For some time now I have trudged through the wilderness of ESP, like Diogenes with his lantern, searching for
bedrock amidst all of the Uri Geller stage magic and Jeanne Dixon tabloid fluff. The nonsense that still appears in
“respectable” print never ceases to amaze [and amuse] me - for example Targ & Harary’s Mind Race (1984). Targ is
a Stanford Research Institute physicist who says that he has worked for a decade on a “multi-million-dollar program
of psychic research financed by the Defense Department and intelligence agencies” - retitled in 1995 “Project Star
Gate”.
Targ’s pet project consisted of “remote viewing” experiments, on which I was eventually briefed at the State
Department. It was an eyeball-roller, not only because the statistical data SRI offered proved nothing, but also
because the transmission of visual information to the brain simply doesn’t occur outside the visible
spectrum. Light-waves from the central fountain in Washington Square Park (alleged to have been “seen” by one
of Targ’s subjects) are atmospherically diffused long before reaching Palo Alto, California.
There’s much we don’t know about the brain’s internal design, but how information travels into and around it is
no mystery at all. Electricity - the same stuff that makes flashlights work. Please note that the electrical impulses
rocketing around in your head are extremely weak: To light a flashlight bulb you would have to generate about 30
million times your present level of brain current.
Fascinating experiments in ESB (Electrical Stimulation of the Brain) have been done by Dr. José Delgado of
Yale University. Delgado’s probes, using tiny amounts of current, were capable of changing moods, stimulating
memories, and even causing motor actions despite the conscious will of the subject to resist. If the human brain
were not well-insulated against external electricity [which it is], you would have an explosion of utterly arbitrary
thoughts every time you drove under a high-tension wire or scuffed your shoes on the carpet.
Reality check time:
(1) Coherent visible light waves (a visual “picture” of something) don’t travel through the
atmosphere without progressive distortion and disintegration. “Remote viewing” at the
extreme distances claimed flatly violates the laws of physics.
(2) Unamplified electrical brainwaves can’t be picked up past EEG electrodes pasted onto
your body. Just as obviously they don’t jump between heads, much less across rooms or entire
countries. And even the EEG detection of a brainwave is far too crude to pick out a specific thought or
mental image.
If the Pentagon and the intelligence community did in fact blow $20 million on “psychic” snake-oil, P.T.
Barnum and Harry Houdini must be rolling merrily around in their graves.
So what if anything is possible in this field? How and why?
The electrical energy in your brain occurs in waves measured according to cycles per second (CPS). 1-3 CPS =
delta waves, characteristic of deep sleep. 4-7 CPS = theta waves, characteristic of high emotion, violence, and
frustration. 8-12 CPS = alpha waves, characteristic of meditation, relaxation, and “searching for patterns”. 13-22
CPS = beta waves, characteristic of frontal brain activity, deliberate effort, and logical thought.
We’ll come back to brain waves in a moment, but first a word about another principle: resonance. Resonance
is a very interesting concept and deserves a precise definition:
(1) a vibration of large amplitude in a mechanical or electrical system caused by a relatively small periodic
stimulus of the same or nearly the same period as the natural vibration period of the system.
(2) the intensification and enriching of a musical tone by supplementary vibration that is either
sympathetically or mechanically induced.
In the course of my research I examined the work of Dr. Nikola Tesla, one of recent history’s more charming
“mad scientists” who rattled the cage of “recognized” science with, among other things, experiments in resonance.
Biographer Margaret Cheney relates in Tesla: Man Out of Time:
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time nothing happened, but at last the great steel link began to tremble, increased its trembling until it
dilated and contracted like a beating heart, and finally broke.” Sledgehammers could not have done it, he
told a reporter, crowbars could not have done it, but a fusillade of taps, no one of which would have harmed
a baby, did it.
Pleased with this beginning, he put the little oscillator in his coat pocket. Finding a half-built steel
building in the Wall Street district, 10 stories high with nothing up but the steelwork, he clamped the
oscillator to one of the beams. “In a few minutes I could feel the beam trembling. Gradually the trembling
increased in intensity and extended throughout the whole great mass of steel. Finally the structure began to
creak and weave, and the steelworkers came to the ground panic-stricken, believing that there had been an
earthquake. Before anything serious happened, I took off the oscillator, put it in my pocket, and went away.
But if I had kept on 10 minutes more, I could have laid that building flat in the street. And with the same
oscillator I could drop Brooklyn Bridge in less than an hour.”
Now a little-known but interesting fact is that brain-waves are subject to the principle of resonance.
Energy-waves reaching your brain through any medium - eyes, ears, or flesh - will tend to induce your brain-waves
to cycle at the same wave-length. A common example of visual resonance is the seizures that some people
experience when exposed to a light flickering at 10 CPS.
The audio spectrum - being the range of sound vibrations which human hearing can consciously detect - is from
15 CPS (bass) to 20,000 CPS (treble). The infrasonic range - 10-15 CPS - is too low to be consciously detected but is
nonetheless capable of inducing resonance in the brain. Below infrasound [and sometimes encompassing it] are
Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) waves, which are powerful and durable enough to travel through the Earth for
communication with submerged submarines.
The relaxation which you paradoxically feel when listening to the deep, heavy throbbing of drums or bass
guitars at rock concerts is the same as that felt by American Indians listening to the large dancing-drums
accompanying their ceremonial campfires. Resonance is produced which inclines your brain-waves towards
alpha, and if the rate of the beat seems particularly pleasing to you, I recommend that you take your pulse. My guess
is that it will be close (somewhere around 70 CPM), which your system will find subconsciously soothing. [If you
wish to calm a crying infant, rock its cradle at about that speed, or hold it to your breast so that it can hear the
beating of your heart. Try it!]
Theta happens to be a very curious range. Soviet research into PK phenomena alleged that PK activity is
generally associated with a sudden surge of theta activity at the 4 CPS level. Theta activity is also more common in
the brains of young children than in those of adults, which may have something to do with the rumor (which I
cannot call more than that) that “poltergeist” activity is usually catalyzed by the presence of a child in the house.
Particularly during the post-World War II era, American and Soviet inte
lligence agencies weren’t very clubby
about exchanging any information, and especially not research in delicate/sensitive areas like mind-control
techniques. On the other hand there was a lively dialogue on psi between West and East in civilian scientific
circles, much to the anxiety and annoyance of Green Door types.
Here in San Francisco Michael Murphy, founder of the famous Esalen Institute in Big Sur, and his associate
Steve Donovan created the Transformation Project, a mammoth database of files - rooms and rooms of meticulous
file cabinets in those pre-desktop-computer days - to correlate the world’s research on ESP. Murphy had dialogued
extensively and exhaustively with Soviet ESP scientists, traveling widely in the USSR throughout the 1970s, and
wrote up the results up in thinly disguised “fiction” such as An End to Ordinary History (1982).
Via the Transformation Project file library, I was able to review vast amounts of records and published results
of various government and university experiments in the field of ESP from both the Western & Eastern Blocs as well
as non-aligned countries. The range and scope of the TP files went far beyond anything in the intelligence agency
and Defense Department libraries on this topic.
One of the most rigorous and conclusive analyses was conducted in 1977 by E. Balanovski and J.G. Taylor of the
Department of Mathematics, King’s College, London. The TP files contained detailed reports of their findings,
including an extensive article in Nature magazine #276, November 2, 1978.
After having reviewed previous experiments attempting to test ESP for EM emission, B&T declared their
dissatisfaction because of imprecise test conditions, exclusion of parts of the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS), and
inadequate write-ups of the results. They determined to cover the entire EMS, and to do so under the most rigorous
test conditions possible.
The battery of sensors they assembled included skin electrodes, electrometers, magnetometers, loop antennae,
crystal detectors, horn antennae, thermocouples, electric thermometers, infrared detectors, and ultraviolet
detectors. Many of these sensors overlapped one another’s frequency range, and altogether they covered the entire
EMS from 0 to 3x105 GHz! As can be imagined, before the first experiment could be conducted, extensive test-
running of all these sensors had occurred in order to record and filter out the irrelevant EM “noise” in the test areas,
including passing cars and TV/radio station broadcasts. Readings were recorded on strip chart recorders, video tape
recorders, and direct photographs of oscilloscope and frequency analyzer screens. The efficiency of this battery of
devices was quickly evident:
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Needle-Rotation: (2 subjects, 2 controls, 92 trials) A needle was suspended by an extra-fine nylon
thread inside a clear perspex cylinder which was clamped securely to a nylon bench. Movement was
achieved by the subjects moving their hands and wrists back and forth around the cylinder at about 5 cm
from it. In each of the 12 sessions the subjects produced a 60° average rotation of the needle, sometimes up
to 200°. We established that a rotation of 50° was produced by a potential of 2 mV with respect to earth at
frequencies 0-1 MHz. For up to 60° rotation, skin electrode measurements on 2 earthed subjects indicated a
skin potential of only 0.2 mV. We concluded that the rotation could not be caused by E or H fields from 0-1
MHz produced by the subject’s body. When an anti-static ointment was rubbed over the surface of the
cylinder, the whole phenomenon vanished, indicating that the effect was due to charge induced on the
needle from the outer surface of the cylinder. The VTR showed the subjects inadvertently touching the
surface of the cylinder in their attempts to move the needle. Further tests showed that the amount of
rotation produced was directly correlated to the amount of charge on the outer surface of the cylinder.
“ESP” rotation of a straw atop a glass of water inside a glass dome was traced to convection current inside the
dome produced by the heat of a nearby electric heater. No EM activity was detected. “ESP” rotation of a compass
needle was also EM-free. The amount of rotation was then found to decrease with increasing distance between the
compass and the subject’s body according to the inverse square law. It also decreased when steel sheets were
inserted between the subject and the compass. Conclusion: electrostatic charge once again.
Uri Geller Dept.: When hooked up to the array of sensors, metal-benders proved to be 100% unable to bend
metal, either by contact or at a distance. When the attached sensors were removed, there were some apparent
successes - but the remote sensors still detected no EM signal:
Attempts were made to cause bending of a strip of metal or plastic by feeding EM energy into the strip.
A Paradynamics 10 GHz X-band microwave source was used (50 kW peak power, 0.6 or 2.1 microns pulse,
variable p.r.f. with external modulation). Strips of various metals, plastic, and various crystals were
irradiated, and vibration of the specimens was observed at the modulation frequency in agreement with
surface acoustic wave generation. Strips of aluminum, copper, and brass cut to lengths appropriate to the
internal modulation showed resonance effects (at 1-3 KHz) when inserted into the waveguide of the X-band
source. Although energy was thus absorbed in the strips, no bending ever occurred.
The results show that no unusual EM emission from the subject’s body was observed over the entire
spectrum. If there had been low frequency signals, they could not account for the phenomenon. First, their
focusing power is very poor. Second, the energy transfer is inefficient. Third, the signal levels observed are
too low by a factor of about 109 to explain the effect. The best candidate would be the microwave range 1-5
GHz; at these frequencies the focusing power is good and the energy transfer can be efficient for the
generation of surface acoustic waves, as the skin depth in metals at these frequencies is negligible. But no
microwave emission higher than the black-body radiation at the human body temperature was ever
detected. Microwave radiation emitted by the body corresponds to a power level of 10-14 W. Therefore EM
radiation cannot explain the apparent metal-bending occurring in the absence of the contact and television
sensors.
The full sensor array further detected no unusual EM radiation during attempts at “psychic healing”, and
statements by “healers” and “patients” alike of heat sensations were not verified by any of the temperature sensors.
No unusual EM activity was detected during dowsing experiments either. Dowsers who claimed sensitivity to
magnetic fields down to 10-5 G were tested and found insensitive to the presence of 100G!
Contrary to 1995 media stories, word of U.S. government dalliance with ESP actually leaked out in the early
1980s. In Mind Wars (1984) Ronald McRae, a Jack Anderson associate clearly having a great time with the “Project
Star Gate” antics, observed:
In the ’70s the Navy signed a $50,703 contract with SRI to determine whether psychics could detect remote EM
sources. Yet the Navy flatly denies that it has “ever used psychics to track submarines”. It describes one psychic
antisubmarine project as an “investigation of the ability of certain individuals to perceive remote, faint, EM stimuli
at a noncognitive level of awareness”. SRI d
elivered the final report in 1978, claiming success with several psychics.
McRae continued that, “despite its denials, the Navy has thus far employed at least 34 psychics to track Soviet
ships and submarines”, and a number of psychics - like “Madame Zodiac” of Washington, D.C. - dutifully trooped
forward with stories of nervous, chain-smoking Navy officers hunched over their crystal ball tables while awaiting
word from Beyond of the location of the nearest Soviet sub. McRae quoted pop-occult sociologist Marcello Truzzi, to
wit: “Psychic powers might have extremely important military and political consequences should the enemy be able
to use them to break through national security defenses.” Woo, woo.
The Army first flirted with this particular snipe-hunt in 1980, when an article on “psychotronic warfare”
appeared in Military Review, the journal of the prestigious Command & General Staff College. This was another
Gomer Pyle “gaw-ul-lee!” article with absolutely no hard evidence to back it up. Not to be outdone by the Navy and
Madame Zodiac, however, the Army in 1984 launched a 5-month experiment called Project Jedi. Named after the
Star Wars movie knights who were able to perform exotic mental/magical feats, Project Jedi sought to use
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neurolinguistic programming (NLP) as a new way of teaching recruits to fire weapons. This was done through
psychological analysis of the thought-patterns of expert shooters as they fired. 23 soldiers were then trained to fire,
some according to the NLP “guided imagery” and others per conventional instruction. Training time was reduced
almost by half for the NLP group.
In 1985 forty soldiers undergoing Russian language training were divided into two groups, one of which was
trained according to a technique called “Suggestopedia”. This involved Tai Chi-like calisthenics, followed by mental
relaxation & breathing exercises, followed by “guided imagery” a la Project Jedi. The bottom line was nyet:
“Suggestopedia” didn't work.
There were, however, still more psychic fish to fry. In 1985 The Army commissioned a two-year, $425,000
report from the National Research Council, an agency of the National Academy of Sciences. Among the topics