But science in China would come under attack during the Cultural Revolution. In an effort to sound pro-proletariat, the Fifth Academy changed its name to the Seventh Ministry of Machine Building, and Tsien was removed from the position of director. He remained one of what are believed to be only fifty scientists protected by the state during this time. He quietly worked on a classified program involving manned space flight, and in April 1968 spearheaded the formation of the 507th Research Institute also known as the Beijing Institute of Space Medical Engineering. In 1972 Mao suffered a stroke, and the moderate Deng Xiaoping took control of the government. In 1976 Mao died. With Deng Xiaoping now officially in power, China began steps toward reform. Science returned to the limelight, and H. S. Tsien once again became its mouthpiece, this time for the new government.
Here began a mysterious transition that the U.S. intelligence community sought to understand. With his reemergence into the spotlight, Tsien became a vocal advocate of Extraordinary Human Body Functioning, ESP, PK, and qigong. He was the man behind the emergence of phenomena research, and he did it almost single-handedly. After the publication of the article about Tang Yu and the Extraordinary Powers Craze, the Chinese opened a classified research institute dedicated to the study of anomalous mental phenomena. It was located inside the Beijing Institute of Space Medical Engineering, under the leadership of H. S. Tsien. It was here that China’s leading scientists began developing military applications for Exceptional Functions of the Human Body, extrasensory perception, and psychokinesis.
Decades of rocket research had left Tsien with the deep conviction that there existed a symbiotic relationship between outer space and inner space, between the cosmos and man. The link, he said, was qi. What for “two thousand years [was] considered a mysterious ancient form of Chinese medicine” could now be understood in “the language of modern scientific technology,” Tsien told a gathering of Communist Party leaders in June 1981. Citing “laboratory experiments with EHBF teenagers [who] demonstrated sight not by eyes” (i.e., ESP) and “influenced animate or inanimate objects” (i.e., PK), Tsien said that researching the “energy powered by the vital force of qi” would lead to the next “scientific revolution.” There were military advantages to be had. “In time of war, the body in [a state of] EHBF is beneficial,” declared the father of China’s rocket program. “This enthusiastic atmosphere [in China] reminds us of the same atmosphere when Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum mechanics were introduced onto the stage of modern science,” he said. “The only different is that the stage at that time was Western Europe and now the stage is the People’s Republic of China.”
In Washington, D.C., the Defense Intelligence Agency wanted a firsthand assessment of what was going on in China with these EHBF teenagers, H. S. Tsien, and the various labs involved. Arrangements were made to send Hal Puthoff to China in a clandestine capacity, as a contractor on the Special Access Program, Grill Flame. In October 1981, a delegation of eighteen American and Canadian researchers, scientists, and journalists traveled to China to meet EHBF scientists and researchers under the auspices of civilian interest in psychic research. Puthoff was a member of the delegation, working undercover for DIA. The twelve-day trip included visits to Beijing, Xian, and Shanghai. In Beijing, the group visited military science facilities at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Institute of High-Energy Physics.
Upon his return, Puthoff prepared a sixty-page classified report entitled “Psychoenergetics Research in the People’s Republic of China (1982),” now declassified. He confirmed the experiments, met many of the scientists, and observed the modern equipment being used in China’s laboratories. “H. S. Tsien has been the driving force behind establishing EHBF science,” Puthoff wrote, cautioning DIA not to underestimate his power and influence. “He is thought to have had a major role in developing China’s first nuclear bombs.”
The report was sent to Dr. Jack Vorona at DIA for review. The goals of the psychic research program had always been “to evaluate the threat that foreign psychoenergetics achievements might pose to US national security, and to explore the potential of psychoenergetics for use in US intelligence collection.” The threats from foreign governments had previously been limited to the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact nations. Now China was added to that list. “A potential threat to US national security exists from foreign achievements in psychoenergetics in the USSR and China,” a declassified memo made clear. “This research is well funded and receives high-level government backing.”
At the Pentagon, Puthoff’s report was sent to Richard DeLauer, undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. DeLauer had attended Caltech, H. S. Tsien’s alma mater, and was aware of the power and influence wielded by the man he called the “elder statesman” of Chinese scientific technology and development. Three months after receiving the report and a back-up briefing, DeLauer signed a memo allocating additional resources, Program Six funds, for the psychic research program Grill Flame.
There was an interesting story unfolding in California around this same time. It appeared anecdotal at first, but would come to have significance. In 1983, not many Americans were familiar with the ancient Chinese concepts of qi and qigong, and far fewer knew anything about the Chinese rocket scientist H. S. Tsien. But in Manhattan Beach, a systems engineer for Boeing Aerospace named Jack Houck was familiar with both. He saw a connection between qi and psychokinesis that no one in America had really considered before.
Observing Uri Geller bend spoons on TV, and reading reports of children being inspired by Geller to bend spoons in their homes—allegedly using the power of their minds—got Jack Houck to thinking. “During the process, people often [said] they felt energy coming from their hands,” Houck stated. He also noted that several local martial arts practitioners he knew also spoke of an internal energy they could summon with their minds and that was felt as heat in their hands. “They call it ‘qi,’” said Houck.
As an aerospace engineer Jack Houck was interested in the concept of bending metal with the mind. He began having discussions with a colleague from McDonnell Douglas Aerospace Company, a metallurgist named Severin Dahlen. Houck and Dahlen wondered whether the ability to bend metal this way had something to do with one’s belief system. Perhaps psychokinesis was not a so-called paranormal superpower but an ability to harness the energy force the Chinese called qi that was latent in all people.
As an experiment, Houck decided to host a spoon-bending party with twenty-one people at his Manhattan Beach home in January 1981. If any of the spoons were bent, Dahlen would analyze the results from a metallurgist’s point of view. The two scientists created a three-step protocol for guests at the party: “1). Make a mental connection to what you want to affect [bend]. 2). Command what you want it to do by shouting ‘Bend! Bend! Bend!’ 3). Let go.” The “let go” part, Houck explained, meant allowing your mind to let go of the idea that it is impossible to bend metal with the mind.
“In the first experiment, to test the conceptual model, we had regular, average folks. Half of the people were interested in psychic-type things, the other half were members of a tennis club I belonged to,” Houck recalled. Unlike a martial arts setting in which the practitioner concentrates silently, Houck and Dahlen wanted to create a high-energy environment of excitement with everyone shouting “Bend!” “This one young boy, fourteen, had his fork fall over,” Houck wrote. “Everyone in the room saw it because he jumped up out of his chair, screaming.” Houck said that what happened next was particularly fascinating. “Most of the people in the room… had what I call an instant belief system change. Everyone’s fork or spoon started to get soft for five to fifteen seconds.” In that window of time, says Houck, “nineteen out of the twenty-one spoons [or forks] bent.” Houck began hosting spoon-bending parties. The results were almost always the same. “Roughly eighty-five percent of the spoons bent.”
Dahlen the metallurgist tested the bent spoons in the lab. His conclusion, “Stainless flatware se
ems to be the easiest metal to [bend] with PK. This is because of [the] metallurgical characteristics of stainless steel. Stainless flatware is usually stamped out in large quantities. The process of cold stamping creates a large number of ‘dislocations’ along the grain boundaries in the metal. The PK energy is somehow dumped into the metal and these dislocations act as beacons for that energy. Once the PK energy lands at a dislocation, there is nowhere for it to go and it turns into heat, much as when neutrons and X-rays penetrate solid objects.”
At his spoon bending parties Houck watched hundreds, then thousands, of average Americans suspend their disbelief and bend metal without physical force. Yes, it’s likely that some percentage of the guests cheated. But hundreds of them bent hacksaw blades, silver-plated serving spoons, and five-sixteenth-inch steel rods that are physically impossible to bend by hand. By the time Hal Puthoff’s paper on psychoenergetics research in China was making its rounds at DIA, Jack Houck had hosted more than fifty PK parties, attended by approximately one thousand individuals. His conclusion was that “everyone seems to be able to do PK. Metal often continues to bend for up to three days. This seems to correlate well with the ‘qi energy’ discussed in various martial arts disciplines.”
Naturally, there were military implications in what Jack Houck had unveiled, and soon he would be contacted by the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Killers and Kidnappers
On March 30, 1981, just seventy days after becoming president, Ronald Reagan was shot and seriously injured in an assassination attempt in Washington, D.C. As the president was leaving a speaking engagement at the Hilton, the assassin, John Hinkley Jr., was able to fire six bullets in the direction of the presidential entourage, striking President Reagan with a single shot. It was a perilously close call. The president’s left lung was punctured and he suffered heavy internal bleeding. The attempted assassination was the first time a bullet had hit a sitting U.S. president since John F. Kennedy had been killed in Dallas eighteen years before.
Two months later in Rome, in St. Peter’s Square, Vatican City, an assassin opened fire on Pope John Paul II, the leader of 600 million Roman Catholics around the world. Four bullets hit the pontiff; two lodged in his abdomen, another hit his left index finger and another his right arm. The Pope underwent more than five hours of surgery and survived. That fall, on October 6, 1981, Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat was assassinated by Islamic fundamentalists in Cairo, an event that stunned the world. Sadat had been watching a military victory parade when a group of men in uniform threw grenades and fired assault rifles at him. Mortally wounded, Sadat was airlifted to a military hospital and died two hours later. In a span of roughly seven months, there had been three assassination attempts against world leaders, with three direct hits and one death. The perceived vulnerability of international figures escalated to alarming proportions.
The day after Sadat was murdered, newspapers across America and around the world hinted at future assassination plots against President Reagan. The Secret Service tightened protocols and the FBI was placed on high alert. Across the intelligence community, analysts were assigned a variety of threat assessments both foreign and domestic. At CIA and DIA, intelligence officers learned of a plot by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to send Libyan hit squads to kill President Reagan and members of his cabinet. The president began traveling in an unmarked limousine. Secret Service members were assigned to protect National Security Council staff. A pair of surface-to-air missiles was installed on the White House roof.
The CIA learned of a second presidential assassination plot, this one spearheaded by the international terrorist Carlos the Jackal, who was thought to have already entered the United States. All kinds of intelligence collection were called up to thwart assassination plots, including human intelligence, signals intelligence, imagery intelligence, open-source intelligence—and the Detachment G remote viewers at Fort Meade.
In Washington, Dale Graff had just begun his new job working for Jack Vorona, assistant vice director for scientific and technical intelligence at DIA. Graff moved to the nation’s capital and rented an apartment not far from his office, on the far side of Arlington National Cemetery. Barbara stayed behind in Dayton, where she worked as the head nurse at St. Elizabeth Hospital; she and the children would join him the following year. Graff’s role as Vorona’s action officer was to oversee both the SRI research in Northern California, now being financed by DIA, and the Grill Flame operation at Fort Meade. With the assassination threat level heightened, Graff traveled back and forth between Arlington and Fort Meade, where he worked with the information provided by remote viewers and tried to develop protocols to separate signal from noise.
The information was voluminous, and much of it was noise. For example, Fort Meade psychics drew sketches of would-be assassins that were male and female, and ranged in age from eighteen to sixty-five. Some had black hair, others wore wigs. Some had brown eyes, others had altered their eye color with contact lenses, still others wore glasses. One remote viewer was certain of an assassin who “always dressed in natural tones and wore brown shoes.” Almost all of the remote viewers perceived an assassin carrying a 9mm automatic pistol. Descriptions of getaway vehicles included a Chrysler, a Ford, a light-blue sedan, and a purple GMC van with gold trim, black interior, and carpeting on the seats. The remote viewers pinpointed dozens of locations on maps around Washington where they individually intuited that an assassination attempt might occur. The information was as overwhelming as it was nebulous. Where to begin? Day in and day out, deciphering the information and devising a plan of action was Dale Graff’s greatest challenge.
Given the critical nature of the operation, Grill Flame’s ancillary support team at SRI was brought in on the high-priority effort. Staff at SRI consisted of two senior scientists, a research analyst, a consultant, and several support personnel. Normally the remote viewers at SRI worked on research programs. Now they too were shifted to operational status. As data from the SRI viewers came in, Graff examined it. On the afternoon of December 12, 1981, Hal Puthoff was working with remote viewer Gary Langford, the former naval officer who’d provided information on the Zaire operation and the missing Soviet bomber. In this particular session, Puthoff asked Langford to “determine if an event of major importance to the United States [will] occur in the near future.” Langford worked the question for several days with no clear impressions coming in, he said. Then, three days later, on December 15, at 8:37 a.m., during a session identified in declassified CIA documents as Task Identification 0049, one of the most spectacular apparent instances of extrasensory perception intelligence in the history of the program occurred.
Out of Langford’s mouth came a prophecy: “A United States Pentagon official would be kidnapped by terrorists on the evening of 17 December 1981.” The information was so specific in terms of date and time, and Langford was so assertive in relaying this information, that Puthoff ran several additional sessions with him to try to learn more. Langford said he saw the terrorists breaking into this Pentagon official’s apartment, binding and gagging the man, and then kidnapping him. Even more specifically, Langford saw this high-ranking official being shoved inside a trunk and secreted in the back of a van. The kidnappers were Mediterranean-looking, Langford said, and the van was blue with some kind of strange markings on the side. He drew a sketch of the trunk and its dimensions.
Puthoff alerted Dale Graff. The DIA passed Puthoff’s information to the FBI, which issued a threatened kidnapping alert against a federal official. The International Criminal Police Organization was alerted, and by the next morning, INTERPOL had issued a worldwide counterterrorism alert.
At 5:30 on the evening December 17, 1981, Brigadier General James L. Dozier, a senior Army official and deputy chief of staff in the NATO Southern Command, was sitting in his penthouse apartment on Strada Lungadige Catena in Verona, Italy, with his wife, Judy, when the doorbell rang. Dozier, age fifty, was a graduate of
West Point, a Vietnam War veteran, and a recipient of the Silver Star. He had been reading a letter when the doorbell rang. He stood up and walked toward the door. Interviewed in 2015, Dozier recalled thinking the situation was odd. The bell was the one that rang when pushed from inside the building, here on the top floor, not down on the street. The Doziers weren’t expecting visitors, but perhaps it was a neighbor, Dozier recalled.
“Chi e?” Dozier asked. Who’s there?
A man on the other side of the door addressed him as Generale and identified himself as a plumber. There was a leak in the building, the voice said; could he come inside?
Dozier opened the door. In front of him were two young men in workmen’s uniforms. Each had a full beard and mustache. One carried a leather bag.
“I told my wife, ‘Don’t worry,’” Dozier recalled, explaining that the plumbers were trying to determine the cause of a water leak in the building. Judy had used their washing machine earlier in the day, and Dozier led the men toward the appliance.
“Il termosifone?” the plumber asked.
Dozier did not have any idea what a termosifone was. He headed into the library to get a dictionary and was looking for the translation when he was attacked. The leader grabbed him from behind. Dozier swung around just in time to see that the man had backed up. “I was looking down the barrel of a pistol,” he recalled. The man pushed Dozier; Dozier struck back, and the two began fighting. The second man joined in, punching Dozier until he almost lost consciousness. He lay on the floor, an eardrum ruptured and bleeding from open wounds on his forehead and cheek. “When I looked up, I saw they had my wife on her knees with a pistol to her head. That’s when the fight was over,” he said. The kidnappers tied up Judy, gagged her, and put heavy tape over her eyes. They bound the general’s ankles with rubberized elastic bandages and heavy packing tape, and taped over his mouth. With guns drawn, they ordered him to his feet. Using walkie-talkies, they summoned two accomplices, who arrived with a large steamer trunk on a mover’s dolly. With a gun to his head, Dozier climbed inside. He was rolled down the hallway and into the service elevator. Outside on the street, additional accomplices waited in a blue Fiat van. The general’s trunk was loaded into the back. The door slammed shut and the van sped away.