The polygraph, or lie detector, works on the assumption that deception can be detected by measurable changes in human body functions, including pulse, respiration, and perspiration. In most people, the fear of being caught in a lie produces anxiety, which in turn causes these individual levels to change. Backster authored the CIA’s infamous “lifestyle issues” test, a series of questions that asked of each prospective CIA employee things like “Are you a homosexual?” and “Do you take drugs?” For over a decade, Backster administered these tests, monitoring applicants’ reactions with a polygraph. Eventually he moved to New York City and founded the Backster School of Lie Detection. There he began training FBI agents and state police detectives the art of detecting deception. He quickly became an expert witness for law enforcement, testifying in courtrooms and before congressional committees. Colleagues liked to say that Cleve Backster could always spot a liar, but he saw the situation from a different point of view. “I like to think of the polygraph as a truth detector,” he said.
Then, on the night of February 2, 1966, a single experience changed the direction of Backster’s lifework. The way he told the story, he’d been up late working in his office on a hard-to-crack FBI case when his eyes landed on a new houseplant his secretary had recently purchased for the office. He wondered what would happen if he administered a polygraph to a plant? Are plants aware? Backster attached the polygraph’s sensor pads to the plant’s leaves, set the levels on the machine, sipped his coffee, and thought about what to ask the houseplant. Then he got an even better idea, he recalled. Why not try to elicit a more direct, potentially anxiety-producing effect? He decided to set the plant’s leaves on fire and see whether the polygraph recorded a measurable change.
Something remarkable happened, he said. As he prepared to strike the match against the matchbox’s ignition strip, the lie detector readings spiked dramatically. It was a eureka moment for him. Plants had consciousness, he was convinced. And even more interesting, he later explained, was his next realization: his experiment suggested that plants had extrasensory perception and could communicate with other life-forms. The plant perceived that it was going to be burned by Backster’s lit match and reacted with a measurable change, he said. He wrote up his findings as “Evidence of a Primary Perception in Plant Life,” which was published in the International Journal of Parapsychology in 1968. He called the results of his experiment the Backster Effect. His work would eventually become the subject of the bestselling book The Secret Life of Plants, by journalists Peter Tompkins, a former OSS officer, and Christopher O. Bird, a CIA operative.
Skeptics and scientists tore the Backster Effect to shreds, starting with the fact that plants lack a nervous system. Backster’s methods were amateurish, naïve, and irresponsible, they said. Backster was not a scientist, and his experiment did not adhere to scientific method. As of 2017, no other scientist has been able to repeat the experiment under strict laboratory controls. But the idea of plant sentience inspired others to consider the possibility. Indeed, Charles Darwin, who studied plants all his life, once observed that the root tip, or radicle, “acts like the brain of one of the lower animals.” Undeterred by his critics, Backster stood by his experiment. “Such high resistance to new ideas does not concern me,” he said. “I have a truly wonderful ally: Mother Nature.”
By the time Hal Puthoff wrote his letter to Backster, the former CIA polygrapher had broadened his experiments on plant sentience. In a follow-on experiment he cut a houseplant in two, then moved the halves into different rooms, where he burned the leaves to see whether distance affected the polygraph response. His conclusion, that a plant’s ability to register fear and read minds was not limited by distance, was the experiment that caught Hal Puthoff’s attention.
“I wanted to do a similar, long-distance experiment,” remembers Puthoff. For over a year he had been tracking the work of international scientists who were on the tachyon hunt. “Physicists were doing all kinds of experiments in search of the tachyon,” says Puthoff. “Cosmic ray experiments, accelerator experiments, but they were all apparatus-based, inanimate physics experiments. The one place no one had looked was in biological organisms, in animate physics.” Which is how Cleve Backster fit in. “My idea was to grow an algae culture, split it, then separate the cultures by a distance of five miles. Then I’d zap one culture with a laser, burn it, see if the sister culture responded.” Puthoff’s experiment would attempt to answer two questions. “The first question was, Do living organisms really interact at a distance? If the answer was yes, then the second question was, Could the existence of tachyons provide the answer as to how the organisms communicate?”
Puthoff wrote Backster and included a copy of his proposed algae culture experiment. He wanted to know what Backster thought of his idea. The letter arrived at Backster’s lab in March 1972. By then, Backster had moved on to a new series of extrasensory perception experiments involving humans and plants. His human research subject was an artist and a psychic named Douglas “Ingo” Swann.
Ingo Swann, by his own account, had been considered odd since the age of three. As a boy growing up in Telluride, Colorado, he was not just “doubly or triply” strange, he said of himself, “I was quadruply freaky.” He experienced premonitions and saw the auras of people around him. When he closed his eyes and went into a dream state, he could leave his body and travel to other places, a situation understood and accepted by his maternal grandmother, who was also “sensitive.” Swann’s family encouraged him to study hard at school, develop his art, and channel his “spontaneous shifts in perception and awareness” into his work. In 1955, he graduated from Westminster College, in Salt Lake City, with a double major in biology and art. He had plans to become a scientist and to get a PhD in genetic research, but instead enlisted in the U.S. Army and served three years in Korea.
After he left the Army, in 1958, Swann moved to New York City determined to pursue a career in art. To pay the bills, for the next twelve years he worked as a clerk in the office of the United Nations Secretariat. But at night and on weekends he worked on his passion and his craft, and it was in the New York City art scene that he met a legendary woman, a painter, muralist, and high-society entertainer named Buell Mullen.
Mullen moved in a circle of the powerful. She had painted portraits of world leaders including President Eisenhower and Madame Chiang Kai-shek. “She loved to give large, sit-down dinner parties in her glamorous studio on Central Park South, its tall windows facing on Central Park,” Swann wrote in an unpublished autobiography. “One of her favorite topics was psychic phenomena.” Swann found this amazing, he said. “For the first time in my life, I was able to witness the actual but hidden extent of the demand for psychics among the wealthy, among politicians, Wall-street types, cultural gurus and even among the very powerful.” Swann was even more surprised to learn that many of these individuals financed ESP experiments; Cleve Backster was one beneficiary. This was reminiscent of the way Alice Astor Bouverie, Marcella du Pont, and Joyce Borden Balokovic had financed Andrija Puharich’s work two decades before.
At one of Buell Mullen’s parties Ingo Swann met Cleve Backster. The two men hit it off. Swann asked Backster if he could come to his lab. “What I wanted to do was see plants responding to human thoughts,” Swann later recalled. He was also at a turning point in his life, having recently left his day job at the UN to focus on his artwork. In order to support himself he’d taken a job as a guinea pig for psychic research. Most of the work came from the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR), the oldest such organization in the United States, founded in 1885 by the philosopher and physician William James. Despite its fancy offices inside a beautiful brownstone at 5 West Seventy-third Street, behind the Dakota apartment building, Swann generally disliked working at the ASPR. In his opinion most of the PhDs in residence were small-minded and “snobbish,” fueled by bureaucratic pettiness and self-righteous indignation about who was psychic and who was not.
At ASPR, Swan
n had been working with the director of research, Karlis Osis, the Latvian-born PhD who specialized in deathbed visions. This was the same Dr. Osis who’d participated in the U.S. Army’s classified ESP tests with cats, starting in 1952, back when Osis worked as a researcher at J. B. Rhine’s Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University. Now, Osis was using Swann for a series of experiments purported to involve out-of-body experiences (OBEs), also known as traveling clairvoyance. The Osis-designed OBE experiment had Swann seated in a lounge chair inside an office at ASPR and wired up to a refrigerator-sized machine called a Beckman Dynograph, which recorded his physiological signals on magnetic tape. Across the room was a tray suspended from the ceiling. Osis’s assistant, Janet Mitchell, would enter the room carrying a box with an object hidden inside. She’d ceremoniously climb a ladder and, out of view of Swann, place the box on the tray. When she was ready, she’d indicate to Swann that the experiment had begun.
“I was expected to practice floating up out-of-the-body to the ceiling and utilize my out-of-body ‘eyes’ to spy down on the targets hidden on the suspended trays,” wrote Swann. “Take your time,” Janet Mitchell would say. “Don’t feel nervous because that raises your blood pressure and distorts the brainwave feed-outs,” Swann recalled being told. Very quickly Swann said he could “see” what was hidden in the box. The problem, he said, was that he had great difficulty trying to articulate what he saw. Osis found this unacceptable and got mad. Swann’s description of the items was inadequate, he said. Swann asked for a pen, and instead of trying to say what he saw, he drew what he saw. Osis and Mitchell were thrilled with the results—so thrilled, they said, they planned to repeat these experiments under tightly controlled laboratory conditions and submit the results to the Psychology Board of America for review.
Ingo Swann was fascinated by the tray test results, but for a different reason. “There [was] a myth or legend in psychical research and parapsychology that psi subjects [i.e., psychic people] need time to gather their wits and for their impressions to start coming in,” he wrote, as if target identification required time. Throughout history there existed the conception of mediums rubbing their temples or gazing into a crystal ball, concentrating and waiting for the phenomenon of extrasensory perception to occur. “I was finding this anticipated slowness not true at all regarding the experiments at the ASPR,” Swann noted in his journals. “I found, or eventually noticed at any rate, that the moment I set my attention onto the target—well, there it was.… Instantaneously,” he wrote. “I first noticed this on the [earlier] informal, long-distance experiments. When Janet said she was ready to record the brainwaves, my attention went to the target [without any] delays. I then noticed this had also been true in the case of the OOB experiments as well, and with all of the other kinds of experiments, too.”
The Osis experiments helped Swann identify something he’d not considered before. Psychic functioning occurred at light speed, metaphorically at least. Swann decided to call this concept the “speed or velocity of psi signals,” or “instantaneous connection to the psi signals.” He’d mentioned this idea to some of the PhDs at ASPR, and they’d dismissed it. After all, he was not a scientist and lacked a PhD, they said. “No one knew what I was talking about,” said Swann. Except Cleve Backster, who told Swann that he’d recently received a copy of a research proposal from a physicist named Hal Puthoff, who was pursuing a related hypothesis at the Stanford Research Institute.
Swann wrote a letter to Hal Puthoff. “Swann said that if I were interested in investigating the boundary between the physics of the animate and inanimate, I should consider experiments of the parapsychological type,” remembers Puthoff. Swann also referenced some apparently successful psychokinesis experiments he’d done in a laboratory at the City College of New York for Gertrude Schmeidler, the experimental psychologist and Harvard PhD who’d famously coined the parapsychological concepts of sheep and goats.
Puthoff wrote back, inviting Swann to come out to California and be tested in a lab at SRI. The experiments would take place inside a Faraday cage, under strict laboratory controls. For the first time in American history, Puthoff said, psychic functioning could be examined from a physicist’s point of view, not from the perspective of a psychologist or parapsychologist. Swann said he’d think about it. Privately, he noted in his journal that he’d spoken way too soon. Puthoff’s offer intimidated him.
The following month, on April 26, 1971, the American Society for Psychical Research held a large reception to honor “Ingo Swann, Dr. Karlis Osis, Ph.D., and Research on Out of the Body Experiences.” The way the story was presented in the ASPR newsletter, an independent judge from the Psychology Board of America (allegedly blind to the fact that she was judging out-of-body experiments involving ESP), determined that Ingo Swann had correctly made and matched picture drawings of items hidden from view, and that this was a one hundred percent match, which was considered far above chance expectations. When a second judge asked for a retest, Swann allegedly again scored a one hundred percent match. The test results were going to be the lead story in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, and the evening’s grand reception was honoring this milestone.
“Reception for Ingo Swann: Expanded Awareness in Art,” the sign outside the venue read. “Mr. Swann has been participating extensively in ASPR experimentation on out-of-body states.” The gathering promised to provide guests with an opportunity to see Ingo Swann’s artwork and meet the man with the X-ray eyes. Score of reporters were invited, and gossip columnists, too. Ingo Swann had mixed feelings about all this, he said. He was naturally shy and prone to feeling self-conscious in crowds. In his journals he lamented that he’d recently put on a lot of weight. “By now I was so fat, fat, fat, I couldn’t fit into any nice United Nations suits, of which I had an even dozen,” he wrote. “During the week before the reception I had drank only liquid protein in an effort to reduce. While dressing, I felt I was getting ready to volunteer for the guillotine.” Then, “what the hell,” he thought, “while slowly and reluctantly squeezing into my clothes, I smoked ten cigars and drank five vodka and sodas. And so I arrived at the dreaded reception a half-hour late.”
It was 1972, and out-of-body experiments were in vogue. A huge crowd of people showed up for the event, and in local newspapers the following morning, Swann was hailed as New York City’s “super psychic” and “the Superman of psi.” But there are at least two sides to every story, as Ingo Swann soon found out. “I learned that I was, among other things, a drunkard; a debaucher; an alcoholic; a homosexual. I wasn’t married, and so, it was said, I ‘must be’ [gay].” One gossip columnist noted that Swann was writing sex novels and speculated that maybe he was a pornographer. When it leaked that he and Cleve Backster were doing psi experiments with “biologicals,” the rumors took a salacious turn. “The gossip line exploded regarding how and from whom [Backster] got his specimens, and under what circumstances,” lamented Swann.
The disparaging press devastated Swann, but it also compelled him into action. He would go to Stanford Research Institute and be tested by a real physicist, he decided. Forget New York City with its double standards and its gossips. Either his extrasensory abilities were real or they were not. At SRI, he would be tested scientifically and the reality of psychic functioning would be vindicated, or he would fail and psychics would remain on the fringes of society where they’d always lived. If extrasensory perception was proven to be a figment of the imagination, chance, or a host of other disparaging things people had been saying for centuries, so be it. Swann decided he’d take a risk. What else, really, did he have to lose? He would accept Hal Puthoff’s invitation after all. The only problem was, he lamented in his journal, he was fat and had no clothes. Why not shed that old idea, too? Swann decided to undergo a welcome shift in attitude and perception about his own physical body, about himself.
“After the reception at the ASPR, I began receiving invitations to dinners and parties by the score, often from peo
ple I didn’t even know. I suppose everyone wanted to see what this odd mixture of gossip looked like. I became mildly amused by watching people try to fit me into their usually limited stereotype concepts—and took a small revenge by doing everything I could not to fit into any of them.” Like a snake shedding its skin, a new Swann emerged. And since he could not fit into any of his conservative clothes, “I bought new ones at used clothing stores, and wore them boldly everywhere I went. But these tended to be religious, police or military clothes of one type or another. I mixed these with ordinary clothes, and went to the dinners and parties wearing them. I was expected to be abnormal, and so it was a pleasure to present myself as such.”
It was liberating to Swann. He felt free of the bondage of this old idea that it mattered so much what people thought of him. “Prior to this,” he explained, “I had tried very hard to not be considered an oddity. Now that changed. I said to myself, ‘To hell with not trying to be an oddity, let me just experience being my true self for a while.’” And so he started appearing in public dressed in various new ways, adding what he called “discrete costume elements” to his daily attire.
In June 1972, Swann boarded a plane for California, ready and willing to be tested by a physicist at SRI. When he arrived at the San Francisco airport he was dressed all in white: white cowboy boots, white pants, and some kind of white religious frock. The ironic part was that Hal Puthoff barely noticed, and if he did, he did not bat an eye. The Stanford Research Institute was located thirty minutes south of San Francisco, which in 1972 was the hippie capital of the world.
Hal Puthoff’s physicist colleagues at SRI warned him not to get involved with psychics. Anyone who claimed to have extrasensory powers was a charlatan or unstable or both, they said. Puthoff took note but remained undeterred. He decided to design a fail-safe psychokinesis experiment, he recalls, one in which there was no room for fraud. “I was able to gain access to one of the best-shielded devices on the planet, a superconducting-shielded magnetometer used for looking at subatomic particles known as quarks,” he said. “In 1972, the quark was hypothesized to be a subnuclear constituent of nuclear particles such as protons but not yet isolated outside of a nucleus, and the search was on.” The quark detector Puthoff borrowed for the Swann psychokinesis experiment was a highly sensitive machine designed to look at decay in a magnetic field. Puthoff’s colleague Dr. Arthur Hebard, of the Stanford High Energy Physics Laboratory, had access to a magnetometer for quark experiments, and Puthoff made arrangements with Hebard to borrow it. In documents declassified by the CIA, the magnetometer had been developed under an Office of Naval Research contract and “is of the superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) variety.” It was now located “in a well [basement] under a building” called the Varian Physics Hall.