So Supernatural - CONSPIRACY: Project Stargate

Episode Date: June 3, 2020

For more than two decades, the CIA and U.S. military ran a top-secret project to study psychic phenomena. The declassified files suggest that psychic powers do exist—and that they were used in some of the most important intelligence operations of the 20th century.

The story I'm about to tell you is so ridiculous, I barely believe it myself. From the early 70s to the mid-90s, the CIA and military ran a secret study on psychic phenomena. They wanted to figure out how psychic powers could be weaponized for national security purposes. That's not even the weird part, though. What's really stunning are the results. The researchers called them eight martini results because what happened was so unnerving that any agents who came to observe had to go out and drink eight martinis to get over it. If you're skeptical going into this, you're not alone. Barely anyone in the government

took this project seriously because it seemed so out there. And yet, the program kept running for 23 years, consulting on hundreds of military and intelligence operations. Because frankly, it worked. This is Supernatural, and I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. This week's episode is about Project Stargate, a top secret CIA and military program that ran for over two decades. Even though it was eventually shut down in 1995, the final report suggests that psychic phenomena is real. And it was used in hundreds of intelligence operations in the 70s and 80s. We'll have all that and more coming up. Stay with us.

You guys know I love a good government conspiracy. I've talked about a few on my other show, Crime Junkie, but what I've got for you today is way more out there than anything that's ever been covered on Crime Junkie before. It started in 1970 with a 23-year-old stage magician named Ori Geller. Ori is pretty popular in his home country of Israel. He's famous for things like bending metal spoons with his mind or making clocks stop on command, things that could be explained by regular sleight-of-hand tactics. But he claims to be telepathic, and he has an uncanny ability to read people's minds. In September 1970, there was one

incident that launched Ori to international stardom. He was doing a show in Tel Aviv when suddenly his heart started racing. He felt so sick that he had to sit down. He apologized for the interruption and told the audience why he felt so ill. He'd had a premonition. The president of Egypt had either just died or he was about to die. A journalist in the audience actually runs out to a payphone to check the newswired, but there's no word about anything having happened. The audience is honestly kind of annoyed by the dramatics

and they start to trickle out. But later that night, news breaks over the radio. The president of Egypt had died of a heart attack that very evening. The prediction was shocking enough to draw attention from the media all over the world. Not long afterwards, an American scientist approaches Ori after the show. He tells him that his abilities would be very interesting to the CIA. Now, you're probably wondering, why would the CIA want to study psychic abilities?

The answer, like most things in the 70s, is because the Soviets were doing it. There was a video making the rounds at the Pentagon of a classified experiment at the Soviet military lab where a woman apparently stops a frog's heart with her mind. Now, no one's really sure if this was real or a disinformation campaign, but if the enemy was researching this, the U.S. better do it too. They were most interested in extrasensory perception, or ESP,

the ability to perceive things outside of the regular five senses. That includes telepathy, seeing the future, and something called remote viewing, which is basically where you can see things in your mind's eye that aren't physically in front of you. It's obvious how those skills could be useful for intelligence gathering if

anyone could prove that they actually exist. So the CIA director personally signs off on bringing Ori Geller to the States to test what he can do. It takes over a year to get this thing going, but in November of 1972, Ori arrives at the Stanford Research Institute in California, where the classified project will be headquartered. A CIA analyst named Kit Green is going to oversee the program, and he works with the researchers to make sure everything's done right. Now, security is obviously a concern, since for all anyone knows, Ori could be working with the Israeli intelligence. So before the test begins the entire lab at SRI is swept for bugs and Ori is scanned to make sure there's no electronic or magnetic devices on him. They also consult a magician to plan for any tricks

Ori might try to use to fake telepathic abilities. The experiments have to be absolutely foolproof or the results won't be worth anything. What they come up with is almost laughably simple. They put a die in a sealed box and shake it. Ori has to predict which number is facing upwards. Ostensibly, this would check for remote viewing abilities, being able to see inside that box without actually physically seeing it. Lo and behold, Ori answers correctly eight times in a row. The probability of that happening is literally one in one million. So they decide to move on to a more complicated test. They line up 10 aluminum film canisters and they put a small object in one of them and leave the others empty. Just by looking at them, Ori has to figure out which of the canisters contains the object.

And guess what? He did it correctly. Twelve times without a single error. And the probability of that? One in a trillion. He never guessed incorrectly, but there were two trials where he declined to answer. Now what's interesting is the hidden objects in those rounds were a sugar cube and a metal ball bearing wrapped in paper. He couldn't sense anything from those objects, but he had no trouble with the other ones, like small magnets, metal ball bearings not wrapped in paper, and a dropper full of water. It seems like whatever ability he has is somehow connected to metals or magnetic fields. In another

experiment, he's able to affect the reading on a magnetometer just by sitting next to it. They also test to see if he can really bend a spoon with his mind. And spoiler, he can't. It turns out that that one is just a stage trick. But if there were any doubts about his abilities, this next experiment put it to rest. An outside assistant prepared a stack of double sealed envelopes, each containing index cards with different drawings on them, and then they locked them in a safe and the researchers didn't have the combination to it. Before each test, the researchers would choose one envelope at random. They would look at the picture, seal it back up, and then go sit with Ori in the experiment room. Ori had to draw a copy of the chosen picture just by reading their minds. They tried this seven times, and every single time,

Ori was able to draw a near-perfect reproduction of the original image. The scientists and the CIA agents are stunned. When the report gets back to the Pentagon, they're surprised too, but they're not totally falling for it yet. Ori is an internationally renowned magician after all. They figure this is all some kind of parlor trick. The Defense Department sends their own team down to see what's going on. They conclude that the experiment wasn't objective enough. The researchers' bias must have skewed the results somehow, but they don't explain how. With the exception of the drawing test, all of these experiments were double blind. And honestly, I can't even begin to imagine how a personal bias could affect a magnetometer. So the CIA completely disregards the criticism. Not only are they continuing the research at SRI, they are upping the ante. The next experiment is

another version of the drawing test with an added twist to prevent any remote possibility of cheating or fraud. Ori is placed inside a double-walled, soundproof, electrically shielded room. The researchers, in a different room, flip through a dictionary and choose a word at random, and then draw a picture of that word. They tell Ori over the intercom when the picture is done. Without telling him anything about what the picture or word is, he has to draw his own replica. The first picture drawn by the researchers is a firecracker. Uri says that he sees a cylinder with noise coming out of it,

which is technically not wrong. And he ends up drawing a drum that actually looks pretty similar to the drawing of the firecracker. The next one is a bunch of 24 grapes. Ori also draws a bunch of exactly 24 grapes. They tried this experiment a few different ways, putting the researchers in the shielded room and Ori outside of it, drawing the pictures on a computer,

saving the file and turning it completely off before Ori even gets there, and even having scientists all the way on the East Coast draw the picture. And he gets it right every time except twice. Now, weirdly, the two times Ori can't replicate the picture are when it was drawn by a researcher he doesn't get along with. But even though he couldn't tell what the picture was in those cases, he did guess that they were drawn by that researcher that he doesn't like. Now, what this means is a total mystery to the researchers, though. But after eight days of tests, the final report says that Ori, quote,

has demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner, end quote. At the same time, SRI is also studying a second subject named Ingo Swann, whose talents go way beyond what Ori can do. In preliminary tests, a pair of scientists would drive out to a randomly chosen location, and Ingo, back at the lab, would have to try and draw a picture of what they were seeing out there. And he did alarmingly well. So the CIA overseer, Kit Green, comes up with an experiment to see how far they can push this. He walks out into the

hallway and asks the first person he sees to think of a location, any location, and go write down the coordinates for it. Then he asks the lead researcher, Dr. Hal Puroff, give the coordinates to Ingo, who's locked in a Faraday cage. Ingo mentally projects to those coordinates and describes what he sees. Rolling hills, highways to the west, a river to the east, cities to the north and south. He says there's a circular driveway with a flagpole in the middle and he gets the impression that it might be a military base. Like there's something underground, maybe old bunkers or a covered reservoir. He draws a map of the area and hands it over to Puthoff. The whole process takes six minutes total. While Dr. Puthoff is preparing his report the next day,

he gets a call from another potential psychic that he'd been in contact with, Pat Price. Just out of curiosity, Puthoff gives Pat the same set of coordinates Ingo had been given and asks him to write down a description. He doesn't really expect anything to come from it. It was just kind of a random whim. But when Pat Senn's put off his description, it matches Ingo's almost exactly, but in way more detail. He's not just seeing a military base. He says that it's a former missile test site. There are launchers scattered around the base. He says the site's a former missile test site. There are launchers scattered around the base. He says the site's code name is Sugar Grove. Ingo thought that there might have been an underground bunker.

Pat is actually able to see inside that bunker. He describes the file cabinets, the floor layout, the name place cards on the desks. He even says that there's a set of documents sitting on top of a file cabinet against the north wall, and it's labeled Operation Pool Something. He can't quite make out the last word. Dr. Putoff isn't sure what to make of this, not only because of the level of detail, which is frankly insane on its own, but because it matches up so well with Ingo's description. Either they're both in cahoots or they're both really psychic. But it gets weirder from there. When Kit gives Ingo's description to the colleague who came up with the coordinates, he finds out it's actually totally wrong. The location was the colleague's cabin in West Virginia. There's

no flagpole, no circular driveway, no big buildings, just a small cabin in the woods. Kit is disappointed, but he can't shake it off that easily. How did Pat and Ingo come up with near identical descriptions that are both wrong? Like what's going on here? So that weekend, Kit drives out to the location personally because he's got to see this for himself. He finds the coordinates, he finds the cabin, and then he keeps driving just a little further down the road. And he sees a flagpole, a circular driveway,

a building just like the one Pat and Ingo described. Kit eventually figures out that this is actually a top secret military facility codenamed Sugar Grove, just like Pat said. It's so highly classified that his CIA colleague had no idea it was right down the road from his own cabin. On Monday, Kit writes a report on this and sends it off to his supervisor. And on Tuesday, he gets a visit from the CIA's security officers. The information Pat gave about the base was so accurate, it triggered an espionage investigation. The names, the folders, the floor plan, the color of the filing cabinets,

it was all correct. There were only two ways this random civilian could have known this information. Either someone at SRI infiltrated the top secret base and passed the details on to him, or he's psychic. After a long investigation, the SRI team is cleared of any crimes and Pat is invited into their research study. They put him through the same kind of remote viewing test that they've been doing with Ingo. And the results are shocking. In one experiment, Ingo is given 10 sets of coordinates from around the globe. His responses are scored as either A, a hit, which is a good description of the target, B, neutral, meaning possibly accurate but not enough detail

to be sure, or C, a total miss and definitely wrong. And the results? Seven hits, two neutrals, one miss. Pat's results were pretty similar. Out of nine descriptions he gave, a set of blind judges were able to correctly match seven of them with the actual locations. When Kitt sends these reports to his higher-ups at the CIA, they are understandably shocked. No one quite understands what they're dealing with, but the word spreads quickly around the government. Everyone wants to see what this intelligence-gathering goldmine can do in the real world. And in February 1974, they have the perfect opportunity to put the psychics to work,

the kidnapping of Patty Hearst. We'll look at that right after this. Now back to the story on february 4th 1974 patty hearst the heiress to the hearst newspaper empire disappeared from her apartment in berkeley california the local police had heard about the research group going on at sri just across the, so they reached out to see if their psychics could be of any help. The next afternoon, Pat Price and Dr. Putoff go down to the police station. At this point, no one has any idea who kidnapped Patty or what they want, hence why they're

desperate enough to bring in a psychic. Reportedly, Pat sorts through some mugshots and he finds three that he pegs as the kidnappers. One of them he can't quite name, but the name Lobo pops into his head. And that's the Spanish word for wolf. He also tells police that Lobo had recently had a tooth pulled without anesthesia. As it turns out, that man was in fact one of the kidnappers. His name was William Wolfe, and he had in fact had a tooth pulled without anesthesia. The other two mugshots were eventually confirmed to be two of the other kidnappers. This all seems too bizarre to be real, but it was real. According to the CIA files, Pat provided, quote, a significant amount of data, end quote, for the investigation. Pat was kept on the case and for months he tried to use his remote viewing powers to find Patty.

He was able to see her clearly, locked in a closet somewhere, but it was too difficult to shift his perspective outside to see a street sign or anything useful. In the end, he wasn't much help in actually locating Patty, but the amount of information he could provide was absolutely shocking. Over the next year, Pat was passed around between different government agencies. He helped the NSA with a secret operation in Africa. He helped the Navy locate submarines, and he even took a peek inside a Soviet nuclear testing facility. His observations aren't 100% accurate. Sometimes he misses details or he'll describe something that isn't actually there. But a lot of what he sees is eerily spot on.

He's doing so well that in 1975, the CIA takes him out of the research program and recruits him directly as an intelligence asset. What he does for them is a mystery, but it must have been sensitive because within a matter of months, he suddenly dies under very suspicious circumstances. There was no autopsy because some mysterious man just showed up at the hospital and somehow convinced the staff not to perform one. Instead, they just wrote down that he died of a heart attack. Whether the CIA took him out or a foreign government was behind it, we'll probably never know.

But just like that, the most promising remote viewer in the study is gone. Around this same time in 1975, there was an incident with SRI's other star subject, Ori Geller. The short of it is a group of nuclear scientists who were studying him all started to see terrifying images at night. One of them reported waking up to see a disembodied arm floating above his bed. No one knows what was going on here, but two of the scientists were so freaked out they completely quit their careers. The CIA was understandably alarmed by this, so Kit Green went out to the SRI lab to investigate. He found no rational explanation whatsoever.

The only thing that he could think of was that Israeli intelligence was using Ori for some kind of psychological operation. I mean, holograms were just becoming a thing. Maybe this was Mossad's idea of a practical joke. Whatever's going on, though, with Pat suspiciously dead and Ori possibly being a foreign agent, SRI is in trouble. And to make things worse, as a result of the Watergate scandal, which had happened over the past couple of years, the CIA is under a lot of fire in general. They're scrambling to shut down anything questionable to save face, which includes their psychic research. The SRI's program's funding is terminated, but before they completely disband, the military swoops in with an offer. They'll continue funding for the project if they can figure out how psychic powers can be weaponized. So in October 1978, six years after the study began, it's rebranded as an army intelligence program called Operation Grill Flame.

Their mandate is to find soldiers who have latent psychic abilities and train them to use them on the battlefield. The researchers have a rough battle ahead of them since they still don't understand how ESP works, never mind how to teach it. They're not even sure if it's possible to teach it. But after screening thousands of Army personnel, they narrow it down to a team of six who seem like promising candidates. The plan at first is to take it slow. For the entire first year of the study, they'll do basic tests to establish that remote viewing is actually possible. In the second year, they'll do basic tests to establish that remote viewing is actually possible. In the second year, they'll figure out how to train the recruits to harness their full abilities. And in year three, they'll start developing protocols for how to put it into

action. But as most of us know, nothing ever goes quite as planned, not even if you're psychic. Only a few months after the new recruits begin their training, the Iran hostage crisis happens. On November 4th, 1979, the U.S. embassy in Tehran was taken over by student rebels and nearly everyone inside was taken hostage. In response, I promise you this is not a joke, the National Security Council calls in the psychics. The six recruits get a call in the middle of the night telling them to get to the office ASAP. For the next several months, they're working overtime to figure out where the hostages are being held, when they're being moved, who's in each room, what the layout is like.

I mean, anything that could be helpful. Of course, the Army isn't just going to go in guns blazing based on the word of six trainee psychics. But a lot of what they see lines up with intel the military already got from other sources. So they start to take it seriously. In fact, according to the Army Intelligence Agency, 45% of the reports from Grill Flame were proven to be partially or completely correct, and 55 percent were incorrect, which is astounding if you consider how much they're shooting in the dark here. The report even said that, quote, the degree of success appears to at least equal, if not surpass, other intelligence collection methods, end quote. When the hostage situation still isn't resolved by

April, the Grill Flame team is sequestered in a suite of hotel rooms to work around the clock. And that's when things start to go off the rails. In mid-April, one of the remote viewers unexpectedly sees something way off target, a chaotic scene of American soldiers rappelling out of helicopters somewhere in the desert. A few days later, another viewer, Fern Govan, sees the same thing. And this time, there's fire and destruction and people dying.

And then on April 24th, one of the viewers, who's only identified as Nancy S., has a complete breakdown. She sees some sort of attack happening, machine guns, a fire or explosion, and then she starts to hallucinate vividly. She sees hundreds of giant gorillas stampeding, carrying tiny rockets. Now, it sounds a little funny when you say it out loud, but if you actually look at the transcripts of this, Nancy is terrified. The project manager, Scotty Watt, is afraid that the trainees are breaking under all the stress. If they keep going, it might do irreversible psychological damage. So he officially ends the mission. They're all told to pack up and go home. But then,

late that same night, Scotty turns on the news to see President Jimmy Carter giving an address. There was a failed hostage rescue attempt that afternoon. A squadron of army helicopters were supposed to be flying into Tehran, but there was a terrible crash in the desert and one of the helicopters went up in flames. Eight servicemen and one Iranian civilian were killed. It was eerily similar to what Nancy saw during that same time span and what Fern and the other unnamed remote viewers saw a few days earlier. Two of them had apparently seen into the future. After this incident, Nancy and Fern both quit the project. And I don't blame them.

It must have been a horrifyingly traumatic experience. But despite them leaving, Operation Grill Flame keeps going on without them. Over the next few years, the team works on hundreds of missions, mostly related to terrorism or hostage situations. The same results keep happening. They provide some stunningly accurate intel, but it's so spotty that most of the time it's functionally useless. A lot of the problem seems to be boredom and burnout. After a day or two on each mission, the accuracy rate starts to plummet. So the clear solution is to train more people to

do this. If the first six trainees were able to harness some hidden psychic ability, maybe anyone could. The question, of course, is how? Kit Green has an answer. You can't. After his years running the SRI study, he knows that some people just have it and some people don't. Any attempt to force people into that state could do more harm than good. But he'd officially been taken off the project when it transferred from the CIA to the army. So even though he was asked for his recommendation, it eventually was overruled. The program was now under the control of General Albert Stubblebine at Army Intelligence, and he had his own ideas. Chief among them was sending soldiers to a New Age retreat in the Blue Ridge Mountains called the Monroe Institute.

What happened next was the beginning of the end for the psychic research program. We'll get back to that after this. Let's get back to the story. More than a decade into the psychic research program in November 1983, the Army's Intelligence Division approved a new training program called RAPT. The acronym stands for Rapid Acquisition Personnel Training, and it's just as meaningless as it sounds. The week-long program takes place

at the Monroe Institute in rural Virginia. If there's any science behind it, it still remains to be seen. But the idea is to train people to enter a higher state of consciousness, and in the opinion of General Albert Stubblebine, to harness their hidden psychic powers for military purposes. Wrapped trainees spend most of the day and night in tiny rooms that are just big enough for a twin bed. For an hour or more at a time, they lay there listening to guided meditation tapes that are supposed to gradually move them from focus level one, which is like a regular waking consciousness, to level 21, which is an ethereal dimension where time and space cease to exist. On the seventh day, once all those levels have been accessed, the participants are taken downstairs and told to lie in a circle on the

floor holding hands. Another guided meditation plays over the loudspeaker, and after just a few minutes, the soothing voice suddenly veers into some very direct questions. Will there be a terrorist attack at the government facility in Washington, D.C. area in the next few months? Where will the next terrorist attack take place? When will the next terrorist attack take place? As you can imagine, the only result is shock and confusion. According to Kit Green, who wrote a report recommending that the soldiers do not go through the WRAPT program, the guided meditations could succeed in lulling the participants into an altered state of consciousness, essentially hypnosis. But there is no basis for thinking this altered state can give

someone psychic powers or that it could be useful at all for intelligence gathering. But again, this is the Army's project now, and they do what they want. Unsurprisingly, just two months after the Army's first wrapped session, disaster struck. In the middle of the training program, an Army officer had a psychotic breakdown. He took off his shirt and threatened to kill the Institute's director with a ballpoint pen, accusing her of working for a foreign enemy. The fallout of this was immediate. General Stubblebine was forced into retirement, and in July of 1984, the Army canceled the entire remote viewing research program. After a long bureaucratic battle, in 1986, the program was finally revived by the Defense Intelligence Agency, or the DIA.

But the downhill slide had already started. It was really only going to get worse from here. By this point, it was perfectly clear that training people in ESP doesn't work. The new reboot of the program is able to find a few genuine psychics, but training the masses is looking like a lost cause. To make matters even worse, the new program is being supervised by an intelligence officer named Ed Dames, who is, to put it lightly, eccentric. Instead of having the remote viewing trainees work on regular defense operations, he set them off to investigate the real questions. Where is the lost city of Atlantis? Who killed JFK?

And is there life on Mars? The program manages to keep running for five years without any big trouble. But then, in 1991, a news story breaks that Ed Dames and two of the program's remote viewers are contracting their services out under a private company. Now, for one thing, it's a problem that they're doing this without approval in the first place. But what's even more troubling is that it's international news. This program is supposed to be classified. And then in 1993, it comes out that Ed Dames and one of those same remote viewers, David Morehouse, are collaborating on a book about the still classified project, which by now has assumed its final name, Project Stargate. Now, the book never came to be because the next year, David Morehouse is court-martialed for a

bizarre list of offenses ranging from assault to adultery to theft of army property. He's facing jail time, and in an effort to get out of it, he feigns insanity, claiming that the remote viewing program drove him into madness. His get-out-of-jail-free strategy is eventually debunked, but the damage is already done. Congress caught wind of this whole pileup of Project Stargate scandals, and they want to know what on earth is going on over there. They order a full investigation of Stargate by an outside group called the American Institutes for Research. One of the lead researchers on the review team is

a psychologist named Ray Hyman. It's not his first encounter with the project. In fact, way back in 1972, 23 years earlier at this point, he was on the team from the Defense Department that came down to review the work at SRI. If you remember, the conclusion Dr. Hyman reached back then was that SRI's research had to be a fraud, despite all the evidence to the contrary. So he's about the furthest thing from an impartial judge as they could find. The team has less than two months to review 23 years worth of research. So to save time, they decide not to even look at the thousands of tests that were done at SRI. They're only going to analyze 10 experiments from the past year, 1994 to 1995. But even with that disappointing data pool, Hyman and his co-author, Dr. Jessica Utz, come to some pretty amazing conclusions.

They both agree that, quote, real effects are occurring in these experiments, end quote. There were no apparent methodological problems, there was no fraud, and the results could not have been statistical flukes. Where they disagree is on what's causing those effects. Dr. Utz thinks it's pretty obvious. It must be some undiscovered mental ability. She writes, it's clear to this author that anomalous cognition is possible and has been demonstrated. I am confident that the questions are no more elusive than any other questions in science, and that if appropriate resources are targeted to appropriate questions, we can have answers within the next decade. Now that seems kind of promising, but it makes Dr. Hyman's conclusion seem kind of bizarre, because he agrees that

something real is going on here, and yet he insists it's not any kind of so-called psychic mental phenomena. So what is it instead? He admits, I do not have a ready explanation for these observed effects. Dr. Hyman theorizes that there could be some unknown flaw in the experiments that explains the results. Although, again, he has zero idea what that flaw could be. It seems like he just doesn't want to admit that psychic powers might exist, but he doesn't offer any reasonable alternative. And in the end, his opinion won out. The executive summary of that report,

aka the only part anyone in Congress is actually going to read, says that even though a statistically significant effect was observed, there's no justification for continuing the research because they weren't able to find a cause or explanation for that effect, which is incomprehensible to me since the only way to find the cause is to keep studying it. The summary also states that, quote, in no case had the information provided by the remote viewing ever been used to guide intelligence operations, end quote,

which, by the way, we know is a complete straight up lie. It wouldn't be surprising if the CIA was intentionally using this report to cover up evidence. I mean, imagine going before Congress and having to admit that you've been using psychics to gather intelligence for literally decades. Maybe it's just better for everyone to pretend this was all a big misguided joke. And that is what they think. As soon as the report's in, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency are ordered to shut down Project Stargate for good. When the report is released to the public a few months later in November 1995, it immediately becomes a national laughingstock. It's all over the news and the tone is not positive.

Obviously, it's hard to blame anyone. If you just hear that the CIA shut down their psychic spy program for lack of results, I mean, that sounds absurd. But what's disappointing is that since no one is willing to take remote viewing seriously, we never got an answer on what was going on. We have statistically relevant evidence that certain people, if not all people, can see things without being physically there. Some can even see into the future, and yet no one with the right resources wants to figure out how. Dr. Utz said that we could have had answers in a decade if we kept researching. But now, we probably never will. Instead, what we're left with is a big question mark. The most promising theory is that it has

something to do with quantum physics. There's something called quantum entanglement, which is where groups of particles are able to communicate with each other no matter how far apart they're separated. This is actually a leading theory on how birds migrate. Quantum entangled particles in their eyes allow them to quote-unquote see the Earth's magnetic fields, giving them a kind of internal compass. It's possible that something like this could account for how people can see locations they're not physically at, especially considering that from the very first experiments with Ori, it seemed like magnetism had something to do with it.

And this could also explain precognition or seeing the future. There's a theory that quantum entangled particles can actually reverse the timing of cause and effect. So an event that happens in the future can affect something in the past. The evidence is contentious, but some physicists believe it, including Dale Graff, who was involved with Project Stargate for 16 years. Quantum physics in general is not very well understood right now. But unlike ESP, it's actually being researched. So hopefully, one day, there'll be some answers. There's so much we still don't know about the

universe, and science proves almost daily that just because there isn't evidence of something yet, that doesn't mean it's not real. Thanks for listening. I'll be back next week with another episode. To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all AudioChuck originals.