways to improve premonition through training?” he asks.
According to the Pentagon, the program was born of field reports from the war theater, including a 2006 incident in Iraq, when Staff Sergeant Martin Richburg, using intuition, prevented carnage in an IED, or improvised explosive device, incident. Commander Joseph Cohn, a program manager at the naval office, told the New York Times, “These reports from the field often detailed a ‘sixth sense’ or ‘Spidey sense’ that alerted them to an impending attack or I.E.D., or that allowed them to respond to a novel situation without consciously analyzing the situation.” More than a decade later, today’s Defense Department has accelerated practical applications of this concept. Active-duty Marines are being taught to hone precognitive skills in order to “preempt snipers, IED emplacers and other irregular assaults [using] advanced perceptual competences that have not been well studied.” Because of the stigma of ESP and PK, the nomenclature has changed, allowing the Defense Department to distance itself from its remote-viewing past. Under the Perceptual Training Systems and Tools banner, extrasensory perception has a new name in the modern era: “sensemaking.” In official Defense Department literature sensemaking is defined as “a motivated continuous effort to understand connections (which can be among people, places, and events) in order to anticipate their trajectories and act effectively.”
Over decades, wars change location and weapons design evolves, while man’s perceptual capacities remain relatively close to what they have been for thousands of years. Fifty years ago in Vietnam, Joe McMoneagle used his sixth sense to avoid stepping on booby traps, falling into punji pits, and walking into Viet Cong ambushes. His ability to sense danger was not lost on his fellow soldiers, and the power of his intuitive capabilities spread throughout his military unit. Other soldiers had confidence in this subconscious ability and followed McMoneagle’s lead. In a life-or-death environment there was no room for skepticism or ignominy. If it saved lives, it was real. Since 1972, CIA and DoD research indicates that premonition, or precognition, appears to be weak in some, strong in others, and extraordinary in a rare few. Will the Navy’s contemporary work on “sensemaking,” the continuous effort to understand the connections among people, places, and events, finally unlock the mystery of ESP? Might technology available to today’s defense scientists reveal hypotheses not available to scientists in an earlier age?
At Naval Hospital Bremerton, in Washington State, defense scientists and military researchers are exploring cognition and perception in soldiers’ virtual dream states. Starting in 2011, as part of a research program called Power Dreaming, soldiers plagued by PTSD-related nightmares have used biofeedback techniques similar to those studied by Colonel John Alexander in the Intelligence and Security Command’s Beyond Excellence program, under General Albert Stubblebine. For today’s Navy, biofeedback has been updated with twenty-first-century virtual reality technology that did not exist thirty years ago. Sponsored by the Naval Medical Research Center, the Power Dreaming program involves a process called Cognitive Behavioral Treatment for Warrior Trainees. Participants are active-duty soldiers suffering from PTSD-related nightmares who are eligible to be sent back to the battlefield. The method, called redreaming, is alleged to be a learned technique that produces changes in the way one’s brain processes information. Its goal is to teach trainees to transform their debilitating nightmares into empowering dreams using biofeedback techniques and computer technology.
Biofeedback, born in 1962, draws on the idea that the human brain (millions of years in the making) can benefit from seeing itself work in real time. Some of the life processes the trainee can see in real time are his brain waves, heart rate, muscle tension, skin conductance, and pain perception. The process goes like this: when the soldier wakes up from a nightmare, he gets out of bed and goes to a nearby government-issued computer. He puts on 3-D goggles and straps a Heart Rate Variability biofeedback device onto his forearm so that biofeedback can be integrated into the redreaming process. Hooked up to these two devices, the soldier opens a software program called the Book of Dreams. With a few clicks on the keyboard, he enters the virtual world Second Life.
A soldier’s first Power Dreaming session will begin with a virtual scenario crafted to simulate the event that likely caused the PTSD nightmares. It features an avatar of the warrior trainee—a 3-D human cartoon of the self. In one of the Book of Dreams training videos, a soldier’s avatar is seen driving a Humvee behind another Humvee along a narrow mountain pass in a place that looks like Afghanistan. The first Humvee is hit by an IED, and the avatar soldier in the second Humvee watches the explosion happen. All around him people die and bodies fly. The soldier’s avatar tries to help a dying colleague (who appears to be missing his legs) but fails. The trainee is instructed to look at his biofeedback information, which appears on graphs on the computer screen, and to begin creating, or redreaming, a new narrative.
Using the Book of Dreams software, the trainee can make his avatar run, walk, or fly away from the carnage to any pleasant environment imaginable. New geographical scenarios can be set at the beach, in the jungle, on a mountain, even in an underwater dream world filled with fish. The Book of Dreams allows the avatar to share his utopic virtual world with human or animal companions, including real pets (like a dog) or imagined ones (like a dragon). The warrior trainee can customize the weather, the time of day, and the background music (in the Navy training video available to journalists, the music is distinctly Chinese). While moving through this pleasant virtual world, the trainee is instructed to observe the real-time biofeedback data on his computer as the redream continues. This information is also monitored and tracked by naval medical research doctors. Can humans alter their consciousness and change their dreams? The Navy thinks so. Using one’s mind to change the chemistry of one’s brain is psychokinesis dressed up in a new name for a new age: Power Dreaming.
Government programs that claim to harness the power of the mind to influence matter exist across the Defense Department today. The Pentagon currently supports more than fifty qigong-based programs for soldiers and veterans, the majority of whom suffer from PTSD. But the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services still consider qigong “unproven as medicine,” and the NIH cautions that so-called energy medicine “can improve outcomes, have no effect on outcomes, and worsen outcomes with respect to healing effect
s.” Scientific skeptics insist that qigong and all forms of traditional Chinese medicine are “chicanery,” including acupuncture and acupressure. The belief in “the mind’s ability to affect the health of the body” is pseudoscience, according to the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, successor to the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.
The Army and the Marines appear to disagree. The Operation Warrior Wellness program, offered at Army and Marine bases and Veterans Administration medical centers across the country, teaches Transcendental Meditation to PTSD sufferers. The TM-based Resilient Warrior Program has been the subject of 340 peer-reviewed studies and has received more than $26 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health. Key findings of the program—with its NIH caveat, “unproven as medicine”—include a 40 percent to 55 percent reduction in symptoms of PTSD and depression, a 42 percent decrease in insomnia, 30 percent reported improvement in satisfaction with quality of life, and a 25 percent reduction in plasma cortisol levels. The man behind Operation Warrior Wellness is the film director David Lynch, who has been meditating since 1973 “twice a day, every day. It has given me effortless access to unlimited reserves of energy, creativity and happiness deep within. This level of life is sometimes called ‘pure consciousness’—it is a treasury. And this level of life is deep within us all,” says Lynch.
This drives skeptics wild. The Skeptic’s Dictionary describes Lynch’s efforts to help traumatized soldiers recover from PTSD through meditation as being as effective as “sharing ice cream cones. At least one study has found negative health effects from meditation,” the Dictionary’s author, Robert Todd Carroll, writes, including “feeling addicted to meditation; uncomfortable kinaesthetic sensations; mild dissociation; feelings of guilt; psychosis-like symptoms; grandiosity; elation; destructive behavior; suicidal feelings; defenselessness; fear; anger; apprehension; and despair.”
At the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the U.S. Army, scientists are building technology-based mental telepathy systems, called “synthetic telepathy,” for the modern era. Under the rubric of brain-computer interface technology, the goal, says the Defense Department, is to enable future “soldiers [to] communicate by thought alone.” Present-day brain measuring and recording technologies like electroencephalography (EEG) have advanced to the extent that the brain’s alpha rhythms (electrical oscillations that predominantly originate from the occipital lobe) can be detected, translated into a computer-based speech recognition system, and transmitted to another person at a remote location. With a four-million-dollar grant from the Army Research Office, scientists at the University of California, Irvine, are at work on synthetic telepathy helmets for the Defense Department to allow soldiers to “tell machines to do what [they] want by telepathically thinking about it,” as reported in Digital Journal in May, 2013. “Initially, communication would be based on a limited set of words or phrases that are recognized by the system,” says program director Michael D’Zmura, chairman of the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the university. “It would involve more complex language and speech as the technology is developed further.”
This synthetic telepathy technology builds off of work pioneered in the early 1960s by physicist Edmond M. Dewan of the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories in Bedford, Massachusetts. Motivated by a desire to gain philosophical insight into the nature of consciousness, Dewan trained himself and members of his research staff to modulate the brain’s alpha rhythms. They practiced until they were able to control their own brain waves at will, and—hooked up to 1960s state-of-the-art machinery—filmed the results of their experiments (which can presently be viewed on YouTube using the keywords “brainwave control device by Edmond Dewan”). After advanced training, Dewan was able to imagine individual letters of the alphabet in Morse code and then send these coded signals to machinery—first letters, then words, and finally phrases. Dewan’s first Morse code message took twenty-five seconds per letter to transmit and record. The phrase was, “I can talk.” Upon authentication of this seminal laboratory experiment in 1964, the Washington Post carried a page one above-the-fold article titled, “Man’s Brain Waves Can ‘Talk’ Overcoming Speech Barriers.”
At the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences (I-LABS) at the University of Washington in Seattle, similar studies are under way. If the first milestone toward synthetic telepathy was to compose messaging using thought alone, the next step was to be able to send those messages to a designated recipient (human or machine) using thought alone. Dr. Andrea Stocco, a co-director at the laboratory, explains. “Evolution has spent a colossal amount of time to find ways for us and other animals to take information out of our brains and communicate it to other animals in the forms of behavior, speech, and so on,” Stocco says. “But it requires a translation. We can only communicate part of whatever our brain processes. What we are doing [with this new technology] is kind of reversing the process a step at a time… taking signals from the brain and with minimal translation, putting them back in another person’s brain.” Experiments filmed in Stocco’s laboratory on August 12, 2013, performed in collaboration with computational neuroscientist Rajesh Rao, demonstrated synthetic telepathy between two human test subjects for the first time in human history.
In 2014, direct brain-to-brain communication was achieved on an international scale, this time by a team of scientists led by Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone, professor of neurology at the Harvard Medical School, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, using the Internet as a pathway. The work was partially financed by the European Commission’s Future and Emerging Technology program, often referred to as the EU’s DARPA. “The telepathy experiment involved technology, not ESP,” Dr. Pascual-Leone assured me in a telephone interview in 2015. The sender, or “emitter,” sat in a laboratory in Thiruvananthapuram, India, wearing an EEG cap that detected and captured his brain’s electromagnetic activity. Using the same system of messaging developed by Edmond Dewan in the 1960s, this sender transmitted the mental message, “hola,” (“hello” in Spanish) to three test subjects sitting in a laboratory in Strasbourg, France. Each recipient in France wore on his head a magnetic field generating device called a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) cap. The test subjects in France received the sender’s information as a sequence of tiny jolts to their occipital lobes, which caused sensations and showed up as flashes of light in the corner of their vision. As a result of this experiment, a coded message was successfully transferred between human brains separated by a distance of approximately five thousand miles. “By using advanced precision neuro-technologies, including wireless EEG and robotized TMS, we were able to directly and non-invasively transmit a thought from one person to another without the person having to use language, to speak, or to write,” Dr. Pascual-Leone said. “It is a remarkable step in human communication.”
These direct brain-to-brain communication technologies would have been impossible to fathom in an earlier age. In the modern era, they have become reality. With technology-based synthetic telepathy research far outpacing traditional forms of mental telepathy research, what might become of psychic research?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Scientists and the Skeptics
Three pioneers involved in the government’s anomalous mental phenomena programs—ones that began in the 1970s—remain active in the work, still searching for the sources of the phenomena. Since 1985, Hal Puthoff has been chief scientist at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, in Texas. Located in the suburbs, the facility is a two-story brick-and-glass building surrounded by oak and elm trees in a research park. Inside the lab, some of the most exotic propulsion physics research in the nation takes place. The institute’s research arm, EarthTech International, manages thirty-two subcontracts, mostly military and intelligence related. As chief scientist, Puthoff oversees the work of three physicists and two experimenters. “We pursue novel ideas in gravity, cosmology, and new sources of energy,” he tells me when I visit the i
nstitute in 2015. The client list includes the Department of Defense, NASA, Lockheed’s Skunk Works, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s 100-Year Starship project for interstellar travel capabilities. Puthoff confirmed that he continues to act as a consultant on government black programs. “Yes, I presently work on classified programs in the aerospace sector,” he says. “Given my past activities I fall into the class of consultants that, when an enigma arises, [I get] the call.”
Puthoff shows me around the lab, which takes up the ground floor. It’s filled with measuring systems, gauges, and analytical instruments. Sources at the Defense Intelligence Agency confirmed to me that EarthTech International has for years maintained a Defense Department contract to investigate what are known as “excess energy” claims, devices that allege to be powered by things like magnetic motors and cold fusion (also known as low-energy nuclear reactions). It is ironic that a scientist who has spent decades of his professional life fighting claims by skeptics that he is a fringe scientist is in fact one of the go-to people when the Defense Department needs a credible laboratory to disprove an extraordinary excess energy claim. “These claims are a primary focus of our investigations here,” Puthoff says. “So far we have disproven all of them.” The findings are made public on the EarthTech website.