Most of the problems stemmed from fundamental lack of awareness and what Frey called “glib assumptions that government scientists had a complete understanding of the nervous system function.” In a 1969 paper he asked, “Why is there so much misunderstanding and confusion and so little data collection in this area? I can recall being shown on a chalk board the calculations that ‘proved’ that nerves can not be affected by RF [radio frequency] energy.” He added that “there was, however, one basic fault in this line of reasoning. The fault was the assumption that we have a good understanding of nervous system function. This assumption is wrong.”
Frey worked hard to overcome the jurisdictional battles over who would control and be responsible for research. He had seen many Russian papers on this subject matter rejected as “uninterpretable.” In fact, said Frey, atrocious translations were the problem. “In one [paper] the word for hypothalamus was translated as cerebellum,” he wrote.
Frey’s research and experiments added further resonance to the mysterious links between ESP and PK and electromagnetic weapons, links being actively studied by the Russians. In the late 1960s, Frey reported that he could speed up, slow down, or stop an excised frog heart by synchronizing the pulse rate of a microwave beam with the heart itself, an experiment that echoed what Nina Kulagina was reported to have done with her mind. “Similar results have been obtained using live frogs, indicating that it is technically feasible to produce heart attacks with a ray [electromagnetic] designed to penetrate the human chest,” wrote Robert O. Becker, a colleague of Koslov and Frey. Becker, twice nominated for the Nobel Prize, worked on microwave weapons for the Defense Department until his resignation in the early 1970s, after working on a classified project that used microwaves to disorient people. “He quit because he considered such work immoral,” wrote a reporter covering the subject for New Scientist magazine. Becker’s government work convinced him that a microwave signal such as the Moscow Signal “could affect the central nervous system, put people to sleep, interfere with decision making capacity and induce chronic stress,” he said, and noted that the Soviets had been “using embassy employees as test subjects for low-level EMR [electromagnetic radiation] experiments.”
Was the Moscow Signal benign, as put forth by Koslov, or potentially lethal, as Becker and Frey believed? Did embassy employees really have elevated mutagenesis and carcinogenesis, or was this hype? And what were the Soviets trying to accomplish by linking EM weapons to ESP and PK? U.S. defense scientists wondered. The CIA hired a defense contracting company called AiResearch Manufacturing Group to conduct a classified study. AiResearch, located in Torrance, California, had an array of classified defense department contracts, including ones in avionics, hydraulics, and microprocessors. The company had also engineered the life support systems for the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts, which gave it unique expertise in the area of human physiology in extreme circumstances and under duress.
AiResearch found much of the work in the Soviet Union to be “speculative, unscientific and sensationalistic.” But in one area they found cause for alarm. The Soviets were developing ways to try to enhance psychic functioning by bombarding test subjects with very high frequency (VHF) sound and pulsing the brain with electromagnetic signals. Soviet researchers sought to bring humans to “the razor’s edge between sleep and wakefulness,” and to “facilitate hallucinations and altered states.” The goal was “changing the psychological states of the subject.” What Andrija Puharich set out to do with hallucinogenic field mushrooms more than twenty years before, the Soviets were now trying to accomplish with advanced technology.
Further details were elusive. The problem, wrote the authors, was that Soviet ESP, PK, and EM research was “cloaked in secrecy [and] camouflaged with false information.” Access to more information was impossible because the Soviets likely conducted their experiments inside a “secret parapsychology laboratory inside a mental hospital.” With such limited information available, the success of the research could not be determined. “Because the history of physics has been full of surprises, prudence dictates that one should consider [these concepts] until disproven. We therefore must suggest further research,” the AiResearch study concluded.
The authors emphasized one critical difference between research that was going on in the East and in the West. In the West, the authors explained, ESP and PK researchers “cling to an undertone of a religious-like belief in transcendent mechanisms. The Russians reject this idea. As Marxists, or ‘doctrinaire materialists,’ everything has a scientific explanation.” What made this more perplexing was that even without the mystical explanation, “The Russians assume the reality of thought transference.”
The psychic research program at SRI was hanging on by a financial thread. Now that Puthoff and Targ’s Navy contract had been unceremoniously canceled by Koslov, funds were running out. In the summer of 1977, the chances of Puthoff and Targ finding access to a submarine to test the ESP and ELF theory were close to nil—until Puthoff learned of a radical experiment being conducted by Stephan Schwartz, the former naval officer who had served as the special assistant to Admiral Zumwalt.
Six months earlier, in the fall of 1976, Schwartz had been sitting around a kitchen table in Los Angeles with two former Naval officers, Don Keach and Don Walsh. Keach and Walsh were two of the world’s most famous deep-sea explorers. Keach was the submarine pilot who in 1966 had located a lost hydrogen bomb lying on the ocean floor off the coast of Palomares, Spain. The bomb, capable of destroying a major city if detonated, had been jettisoned from a B-52 bomber during a midair collision with its refueling aircraft. Walsh had performed an equally legendary feat, albeit with no weapons involved. In 1960, he and a crewmate made the deepest dive ever undertaken, to the bottom of the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean. (Not for fifty-two years would anyone else make that dive, until James Cameron did, in 2012.) Keach and Walsh were now running the Institute for Marine and Coastal Studies at the University of Southern California. The conversation turned to Schwartz’s earlier idea, back when he was in the Navy, about putting a psychic on a submarine. “I wanted to see if a remote viewer could locate a previously unknown shipwreck on the sea floor,” Schwartz explained in 2016.
As circumstance would have it, Keach and Walsh happened to be in a position to help. In a few months, and for a brief time, Keach and Walsh were going to have rare access to a submarine. “It was coming down from Canada for sea trials at their marine facility,” Schwartz explained. “They said that I could have her for three days.” For Schwartz, it was the opportunity of a lifetime. Taurus I was a state-of-the-art, five-man submersible capable of traveling to a depth of 1,000 feet. At thirty-one feet long, she cost $3 million to build. She had a large viewport and a claw to retrieve items on the ocean floor. With a submersible at his disposal, all Schwartz needed were the psychics. He wanted the most reliable psychics in the country for his project, so he reached out to Ingo Swann. Swann introduced Schwartz to the scientists at SRI; Hal Puthoff was particularly excited to collaborate.
The opportunity presented by Schwartz was fortuitous. Puthoff had recently been contacted by Dale Graff, a civilian scientist who worked for the U.S. Air Force. Graff, who worked in the Foreign Technology Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, wanted to keep a low profile, he said. He was interested in anomalous mental phenomena on a deeply personal level—something had happened to him, exactly what he was not yet willing to say. But Graff believed there might very well be an Air Force application or capability for ESP. If he and Puthoff could devise a modest but unique experiment, Graff believed he might be able to get the Air Force to supply funding. Schwartz’s proposed submersible experiment was exactly the kind of opportunity both Puthoff and Graff had been looking for.
And so, in the summer of 1977, with a small contract from the Foreign Technology Division, Puthoff, Graff, the SRI team, and psychics Ingo Swann and Hella Hammid—a professional photographer and psychic
who had replaced Pat Price—teamed up with Stephan Schwartz to conduct one of the most unique psychic functioning experiments of the 1970s, Project Deep Quest. (Schwartz was unaware that Graff was working for the military.) To ensure an unbiased third-party observer, Schwartz hired a NASA satellite imagery specialist named Anne Khale, who accompanied the team and monitored all of the control elements for fraud. There were two elements to the program, an unclassified one in which Schwartz would hunt for a shipwreck, and a classified project for the Air Force to test long-distance remote viewing inside a submersible. The unclassified quest was later featured in an episode of In Search of…, hosted by Leonard Nimoy. The episode was called “Psychic Sea Hunt.”
To begin with, Schwartz purchased a standard nautical chart that mapped an area around Catalina Island, off the coast of Los Angeles, that was roughly 1,500 square miles. He gave copies of the map to Swann and Hammid and asked each of them to locate by extrasensory perception any sea wreck on the ocean floor, to mark the location on the map, and to describe what would be found there. The method employed map dowsing, the same process used by Uri Geller to help Moshe Dayan locate lost archeological sites in Israel and the Sinai.
Using this technique, Swann and Hammid each marked multiple locations where they believed wrecks could be found. “I sort of look at the map not as much with my eyes as sort of get the feeling of it,” Hammid explained in the film. “I tend to get a sort of feeling of a heaviness, I can’t describe it any other way, and that’s where I mark the map.” Of map dowsing, Swann said, “You work up to it, you separate yourself from the environment, separate yourself and become psychic. That’s how you do it.”
Cartographer and career submariner Brad Veek created a composite from the two maps marked up by the psychics. Schwartz took this composite to the Bureau of Marine Sites of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey for their official opinion, which was recorded live on film. The Geodetic Survey is the federally funded organization responsible for keeping track of maritime wrecks. In reviewing the map, an official confirmed numerous places marked by the psychics where shipwrecks were known to exist. These were eliminated as targets. In theory, the psychics could have cheated by secretly consulting government maps. What remained was a single target on the composite map that had been marked by both Hammid and Swann independently. What excited Schwartz was that these marks were just a few hundred yards apart. This was where the Taurus I submersible would go, Schwartz told the official, who gave his name as Thomas Cooke.
“Of all the existing known wrecks or suspected wrecks [including] fifty-three wrecks reported in the Catalina area, I am convinced there has been no known reported wreck in this area,” Cooke told the film crew. He added how difficult it was to precisely locate a shipwreck on the sea floor, even when its location had already been identified by sonar or other technical means. “Finding a wreck, even when you know where it is, is an art in itself,” Cooke warned, and compared the psychics’ quest to a “wild goose chase.”
For the classified Air Force project, Graff and Puthoff designed a simple remote-viewing experiment, a variation on the outbounder-beacon test designed by SRI for the CIA. Once the Taurus was deep underwater, at a predetermined time the psychics and the scientists were each given a set of six sealed envelopes. Inside each envelope was an image of a site in the San Francisco area. When the time came, Puthoff and Graff chose one of the six envelopes, opened it, then drove to the site and remained there as a beacon for the psychic in the submarine. At the same time, the psychic in the submersible was instructed to open all six envelopes, view the sites, and call out the location of the scientists. These experiments were also recorded, but not for the TV program.
Seated inside the submersible, 500 feet underwater and 375 miles away, Hammid quickly identified which photograph she believed was correct, which makes for a great story, but is also a one-in-six chance, not the worst odds. The scientists, Hammid said, were standing beside a giant oak tree on a hilltop, which in fact is where they were. The final step in the Air Force trial had been tailored for an emergency military scenario. On the back of each card was a message. Examples in this test included “Remain submerged for two days,” and “Proceed to base one,” and “Standby alert on priority targets.” The submersible crew searching for the sunken treasure was not expected to act on the command. Rather, it was a dummy message designed to indicate to Graff’s Air Force superiors at the Foreign Technology Division how ESP could be one part of a series of fail-safe protocols.
A second test with Ingo Swann delivered similar results, according to Graff’s declassified report. Confident in the experiment’s design, its protocols, and its strict controls, Graff took the results to his superior. “Two experiments of this type were carried out, one each with two subjects. For this first experiment the submersible was at a depth of 170 m in water 340 m deep; for the second the submersible rested on the bottom in 80 m of water… land-to-submarine communications by means other than the known five senses worked accurately,” read Graff’s report. From a counterintelligence point of view there were serious implications to consider, Graff wrote. Among them was the idea that there was no way to hide classified information from a talented remote-viewer like Hella Hammid or Ingo Swann. Air Force officials thanked Graff for his efforts and said they’d get back to him.
Stephan Schwartz’s unclassified effort was also a success. A previously unidentified shipwreck was located on the seafloor in the vicinity where Swann and Hammid said it was. The claw on Taurus I pulled up several pieces of the wreck. How long it had been there no one knew. This was the first time in U.S. history that psychics had located an underwater archeological site from inside a submersible.
For Puthoff and Targ, a new funding opportunity was now at hand. The SRI scientists called on the ambassador of psychic research, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, for help. Mitchell had created a nonprofit institute in Petaluma, California, called the Institute of Noetic Sciences, where he worked on metaphysical and consciousness studies full-time. On behalf of Puthoff and Targ, Ed Mitchell was able to secure a meeting with CIA director George H. W. Bush. Mitchell traveled to Agency headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, where the CIA director listened intently, Mitchell recalled in 2015. “He said his hands were tied because the Agency was in too much [trouble] with Congress.” For the anomalous mental phenomena program to survive, Bush told Mitchell that it would need a military sponsor.
At Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dale Graff served as chief of the Advanced Missile Systems Forecast Section, the department assigned to keep the Air Force and Defense Department planners aware of the most classified, cutting-edge military research going on in the Soviet Union. Graff urged his superiors to fund a classified program with the SRI scientists that would focus on remote viewing research with special emphasis on locating lost airplanes. Several months later Graff got his answer: funding had been approved.
Graff could not have foreseen that his initial effort would turn into a colossal, twenty-year effort by the Defense Department to use psychic functioning in military operations. The program would involve numerous military and intelligence agencies, the National Security Council, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, even the president of the United States.
PART III
THE DEFENSE DEPARTMENT YEARS
Nature shows us only the tail of the lion. But there is no doubt in my mind that the lion belongs with it even if he cannot reveal himself to the eye all at once because of his huge dimension.
—Albert Einstein
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Paraphysics
Through the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense was now officially running a psychic research program. When the CIA was running the program, DoD had been a client; now the Pentagon was in charge. One of the first actions taken by DoD was to assign the Defense Intelligence Agency—the Defense Department’s top spy agency—to perform a classified study on parallel research programs going on in the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries. The ass
ignment went to civilian physicist Dale Graff, chief of the Advanced Missile Systems Forecast Section at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
“Nobody wanted the job,” Graff recalls. The majority of individuals Graff worked with in his division did not take extrasensory perception and psychokinesis seriously, let alone perceive it to be a threat. So the first thing Graff did was pivot the existing nomenclature away from psychology toward physics, which was not unlike what the Soviets had done with their program a decade before. With an emphasis on hard, as opposed to soft, science, Graff felt the report would get more traction at the Defense Department, which would disseminate it. For example, he titled his report Paraphysics R&D—Warsaw Pact; “paraphysics” a word he coined.
Graff’s report highlighted Soviet research in electromagnetic fields, quantum physics, holography, and gravitation. He discussed biophysics and psychic healing, Kirlian photographs, auras, and map dowsing. He paid particular attention to psychokinesis. If PK was a genuine ability, it had the potential to disrupt or disable delicate electronics on Air Force weapons systems even on a micro level, so the research was critical even if it turned out to be a dead end.