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Approved For Release 2001/03/26 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080027-5
fun Times
Advice: Lipstick
at the table?/7
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Gardens: The joys
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SECTION E
ington Times
In search of modern Merlins:
Psychics gain wider credibility
By Tom Kelly
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
B
elief in psychic phenom-
ena, on par with a be-
lief in astrology a
decade ago, is gain-
ing new respectabil-
ity.
The most striking
change is in the scientific commu-
nity. It is exhibiting a new willing-
ness to believe that some people can
know things by inexplicable means
and that others can will the behavior
of physical objects.
Psychologist Brenda Dunne, a
member of a Princeton University
scientific team which has conducted
elaborate tests of psychic ability for
15 years, says the era of flat rejec-
tion is nearly over.
"A survey taken about three years
ago among scientists showed that a
clear majority, well over 50 percent,
believe there is something there.
This is in contrast to one taken about
12 years ago when most did not."
Marcello Truzzi of East Michigan
University, who was chairman of the
Committee for Scientific Investiga-
tion of Claims of the Paranormal,
decided his associates were inter-
sted only in debunking phenomena.
b he founded the Center for Scienti-
Anomaly Research, which keeps
determinedly open mind.
"If this stuff has any truth, it has
Approved Pof Release 2001/0
ional security, he says.
Sem. Clan bir Rell
the new acceptance and linkage
ational security also is apparent
-------

people don't object - it's
Ms. "Ball. "If Jim and I
ve things he says, peo Approved For Release 2001/03
us. But when he says it,
cally broadens the show."
"H, page E5
M
175⑈
WMZQ
-ss D. Franklin/The Washington Times
studios.
Jim Wright, Texas Democrat, is an-
other.
staff "take a detached, scientific and
very supportive interest" in the work
being done by her and her col-
leagues.
Mr. Wright's office says he has at-
tended lectures by Washington psy-
chic Anne Gehman; Mrs. Gehman
says she has discussed psychic phe-
nomena with Mr. Wright and his
wife, Betty, and has a friendly rela-
tionship with them.
Mr. Pell, perhaps Capitol Hill's
most unabashed believer, has urged
the National Science Foundation, the
Defense Department and other gov-
ernment agencies to increase psy-
chic research funding. He has a full-
time staff member, C.B. Scott Jones,
whose exclusive job is to monitor re-
ports of psychic activities ..
Rep. Charlie Rose, North Carolina
Democrat, is the founder of the Con-
gressional Clearing House on the
Future, which has met with psy-
chics. He has urged the CIA to initi-
ate a "psychic Manhattan Project" to
develop its abilities to monitor Soviet
military projects.
The government's interest in psy-
chic phenomena began in the '70s
when the Pentagon and the CIA, with
the backing of Congress, sponsored
1000002795
3 Photo by Stephen Crowley The Washington Times
Washington psychic Anne Gehman cautions that any medium who
guarantees physical phenomena is a "liar, a cheat and a fraud."
experiments on remote viewing at
SRI International, formerly Stan-
ford Research Institute, at Menlo
Park, Calif. It continues today.
In a report last year, the National
Research Council said the Army and
its advisers had considered if para-
normal forces "might be used to jam
enemy computers, prematurely
trigger nuclear weapons and inca-
pacitate weapons and vehicles." It
said "one suggested application"
was to form a battalion of "warrior
monks" who could exert long-
· distance influence over enemy per-
sonnel.
The cutting edge currently is fo-
cused on less spectacular goals, the
abilities of people to foresee coming.
events - Precognitive Remote Per-
ception + or to shape current ones
- psychokinesis.
The most intriguing results have
been those reported by scientists at
see PSYCHIC, page E2
TER / Hap Erstein
e a Face'
Ippetry
1 Paris
gh we tend to relegate
·uppetry to the realm of
hildren's entertainment,
he French understand
rdly kid's stuff.
an a birthday party di-
ppets can be the conduit
nedy and chilling drama.
se the faces of puppets
aly immobile does not
they cannot convey the
emotion.
-e among the unspoken
y which a Parisian pup-
with the intriguing
alulu operates. With its
how, "Face a Face," a
ling, moving and infec-
asing series of skits,
: Heracio Peralta and
-colas expand the possi-
heir art without over-
it with spectacle or gim-
appearance is the first
"ench puppet theaters to
Le French Embassy this
= 1989 lan C, Armstrong
Puppeteers fade into the background once the performance starts.
year under the umbrella of the
Marionette Performance Festival
Francais. If the other two compa-
nies are as inventive and awe-
inspiring, you should make a point
of pulling strings to go see them
all.
Although billed as appropriate
for both adults and children, one
fears that today's television-trained
youngsters may not have the pa-
tience or attention span for a show.
that evolves in such delicate
strokes and tiny touches. Instead,
"Face a Face" manages the more
difficult achievement of
transforming adults, at least those
who are willing to accept the ex-
perience, into children.
The stage of the modern Maison
Francaise auditorium is clad in
black, as are the two puppeteers.
At times they appear alongside the
puppets they manipulate, occasion-
ally interacting with them and of-
ten merely standing out of the light
in a semblance of invisibility.
When they mask themselves
completely in black, all it takes
from a cooperative viewer is the:
slightest squint and the puppets are
moving by themselves.
At one point, Miss Nicolas care-
fully takes a puppet of an old
woman out of a wicker basket, lays
-it down on the table-performance
platform and leaves the stage. With
a wondrous touch of theatrical
magic, the doll then snaps to life --
by itself or at least at the hand of
the unseen Mr. Peralta.
The puppets move by the simple,
almost imperceptible actions of
their masters, all the better to sus-
"tain the illusion of self-propelled
creatures. Bululu strips puppetry
down to its essence, a feat well il-
lustrated by the opening scene of a
see PUPPETS, page E5
Approved For Release 2001/03/26 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080027-5

ane Haslem Salon (2025
Place NW) in DuponApproved ForRelease 2001/03/26 MGIA-RDR96-00787R000200080027-5ation for atmos-
ly was intended to be a
ion venture to Mrs. Has-
ngtime gallery on Seventh
But as lease problems
ner to close the Seventh
space last December, the
of regular monthly exhibi-
ow has fallen to the salon.
salon will continue to func-
mewhat differently from a
Her son and the salon's di-
through Feb. 11, might inspire
women are depicted in art has be-
come a subject of intense debate
and analysis over the past decade,
and women are Ms. Friedman's
preferred subject matter.
If her small portrait renditions
of heavy-lidded, porcelain-skinned
beauties are innocuous enough, a
number of full-figure and multiple-
figure compositions display the
tense conjunction of innocence and
by disjunction from ure sur i canor
tures of the women from Picasso's
*classical period, and such classical
subject matter as Botticelli's
"Three Graces."
Ms. Friedman's "Three Figures
on the Beach" translates this Re-
naissance motif into a dream vi-
sion; the cavorting women seem
oblivious to a severed foot on the
sand before them. The intimation
of menace and prior violence that
phere. As a result, we tend to read
the paintings as patches of color on
canvas even as we relate to their
recognizable subject matter.
Achieving this kind of tension
between the formal and the repre-
sentational has long been a concern
of painters. Mr. Koch, however,
casts no new light on the matter,
and here the picturesque remains
just picturesque.
Hotel Terminus"
NR (descriptions of Holocaust
9S)
Victims, colleagues, employers,
mtances, observers of Klaus
CTION: Directed, researched
Dduced by Marcel Ophuls,
ive-produced by John S.
han, Hamilton Fish and Peter
edited by Albert Jurgenson
atherine Zins, associate
ser Bernard Farrel, with Memory
released by the Samuel
wyn Company
41/2 hours plus a brief
mission
E: Cineplex Odeon Circle Outer
er, 4849 Wisconsin Ave. NW
I: Opens Friday
IUM RATING: FOUR STARS
D, his bodyguard in Bolivia, his
Fney in France, his U.S. employ-
In the postwar Counter Intelli-
De Corps who used and pro-
ed Barbie for his information
-ommunists.
Ir. Ophuls also talked with Bar-
3 victims who have harrowing
mories of his torture methods in
ns, with journalists and Nazi
ters who tracked Barbie, with
-istance leaders, Auschwitz sur-
ors, Bolivian authorities and
des of others who knew Barbie
knew of him.
They all have important stories,
hearing them all in one big,
-- straining (subtitles and IDs),
Dressing dose is a numbing, of-
- disengaging experience. I vote
three 90-minute TV segments
d less of Mr. Ophuls' words and
aug face on screen.
PSYCHIC
From page E1
SRI, Princeton and the Mind Science
Foundation in San Antonio, Texas.
In the precognition tests one per-
son, the "precipient," describes a
randomly selected place that a col-
league, "the agent," is about to visit.
Miss Dunne says in a test which
she conducted when she was at Mun-
delein College in Chicago, the agent
picked a sealed envelope from a
stack of 10 containing sites chosen
by outsiders.
The Rockefeller Chapel at the
University of Chicago was the site
picked and the precipient, some
miles away, described the chapel in
extraordinary detail: "I am getting
the little turrets around the building
... long windows in a row quite high
. .. a heavy wooden door with a black
bolt on it. ... My feeling at the mo-
ment is that it is a building like a
church, and I can see the pews."
Miss Dunne said that about 15
percent of similar tests at Princeton
produced results equally rich in ac-
curate detail.
The main emphasis at Princeton,
however, has been on psychokinesis,
which can be more easily fitted into
scientific controls. Robert G. Jahn,
dean emeritus of the School of Engi-
neering and Applied Science, Miss
Dunne and others have reported the
results of 78 million trials in which
voluntary operators have tried to in-
fluence the behavior of natural
.background static, called "white
noise," and the distribution of free-
falling balls.
In the first experiment an elec-
tronic device produces 1,000 white:
noise pulses a second. Left to
chance, half would have positive
electrical charges, half negative.
The participating volunteers try
to influence the impulses by concen-
trating on a desired outcome. The
results over the years show a diver-
gence from the norm 10,000 times
greater than indicated by chance.
In the second major experiment,
called the "Random Mechanical
Cascade," a specially designed ma-
chine drops 9,000 polystyrene balls
through a matrix of 330 pegs.
Left to chance, the balls would be
distributed among 19 bins in a uni-
form, perfectly balanced fashion,
with a few at each end and most in
the middle in what is known as a bell
curve.
Operators will the balls to one side
or the other. And results over 15
years, according to Miss Dunne,
have, again, been 10,000 times as
great as anticipated.
The other major psychokinesis
experimenter, Helmut Schmidt, a
quantum physicist formerly of Duke
University and currently of the
Mind Science Foundation in San
Antonio, has achieved even more
striking results. His subjects try to
influence the clicks of a Geiger
counter.
The clicks, which measure the
emissions of radioactive materials,
come at predictable rates. Operators
try to speed or slow them. Mr.
Schmidt says they have outscored
chance by 10 million to one.
The scientific interest in para-
normal events has a historical foun-
dation. Thomas Edison was a firm
believer in the paranormal, and
physicists Albert Einstein, Max
Planck and Neils Bohr took open-
minded attitudes.
In the 1920s, J.B. and Louisa
` Rhine were appointed to the faculty
of the Department of Psychology at
Duke University, where they
touched off a new interest in psychic
phenomena.
Reports by today's experimenters
have received considerable atten-
tion, but less than total acceptance
in the scientific community. John
Palmer, of the Foundation for Re-
search of the Nature of Man, in Dur-
ham, N.C., says in "An Evaluative Re-
port on the Current Status of
Parapsychology" (1985) that the ex-
periments do support the existence
of anomalies.
A report by the National. Re-
search Council, "Enhancing Human
Performance" (1988), which was
funded by the Army, concluded that
they "fall short of an experimental
ideal" and do not "justify any conclu-
sion." The report praised "the sin-
cerity and dedication" of the investi-
gators and recommended that the
Army continue to monitor the work
at Princeton, SRI and San Antonio.
Mr. Truzzi takes a more positive
view. He says scientists prefer to de
scribe test results as "anomalies," o1
: abnormalities, and avoid such term
as paranormal phenomena.
He says he would prefer to hav
their significance explained i:
terms of physical laws. If they tur
out to be paranormal phenomena, h
says, "it would shake my world to it
foundations."
Mrs. Gehman, a board member (
the National Spiritualist Associatio
of Churches, who charges a min
mum "gift" of $100 for a 60-minu:
session and who says she has mar
people from Capitol Hill among ht
clients, believes that she can cor
municate with "those who have goi
through the process of death," and
certain situations can heal and bei
metal.
But she says 99.9 percent of r
ported physical phenomena -- tat
rapping, levitation and such - a
fraudulent and that any mediu
who guarantees physical pheno)
ena is a "liar, a cheat and a fraud.'
She says that if the scientis
eventually prove that their ano
alies are rooted in natural law
won't bother her at all.
"Whatever the explanation," s
says, "I will be content."
Pe
MUS
Approved For Release 2001/03/26-