CIA-RDP96-00788R001200050009-6

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Approved For Release 2003/09/10 : CIA-RDP96-00788R001200050009-6
ngton post
Monday, April 23, 1984
JACK ANDERSON
Psychic Studies
Might Help U.S.
Explore Soviets
U.S. intelligence agencies won't
talk about it, but they are rushing to
catch up with the Soviet Union in
what one scientist jocularly calls "the
race for inner space"-psychic re-
search.
Parapsychology is a field so full of
pseudo-scientists, flakes and outright
charlatans that it's easy to debunk
the whole idea as a comic-strip con-
cept unworthy of serious scientific
study.
In 1981, when I first began report-
ing on secret U.S. and Soviet pro-
grams using so-called psychics to
gather intelligence, some of the gov-
ernment-funded projects were obvi-
ously off-the-wall. There was the
"hyperspatial nuclear howitzer" that
would "transmit" a bomb explosion
from the Nevada degert to down-
town Moscow with the speed of
thought, or the "anti-missile time
warp" that would send an incoming
enemy missile into the past, blowing
up dinosaurs instead of 20th century
Americans.
But there are legitimate labora-
tory projects that may eventually
unlock the mysteries of the human
mind. One of the most promising is
the testing of "remote viewing"-the
claimed ability of some psychics to
describe scenes thousands of miles
away.
The CIA and the Pentagon have
an obvious interest in this phenom-
enon. If they could get psychics to
throw their minds behind the Iron
Curtain, there'd be no need to risk
the lives of human agents.
The CIA sent representatives to a
parapsychology conference in Virgin-
ia last December. Besides the usual
spoon-bending-which professional
magicians have denounced as a fairly
simple trick-there was serious dis-
cussion of remote viewing. In fact,
the CIA is now seriously pondering
the possibility of raising "psychic
shields" to keep Soviet remote view-
ers away from our secrets.
I asked my skeptical associates
Dale Van Atta and Joseph Spear to
find out how remote viewing has be-
come almost universally accepted in
the intelligence community. They
gained access to top-secret briefings
on the subject. This is what they
learned:
The CIA's latest remote viewing
project was code-named "Grill
Flame," and was carried out in part
by two respected academics: Harold
Puthoff, formerly with the National
Security Agency, and Russell Targ,
formerly with the Stanford Research
Institute in Menlo Park, Calif.
Puthoff and Targ conducted at
least two tests that produced astop.
ishing results. They gave one psychto.
the latitude and longitude of a re-
mote location and told him to pro-
ject his mind there and describe the
scene. He described an airfield, cots!"
plete with details-including a large
gantry and crane at one end of the
field.
The CIA was impressed, but calf
ical. There was indeed an airfield t
the map coordinates the psychic bed
been given. The site was the Soviets'
ultra-secret nuclear testing area st
Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan. Bu
there was no gantry or crane thereun ..
Still, it had been a while since"
U.S. spy satellites had taken pictures
of the Semipalatinsk base. So the
CIA waited for the next set of phe-
tos-and sure enough, there were.,
the gantry and crane, just as the puf-
chic had described them. No one, In :
U.S. intelligence agencies had known
the equipment was there, so the in-
formation couldn't have been leaked
to him.
The second test involved a Soviet
TU95 "Backfire" bomber, which the
CIA knew had crashed somewhere in
Africa. They were eager to find it be -:
fore the Soviets did, so they could .:
take photographs and perhaps pur-
loin secret gear from the wreckage.
So one of Project Grill Flame's,re-
mote viewers was asked to locate the
downed bomber. He gave the CIA.
the location within several miles.
HANK KETCHA AA
Approved For Release 2003/09/10 : CIA-RDP96-00788R001200050009-6