Nexus - 0806 - New Times Magazine-pages

Page Content (OCR)

AMPLIFIED MIND POWER RESEARCH IN THE FORMER SOVIET UNION AMPLIFIED MIND POWER RESEARCH FORMER SOVIET UNION THE Behind the scenes, the CIA had an abiding interest in watching the progress of Soviet parapsychology and in exploring ESP techniques for its own covert purposes. Part 3 of 3 he following text, released by the Central Intelligence Agency under the Freedom of Information Act, deals with a twofold project designed to examine the poten- tial use of extrasensory perception for "practical problems of intelligence". The author of the memorandum outlined a project of at least three years in length and estimated the cost for its first year. The project was envisioned as aiming at reliability and repeatability among "exception- ally gifted individuals" and at the utilisation of "scattered" ESP results through "statistical concentration". Names, telephone numbers and other items that might permit the identifi- cation of individuals or departments were deleted by the CIA at the time the document was released in 1981, and such deletions are noted in the text. There are no indications of whether the project was actually undertaken, nor is it clear whether the text is an interoffice memorandum between two agency officials or was addressed to a CIA official by a researcher working under a contract or grant outside the agency. The memorandum is dated January 7, 1952, and its full text follows: If, as Now appears to us established beyond question, there is in some persons a certain amount of capacity for extrasensory perception (ESP), this fact, and conse- quent developments leading from it, should have significance for professional intel- ligence service. Research on the problems of extrasensory perception has been in the hands of a very few workers and has not been directed to the purpose here in mind, or to any practical application whatever. However, having established cer- tain basic facts, now, after long and patient efforts and more resistance than assis- tance, it appears that we are ready to consider practical application as a research problem in itself. There are two main lines of research that hold specific promise and need further development with a view to application to the intelligence project. These two are by no means all that could be done to contribute to that end; rather, everything that adds anything to our understanding of what is taking place in ESP is likely to give us advantage in the problems of use and control. Therefore, the Rockefeller-financed project of finding the personality correlates of ESP and the excursions into the ques- tion of ESP in animals, recently begun, as well as several major lines of inquiry, are all to the good. The two special projects on investigation that ought to be pushed in the interest of the project under discussion are, first, the search for and development of exception- ally gifted individuals who can approximate perfect success in ESP test performance, and, second, the statistical concentration of scattered ESP performance, so as to enable an ultimately perfect reliability and application. We have something definite to go on in each case, and it is with this in mind that we are inclined to make a seri- ous effort to push the research in the direction of reliable application to the practical problem of intelligence. First, a word about the "special subject". On a number of occasions, through the years, several different scientific investigators have, under conditions of excellent control, obtained strikingly long runs of unbroken success from subjects in ESP tests. The conditions allowed no alternative. At least one of them occurred with the target cards and experimenter in one building and the subject several hundred yards away in another. Due to the elusive, unconscious nature of ESP ability, these same From the website: www.biomindsuperpowers.com/ Pages/Ebon1.html NEXUS = 43 THE CIA's EARLY INTEREST IN ESP PROJECTS by Martin Ebon © 1996 OCTOBER — NOVEMBER 2001 www.nexusmagazine.com