Angry Planet - The psychics with top secret security clearance

Episode Date: May 3, 2017

Even if you think a government program to fund research into extra sensory perception, remote viewing and mind reading is crazy, U.S. taxpayers have paid for it. This week on War College, Pulitzer-prize finalist Annie Jacobsen walks us through the years she spent digging through government documents and researching the U.S. military’s interest in the paranormal. Jacobsen uncovered once-classified material detailing these covert programs intended to help intelligence agencies access secret documents, locate hostages and read minds. By Matthew Gault Produced and edited by Bethel HabteSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The views expressed on this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. He was able to actually see, and that is in quotes, using the sixth sense, he could see names, and numbers on actual documents in classified facilities thousands of miles away. And this was verified by Defense Department because they actually tested price against one of their own secret underground NSA facilities.

So this is a weird story. It's a story about how the U.S. government pursued research into something that most people think is ridiculous. It's about scientists and psychics with top secret clearances. Now, I'm not saying that any of it's real, but the American taxpayers have absolutely paid for it. You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Hello, and welcome to War College. I'm your host, Matthew Galt. With me today is Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobson.

Long-time listeners may remember Jacobson from her last visit to War College, where she laid out the history of DARPA, Pentagon's mad scientists. This week, she's here to talk to us about her new book, Phenomena, the Secret History of the U.S. government's investigation into extrasensory perception and psychokinesis. Annie, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. So this stuff's been picked over in the culture for decades now, and we typically mock it. And one of the things I love about your book is that it makes the stuff feel both relevant

and dangerous. Well, it's amazing to report on war and weapons and U.S. national security and secrets and find that all roads, kind of all origin stories, lead back to the Nazis. And writing phenomena was no different. I was surprised to come across this cache of captured Nazi documents that the Allied intelligence forces captured at the end of the war that dealt with Heinrich Himmler's absolute obsession with the occult. That is what it was called then. And the slow process of pulling out the really far out superstition-based magic, almost sorcery type plans that Himmler had

in play from these sort of bizarre quasi-supernatural forms of divination like ESP, map dowsing, psychokinesis. these became very interesting to the CIA, not as a point of ridicule at all, but as a real serious arena of exploration. And what was most astonishing to me reporting phenomena was that here we are now, in the present day, these programs continue. I want to get to the origin of some of these programs. So can you tell me who Dr. Pujaric was and why he was? important. Pujaharat was a very interesting character and you mentioned kind of this idea of the conspiratorial mk ultra you know spider web type ideas that have been picked over by numerous people but when you can find details that are original and you know unreported before for me that becomes

really interesting as a journalist and that was the case with Pujarak he worked on a very little known program before this book called, that was part of MK Ultra, but that was called Sub Project 58. And it was the program to try to locate and then master the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms. So unlike the LSD programs, which have been looked over extensively, this was kind of an unknown secret weapon that the CIA was pursuing based on an Aztec legend. I mean, amazing to look these declassified documents and actually see the CIA talking about it was called Teo Nocnal, which is the Aztec word for God's flesh. The plan was to give these hallucinogenic mushrooms to shaman type people and that their divinatory powers would somehow be enhanced. A perfect little CIA

note on the side was, you know, also allegedly the shaman can tell you, Who Stole Your Donkey? Which is just a great little, you know, CIA intelligence collection pursuit that makes perfect sense. Who stole the donkey? Right. And presumably, if they could help you find who stole your donkey, you could help them find all sorts of other things. Exactly. Who stole my men?

You know, where are the missing hostages? Where's our downed fighter jet? Where's Patty Hurst? I mean, all of these questions literally became, I mean, the past. Patty Hurst issue came decades later, but these were actual applications that the CIA used for its alleged psychic soldiers. And before we dive more into this, I want to stress to our listeners that this is an incredibly well-researched book based on primary documents and hours of interviews, and that you really, really did find a whole bunch of declassified information that has not been reported on before. And going back to Pujarak, one of the things I found about Puparuk that was astonishing was because these documents are very difficult to locate.

It's almost a stroke of luck when you find them. And that's what happened to me at the Library of Congress. I was on a search. The Puharic documents are allegedly lost to history. And he's such a controversial character. He appears in every one of these books as a reference, but only as a reference. And I found through his personal correspondence, with one of the DuPont family members who was financing Pujaharix research into hallucinogenic mushrooms.

At the same time that the Army Chemical Center and the CIA were financing Poohawarix research. So I found all these letters between the two of them about the kind of work they were doing and where the root of the fascination came from. And that was trying to determine if this alleged power, this ESP, extrasensory perception, the sixth sense, if you will, advanced intuition. Was it something that was biological as Dr. Pujaric originally was examining because he was a medical doctor? Or was it something from without? And that's where you get into all these supernatural, paranormal concepts, because the without, of course, indicate some kind of a supernatural being.

Now, why did he end up becoming such a controversial figure? Because at times in the book, he's described as a brilliant scientist, and then later is kind of ridiculed. Well, he is what I consider to be a cautionary tale. And I worked with Pujarak's son, who lives in Europe, who gave me an extraordinary access to photographs of Pujarak. And when you look at his physical progression, You can almost see this downfall is how I perceived it.

And what happened with Puharik specifically is he began to take the magic mushrooms, the hallucinogenic mushrooms, the drugs himself. In his notes, he writes that he's using himself as the control, you know, and that he gives the drugs to the psychics to kind of see how they affect the psychic person and how they would affect a non-psychic person, meaning himself. But perhaps that led to his going off the reservation, if you will, because in many ways, phenomena is a quest narrative. It's about people's mad search for this mysterious enigma. You know, is extrasensory perception fact or fiction?

I mean, is it fantasy? And Puharik was one of those guys who pursued it literally to the gates of hell. Speaking of mysterious enigmas, I want to talk. about one of the psychics now and probably one of the more famous ones, Yuri Geller. How does he enter this story and what's his involvement with the Israeli military and the U.S. military? From the declassified CIA documents, we now know that Geller was a CIA asset. He was very interesting to CIA and also the Defense Department. And as I report in phenomena, there are these documents written by an assessment and a nationalized. written in the Pentagon saying, look, and I'm paraphrasing, but we need to examine Geller. I mean, allegedly he bends spoons and can start and stop watches, wrist watches. But the Pentagon asked, what might a guy like Geller with his psychokinesis, alleged psychokinesis,

the ability to affect matter with the mind so that the Pentagon asked, what might a guy like Geller be able to do with the electronic system on an ICBM missile. That was a very real question for him, and they wanted the CIA to look into him, to research him, and really to examine his biology, his neurophysiology. Go picking up where Puharik left off, pursuing the idea, is this from within? Is it kind of an inner talent? and if so, can we capitalize on this as the CIA? And I want to stress to our listeners again, some of the younger ones that may not know or may not remember

that Geller was a celebrity in the 70s. He was on TV quite a bit and actually had a pretty public debunking episode on Johnny Carson. Yes, and his, you know, decades-long battle with James Randy, the amazing Randy, kind of a pioneer of the scientific skeptics. I report in the book because it's fascinating and it underscores the battle going on always in this arena. You know, it's, as I say, it's sometimes science versus the supernatural, but it's also really about these different personalities.

I mean, James Randy is a magician and he was and remains, I interviewed him for the book, convinced that Geller is a fraud, a hawkster, a charlatan, just up to no good and never has been. And then you have, on the other hand, all these incredible Geller supporters. I mean, CIA doctors, his CIA handler, people who went into this complete skeptics saw Geller do what he did and have what I call a conversion moment, where suddenly they believe Geller has some kind of innate past. if you will that is inexplicable but also undeniable and you met Geller and interviewed him for the book correct I did I interviewed him at his home in

England and at his home in Israel and you know what's interesting is a question that's often asked is if people are psychic then how come they don't win the lottery well Geller is one of the few psychics that actually has repeatedly won the lottery not the literal lottery lottery but a figurative one he's extraordinarily wealthy, has amassed a fortune, and this is all fact-checkable with Forbes magazine, that he amassed this fortune performing map dousing. Again, a quasi-science. Many people would call pseudo, almost every scientist calls pseudoscience, where you're able to, using an unknown sense, the sixth sense, pinpoint on a map where an object is hidden. Now, in Geller's

case, he teamed up with oil companies, gold companies, silver mining companies. And while he began working on a commission for what he could locate, you know, literally by pointing at a map and saying that's where the treasure is, he then began to work in partnership with these multi-billion dollar organizations and take a, you know, a piece of the pie and has become extraordinarily wealthy doing that. And I was witness to some of that at his different homes. Tell me about the Swan-Gellar phenomenon. What were those experiments and what were the results? Those were the early CIA experiments that put Geller on the map for CIA.

So we talked about Erie Geller as one of the CIA psychics. The other one was a man by the name of Ingo Swan. And he was remarkable in many ways and sort of adored by his physicist handlers. because he had, first of all, he had a real desire to work with the CIA, and he had no conflicts. And so, whereas Geller left, Ingo-Swan stayed on. But the CIA called the phenomena the Swan Geller effect or the Swan Geller phenomenon, meaning, and in one of the declassified documents, they say that, you know, it is inescapable that this phenomena exists as a reality. And that is a very bold statement coming from CIA.

All right. I'm going to take a minute here to pause for a break. You're listening to War College. My name is Matthew Gaunt. We are talking with Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobson about her new book Phenomeno, which delves into the strange but true history of the American military's long attempt to utilize psychic phenomenon for their own ends. Thank you for listening. This is War College.

I am your host Matthew Galt. We are returning to our conversation with Annie Jacobson about her new book phenomena. Annie, can you tell me who Pat Price was? Pat Price was the third point on the triangle of the CIA's sort of Uber psychics, if you will. And he was remarkable because he was able to actually see, and that is in quotes, using the sixth sense, he could see names and numbers on actual documents in classified facilities thousands of miles away. And this was verified by Defense Department because they actually tested Price against one of their own secret underground NSA facilities that there was absolutely no way Price could have gotten into. And yet he was able to pull names and numbers off of, you know, literally.

Manila files inside filing cabinets underground. And it was so shocking to the Defense Department that they did their own security investigation into CIA. Again, you need to classify documents. It's remarkable to read about because they were convinced for a while that Pat Price was some kind of a mold because they couldn't figure out how on earth he could have this information. And he was doing what we commonly think of as remote viewing, right? And that was a term, yes, that was created by CIA to destigmatize this occult concept of ESP. I mean, one thing I think is important to make clear. And again, I report phenomena.

I try to report it neutrally. Like here's what one side says. Here's what the other. And most important what the scientific skeptics say with good reason is that you know, ever since the scientific revolution of the 1500s, it's been agreed upon that to call something science, one must pass five scientific steps, you know, in the laboratory with one's experiments, and then those experiments must be consistently repeatable. Otherwise, it's not science. It's a hypothesis. Well, ESP, psychokinesis, you know, there's remarkable results.

as we learn from the CIA and DOD declassified documents, but they're not repeatable every time. And so that is the central organizing debate, and with good reason about why the phenomena is considered pseudoscience by most people. But with that said, CIA is after what it can exploit, and so is DOD. And the results of some of these remarkable, inexplicable talents is what keeps the intelligence community and the defense community in the work. And that's what I found really interesting. You know, is this a cycle of kind of a fool's errand?

Or as each decade passes and we move toward. What is now a world where neuroscience, computer technology, and modeling of the human body and the human brain is possible in ways that could never have been imagined before, will this age-old mystery be solved? Reading through, especially the CIA years, it really feels as if they were constantly pursuing big personalities like Geller, like Price, is it possible that they were just, taken in by charismatic hucksters? It's why I write about the placebo effect, the idea of self-fulfilling prophecy, or the Tinkerbell effect, which is, you know, it's real because I say it's real. That must be considered, and I think readers get to decide. But as far as the big personalities are concerned when you're talking about CIA, their

conclusion, or the way it was said to me by one, neurophysiologist in particular, Dr. Kit Green, who was the CIA's doctor way back in the 70s and continues to work today in this field, he said to me that the best way to think about the big personality that we've been talking about is the Mozart analogy. In other words, Annie here can't sing in the shower. And you think of what Mozart is capable, was capable of in his music. the CIA's position was Mozart being a supernormal, not paranormal,

but supernormal. And so that was how they chose to consider the swan, the Geller, the Pat Price of this world as kind of the Mozart,

a Mozart in his own right. Whereas the Pentagon, when they kind of started looking into this stuff, they were much more interested. It seemed to me in training people in it and getting the common soldier to be able to do it. And this is kind of what I think of as the men who stare at goats era, right? And I'm wondering if you can tell us how stuff trained, how the focus really transitioned from the CIA to the defense department in general. You're absolutely right that the defense department loves and lives by training. I mean,

there's a training manual for everything, from booby traps to survival to counterinsurgency. And whereas the CIA could play fast and loose, my interpretation, of, you know, what this really was, the Defense Department felt that it needed to be really clear that this was a trainable skill, whatever that meant, and even my interpretation, at the risk of sounding like a big catch-22. So they decided that they could train your average soldiers to be psychic. And in my opinion, that's where grave, you know, real problems arose because the leading psychics that the Defense Department had, many of whom came over from the CIA program, were inherently by their own, you know, statements about themselves, the psychic. But at the Defense Department, the term psychic was, you know, term non grata. I mean, you could not say that.

You had to say remote viewing. And you had to also promote the idea that it was a trainable skill. It led to an extraordinary conflict because the people who were delivering the best results were the ones who were sort of born psychic, if you will. The super normals, the Gellers and the Swans. Yes. And although they had moved on at that point, I tell. tell the story for the first time on the record of a woman named Angela Dela Fyura, who became the Pentagon's lead psychic. She became the person at DIA that was looked to to solve

some of the greatest unsolvable problems. You know, where is hostage X? Where is Qaddafi's ship carrying the chemical weapons? Where is the fugitive Charles Jordan? Angela Dela Fiora was able to give information, what is called actionable intelligence that led to the location of the hostage, the location of Gaddafi's ship, and the location of the fugitive Charles Jordan. Again, declassified documents demonstrating, wow, where is this, you know, what is the root of this sixth sense? Who knows, but the information provided by this asset, Angela Della Fura, is actionable intelligence. There's the problem. And yet despite that, things kind of start to fall apart in the 80s and then kind of culminate in a really high profile associated press piece in 1991.

What happened? Some of the soldiers who were being trained to be psychic began to become resentful of those who were really getting more attention from the DIA scientists who were. were like Delafura, who were using the Delafuras as assets, you know, they were getting a lot more of the operations. And the soldiers became resentful and began spending a lot of time pursuing, again, going back to the idea of Puharach with the cautionary tale, pursuing these really far-out ideas of the supernatural. I mean, the supernatural plagues the phenomena, you know, from time immemorial. And it did so again at the Pentagon. And you have this group of soldiers who are trying to locate, you know, alien bases on Mars and who killed JFK and, you know,

where is the Ark of the Covenant? Interestingly, many of the same concepts pursued by Himmler's occultish individuals back during the warps, particularly where's the Ark of the Covenant? Where's the lance of destiny? And when those soldiers were asked to move on, you know, kind of politely retired, a couple of them began going public with what was then, classified, highly classified information about this program. And they began to kind of squeak it out into the civilian sector and offer their services as psychics to others. And, you know, that does not go over well at the Pentagon, but there were problems of, you know, do we draw attention to this? How do we reprimand these individuals? And things went from bad to worse. One guy winds up in a mental institution.

and, you know, as I write in phenomena, the downfall of the program is unstoppable. Is there any research into this now? That's what I was, you know, amazed to learn and really excited about reporting in the book that here we are in the modern era and these programs have now been rebooted and rebranded under very 21st century high technology names. I mean, they're called things like, enhanced perceptive capabilities or sense-making. The Office of Naval Research has a program where they're training sailors and Marines

to think precognitively. I mean, that is ESP. And they, you know, in the same way that there was the term remote viewing in the 70s and 80s, now you have these new terms. But what is interesting is because the emphasis is all on human, Human physiology, neurophysiology, the brain. What is the brain capable of? What kind of knowledge can man obtain?

You know, the old myth, we only use 5% of our brain or fact. That's where this new work lies, and it seems to thus far have evaded the snickering journalists, if you will, who, you know, link this kind of work to the occult and to the supernatural. All right. So you spent several years looking to all of this stuff. You met the big personalities. You talked to them. You've been looking through the government records.

What do you make of it? Is there anything to all of this? What do you think? I think that discounting the sixth sense is unhelpful. because there is much to be learned about all that man does not know. I mean, one of the things I did researching the book, I went to the British Museum and I looked at the oldest library in existence. It belonged to King Ashburnapal of Assyria in 600 BC.

And at that time, writing had been around for 2,000 years, Cuneiform. And Ashburnapal was the most powerful ruler in the world. as it existed then. And in his hubris, he gathered together all of the world's knowledge. This is what he said, right, you know, meaning all of the documents that existed. He had everything in his library and he knew it. I found a certain levity to that idea that even then rulers thought they knew everything. And you think of where we are 2,500 years later.

and what was known then and even what was known 50 years ago before we went to the moon was unimaginable to humans and so going back to that theme which I find extraordinary about science and technology affording man access to his own knowledge you know it's it's like a it's like the oroboros eating its own you know the snake eating its own tale, that will the equipment that we have created, the tools that we have created, the science and technology, the fMRIs, the computers that can calculate 93 quadrillion calculations per second, will this technology allow us to learn more about our own knowledge capabilities? That I find the heart and soul of phenomena, and that I find infinitely interesting.

Annie Jacobson, thank you so much for joining us on Warwick. College. Her new book is Phenomena, the Secret History of the U.S. government's investigation into extraceousityity perception and psychokinesis. There's a lot of amazing stories in there that have never been told before. Please check it out. And thank you so much for joining us, Annie. Thank you for having me. Thank you for listening to this week's show. War College was created by Jason Fields and Craig Hecht. It's hosted by Matthew Galt, who also wrangles our guests. It's produced by me, Bethel Hoppe. If you like our show and want to support, us, please, as always, give us a stellar review on iTunes. It very much helps other people

find the show. To send us ideas for future shows, simply tweet at us. We are at War underscore College. Thanks for listening.