Somewhere in the Skies - Annie Jacobsen: A War of Psionics

Episode Date: March 24, 2025

On episode 401, we are joined by New York Times Best-Selling author, Annie Jacobsen. With the term "psionics" circling the UFO world as of late, we look back at a book written by Jacobsen called, Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception. While independent groups are now studying and attempting to use psychic abilities to "summon" UFOs, how did rival nations, during the end of World War 2 and through the Cold War, use similar abilities through various military and intelligence agencies? Why did they invest millions of dollars into classified programs to study mental telepathy, precognition, and extrasensory perception? Was it all for intelligence gathering and defense purposes? Or could there have been more otherworldly reasons as well? Find all of Annie Jacobsen's work at: https://anniejacobsen.com/ Please take a moment to rate and review us on Spotify and Apple. Book Ryan on CAMEO at: https://bit.ly/3kwz3DO Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/somewhereskies ByMeACoffee: http://www.buymeacoffee.com/UFxzyzHOaQ PayPal: [e-mail] Discord: https://discord.gg/NTkmuwyB4F Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/ryansprague.bsky.social Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomewhereSkies Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/somewhereskiespod/ Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryansprague51 Order Ryan’s new book: https://a.co/d/4KNQnM4 Order Ryan’s older book: https://amzn.to/3PmydYC Store: http://tee.pub/lic/ULZAy7IY12U Read Ryan’s articles at: https://medium.com/@ryan-sprague51 Opening Theme Song by Septembryo Copyright © 2025 Ryan Sprague. All rights reserved Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You are now somewhere in the skies with your host, Ryan Spray. For a number of years, CIA had been tracking Soviet work in the so-called ESP area. And they're really concerned because the Soviets, including the KGB, were spending millions of dollars every year on this kind of phenomena. They're very concerned about what could be being done to us. They were specifically interested in whether individuals could extract information or get information from remote. moat sites or from hidden material. And so it was critical to them to find out, you know, just what abilities do people have. A batch of declassified CIA documents that revealed the agency's dealing

with the paranormal is now official. According to the Secret Files, the Central Intelligence Agency used a team of military-trained telepathic individuals during the Iran embassy siege nearly 40 years ago. The program named Grill Flame was established in 1975 and began as research into paranormal abilities. But its star turn came in 1979 when the telepaths were used to provide information on where the hostages were being held inside the embassy and the state of their health. It really comes of no surprise that our intelligence agencies would attempt to obtain information by any means necessary. But as we heard from former director of projects, Dr. Harold Putoff, the CIA, went to such great lengths during the Cold War as to bring in psychics who they believed could remote view Soviet and KGB targets and spy on them.

As we also heard, this was later used in Project Grill Flame during the Iran Embassy siege. The overall project was officially terminated in 1995, having reached no solid conclusions on the accuracy of remote viewing and psychic abilities. But the CIA's involvement goes far deeper than the CIA's. this. And as we'll hear from today's guest, the wars waged with the mind and a military intelligence sense may still be far from over. Annie Jacobson is a journalist, bestselling author, and 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Her books, Area 51, Operation Paperclip, and the Pentagon's brain were New York Times bestsellers and have been collectively published in many languages.

Today, we'll be talking about her newest book, Phenomena, the secret history of the U.S. government's investigations into extrasensory perception in psychokinesis. We'll hear how the idea of psychic warfare all began in the U.S. who was involved and even how this all can be connected to the UFO topic as a whole. So, without further ado, let's get to the interview with Annie Jacobson. Annie, thank you so much for joining me today. Well, thank you for having me. It's an absolute pleasure.

I've been following your work for a while now. And if there's anything I've learned from reading all your books, there is definitely a running theme of digging deep into the intelligence agency apparatus. And this new book does just that as well. But with a very interesting topic, and that's psychokinesis and ESP, and you found a pretty interesting link that ties all your books together. something that they all seem to always come back to. Would you mind touching on that briefly with us? Yes, and thank you for noticing that, that all roads lead to the Nazis. At least when you're a

national security reporter covering war, weapons, U.S. national security and secrets. And phenomena is no different. I began the story, the kind of launch point, is this discovery by U.S. intelligence agents at end of the war. They were called Operation Al-Sauce, and they discover a weird trove of Heinrich Himmler's science department documents. The department was called Das Ananerbe, and this unit within it explored extrasensory perceptions, psychokinesis, map dousing, and then also very extreme forms of the occult which Himmler was pursuing and pushing among his SS men. And we discovered this weird cache of documents. And Samuel Goodsmith, who was the lead physicist at the time hunting down atomic secrets

and biological weapons secrets and all these other things I write in my other book, Operation Paperclip, kind of cast aside this weirdo, what he thought was a sort of weirdo, supernatural research. But it comes back into play a few years later because what we find out that the Soviets got the other half of the Dasana Narrabay documents that dealt with the supernatural, if you will. And that's really, I think the launching point for this extraordinary battle between science and the supernatural. Is it fact? Is it fantasy? You know, and this question drives the narrative. And boy, was it intensely interesting to research and report on this because it's such a mystery.

Oh, I can only imagine. And I mean, and within your research, you do mention that toward the end of World War II in mixing that magic and the supernatural, that these files were split amongst us and the Russians, which is extremely enticing in terms of ESP and psychokinesis. For our listeners who may not really know the difference between ESP and psychokinesis, could you like, could you briefly give us the clip notes on that? Of course. I mean, extrasensory perception is what ESP stands for. And it almost says it says it itself. It's gaining knowledge from the means other than the five known senses. And so the sixth sense has in the modern era kind of been conundated.

with the idea of seeing ghosts, I think largely because of the movie by that same title. But the sixth sense over a broader period of decades has really been used to mean that the kind of, let's say, divinatory power, an idea of precognition, an idea that you could see the future, that you could know the unknown, that you could also have knowledge about, you know, information. that could be used as what the CIA would call intelligence collection. Psychokinesis, on the other hand, is, in short summary, using the mind to affect matter. So scientific skeptics would tell you that's pseudoscience, and that's not possible. People who are in the work and study this say, oh, yes, it is, and there's a whole host of psychokinetic abilities that range from, say, you know, bending a spoon with a tip of the tongue and a tip of the of the fingertip and the command bend, as Erie Geller does, or even meditation or

like monks who are able to sit in freezing cold water and actually adjust their body temperature so that they don't suffer from hypothermia. That's the gamut of psychokinetic abilities. Right, right. And we've heard, you know, similar accounts of like this is what we could consider a mutant, as it were, if you were looking at it from a comic book standpoint. But on a more serious level, Annie, in the early days of what we now know as MK Ultra, the CIA, if I'm correct, they used magicians, hypnotists, and even a witch. This really caught my attention in your book.

Could you tell us a little about Sibyl Leak and her work with the U.S. intelligence agency? What's interesting about her is she's been completely, you know, buried, if you will, her work. As I found with a number of others really interesting people who pop up here in my book, because there is so much stigma attached to it, Sible Leak was a famous witch in Britain. She was a white witch, meaning she only used her powers for good. but she allegedly left England in 1944 because witches were still being persecuted, according to her. And I interviewed her son, who's in charge of all of her papers.

He lives here in the United States, and is interestingly a NASA photographer. But she allegedly moved here because she was being persecuted, but in truth, she became a CIA asset. And she was used along with a number of other people more famously, in the 50s like magicians, very separate subject, which is using magicians, stage magicians, who are actually using tricks and deception to fool someone into believing in psychokinesis, whereas those who have psychokinetic powers are working from the premise that they, actually have a yet on scientifically unknown ability to affect matter with their mind. Interesting. And now you did mention the name Eerie Geller a moment ago. And could you briefly run us

through who this guy was and his connection with the CIA? Uri was a CIA asset. And we know that now from these declassified documents that I report on in the book. And, you know, people know Uri Geller as the spoonbender. So you might, and, you know, there's a million different reasons why people might have a preconception in their mind that he's a fraud or a magician. And there's a million reasons why people might swear by his talents, all preconceptions. What I aim to do in the book, in my hours and hours of interviews with Geller, was to try and neutrally present the facts of Geller's story and let the reader decide what they think,

because I found Geller remarkable. I mean, I interviewed him at his home in London, and I also interviewed him. I spent several days with him in Israel interviewing him. Just a remarkable part of phenomena, I think. But his entree into intelligence collection with the CIA began in the 70s when he became this famous figure, sort of a pop culture figure, doing the talk show circuits, bending, you know, spoons with his mind and also reading, having telepathy, like putting an often trick they would do with Geller as someone would draw out a sketch and then put it in a sealed envelope. Geller would be sitting in this talk show, you know, with a talk show host, and then he would be given the sealed envelope, and he would be asked to draw it. And, you know, time and again, he would do a remarkable assimilation of the drawing. And people just went crazy for him. Plus he was handsome. Plus he had this lovely accent, Israeli accent. Plus he was charming. And he just really, you know, took on the scene. You may say, well, what did the CIA have, care about any of that? What they care? about was his alleged psychokinetic abilities, the fact that he could, you know, bend a spoon with his finger and the command bend.

And specifically what was worrisome to them, and again, these are declassified Defense Department reports that show that state, you know, if Geller could do this to a spoon, what might he be able to do to the delicate electronic system on an ICBM carrying a nuclear? a warhead. That's what they cared about. And they brought Geller to the United States to test him in a lab under CIA handlers and scientists, physicists, who were commissioned by the CIA to work on this research program with remarkable results. I mean remarkable results. CIA drawing the inescapable conclusion that his powers existed as a real phenomenon. They couldn't explain why. That's absolutely fascinating that the CIA would ultimately admit that, yes, ESP psychokinesis are real. Now, the debate, I guess, would be someone like Eri Geller, this seemed to have come at birth. This came natural.

But you also did some heavy research into the debate within the intelligence agencies on if people could be trained to become psychic. Now, is that true? What was this to be? And that's the battleground that most interested me because it was, it's a debate I could really wrap my head around as a journalist. I mean, it's hard to just have two sides shouting at one another, you know, ESP is real. And then that would be the people in the work. And then the skeptic saying, ESP is nonsense and they're all charlatans, fraudsters, and snake are oil salesmen. I mean, there's very little room for journalism in that debate because the two sides are so entrenched.

And in essence, what they do is just, you know, they kind of surround themselves with a lot of individuals who support only their ideas and that they're kind of existing in an echo chamber. Again, that's my opinion. What I wanted to do was look at the debates within the debates to try to, you know, uncover the essence of what might mean something for the future. Because we'll get to this later, but my goodness, the research is still going on today. That surprised even a number of the scientists who have worked on these programs for decades. So the debate began at the CIA with a very legendary CIA doctor named Dr. Christopher Green. He goes by Kit Green. And he was the original physiologist assigned to look at the biology, the physiology, the human interior, if you will, of Geller, of another superiors.

psychic named Ingo Swan, another super psychic named Pat Price, all of who were the leading psychics at CIA for CIA during the 70s. And Green's job was to examine them in every possible neurological, biological, physiological tests that existed in the 70s, which compared to what we have today was not a lot. I mean, the MRI was just coming online. That was exciting in 1973. And Green would look at these individuals, and then they were being tested by physicists and scientists to look at their performance. And their conclusion as a whole was, and I'm paraphrasing here, but we don't know why they have the talent that they have, but we know that it's individualistic. And the analogy that both Green and put off, and Jacques Vallet, who was also involved in this, told me is that they said, The best analogy is the Mozart analogy.

So Annie can't sing in the shower. And you think of what Mozart was capable in terms of music. Right. And you just immediately get the idea of aha. So they would say Mozart was a super normal. I just have normal, bad singing voice. Mozart is a super normal, not a paranormal, but a super normal. And they chose in that kind of see-a-old.

way of, hey, let's live in the gray area. Because remember, CIA always has a job to do, which is intelligence collection. So they wanted to exploit the talents that the Gellers, the Pat Prices, and the Ingo Swans had and use that for their purposes. And they were less concerned with trying to nail down, is it real? Is it fact? Is it fantasy? They were just saying, okay, it works in limited, extraordinarily strange and bizarre cases. And yes, it's not repeatable, never mind about that. I mean, it's not consistently repeatable. And they focused on the individuals.

And they felt this is a Mozart-like talent. This sixth sense. Lots of places can expose you to identity theft. Oh, no. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity, which is way more than anyone can do on their own. If we find anything suspicious,

like new loans or changes to your financial accounts, we alert you right away, all through text, phone, email, or the life. LifeLock app. Get the alerts that could make all the difference. Save up to 40% your first year at LifeLock.com slash special offer. Terms apply. Right. And I would assume, you know, it's not so much of if it's real or not, but how it can benefit the intelligence agencies and, you know, your past work showing how it can benefit the military industrial complex, I would assume. And I found these marvelous, you know, once formerly classified. documents that say almost exactly that, which is, never mind, you know, the debate, what can we, the CIA do to exploit this? And that I found very interesting, and it gave a lot of room for, you know,

and of course these are highly classified programs. So no one had to know. I mean, they didn't have to worry about, you know, such and such senator finding out about it and, you know, having a cow over. this what would be interpreted as wasteful money. Although that debate I really, I found, you know, useless because the amount of money that was spent on these programs is so small compared to the budgets that I looked at for my previous book, The Pentagon's Brain, about DARPA. But in any event, the CIA was able to kind of play fast and loose with the more, the ideas of this area of research that are stigmatized traditionally because they could rise above the fray, take their work really seriously, and figure out the best way to exploit this talent. But then the CIA ran into trouble

in the 70s with its MK Ultra programs being exposed. It's, you know, LSD programs being exposed. And suddenly the CIA found itself in a whole heap of trouble during the church committee hearings and the program needed to go because it was too incendiary, were anyone to find out about it. And so before up to that point, DOD had been a client of CIA, so, you know, meaning NSA, also FBI, Secret Service, you name it. If the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted some information from psychics, they would go to the CIA, give them a request, and then the CIA would task the psychics on it. Well, after the church commission hearings, that all changed.

And the program was inherited by DOD. And the things really shifted there. And there was a movement away from this idea that it's individualistic, that it's the Mozart analogy. And it moved toward the idea of, hey, ESP is something that we can train soldiers to be able to do. And grave problems arose. Absolutely, yeah. You know, when the question of ethics comes into mind, you really have to wonder, like, how deep are they willing to go and at whose expense? We know many scientists have been exploited in terms of these types of things and their theories. And you spoke to one scientist who worked on something called the quantum entanglement theory. I found this deeply fascinating. Could you give us a brief summation, Annie, of just exactly what's the quantum entanglement theory? I found this deeply fascinating.

Could you give us a brief summation, Annie, of just exactly what this theory entails? Greetings, everyone. Ryan Sprague here, host of Summer in the Skies. For over seven years and more than 400 episodes, the Summer in the Skies podcast has always been free to listen to, but it's not free to create. So we offer several ways to help support our efforts and get rewards in return. If you listen to the podcast on Apple, you can click the subscribe button at the top of your Summer in the Sky's feed to become a premium Apple subscriber. Or you can join our Patreon campaign with several tiers available. Both of these options give you the same benefits and rewards, add free episodes, early access to the main show, and bonus episodes and content. Help keep the lights on at the Summer in the Sky's HQ and help us continue to grow by beginning.

becoming a Patreon subscriber at patreon.com slash somewhere skies or by clicking the subscribe button at the top of your Apple feed. Thank you for your continued support and keep looking up. So what I really enjoyed in the narrative and what I love about writing narrative nonfiction is I find these elderly statesmen, if you will. So the sort of scientists who were the leads in these programs in the 70s when they were young. and then interview them and look at how they evolved as scientists, as human beings in their vision over time and where they are today. And Dale Graff was the scientist who really began the program at DOD. So he learned about the CIA program from put-off, from what was being, he took that as a model, brought it to the Pentagon,

and became the progenitor of all these other programs that existed for the next 20 years, basically from the late 1970s all the way until the downfall of the program in the mid-90s. Graff was in charge. Graff was in essence second in command to a scientist named Dr. Jack Verona at the Defense Intelligence Agency. So what is Graff doing now? Well, he took me to a call. He's still in the work.

And his story is particularly interesting because you have that idea that we talked about either. Is it biological? Okay. Let me back up for a moment to give you a little groundwork here. So the biological element of it is super interesting because it's saying this is a talent from within. But within those in the work, there is another group that believes this is also, The within is attached to the without. Now, if you want to take a scientific approach to that, you can say, oh, that's the eureka moment

that a number of scientists or Nobel laureates talk about where they are suddenly given kind of an inspiration of something, almost a divine inspiration, if you will. So there are individuals who pursue this idea that it's not just a biological from within, it's from without. There is some kind of a something. That's where we get really tricky when you're talking. in terms of a federal government, because this touches upon the issues that you are interested in, which have to do with uphology, which have to do with an intelligence, you know, outside of our

universe, if you will. And many of the scientists adhere to that concept. And I did not write about that in phenomena. I hint at it. I talk a little bit about it, but I felt that it was a, it's its own subject, and I wanted to focus specifically on the battle, the battleground of extrasensory perception and psychokinesis. But it's understood that that exists there. And separate from that, you have a very few amount of scientists, Dale Graf among them, who accept that ESP is a real phenomenon, that psychokinesis is a real phenomenon, who have dedicated decades their entire life to this work. But they do not believe it is from without at all. They are the antithesis of a supernaturalist, if you will. They believe that it has to do with biology and it has to do with quantum

physics. And that's where graph sits on the spectrum, which I found very interesting. He rejects any kind of, you know, though without, any kind of intelligence, higher intelligence, if you will. And he says this is basic quantum physics. It's something that Einstein referred to, quantum entanglement is something that Einstein referred to as spooky action at a distance. And in the simplest terms, the way different physicists explained it to me, is that if you have two electrons near one another, they jiggle one another, let's say. That's the metaphor, okay? And if you separate them, even by as much as a galaxy, As Mishu Kaku said, that's where the fireworks begin, because they will also vibrate, meaning they are connected.

They are inherently wiggling with one another, aware of one another, even if you separate them as far away as a galaxy. This was an idea of spooky action at a distance posited by Einstein, you know, but never able to be proved in the laboratory. Well, now in 2017, you have scientists around the world conducting these experiments where they're able to demonstrate that electrons have, you know, essentially are communicating one another around the world. That would have to involve faster than light travel. And that's where you get complicated. And that's where you have a guy like Graf says his idea for this, and this is theoretical physics now, that, um, that. This could account for extrasensory perception, for faster than nightlight information gathering,

for knowing what's happening across the world in this moment. And that concept is called retrocausation. And I write about in the book attending a conference at UC San Diego with the world's leading physicists in this area who pursue this line of thought, as science of the future. And I think one of the things I enjoy most about writing about these very esoteric concepts is getting the world's experts to explain it to me in layman's terms. Because the people who are the smartest in these subjects, they're really able to, as Einstein said, you should be able to explain it to a child. That's how easy it is. Right. Yeah. You know,

you're right. The brightest of individuals should be. able to, you know, quote unquote, dumb it down as simplest of terms as they can. That's an absolutely fascinating theory. And I know others have looked into things such as quantum mechanics. Edgar Mitchell comes to mind, who's done a lot of work within the noetic sciences and consciousness. But you have a very interesting story in your book about Edgar Mitchell, who we know is the sixth man to walk on the moon, and this has to do with the moon. Would you mind telling us this story? It's absolutely fascinating. I loved interviewing Edgar Mitchell, and he was such a sort of hero to me in many regards, and I'll tell you why. I get the ideas for my books, usually when I'm finishing up the previous book. So I was,

the Pentagon's brain, the book about DARPA is really about hard science and involved a lot of, you know, space science. if you will, because that's why DARPA was founded. And I came across in the Apollo image library a photograph of a man on the moon, an astronaut on the moon, but if you look closely in his gloved hand, you realize he's reading a document. He's reading a piece of paper on the moon. And I felt like, my God, this is like such an incredible image. You have the most advanced science, you know, space travel.

And then you have like pre-sumstern. Science, I mean, proto-science, that's what writing is. I mean, without writing, without, you know, the original writing, which we now believe is Cuneiform, from sort of 2,800 BC. Without writing, we wouldn't have science. And so here's this image which contained these two concepts in a single image. And I just found it remarkable. But more specifically, I had to know what that astronaut was reading. Why would he be reading on the moon? And I went, I tracked him down. It was Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14. And what he told me is that he was reading a map. My God, he was reading. Here was a photograph of a man on the moon, reading a map of the moon, on the moon. Why? Because they were lost. And I found this again so human. You could travel 240,000 miles. Mitchell was the pilot on the Antares landing craft. He set down the spacecraft within 87 feet of the target. And then they got lost locally. I mean, what a brilliant, I mean, you know, the quest for phenomena, the quest, is in fact, is it fantasy, science versus the supernatural. This is hogwash.

This is going to lead us to new discoveries. That debate, so much inherent in all. of that is about getting lost. I mean, you have to be able to get lost to find your way. I believe. Every single one of my four books, it was amazing to write for me because I had elderly statesmen, the scientist, talking to me not just about their incredible success stories, but about their failures, about when they felt lost, you know, because that is how you can really, I think, grow as a society and, you know, as a human. And here was Mitchell saying, I got lost on the moon.

And it was devastating to him because, as he said, they got lost. They could not find their target, which was Cone Crater. They were supposed to grab some rocks from inside of Cone Crater, which was a meteorite crater. Geologists back on Earth believed if they could only bring these rocks home, they might be able to solve the ageless mystery of how the moon was actually formed from the Earth. I mean, talk about a tall order. They got lost, they couldn't reach the target, and they had to come home. And Mitchell said he was devastated. But it was on that flight home that he had, what I write about a lot in the book, is what was called a conversion moment, looking out one of the windows of the spacecraft, looking out into space, looking out into the universe. Mitchell told me that he became absolutely convinced that man was not just what we thought, that man's ability, the reaches of knowledge. We were thinking small. They were so much bigger than that. And he believed the answer lay in consciousness. And so he came back from the moon. He quit NASA, divorced his wife,

made all new friends, dedicated the rest of his life toward research into ESP psychokinesis. And he became a front for the CIA. And that's where I knew I had to tell this story. I mean, it was thanks to that interview with Edgar Mitchell that really inspired me to write phenomena. Wow. What a interesting journey he had. And I can understand how that could be such a catalyst for this work that you've done. Now, Annie, like you mentioned earlier, this is primarily a UFO show. So my listeners would probably be remiss if I didn't ask. there is so much skepticism for very good reasons when it comes to the UFO topic, especially within the scientific community. And this goes for the paranormal and supernatural as well. Why do you think that there is such a hardline debunking or even a hostility, as I've heard you say, towards these types of subjects?

I'm fascinated by it. I mean, I have a couple ideas, but of course, every one of my books touches upon these issues. And I have interviewed, you know, literally hundreds of scientists who work in the Defense Department and the CIA and have advised the presidents and have advised the Joint Chiefs of Staff and have won Nobel Prizes. And they are absolutely divided, right? There are those a majority who, you know, loath the idea of uphology. But there are those a minority who are in the work, as I say. And, you know, these are brilliant minds. And so I would be extremely short-sighted to be anything other than open-minded.

I just take the long view, right? I mean, so why does the debate exist? Well, okay, so what I also find interesting is that, as I said, the majority of scientists in the Defense Department and the intelligence community are what Gertrude Schmidler called goats. They are scientific skeptics. And the other term, Gertrude Schmidler was a Harvard experimental psychologist, who created the goats and the sheep paradigm

to talk about how people approach UFO or how people approach any of this subject matter, ESP, psychokinesis, any of the, you could call it paranormal, you could call it anomalous cognition. Sheep are the people on the other side who are open to the idea or the possibility that this could be real.

What I'm fascinated by is that Gallup polls show that 76% of Americans are sheep, and only 24% are goats. So the scientific community is swung the other way, but the general public is open to this idea. And I find that general public interesting, because that's where I think people are working from their experiences as opposed to their what they think they should think. And I do have to say that I interviewed a lot of skeptics for a phenomena because that's part of the job of being a journalist. Want to tell the neutral story. Tell the other side. But I did find an incredible sort of snootiness on the part that I found really, I find limiting and I find unhelpful, that people would kind of insult, you know,

people would say kind of suggest that you were intellectually inferior, you know, for even wanting to investigate these areas. That I find fascinating and I find it quite fun, to be honest with you, to then say, well, that's your opinion. Call me intellectually inferior if you like, oh, well, I'm going to do this research and this reporting because boy, is it interesting and boy, are these individuals interesting. I mean, Kit Green told me the best story. I write about him at length in the book. One of my absolutely most interesting interviews, I think, were with Green because of what he's also doing today with uphology. And again, he looked at the physiology of Geller and others in the 70s.

He ended his long career with CIA, retired, and is now working again with Defense Department. He never stopped working. He's on some of the most prestigious science boards in the nation. I mean, six months ago, he was on General Clapper, head of the DNI, like a nine or ten-man scientist board to advise the director of national intelligence for the president. I mean, that's a huge job. And yet what Green told me is when he lectures at the Pentagon about anomalous situations, you know, that we're talking about, which touched upon not just anomalous mental cognition, but also anomalous. visual sightings of things like orbs. And he talks about this

and sort of the scientists all sit there, you know, aghast. How dare you talk about this? But up at the coffee break, everyone comes up and asks some questions. But no one wants to talk about it on the record. Boy, do I think that's interesting.

That is, I could not mirror that anymore. I mean, there are been times I've gone to these UFO conventions, which are an absolute treat. I I would love to see your thoughts on going to one of those someday. But you do. You see these very, I guess you could say, intellectually snooty individuals who get up there and talk about the very objective and skeptical side of UFOs.

And then you get one beer in them, and they start telling, you know, individual by individual the real story, the stuff they actually have an honest opinion about. It's fascinating. It is. And it also, you know, there's lots of different rabbit holes to go down. And I think that there, you just have to, you have to pick your people in essence. I mean, I know with Edgar Mitchell, I, what I found, because he became very entrenched in, in euphology and in alien visitations. And in my opinion, and again, this is just my opinion, I leave it out of the book. But my opinion is that he got used. by a number of groups because of his high-profile nature. And they pulled him into an arena where he was even more ridiculed, if you will. But in essence, his ideas about consciousness, about the exploration of the far reaches of what man can know were extraordinary, you know, to think about. And he dedicated his life to it. I mean, he was a PhD from MIT.

And when you read the transcript of that Apollo 14 mission, or you can read the chapters in my book on Ed Mitchell because I condense them for you. I mean, the remarkable circumstances in which they functioned were, talk about extraordinary human functioning. I mean, that's what the Chinese call their paranormal programs, if you will, their ESP programs, extraordinary human body function. That's what Mitchell had. That's what he was capable of. And yet to be ridiculed because of his far-reaching speculative ideas, again, I think that's unhelpful. But there are degrees to which people take anything. And I also write about some of those individuals in my book where you can pursue a subject to the gates of hell. And I, you know, there's a, we haven't spoken about and people can certainly read phenomena and get this, what I think is this amazing story of Andrea Pujarek,

who is one of the early, early MK Ultra doctors. And I interviewed his son and I found lost archives. I don't know if they were ever lost. Maybe they just were never found in the Library of Congress of letters that he was writing to different of his benefactors, the Forbes and the Aster's and the DuPonts. They were financing his work. The CIA was financing his work. the Defense Department was. I mean, he was at the forefront in the late 40s and 50s and 60s of all

this research. But then he became, you know, a little too entrenched. He took a few too many magic mushrooms. And I mean that literally, by his own admittance in his journals, and kind of pursued this to what some would say was the gates of hell. So you have different cautionary tales throughout phenomena about how far, how far will this go? Absolutely. You know, and it is. It is endless. And it really depends on the individual, like, which route they take. And I do want to touch on the fact that within your book, you mentioned that most of these programs, they were either, like you mentioned, moved to a different department, or they were closed down. They were terminated. You know, there wasn't anything to

to the public, at least to be officially gleaned from these studies. Do you believe, Annie, and I know that you write about this, that they could still be going on? Well, they absolutely are going on. There is no question. I mean, I'll give you an example. The Office of Naval

Research explores what they call premonition and intuition in sailors and Marines. I mean, that is, you know, they call it anomalous mental cognition. That is a different name for ESP. They, another doctor there calls the spighty sense. They, you know, there's another program that calls sense making, okay? This is the actual definition. Sense making, think about that. That's very broad and vague. What they defined it as the motivated continuous effort to understand connections among people,

people, places, and events in order to anticipate their trajectories and act effectively. I mean, that's premonition right there. And that program, the Office of Naval Research says in interviews, was born of a situation in Iraq whereby a soldier with the sixth sense said to his men, we're not going down that street. There's an IED buried there. they send the robot out, there's an IED. Wow. Now that soldier becomes interesting to the Defense Department,

but in the present day in 2017, instead of going into the laboratory and, you know, in the Faraday cage and conducting experiments right off, they're now looking at that soldier's physiology, looking at his neurobiology. And as it was said to me, trying to map that physiology in the brain and then model it and then accelerate it.

And because you're talking about the Defense Department, the word accelerate means to weaponize it. Exactly, right. So it's basically, you know, rewrapping the Christmas present, as it were, with a new wrapping. Brilliant analogy. And again, you notice no mention of the supernatural, no mention of the without,

never mind where the soldier gets his spidey sense. Right. And here's where I think it gets very interesting. And this is a question. Because in the 70s and 80s, you would, okay, fine, the CIA can ignore the question. Where is it coming from? Right. But now it seems like what the Defense Department is leaning into is using computer technology to legitimize the research in the same way that the CIA drew the inescapable conclusion that the phenomena

exist. If Defense Department today can point to a brain scan and say, look, this is what's going on, they can then finance it. And so then the question, which I think is marvelous, is, my goodness, will the modern era, this incredible advance of technology that we have now, with computers, with nanotechnology, with nanobiotechnology, will this advance of science and technology allow us to solve this ancient mystery. Is it fact? Is it fantasy? Is it science?

Is it the supernatural? Is it hogwash? Is it real? Or will the debate continue? And that is really interesting and exciting to be at that moment in time, I think. Absolutely. And I think your book and the subsequent projects that I'm sure will stem from this book is the inception of that question, of, you know, whether it's real or not, how is it being used, and why isn't the public being made aware of that, like you said, it is to weaponize. We all know there's no money in peace. So while these abilities, whether from within or from without, could benefit mankind, the idea of this that you've touched on in most of your books is that it will always be used as a weapon.

as a defense. Sad in many respects, but understandable in terms of a military mindset. It's fascinating. I look forward to seeing where your research on this goes. Are you continuing your research into this after the book has been released? Well, it's super interesting to me. My heart and soul is in journalism, is being a reporter. But my books wind up in the world of fiction. in the world of television. And that's a long development process. But phenomena has been, is in development now with Stephen Spielberg's Amblin and Jason Blum's Blumhouse.

So you have the company that brought you, you know, ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and decades of movies since, merging powers, if you will, with the company that brought you paranormal activity. Okay. And I'm involved in this creatively in terms of storytelling. And so some of the more exciting, let's say far out there, unfact-checkable stories, which I learned from the scientists, from the psychics while I was writing this project, that I couldn't put in phenomena, the narrative non-fiction book, because they were single-sourced and they couldn't be fact-checked.

They couldn't be buttressed with, you know, declassified documents. Those incredible stories, which had me at the edge of my seat, can find their home in this fictional world. And I think that is super exciting. So when you say, will the work continue? Absolutely, it will continue. See, that's very exciting. And we all know, you know, Spielberg has been known to put truths into his fiction, close encounters, like you said, comes to mind. Jacques Valet was featured in that film.

Many case reports from supposed alien encounters were included in that as well. That's very interesting. And we see that a lot lately with the blending of fiction and these small truths being almost disclosed to the public. So I definitely look forward to that. Do you have any other upcoming projects coming? Well, I'm always writing another book. So, as I said, that's really where my heart and soul lies. But, you know, back to that idea of science fiction and science fact, what you just touched upon,

where these ideas, the fiction writers plant their, plant truths in fiction. The reverse is also true. And maybe this is a great little vignette to end upon because I found one of my most interesting interviews was for the DARPA book. where I interviewed Charles Towns, who won the Nobel Prize in 1964 for inventing the laser. Okay. And the laser is one of arguably the most important dual-use technology advances of the modern world. I mean, you have laser weapons. That's leading Pentagon technology now, all classified.

And then you have laser printers, laser eye surgery, laser, you know, knee surgery, okay? And Charles Towns was two points that he told me that just really made me think bigger and broader than I had thought before. One was that his idea for inventing the laser came to him originally. The original seed was planted when he was a little boy reading science fiction, Yuri Gagarin's The Death Ray. That's what it was called. So the fiction writer had kind of conceived the laser, you know, decades before. And that inspired Towns. But then he told me a really interesting story.

Now, remember, this is a man of science who won the Nobel Prize. So we talked earlier about the within or the without. Charles Towns confirmed a story with me that had been reported elsewhere, that when he was a grown man, he was sitting. on a park bench when the idea of how to create the laser came to him. And he believed that the idea came to him from without. It was a eureka moment for him, but it came to him from some kind of a supernatural being. In his case, because he was a man of faith, he defined that as God. Wow. I found this fascinating. And it's the story I would always use. It was kind of my

Charles Towns' trump card, when the scientific skeptics who I would be interviewing would, you know, kind of doubt my intelligence and say, you know, no scientist worth his salt ever even believes in any such a thing is inspiration from a supernatural being. And I could say, well, that's not what Charles Towns told me. And so, you know, I loved that interview with him. I loved having, and I love having that idea of, and by the way, he said he went back to the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study and had the debate with Einstein and John von Neumann. So it just has this marvelous, it's a marvelous metaphor for really what I think phenomena is about is what are the reaches of what man can know. And who gets to decide what is inspiration,

who gets to decide what is getting lost? And who gets to decide what is science fiction and what is science fact? Absolutely. And I think your book shows that that debate goes on, that conversation continues, and more people are opened up to that possibility and become that higher percentage, you know, amongst the skeptics and the debunkers. So I can only imagine the inspiration this book is going to have on many in the scientific fields, the hard and soft sciences, and to the believers and skeptics alike, any.

It's an absolutely fascinating book. I can't wait for people to hear this today. And where can we find out more about what you're up to? Annie Jacobson.com. Perfect. Author website. Awesome. And all your work can be found there.

Annie, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having you. It's a pleasure. Thank you for joining us somewhere in the skies. Please take a moment to rate and review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever possible. You can find us across all social media by searching for somewhere in the skies.