American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - Why The CIA Hired a Team of Psychics | Paul Smith

Episode Date: October 5, 2024

Parapsychology is a fringey field of physics that involves the study of mind over matter effects. Many elite universities had parapsychology departments in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. At American Alchemy, we think the field is worthy of further inquiry. On this episode, we explore two of parapsychology’s most mind blowing instantiations. The first is a government psychic spy program called Stargate. I interview one of the psychic spies in the program, a guy named Paul Smith, who now teaches people to remote view. The second is a parapsychologist at Princeton named Herb Metz who studies random event generators (or very simple/basic computers) that people can affect with their minds. Pretty insane stuff. If you don’t believe me, watch the episode and see for yourself! Link stargate files, Paul and Herb's books here: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/stargate https://www.amazon.com/Essential-Guide-Remote-Viewing-Perception/dp/1938815017 https://www.amazon.com/Selection-Effect-Consciousness-Shapes-Reality/dp/1733508007/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= *** AMERICAN ALCHEMY is an original series hosted by Jesse Michels that explores the frontier of science and tech. Each week, we bring you exclusive interviews with some of the leading thinkers of our time. INSTAGRAM ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichels TWITTER ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican EMAIL/BOOKINGS ➤ [e-mail] SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7eOJzNRWY4l2UTDvIquxYg?app=desktop original music: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LlLRudDi60Uy4jcmOSEs1 --- - remote viewing paul smith documentary russell targ national security agency Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75-sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. When you get right down to it, nobody knows what consciousness is. There are functions of mind that cannot be described purely by brain process.

In today's episode, we get freaky with parapsychology. If you're unfamiliar, it's basically a fringy field of physics that involves the study of mind over matter. A Russian woman can move objects across a table without touching them. To learn more, I spoke to two mind-bending individuals. The first was Paul Smith out in Cedar City. Utah. More of this is true than you might think. Our plane on the way over here got struck by lightning.

Coming into Vegas? That's even rarer. That's Rob Love. Yeah. Why is Rob Loe with you? Because I taught him how to remote view. Not that's cool. Paul worked in the CIA's Stargate project.

Stargate was a psychic spy program that ran from 1972 to 1995. Paul and others were used as remote viewers, basically psychics that could draw up only using their mines, things like Russian nuclear bases and lost American hostages. Right off the bat, the program had some notable successes. Joe McMonigle, remote viewer number one, described in vivid detail a novel Russian nuclear submarine eight months before it was publicly revealed. And Rosemary Smith identified within a three-mile radius, a lost spy plane that had crashed and fallen under the treetops in Zaire.

President Jimmy Carter recalls being shocked when he figured out that a psychic medium accurately channeled the location of the plane. Next up is Herb Metz, a parapsychologist that works out of Princeton University in New Jersey. Herb spent over a decade at the Pear Lab, Princeton's anomalous research center, specifically focused on an experiment called Random Event Generators. Here's an example of an R-EG. Basically the experiment involves a graphical interface showing ones in zeros

produced by a binary, pretty simple computer. This simple computer is tied to something that that's provably random in quantum field theory, something like radioactive isotope decay. And it basically is random. It just goes up and down, just like a coin toss. So basically, over a long enough time scale, you should see the same amount of ones as you do zeros, maybe with a normal standard deviation. But what this experiment shows is that if you actually have an observer present, they can actually

have a statistically significant skewing effect on the output on the screen based on their intention. I was feeling the other way. You're letting go of that. I sincerely hope that nothing freaky happened to you while watching this episode. But I can assure you that if it did, it's because you're not subscribed to this channel yet. So do that now. Leave a comment with any weird anomalous shit that's happened to you and enjoy this week's American Alchemy with Herb Metz and Paul Smith.

Maybe you should interview me. This is viewing room number one. Oh. This is where we do what we call monitored session. Let's get into just remote viewing and what it is. So remote viewing is you can be trained to do it and it's a way of organizing your perceptual experiences, your consciousness, your interaction with the universe, if you will, to be able to access and perceive locations, persons, and things that you have no other access to.

So for example, on the other side of the planet, literally on the other side of the planet, you can remote view a target without even knowing what the target is. Our classic understanding of consciousness is that it's limited by five senses in memory. This completely breaks that model. Do you have any sense as to what it means in terms of the bigger question of what is consciousness? Yes. So let's take a TV set as an analogy.

That TV is not generating the TV program that we're watching. Transmiss. That's coming over the airways, right? But you go in and pull out one of those plugs and see what happens with the picture on the TV. Okay, it gets all messed up, right? Or it gets to store it in a certain way, pull out a different plug,

and it gets to store it in another way or whatever. That's exactly the same kind of thing that you might be doing with the brain when you're shutting pieces down and seeing it affect consciousness. That isn't evidence to show that physicalism is wrong. It's evidence to show that physicalism isn't necessarily right. Yeah, we have, I mean, look, I like the TV analogy,

we have a binding problem of consciousness, which is we have no idea how the optic pathway, the auditory pathway, your motor coordination. The whole experience becomes a unified experience. Yeah, the movie that we're watching every day. And if you were to listen to music on a radio, you'd have a similar binding problem by just looking at the capacitors, the battery, the antenna, the transmitter.

We've just solved it with technology. We know how to do it there. We just don't know how to do it here. We don't know how to do it here. Exactly. We don't know what the tether, the possible tether is. And to bring it around to remote viewing and other psychic modalities, right, The very fact that you can perceive things at a distance where you shouldn't be able to do that if physicalism is true.

You can perceive things in a difference and show actual veritical evidence that you've done that. Shows that the transmission concept of consciousness is far more likely to be true than the physicalist model where it's all in the brain. In 1972, laser physicist Howell put off was doing experiments with New York City-based psychic Ingo Swans. Swan had been having out-of-body experiences since he was a child. He thought that this ability, if honed properly, could be turned into a rigorous protocol around remote viewing distant objects. When Swan accurately remote viewed the readouts on a highly shielded cork detector, it got the attention of high-up officials in the defense department. In fact, it freaked out the postdoc that was in charge of that machine. What are you doing to my machine?

This prompted the CIA to launch the Stargate project. A psychic spy program to do things like find Russian nuclear bases and lost American hostages. Let's talk about some of the successes that are declassified that you can talk about in Stargate. So one example is the Typhoon submarine in Joe McMontagall. Joe McMontagall was perhaps the best and most effective remote viewer. He was referred to popularly as remote viewer number one. When Joe is on in a session, it's astonishing the stuff he gets. The first thing I'm getting is sort of an overhang kind of a thing like this.

How do you think you developed your skills for, because you really seem to be the best remote viewer, you know, maybe ever. In 1979, Joe was tasked with remote viewing a huge impenetrable building in a shipyard off the White Sea in Russia. He described a massive nuclear submarine in the works. It had the ballistic missile tubes in front of the sail or, you know, the superstructure on the sub. which was unheard of at that time. And everybody thought that was crazy, and it was pretty well dismissed. Eight months after that, those sessions were done,

the Russians floated out the typhoon, the biggest submarine ever built, and its missile tubes were in front of the superstructure on the sun. Pretty crazy. Exactly, as Joe described it. Another big success came that same year when both the Russians and the Americans were scrambling to find a downed T-U-22 spy plane

under the treetops in Zaire. The plane contained highly sensitive Russian cryptic equipment. Russians wanted to find it obviously. The U.S. wanted to find it obviously, right? But they didn't know where it was. And the satellite footprint wasn't big enough or nor was it successful in getting through the triple canopy forest. Dale Graf, one of the Stargate leads,

had a woman named Rosemary Smith remote view the plane. He showed her a picture of the TU22. We're looking for a plane like this. And he said, it's crashed somewhere here. and he gave her a whole map of Africa, the entire continent. And he said, see if you can find it. She essentially made a circle on the map, and it was a three-square-mile area,

and the plane was inside that. That's pretty crazy. Paul had many successes of his own, like this one in 1987 during the Iran-Iraq War. The tasking was describe whatever is most important for us to know about within the next few days. I started describing this vessel, which reminded me an American destroyer,

I perceived an aircraft off at a distance flying around, and then it dropped two little cylinders with stubby wings on it that made roaring sounds that flew around and eventually encountered this vessel, and the vessel is full of smoke and flames and leans to one side is all bent and crumpled. I go home for the weekend. Monday morning I needed a call from Skip Atwater. He said, Paul, where's that session you did on Friday? I said, well, it's in my safe drawer. Why do you care? He said, you haven't seen the papers yet this morning. No, I opened up my copy of the Washington Post, U.S. frigate hit by exosite missiles fired by an Iraqi jet.

Paul had described the USS Stark incident in frightening detail just days before the attack. Was there any way to link your vivid description of what actually happened to possibly stopping it? Yes, that would have been possible. And in which case, the incident wouldn't happen, which would have been great, would have saved 37 Americans. But then the next time something like that happened, they'd say, well, they told us there was going to be attacked last time and nothing happened. You know, why should we believe in this time? You know, it's kind of a no-win. That's the perfect, I think, microcosm of an inherent conflict in parapsychology and making it work.

And I think it's so obvious that there's something there. There's some link between mind and matter where the Cartesian dualist separation that we thought existed is just wrong. But then when it comes to scale, or instrumentalizing a lot of this stuff, it feels like a big challenge. Yeah, but the problem is, of course, we can't explain ESP really within the physicalist paradigm. And if you can't do that, then you can't be accepted in the club. Skeptics are the minority. Skeptics and critics are the minority, but they also have the organs of publication, right? The current paradigm, the current worldview and science, tends to try and suppress any competing worldviews that come into

to happen. So the standard schoolbook example is everybody used to believe that the Earth was the center of the universe. Well then Copernicus and folks like that came along and said, no, the sun is the center of the solar system. And so when you have physicalism, that view is the current received view. And if you start saying, well, this happens independent of physical forces, that totally shoots that in the head. It's almost like the person's consciousness level or something is affecting their remote viewing capacity or getting their effect on a random event generator. And that seems like this fundamentally immeasurable phenomena.

So that also feels like, you know, it's like gravity is just kind of a function of the distance and the mass, you know, two objects. And so this feels sort of harder to pin down. Yeah, well, it's definitely a challenge. I mean, how do you use it, right? Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I could go on about the nature of time and all the different things that occur, all this stuff. How do you think time works?

Oh, no, you don't have time for that. I want to talk specifically about how you instruct other people and kind of the tactics of remote viewing. Can you sort of describe it? Obviously, these are sort of, you know, week-long sessions. First thing is to recognize the signal. Now, the problem is it's a very subtle signal. As you can imagine, it's coming in from, we don't know where it's coming to a physical brain, and when you first start off, you often don't even recognize that you're getting a signal, right?

The other thing I teach them is how to recognize mental noise. And when you know that you're supposed to be remote viewing a target that's on the other side of the planet, your left brain will immediately start trying to solve the problem for you. Let's say the target's the Eiffel Tower. The left brain gets this image or an impression of criss-crossing metal girders. It doesn't know it's the Eiffel Tower. It says, what does that remind me of? Oh, I know it's the bridge we crossed last summer.

So it tells you the targets a bridge when it's really the Eiffel Tower. When I met Joseph McMonigle, he told me that he sent his ego off to do something else while he would do the remote viewing exercise. Do you do something like that? He makes it sound simpler than it is. Sure, yeah. But, yes, what you have to learn, there's a real zen component. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building.

Fit for your ambition for citizens back. It's all about process, it's not about outcome. If you focus on how you're going to do it, how you're doing it, the discipline is involved in it, you have to learn to not care whether you succeed or fail. Many of those things can segue into real life, in the real world, right? And so much trouble is caused in the world by these preconceptions, guessing, judgment, judgments, all this stuff, that if the world would learn, the Zen elements here, a lot of our problems would go away or at least be significantly

dementia. But I don't hold out hope for that happening. After we got tired of talking about hitting mental targets, we decided to switch to physical targets. Because when in Utah, Mario, our cameraman. Next up is Herb Metz, a parapsychologist that works out of Princeton University in New Jersey. Hey, Justin, how are you doing? Good, how are you doing? Thanks for having me. Come on in. All right, let's do it. The Pear Lab was started in 1979 by the dean of the engineering school, a guy named Bob John. Bob John was a plasma physicist who frequently worked with NASA on electronic and plasma propulsion in space. A pretty hard-headed scientist, Bob was the last person to get involved in parapsychological research.

But a student of his came to him basically showing anomalous mind over matter effects in a random event generator. A random event generator is a device that uses. a quantum process to produce random output, random in this case being one of two different states. It's like a coin toss. And then the question is, if we try to influence it, what can we do? I can see you're already trying to influence, all right? Yeah, should we all try? Ready?

Bob became convinced that this experiment was possibly paradigm shifting and worthy of further inquiry, and so he decided to start the pair lab. It's fascinating looking at the graph of the output. it because when people tried to produce more ones than zeros, the line, the chart just keeps going up and up and up. And when they tried to produce more zeros than ones, it goes down and down. And when they were trying to keep it even, the line shows in the middle. So the final sort of chart of the pair data is this beautiful graph that kind of shows pretty definitively that the subjects were able to do what they were tasked to do.

Is there an easily synthesized or kind of a bite-sized version of the data that I can send to friends where I can say, hey, yeah, here it is. You can go through it yourself. There are several books. Bob John and Brenda Dunn of the Parallab wrote two books. Margins of reality and consciousness, the source of reality. There's actually a recent paper by Etzel Cardinia that is a review of all parapsychology from the last 40 or 50 years. The other interesting thing about REGs in terms of sort of proving them in the mainstream is that presumably if you are the experimental test subject, who's looking at the graphical interface

and trying to make it skew towards ones and zeros, maybe you're not the only person having the effect on the REG. Maybe there's an experimenter effect. And so if you have somebody like a James Randy or Michael Schumer go into an R&G experiment trying to kind of disprove it, that might ironically affect the results. and then you end up in this kind of tautological impossible loop where it's very hard to say, well, yeah, they're skeptical and that's actually affecting the experiment. Right.

It sort of messes with our entire scientific epistemology because you can't go in with a priori skepticism because the a priori skepticism kind of affects the experiment. Well, two things on that. One is there was a parapsychologist who was active in the 50s, 60s, and 70s named Gertrude Schmeidler, And she would interview people and find out whether they're sheep, meaning they believe in psychic phenomenon or goats, meaning they don't believe in it. And then she would run parapsychology studies. And the sheep always got much better effects than the goats. And so if you imagine then an experimenter who's doing a study, who either is a sheep or a goat relative to the subject matter, that's going to influence the study.

So that's a well-known experience. So then is this kind of an epistemological sort of overhaul or shift where we can't go into things with a priori skepticism anymore? We're living in a time where a system that has been developed and sort of regulated itself to sort of keep its own integrity. But as we move forward, that system is harder and harder to maintain because it doesn't fit with a lot of what we're learning. there are people today who are already sort of outside of that model. I think young people today are typically don't quite get the scientific paradigm that they're born into because I don't think it really makes that much sense anymore or it's it's too narrow. It's certainly not. Yeah, it's not exciting. I think. Yeah, it's it's not. It's very mechanical. You know, we spent

hundreds of years working on physical survival, you know, making convenience, conveniences, refrigerators, and airplanes and all this kind of stuff. And really, they thought of everything. And that's all great. And it's been a wonderful ride, so to speak. And now people are going, well, what does it mean? Yeah. What do we do?

How does one live a life that's a meaningful life? And so we're shifting to more internal stuff than this external stuff. It's not like material science is slowing down, but conceptually, it's kind of narrowed along a path that is, I think excluding a lot of what is possible because we're still caught in a particular way of thinking about the world. The work that I do with the random event generators is clear evidence to me that our brain, mind systems do things that are not in the realm of biology today. It does feel like somewhat of a weak link between mind and matter. So how do we figure out sort of causal mechanism or figure out how to make that link stronger?

Yeah, no, that's a great question. That is the task at hand. And I believe that in the past, we never had the tools to be able to begin sort of separating out mind functions from brain functions and then sort of recombining them to see how they work together. But now we're developing tools that will, I believe, allow us to do both the computational process, necessary to see what's going on. And then interventions on the brain like transcranial magnetic stimulation, where we can sort of zap certain parts of the brain that I think will then create an enhanced result on people's ability to affect these devices. You can zap the part that inhibits you from getting a better effect. So I think we have a very heavy self-regulation process that keeps us

from getting better effects with these devices. Do you have kind of an optimistic outlook for consciousness research? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that it's inevitable, even though neuroscience is very, very brain-focused right now, we will inevitably come to find that there are functions of mind that cannot be described purely by brain process, that there's a causal activity that cannot be predicted from prior brain states.

Herb has invented all sorts of fun variations of random event generators, like this mind lamp. These devices have a random event generator built into their base, then affects the coloring that comes out of the mind lamp. We had a lot of psychologists purchase them, and they would have them running in their office while they were working with a client. Can we do an experiment right now and try to get it to change to the same color? What do you think about green? I love green, okay?

Okay, let's try to get that to change your green. All right. Pretty good. Awesome. Yeah. There are eight colors that the mind lamp could go to at any given time. So there was a 12.5% chance or a 1 out of 8 chance that we got green on the first try. But because the mind lamp can stay on any given color for up to 3 minutes, there was a 1 out of 6 chance or a 16% chance that we got any color in the first 30 seconds.

So when you multiply these probabilities, you get a 2nd. you get a 2% chance that we got green on the first try within the first 30 seconds of trying. Was this result random? I'm not sure. You make the call. And if you're interested in learning more about random event generators, go grab a copy of Herb Metz's book, The Selection Effect. If you're interested in delving further into remote viewing, feel free to pick up a copy of Paul Smith's book, The Essential Guide to Remote Viewing. To learn more about all of this, I'm including a few resources in the description below. Stargate was actually declassified as a program in 2017, so all of the files are online and are in this description. I think it's important to note a couple of things.

First, anomalies often exist for years in the existing scientific framework, going completely unexplained by them. When there's a scientific paradigm shift, often that new paradigm explains the former anomaly. A good example of this is black body radiation, which was discovered in the 1860s, but only adequately explained by quantum physics at the beginning of the 20th century. We've spent billions of dollars on conventional physics, and we've made a ton of progress, but that progress has stagnated since the early 70s. A lot of our recent talent and spending has gone towards string theory, which is basically just abstract math, and hasn't produced any useful technology.

Compare that to quantum physics, which some people estimate is responsible for a third of our GDP. So you have pretty hard-headed experiments in parapsychology. You have government programs that have lasted decades in the field. And you have the fact that probably less than $30 million has been spent on parapsychology globally in the last hundred years. That's literally less than what we would spend on a single particle accelerator. So I can't definitively say that there's a mind over matter effect. There are definitely repeatability issues, and when it comes to instrumentalizing parapsychology and turning it into predictable technology, there obviously have been some issues in the past.

in the past there too. But given the dramatic implications parapsychology might have on science and in the way we live our lives, I think it's worthy of more investigation and resources. So I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Own it all. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Buckslot machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million dream package. The biggest prize in Yamava's history. Love Serrano members can earn daily instant prizes and secure a spot in the finale May 29. Don't pass go and own it all. Only at Yamava, celebrating its 40th anniversary.

You win? Details at yamava.com must be 21-20. Please gamble responsibly. Monopoly is a trademark of Hasbro. Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion. Please leave a comment, hit subscribe and the like button if you did. My name's Jesse Michaels and this is American Alchemy.