Emotional Abuse of Children #AndrewVachss (Parade Magazine 28/8/1994)
You Carry the Cure In Your Own Heart
Emotional abuse of children can lead, in adulthood, to addiction, rage, a severely damaged sense of self and an inability to truly bond with others. But—if it happened to you—there is a way out.
by Andrew Vachss
Originally published in Parade Magazine, August 28, 1994
The attorney and author Andrew Vachss has devoted his life to protecting children. We asked Vachss, an expert on the subject of child abuse, to examine perhaps one of its most complex and widespread forms—emotional abuse: What it is, what it does to children, what can be done about it. Vachss’ latest novel, “Down in the Zero,” just published by Knopf, depicts emotional abuse at its most monstrous.
Parade article cover photo
I’m a lawyer with an unusual specialty. My clients are all children—damaged, hurting children who have been sexually assaulted, physically abused, starved, ignored, abandoned and every other lousy thing one human can do to another. People who know what I do always ask: “What is the worst case you ever handled?” When you’re in a business where a baby who dies early may be the luckiest child in the family, there’s no easy answer. But I have thought about it—I think about it every day. My answer is that, of all the many forms of child abuse, emotional abuse may be the cruelest and longest-lasting of all.
Emotional abuse is the systematic diminishment of another. It may be intentional or subconscious (or both), but it is always a course of conduct, not a single event. It is designed to reduce a child’s self-concept to the point where the victim considers himself unworthy—unworthy of respect, unworthy of friendship, unworthy of the natural birthright of all children: love and protection.
Emotional abuse can be as deliberate as a gunshot: “You’re fat. You’re stupid. You’re ugly.”
Emotional abuse can be as random as the fallout from a nuclear explosion. In matrimonial battles, for example, the children all too often become the battlefield. I remember a young boy, barely into his teens, absently rubbing the fresh scars on his wrists. “It was the only way to make them all happy,” he said. His mother and father were locked in a bitter divorce battle, and each was demanding total loyalty and commitment from the child.
Emotional abuse can be active. Vicious belittling: “You’ll never be the success your brother was.” Deliberate humiliation: “You’re so stupid. I’m ashamed you’re my son.”
It also can be passive, the emotional equivalent of child neglect—a sin of omission, true, but one no less destructive.
And it may be a combination of the two, which increases the negative effects geometrically.
Emotional abuse can be verbal or behavioral, active or passive, frequent or occasional. Regardless, it is often as painful as physical assault. And, with rare exceptions, the pain lasts much longer. A parent’s love is so important to a child that withholding it can cause a “failure to thrive” condition similar to that of children who have been denied adequate nutrition.
Even the natural solace of siblings is denied to those victims of emotional abuse who have been designated as the family’s “target child.” The other children are quick to imitate their parents. Instead of learning the qualities every child will need as an adult—empathy, nurturing and protectiveness—they learn the viciousness of a pecking order. And so the cycle continues.
But whether as a deliberate target or an innocent bystander, the emotionally abused child inevitably struggles to “explain” the conduct of his abusers—and ends up struggling for survival in a quicksand of self-blame.
Emotional abuse is both the most pervasive and the least understood form of child maltreatment. Its victims are often dismissed simply because their wounds are not visible. In an era in which fresh disclosures of unspeakable child abuse are everyday fare, the pain and torment of those who experience “only” emotional abuse is often trivialized. We understand and accept that victims of physical or sexual abuse need both time and specialized treatment to heal. But when it comes to emotional abuse, we are more likely to believe the victims will “just get over it” when they become adults.
That assumption is dangerously wrong. Emotional abuse scars the heart and damages the soul. Like cancer, it does its most deadly work internally. And, like cancer, it can metastasize if untreated.
When it comes to damage, there is no real difference between physical, sexual and emotional abuse. All that distinguishes one from the other is the abuser’s choice of weapons. I remember a woman, a grandmother whose abusers had long since died, telling me that time had not conquered her pain. “It wasn’t just the incest,” she said quietly. “It was that he didn’t love me. If he loved me, he couldn’t have done that to me.”
But emotional abuse is unique because it is designed to make the victim feel guilty. Emotional abuse is repetitive and eventually cumulative behavior—very easy to imitate—and some victims later perpetuate the cycle with their own children. Although most victims courageously reject that response, their lives often are marked by a deep, pervasive sadness, a severely damaged self-concept and an inability to truly engage and bond with others.
We must renounce the lie that emotional abuse is good for children because it prepares them for a hard life in a tough world. I’ve met some individuals who were prepared for a hard life that way—I met them while they were doing life.
Emotionally abused children grow up with significantly altered perceptions so that they “see” behaviors—their own and others’—through a filter of distortion. Many emotionally abused children engage in a lifelong drive for the approval (which they translate as “love”) of others. So eager are they for love—and so convinced that they don’t deserve it—that they are prime candidates for abuse within intimate relationships.
The emotionally abused child can be heard inside every battered woman who insists: “It was my fault, really. I just seem to provoke him somehow.”
And the almost-inevitable failure of adult relationships reinforces that sense of unworthiness, compounding the felony, reverberating throughout the victim’s life.
Emotional abuse conditions the child to expect abuse in later life. Emotional abuse is a time bomb, but its effects are rarely visible, because the emotionally abused tend to implode, turning the anger against themselves. And when someone is outwardly successful in most areas of life, who looks within to see the hidden wounds?
Members of a therapy group may range widely in age, social class, ethnicity and occupation, but all display some form of self-destructive conduct: obesity, drug addiction, anorexia, bulimia, domestic violence, child abuse, attempted suicide, self-mutilation, depression and fits of rage. What brought them into treatment was their symptoms. But until they address the one thing that they have in common—a childhood of emotional abuse—true recovery is impossible.
One of the goals of any child-protective effort is to “break the cycle” of abuse. We should not delude ourselves that we are winning this battle simply because so few victims of emotional abuse become abusers themselves. Some emotionally abused children are programmed to fail so effectively that a part of their own personality “self-parents” by belittling and humiliating themselves.
The pain does not stop with adulthood. Indeed, for some, it worsens. I remember a young woman, an accomplished professional, charming and friendly, well-liked by all who knew her. She told me she would never have children. “I’d always be afraid I would act like them,” she said.
Unlike other forms of child abuse, emotional abuse is rarely denied by those who practice it. In fact, many actively defend their psychological brutality, asserting that a childhood of emotional abuse helped their children to “toughen up.” It is not enough for us to renounce the perverted notion that beating children produces good citizens—we must also renounce the lie that emotional abuse is good for children because it prepares them for a hard life in a tough world. I’ve met some individuals who were prepared for a hard life that way—I met them while they were doing life.
The primary weapons of emotional abusers is the deliberate infliction of guilt. They use guilt the same way a loan shark uses money: They don’t want the “debt” paid off, because they live quite happily on the “interest.”
When your self-concept has been shredded, when you have been deeply injured and made to feel the injury was all your fault, when you look for approval to those who can not or will not provide it—you play the role assigned to you by your abusers. It’s time to stop playing that role.
Because emotional abuse comes in so many forms (and so many disguises), recognition is the key to effective response. For example, when allegations of child sexual abuse surface, it is a particularly hideous form of emotional abuse to pressure the victim to recant, saying he or she is “hurting the family” by telling the truth. And precisely the same holds true when a child is pressured to sustain a lie by a “loving” parent.
Emotional abuse requires no physical conduct whatsoever. In one extraordinary case, a jury in Florida recognized the lethal potential of emotional abuse by finding a mother guilty of child abuse in connection with the suicide of her 17-year-old daughter, whom she had forced to work as a nude dancer (and had lived off her earnings).
Another rarely understood form of emotional abuse makes victims responsible for their own abuse by demanding that they “understand” the perpetrator. Telling a 12-year-old girl that she was an “enabler” of her own incest is emotional abuse at its most repulsive.
A particularly pernicious myth is that “healing requires forgiveness” of the abuser. For the victim of emotional abuse, the most viable form of help is self-help—and a victim handicapped by the need to “forgive” the abuser is a handicapped helper indeed. The most damaging mistake an emotional-abuse victim can make is to invest in the “rehabilitation” of the abuser. Too often this becomes still another wish that didn’t come true—and emotionally abused children will conclude that they deserve no better result.
The costs of emotional abuse cannot be measured by visible scars, but each victim loses some percentage of capacity. And that capacity remains lost so long as the victim is stuck in the cycle of “understanding” and “forgiveness.” The abuser has no “right” to forgiveness—such blessings can only be earned. And although the damage was done with words, true forgiveness can only be earned with deeds.
For those with an idealized notion of “family,” the task of refusing to accept the blame for their own victimization is even more difficult. For such searchers, the key to freedom is always truth—the real truth, not the distorted, self-serving version served by the abuser.
Emotional abuse threatens to become a national illness. The popularity of nasty, mean-spirited, personal-attack cruelty that passes for “entertainment” is but one example. If society is in the midst of moral and spiritual erosion, a “family” bedrocked on the emotional abuse of its children will not hold the line. And the tide shows no immediate signs of turning.
Effective treatment of emotional abusers depends on the motivation for the original conduct, insight into the roots of such conduct and the genuine desire to alter that conduct. For some abusers, seeing what they are doing to their child—or, better yet, feeling what they forced their child to feel—is enough to make them halt. Other abusers need help with strategies to deal with their own stress so that it doesn’t overload onto their children.
But for some emotional abusers, rehabilitation is not possible. For such people, manipulation is a way of life. They coldly and deliberately set up a “family” system in which the child can never manage to “earn” the parent’s love. In such situations, any emphasis on “healing the whole family” is doomed to failure.
If you are a victim of emotional abuse, there can be no self-help until you learn to self-reference. That means developing your own standards, deciding for yourself what “goodness” really is. Adopting the abuser’s calculated labels—”You’re crazy. You’re ungrateful. It didn’t happen the way you say”—only continues the cycle.
Adult survivors of emotional child abuse have only two life-choices: learn to self-reference or remain a victim. When your self-concept has been shredded, when you have been deeply injured and made to feel the injury was all your fault, when you look for approval to those who can not or will not provide it—you play the role assigned to you by your abusers.
It’s time to stop playing that role, time to write your own script. Victims of emotional abuse carry the cure in their own hearts and souls. Salvation means learning self-respect, earning the respect of others and making that respect the absolutely irreducible minimum requirement for all intimate relationships. For the emotionally abused child, healing does come down to “forgiveness”—forgiveness of yourself.
How you forgive yourself is as individual as you are. But knowing you deserve to be loved and respected and empowering yourself with a commitment to try is more than half the battle. Much more.
And it is never too soon—or too late—to start.
Space Weapon Stirs Debate Over Possible Offensive Use [On Earth] (NYT 22/2/1987)
A debate has developed over whether the space weapon envisioned by the Reagan Administration for the first phase of its plan for a defense against missiles could strike offensively at targets in orbit and on earth.
Scientists and space experts who are critical of the ”Star Wars” plan say the weapon’s potential for offensive use could upset the balance of power and promote war rather than deter it.
Advocates of the antimissile system strongly disagree, saying any offensive roles for the weapon are either limited or nonexistent.
A Homing Rocket
The weapon at issue is a homing rocket meant to destroy targets by smashing into them. Administration officials see it as the first line of defense in a rudimentary antimissile system being considered for possible early deployment in the 1990’s. Constellations of such arms would orbit over the Soviet Union to knock out rising Soviet missiles.
But scientists, many of them critics of the antimissile program, say such weapons could also attack Soviet satellites and battle stations in space.
Moreover, they add, such weapons could be modified so their warheads could enter the earth’s atmosphere to knock out Soviet planes, radars and possibly even missiles in underground silos.
For many attacks, critics say, the weapon is far superior to the lasers, particle beams and other futuristic arms being studied for eventual deployment in what President Reagan calls his Strategic Defense Initiative.
”For certain ground targets, it’s the best offensive weapon” in a panoply of technologies, said Dr. Peter D. Zimmerman, a physicist and senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
Dr. Harvey L. Lynch, a physicist at the Center for International Security and Arms Control of Stanford University, said, ”If the Soviets decided to deploy such a thing, people like Caspar Weinberger would be having fits.” Defense Secretary Weinberger is one of the strongest supporters of ”Star Wars.”
The Soviet Union has consistently said that the proposed antimissile weapons had an offensive purpose and that the United States was seeking strategic superiority and the ability to conduct a nuclear surprise attack.
Advocates of the system disagree, saying that most offensive applications of the proposed space weapons are illusory and that the critics are raising farfetched notions that ignore the laws of physics.
”They’re trying to throw a political scare into people,” Lieut. Gen. Daniel O. Graham, retired, of the Army, said of the charges that the system would have offensive potential. General Graham directs High Frontier, a Washington lobbying group that favors the plan.
Lieut. Gen. James A. Abrahamson of the Air Force, director of the Pentagon’s Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, said that attacks on ground targets were physically impossible with the envisioned space weapon and that his program would never make the technical changes needed to give it an offensive potential. ‘It’s a Red Herring’
”Why we would want to do that is absolutely beyond me,” he said, stressing that the whole point of the program was defense. ”It’s a red herring.”
Despite such assurances, a growing number of groups and individuals are studying whether space arms have possible offensive roles. Secret reports have been completed by the National Academy of Sciences and by the Rand Corporation, a California research organization that studies military issues for the Pentagon. Last week the American Association for the Advancement of Science held a public symposium on the topic at its annual meeting.
So, too, Pentagon officials are said to be quietly assessing the question, if only to consider potential enemy threats. ”They would be remiss if they didn’t look at this stuff,” said Robert English, a senior analyst with the Committee for National Security in Washington, who was a Pentagon policy analyst from 1982 to 1985.
Scientists who study the offense issue say space lasers, whose concentrated beams of light were once viewed as powerful enough to set cities on fire, have lost some of their luster. Dr. Lynch, the Stanford physicist, has calculated that clouds, pollutants and atmospheric distortions could sap most of a laser beam’s power. Although lasers are potentially capable of striking airplanes in flight, they are essentially useless against cities and military targets on earth, Dr. Lynch said.
Doubling of Weapon Funds
In contrast, the space weapon now at the forefront of the Administration’s antimissile quest has considerable potential for earth strikes, according to some scientists.
The power of the weapon’s warhead comes from the energy of its motion when it hits a target – its kinetic energy – rather than chemical or nuclear explosives. According to Defense Week, an industry publication, funds for research on the weapon are to more than double next year, going to $303 million from $126 million.
For defense, the rocket would be fired from an orbiting weapon platform and its small warhead, equipped with heat-seeking sensors, would track rising missiles, destroying them on impact. Several hundred and perhaps even thousands of platforms would have to continuously orbit the earth, a small fraction of them over Soviet missile fields at any given time.
Both advocates and opponents of the weapon say that at least some offensive potentials are inescapable. For instance, the kinetic warhead, speeding through the void of space, could be directed to knock out enemy satellites. ”You’re going to have that capability whether you want it or not,” said General Graham of High Frontier.
Dr. Ashton B. Carter, a Harvard physicist and consultant to the Defense Department, said the weapon also posed a threat to space-based battle stations. ”People interested in defense should be worried about such developments,” he said. ”Every technical advance is not necessarily good news.”
If modified, the kinetic warhead could also enter the earth’s atmosphere to attack planes, military facilities and possibly even ”hardened” missile silos, according to critics of the program. They add that kinetic weapons designed for offense might look no different from defensive ones.
”The kinds of kinetic kill vehicles that have been proposed for use in a first generation S.D.I. system can be redesigned and rejiggered for offensive” strikes against ground targets, Dr. Zimmerman of the Carnegie Endowment told the the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The main modifications, he said, would be to increase the weight of the warhead and to improve the system to guide it. He added that it would reach earth targets in two or three minutes.
After the space-based warhead was launched, he said, the platform would track it and send guidance data with laser beams so the warhead was well-aimed prior to re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere. On average these warheads would miss their targets by about 80 yards, he noted, ”which is obviously too big for most uses.”
To increase accuracy, Dr. Zimmerman said, the warhead could be equipped with its own internal guidance system for the final phase of the flight, which would ”bring the miss distance down” to a few yards. He noted that the huge kinetic energy of the inert warhead would cause it to flash ”into a fireball” when it slammed into an earth target. He said such a weapon would have ”real capabilites against soft and soft-ish ground targets” such as radar installations, and it could also knock out planes.
Other experts say kinetic weapons could be used to launch space-based strikes against ”hardened” military targets, including the concrete-and-steel silos that house nuclear missiles.
Gary Hudson, president of Pacific American Launch Systems in Redwood City, Calif., a private company that develops rocket launchers for commercial payloads, said he once conducted a private study of space-based kinetic arms made of long rods of dense material such as uranium and tungsten.
”There’s no question about silo busting,” he said. ”You’re talking about penetrations of 150 to 200 feet in solid granite.” He added that in the 1970’s the Air Force, in a secret program code-named Trim, also considered the use of dense rods to destroy missile silos.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, a Pentagon consultant who studies offensive roles of space arms for the Pentagon said plans for using kinetic weapons were feasible, but he questioned whether they made economic sense.
”Whether they can be used profitably for ground attack, against silos and other targets, in a cost-effective way is very problematic,” he said. ”Putting heavy things is space is extraordinarily expensive.”
Scientists critical of the antimissile plan say the easiest way to get around the weight problem is simply to equip space-based rockets with nuclear warheads, which long ago were adapted to the rigors of atmospheric re-entry. Such a move is banned by treaty, Dr. Caroline Herzenberg, a physicist at the Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill., told the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. But she added that it could ”unfortunately be accomplished surreptitiously.”
General Abrahamson of the Pentagon’s antimissile office said that all potential plans for attacking targets on earth required extensive modifications to kinetic space weapons and that the arms, as now conceived, would burn up if fired into the atmosphere. Even with weapon changes, he said, successful attacks on missile silos would be unlikely, although he conceded that strikes on airplanes were possible.
He emphasized, however, that the whole trend of the kinetic weapon program was to make warheads smaller and smaller, thus making the possibility of ground strikes ever more remote.
Moreover, he said, no weapon modifications could ever be made surreptitiously because the open nature of American society meant that all such plans would eventually fall into the hands of the Soviet military.
In response, critics say the Russians could never be sure of the benign intent. There would always be doubts. Moreover, critics stress, all military officials must assume the worst to avoid surprise. In this case, the Soviet Union would have to assume that space-based kinetic weapons could be used offensively. And that perception, even if wrong, could lead to a vicious cycle of fears in a crisis that would increase the risk of war.
Moreover, critics of the antimissile plan say space weapons with no ability to strike earth targets could nonetheless play a pivotal role in fighting an offensive nuclear war.
”The most obvious one is to use them in conjunction with a first strike, use them to mop up the weakened response of you adversary,” Dr. Lynch of Stanford told the American Association for the of Science last week.
Photo of Lieut. Gen. James A Abrahamson (UPI) (page 20; photo of Dr. Peter D. Zimmerman (NYT/Paul Hosefros) (page 20); photo of Dr. Harvey Lynch (NYT/terence McCarthy) (page 20)
UK Licenses Human Embryo Creation (JAMA 7/2003)
The United Kingdom (UK) has granted a license to Roslin Institute, Edinburgh, Scotland, to create human embryos for stem cell research via parthenogenesis, a “virgin birth” technique that jolts oocytes into a fertilized state without sperm. The license also allows the institute—former home of Dolly the sheep, which died in February—and its lead cloning researcher, Ian Wilmut, PhD, to derive stem cells from embryos created for in vitro fertilization (IVF) .
These nonhuman primate eggs have developed into 8-day-old embryos via a process called parthenogenesis (Science . 2002;295:819) (Photo credit: AAAS)
It is the fourth license for embryonic stem cell research handed out by the government of the United Kingdom, but the first license allowing the creation of human embryos by any means.
Speaking at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md, Wilmut said that he supports research on all types of stem cells, whether from embryos or adult tissues.
But he added that cloned embryos offer the most promising means for identifying the origins of and treatments for genetic conditions such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig disease (JAMA. 2001;285:1691-1693). Embryos created using DNA from individuals with such diseases could provide researchers with an almost unlimited supply of stem cells, each carrying the key genetic defect. Such a pool would allow scientists to undertake more, and more sophisticated, experiments than any other available technology, said Wilmut, who spoke at a conference sponsored by the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation.
INCREASING THE EGG SUPPLY
INCREASING THE EGG SUPPLY
In an interview following his talk, Wilmut said that the aims of the newly licensed research are two-fold: to improve basic stem cell culturing technologies and to increase the supply of human eggs available for research.
INCREASING THE EGG SUPPLY
Roslin will immediately begin collecting embryos donated by patients from IVF clinics, which typically create several excess embryos per pregnancy attempt. The second route to boosting the egg supply, parthenogenesis, is much more technically challenging, said Harry Griffin, PhD, acting director at Roslin.
INCREASING THE EGG SUPPLY
The process involves gathering immature eggs from donors undergoing surgery for nonfertility-related reasons and then coaxing them to maturity in the laboratory. If successful, Roslin scientists will try to glean stem cells from the parthenotes (embryos grown from unfertilized eggs).
INCREASING THE EGG SUPPLY
Roslin’s agenda is the latest in a long line of advances involving parthenogenesis. Decades ago, scientists discovered that some plants and lower animals, including insects and corals, reproduce via the technique. Because the oocytes do not complete meiosis, they contain a full complement of the parent’s chromosomes—a clone.
INCREASING THE EGG SUPPLY
SUCCESS IN PRIMATES
Then in 1936, Gregory Pincus, MD, one of the scientists involved in developing the first birth control pill, induced parthenogenesis in rabbit eggs via temperature change and chemical agents. In 2001, Michael West, PhD, and colleagues at Advanced Cell Technology (ACT), Worcester, Mass, announced the creation of human parthenotes, although many scientists expressed skepticism about the embryos’ usefulness, as they died shortly after creation. A year later, though, a team led by ACT scientists and Kent Vrana, PhD, professor of physiology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, obtained embryonic stem cells from monkey parthenotes, an advance that sparked a wave of enthusiasm (Science. 2002;295:819).
SUCCESS IN PRIMATES
Roslin is the latest institute to ride that wave, and Wilmut expressed confidence that parthenogenic human embryos will eventually provide a rich source of stem cells for research. But constructing a steady supply of stem cells is just the first step in the research pipeline. Once collected, the cells need to be fed and kept stable.
SUCCESS IN PRIMATES
Because current stem cell lines rely on mouse “feeder” cells, in theory, Wilmut said, unknown viruses in animal feeder cells could find their way into the human cells, a concern that the US Food and Drug Administration has also raised. To avoid that possibility, scientists at Roslin are developing techniques that would rely instead on human feeder cells or, even more ambitiously, on completely cell-free media. That is, the embryonic stem cells would grow in a rich soup of organic compounds.
SUCCESS IN PRIMATES
According to an abstract posted on the Web site of the UK’s Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the agency that grants stem cell research licenses, Roslin now has permission to pursue this goal, too (http://www.hfea.gov.uk/aboutHFEA/researchLicenses.htm).
TO CLONE, OR NOT TO CLONE
TO CLONE, OR NOT TO CLONE
Like Roslin, the other three UK licensees—Guy’s Hospital, London; the Institute of Stem Cell Research at the University of Edinburgh; and the London Fertility Centre—are culturing stem cells from donated IVF embryos.
TO CLONE, OR NOT TO CLONE
Under a sweeping 1990 law, the HFEA regulates all IVF and human embryo research in the United Kingdom; a 2001 update to the HFEA banned all reproductive cloning and mandated that any artificially created human embryos must be destroyed within 14 days. In March, the House of Lords ruled that despite challenges from antiabortion groups, the HFEA holds the authority to license research involving embryo creation via parthenogenesis and cell nuclear replacement, although cloning for reproductive purposes remains off limits.
TO CLONE, OR NOT TO CLONE
Wilmut did not say if Roslin would pursue a license to attempt the more controversial nuclear replacement technique, the method used to create Dolly. In nuclear replacement, genetic material from an adult cell is transplanted into an oocyte, which is stimulated and begins embryonic development—a procedure that succeeds only rarely. While parthenogenesis allows cloning of reproductive-aged females, nuclear replacement could, hypothetically, clone any person, alive or dead (if viable DNA can be recovered).
TO CLONE, OR NOT TO CLONE
While tightly controlled in the United Kingdom, cloning research in the United States is largely unregulated. Bills outlawing the creation of cloned embryos for reproduction—and also for research, depending on the bill—have stalled in the US Congress, leaving the cloning landscape wide open for private companies. However, restrictions apply to researchers receiving federal funds, who may work with a handful of approved but largely uncharacterized embryonic stem cell lines and are not allowed to create cloned human embryos (JAMA. 2003; 289:1092).
New Stem Cell Center
New Stem Cell Center
As parthenotes and embryos evolve as a source of embryonic stem cells, other researchers are concentrating on adult cells with transformative potential.
New Stem Cell Center
One type, marrow stromal cells, have taken center stage with a 5-year, $4.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to Tulane University in New Orleans. The funds will support a new center to prepare and distribute standardized, high-quality marrow stromal cells.
New Stem Cell Center
Because producing the cells is technically challenging, the Tulane center will speed basic and, eventually, clinical research, said Judith Vaitukaitis, MD, director of the National Center for Research Resources at NIH.
New Stem Cell Center
Recent research has shown that, when injected into animals, marrow stromal cells populate bone, cartilage, lung, skin, liver, and brain tissue.—B.V.
#CIA #MindControl at #StanfordResearchInstitute #AlexConstantine #Scientology #ElectronicMindControl
CIA MIND CONTROL AT STANFORD RESEARCH INSTITUTE
By Alex Constantine
December 1996
Concrete evidence that electronic mind control was an object of study at SRI was exposed by the Washington Post on August 7, 1977:
“When the Navy awarded a contract to the Institute, the scientific assistant to the Secretary of the Navy, Dr. Sam Koslov, received a routine briefing on various research projects, including SRI’s. As the briefer flashed his chart onto the screen and began to speak, Koslov stormily interrupted, ‘What the hell is that about?’ Among the glowing words on the projected chart, the section describing SRI’s work was labeled:
ELF and Mind Control.
ELF stands for extremely [low] frequency electromagnetic waves, from the very slow brain frequencies up to about 100 cycles per second…. But the Mind Control label really upset Koslov. He ordered the SRI investigations for the Navy stopped, and canceled another $35,000 in Navy funds slated for more remote viewing work.”
Contrary to Koslov’s order to kill the research, the Navy quietly continued to fork out $100,000 for a two-year project directed by a BIONICS specialist.
Mind control is not a humanitarian pastime: the project was military, and if SRI was indeed a source of covert EMR brain experimentation, test subjects from the community at large were subjected to torture plied with the same thorough disregard for human rights as the radiation tests conducted at the height of the Cold War.
The treatment subjects have received at the hands of their own government would be considered atrocities if practiced in wartime.
Mind control was also used in domestic covert operations designed to further the CIA’s heady geopolitical ambitions, and during the Vietnam War period SRI was a hive of covert political subterfuge. The Symbionese Liberation Army, like the People’s Temple, was a creation of the CIA. The SLA had at its core a clique of black ex-convicts from Vacaville Prison. Donald DeFreeze, otherwise known as Cinque, led the SLA. He was formerly an informant for the LAPDs Criminal Conspiracy Section and the director of Vacaville’s Black Cultural Association (BCA), a covert mind control unit with funding from the CIA channeled through SRI. The Menlo Park behavior modification specialists experimented with psychoactive drugs administered to members of the BCA. Black prisoners were programmed to murder selected black leaders once on the outside.
The CIA/SRI zombie killer hit list included Oakland school superintendent Dr. Marcus Foster, and Panthers Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, among others. DeFreeze stated that at Vacaville in 1971-72, he was the subject of a CIA mind control experiment. He described his incarceration on the prisons third floor, where he was corralled by CIA agents who drugged him and said he would become the leader of a radical movement and kidnap a wealthy person. After his escape from Vacaville (an exit door was left unlocked for him), that’s exactly what he did.
EM mind control machines were championed at Stanford University by Dr. Karl Pribram, director of the Neuropsychology Research Laboratory: “I certainly could educate a child by putting an electrode in the lateral hypothalmus and then selecting the situations at which I stimulate it. In this was I can grossly change his behavior.” Psychology Today feted Pribram as “The Magellan of Brain Science.” He obtained his B.S. and M.D. degrees at the University of Chicago, and at Stanford University studied how the brain processes and stores sensory imagery. He is credited with discovering that mental imaging bears a close resemblance to hologram projection (the basis for transmitting images to the craniums of test subjects under the misnomer “remote viewing?”).
The Institute is bonded incestuously to corporate sponsors. Former SRI Chairman E. Hornsby Wasson, for example, was a director of several major companies, including Standard Oil of California, and he went on to become chairman of the Chamber of Commerce and CEO of Pacific Telephone & Telegraph and Bell Telephone of Nevada.
The SRI/SAIC psi experiments were supervised at Langley by John McMahon, second in command under William Casey, succeeding Bobby Ray Inman, the SAIC director. McMahon has, according to Philip Agee, the CIA whistle-blowing exile, an affinity for technological exotics for CIA covert actions. He was recruited by the Agency after his graduation from Holy Cross College (the alma mater of CIA contractees Edward Bennett Williams, attorney, and Robert Maheu, hit man). He is a former director of the Technical Services Division, deputy director for Operations, and in 1982 McMahon was appointed deputy director of Central Intelligence. He left the Agency six years later to take the position of president of the Lockheed Missiles and Space Systems Group. In 1994, he moved on to Draper Laboratories. He is a director of the Defense Enterprise Fund and an adviser to congressional committees.
Many of the SRI empaths were mustered from L. Ron Hubbard’s Church of Scientology. Harold Puthoff, the Institute’s senior researcher, was a leading Scientologist. Two remote viewers from SRI have also held rank in the Church: Ingo Swann, a Class VII Operating Thetan, a founder of the Scientology Center in Los Angeles, and the late Pat Price. Puthoff and Targ’s lab assistant was a Scientologist married to a minister of the church. When Swann joined SRI, he stated openly, “fourteen Clears participated in the experiments, more than I would suspect.” At the time he denied CIA involvement, but now acknowledges, “it was rather common knowledge all along who the sponsor was, although in documents the identity of the Agency was concealed behind the sobriquet of an east-coast scientist.”
The Agency’s interest was quite extensive. A number of agents of the CIA came themselves ultimately to SRI to act as subjects in remote viewing experiments, as did some members of Congress.
“If you recall,” astronaut Edgar Mitchell, another participant in the experiments, informed radio disinformation broker Art Bell on April 30, 1996, “back in the early ’70s, I did work at SRI with Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ and Uri Geller, and I was invited to brief the CIA on our results. George Bush was head of the CIA at that time. Subsequently, a great deal of psychic work was done by CIA, and very successfully because the Soviets were doing it at that time as well — very successfully.”
Mitchell spins a cocoon of mystical yarns as outrageously far-fetched as any of his SRI cronies. He claims to have traced the brain’s center of ESP to native creativity, a “relationship that exists in nature, it’s responsible for our inner-experience…. It involves the zero-point field, quantum physics, mystical experience, parapsychological functioning….” The ubiquitous “aliens,” he insists, are at the heart of the federal UFO cover-up, visitors from a civilization “a few million, or even a few billion years older than we are.” His book The Way of the Explorer is chock-a-block with the astronaut’s rambling Shamanic cover stories, supposedly the culmination of 25 years of research on intelligent life in the universe and the paranormal.
The Agency was purportedly so taken with the SRI experiments that the bankroll for “human augmentation” research swelled. Millions of dollars were thrown at “Grill Flame” under (DIA) and Navy auspices. The projects at SRI were augmented by a parapsychology team at Fort Meade in Maryland under INSCOM and the NSA. Military intelligence personnel were recruited, including Major Ed Dames, the Psi-Tech founder, occultist and communer with “demons.” General Stubblebine ran the project and broadened it to include tarot and the channeling of spirits. By this time, Puthoff and Swann left the Church of Scientology to join a spin-off religious movement.
The DIA inherited “Grill Flame.” A reporter for the BBC (requesting anonymity) offers a glimpse of the Army’s remote viewing project at Fort Meade, and declares he was given The Official Line, i.e., “we were about to be used for disinformation. As soon as I started asking hard questions, the project was taken away from us and [given] to a far more docile broadcaster.” The British correspondent learned that medical oversight for the psi experiments was provided by Dr. Louis Jolyon West, then a professor of psychiatry at UCLA, one of the most notorious CIA mind-control specialists in the country. Apart from monitoring the health of the subjects, according to SRI spokesmen, Dr. West conducted his own experimental studies of the
phenomenology of dissociative states,” or multiple personalities, at the Institute. Colin Ross, a specialist in dissociative disorders, confirms that Dr. West’s work for the CIA centered on the biology or personality of dissociative states.
In “Pseudo-Identity and the Treatment of Personality Change in Victims of Captivity and Cults” (1994), Dr. Louis “Jolly” West examines the creation of “changelings,” or dissociative personalities that enable the subject of mind-control conditioning to adapt to trauma. “Prolonged environmental stress,” UCLA’s own ranking CIA mind-control specialist observed (in a drastic departure from the public stance of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, an organization he formerly directed as a advisory board member, on multiplicity), “or life situations profoundly different from the usual, can disrupt the normally integrative functions of personality. Individuals subjected to such forces may adapt through dissociation by generating an altered persona, or pseudo-identity.”
Patricia Hearst (examined by Dr. West for trial) hosted an alternate personality named “Pearl,” he offers, a manifestation more distinct and individuated than “Tania.” The newspaper heiress was subjected to a regimen of “persuasive coercion” (a personal form of harassment by an organized group, any form of intimidation short of violence) and trauma-based programmimg of a sort developed by CIA specialists (like Dr. West) — “violently abducted by members of the [CIA-mustered] Symbionese Liberation Army in February of 1974, brutalized, raped, tortured, and forced to participate in illegal acts beginning with the bank robbery for which she was later (in our view wrongly) convicted. The traumatic kidnapping and subsequent 2 months of torture produced in her a state of emotional regression and fearful compliance with the demands and expectations of her captors. This was quickly followed by the coerced transformation of Patty into Tania and subsequently (less well known to the public) into Pearl, after additional trauma over a period of many months (Hearst & Moscow, 1988; The Trial of Patty Hearst, 1976). Tania was merely a role coerced on pain of death; it was Pearl who later represented the pseudo-identity which was found on psychiatric examination by one of us (West) shortly after Hearst’s arrest by the FBI. Chronic symptoms of PTSD were also prominent in this case.”
Many victims of the CIA-anchored experimentation have been left with multiple personalities induced at a young age, and it is certain that the CIA can trigger induced multiple personalities electronically from a remote source to commit any act on cue, the ultimate Manchurian Candidate. Under Dr. West’s tutelage at UCLA, parapsychology experiments of another sort were conducted by Kirlian aura researcher Thelma Moss, a writer for television and a human guinea-pig herself in LSD experiments conducted in 1957. Three years later, as a UCLA psychology student, she designed protocols for her own LSD experiments under the supervision of Dr. Oscar Janiger.
The CIA, of course, could not be far away. Dr. Janiger’s supplier of the drug was the legendary Captain Al Hubbard, the Johnny Appleseed of LSD. “Nothing of substance has been written about Al Hubbard,” Janiger once said, “and probably nothing ever should.” Hubbard, a convicted rum-runner, had a knack for electronic communications. He was recruited by the OSS by agents of Allen Dulles and surely reported to the CIA thereafter. Hubbard, an arch-arch-conservative, joined SRI at the urging of Willis Harman, director of the Institute’s Educational Policy Research Center, ostensibly as a security guard. Harman, an LSD experimenter himself, admits, “Al never did anything resembling security work.” Hubbard was employed on the Alternative Futures Project, a corporate strategy program. Al had a grandiose idea, one co-worker recalls, that “if he could give the psychedelic experience to the major executives of the Fortune 500 companies, he could change the whole of society.” Hubbard was a major supplier to university’s sponsoring experimentation, and flooded the youth subculture he despised with LSD in the 1960s. The massive drug-dealing operation at least as large as the government’s, and had Harmon’s was full support. Al Hubbard’s contract at SRI was canceled in 1974.
Among the labs closed in 1966 with the criminalization of LSD was Dr. Janiger’s. His protege, Thelma Moss, continued to pursue experimentation with the hallucinogen as a psychotherapeutic tool, later as an ESP trigger and for experiments in “behavior modification.” Her increasingly bizarre interests led her to Kirlian photography, and she set up a lab at the Neuropsychiatric Institute under Dr. West.
At least one volunteer in Moss’ experiments alleges to have been led down a blind alley to lifelong torture. D.S. (requesting anonymity) appeared on Moss’ doorstep in 1978. After the experiments, she was overwhelmed by back-to-back psychic experiences. Not true ones, she realized, but precognitive dreams that had to be fed to me. (Biotelemetric subjects routinely complain that their dreams are commandeered.) For 15 years she walked through a barrage of EM novelty effects. The psychic episodes gradually gave way to torture, including severe head pains and endless hours of persuasive coercion, the art of psychological paralysis honed by the CIA in the prison system.
In 1994 she began to receive non-stop audio transmissions that still torment her, cybernetic voices registering on her brain’s primary frequency allocation, her mental channel.
Another indication that military biotechnology, cyber-psi, was focal in Stargate research was the Agency’s choice of The American Institutes of Research (AIR) in Washington, D.C. to evaluate the validity of remote viewing. AIR could be counted on to keep the (mind control) secrets. In the 1970s, the Army’s Office of the Inspector General released declassified files disclosing a series of CIA-DoD behavior modification experiments conducted in prisons, mental hospitals and campuses from 1950 through 1971. The documents identified 44 laboratories enriched with public tax funds for secret, inhumane brain research. The first on the list was AIR. SRI also received funding. An in-house study ensured CIA personnel would not be dragged in from the cold.
Some of the aims of the research:
Inducing toxic psychosis, terminal cancer, stress, sleep, headaches and chemical lobotomies.
Developing foods that taste normal but stimulate fear and anxiety.
The concoction of drugs to facilitate the brainwashing of civilians.
Using LSD-25 and electrodes in the brain to pinpoint pain centers.
A number of SRI spinoffs have taken remote viewing into the private sector. A brochure for the Farsight Institute states flatly that technology is used, and promotes the alien diversion: The Farsight Institute (TFI) was founded by Courtney Brown, Ph.D., in 1995, evolving from a research program he conducted in the early 1990s, described in his book Cosmic Voyage: A Scientific Discovery of Extraterrestrials Visiting Earth (Dutton 1996). “Dr. Brown’s investigations began with his training in a remote viewing technology that had previously been used by the U.S. military during highly classified operations in the 1980s and ’90s,” according to his sales literature. “Historically, the principal breakthroughs with this technology were made at
Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s and 1980s by the gifted artist and natural psychic, Ingo Swann. The vision of The Farsight Institute is to promote the continued research and development of the most modern and effective forms of this continually evolving technology.” Other remote viewing gurus from the SRI program have sprung up like poison mushrooms around the country, ranting obliquely on the paranormal and scapegoating
“aliens.”
The rhetoric is a serious development in intelligence cult programming for mass consumption. The populace is subjected to the same crazed systems used to indoctrinate recruits of the mind control cults.
Psi-Tech founder Ed Dames claimed on Art Bell’s syndicated radio program that his company can comb “the collective unconscious” for answers to such mysteries as the origins of the AIDS virus. By scanning the “Global Mind,” Dames claims, “we perceived massive global weather changes that preclude growing crops, a tremendous problem with epidemics and pandemics in Third World countries because it appears the ozone problem is increasing the mutation rate. Were perceiving a bovine AIDS that kills a lot of babies. The future gets grimmer after that.”
Parapsychology, E.T.s and the “End Times” are not just for the cults anymore. The intelligence community wants the you to believe … believe …
… the Cold War-style propagandists. Current mind control disinformation has its foundations in anti-Communist propaganda. Lt. Col Thomas Beardon, an Army Reservist, was made to order in magazines published by the “Committee to Restore the Constitution” and other ultra-conservative organizations. Beardon had a loyal following. He made a career of writing about emergent Soviet EM mind-control technology, but somehow it rarely seemed to cross his mind that the U.S. might be pursuing the same initiative. Beardon warned that the Soviets were developing weapons that generate “time-reversed (TR) electromagnetic waves,” and were capable of launching a “TR Blitzkrieg War” of awful proportions. He warned grimly that the black-hearted Communists had their hands on “time-reversal” weapons that could “take Europe.” A single flying Soviet “TR wave weapon,” he claimed, was capable of knocking out all British and American radars. It could “kill personnel wholesale.”
[…]
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CIA-Initiated Remote Viewing At Stanford Research Institute (Related Articles)
CIA-Initiated Remote Viewing At Stanford Research Institute
by H. E. Puthoff, Ph.D.
Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin
4030 Braker Lane W., #300
Austin, Texas 78759-5329
Abstract – In July 1995 the CIA declassified, and approved for release, documents revealing its sponsorship in the 1970s of a program at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, to determine whether such phenomena as remote viewing “might have any utility for intelligence collection” [1]. Thus began disclosure to the public of a two-decade-plus involvement of the intelligence community in the investigation of so-called parapsychological or psi phenomena. Presented here by the program’s Founder and first Director (1972 – 1985) is the early history of the program, including discussion of some of the first, now declassified, results that drove early interest.
Introduction
On April 17, 1995, President Clinton issued Executive Order Nr. 1995-4-17, entitled Classified National Security Information. Although in one sense the order simply reaffirmed much of what has been long-standing policy, in another sense there was a clear shift toward more openness. In the opening paragraph, for example, we read: “In recent years, however, dramatic changes have altered, although not eliminated, the national security threats that we confront. These changes provide a greater opportunity to emphasize our commitment to open Government.” In the Classification Standards section of the Order this commitment is operationalized by phrases such as “If there is significant doubt about the need to classify information, it shall not be classified.” Later in the document, in reference to information that requires continued protection, there even appears the remarkable phrase “In some exceptional cases, however, the need to protect such information may be outweighed by the public interest in disclosure of the information, and in these cases the information should be declassified.”
A major fallout of this reframing of attitude toward classification is that there is enormous pressure on those charged with maintaining security to work hard at being responsive to reasonable requests for disclosure. One of the results is that FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests that have languished for months to years are suddenly being acted upon.1
One outcome of this change in policy is the government’s recent admission of its two-decade-plus involvement in funding highly-classified, special access programs in remote viewing (RV) and related psi phenomena, first at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and then at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), both in Menlo Park, CA, supplemented by various in-house government programs. Although almost all of the documentation remains yet classified, in July 1995 270 pages of SRI reports were declassified and released by the CIA, the program’s first sponsor [2]. Thus, although through the years columns by Jack Anderson and others had claimed leaks of “psychic spy” programs with such exotic names as Grill Flame, Center Lane, Sunstreak and Star Gate, CIA’s release of the SRI reports constitutes the first documented public admission of significant intelligence community involvement in the psi area.
As a consequence of the above, although I had founded the program in early 1972, and had acted as its Director until I left in 1985 to head up the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin (at which point my colleague Ed May assumed responsibility as Director), it was not until 1995 that I found myself for the first time able to utter in a single sentence the connected acronyms CIA/SRI/RV. In this report I discuss the genesis of the program, report on some of the early, now declassified, results that drove early interest, and outline the general direction the program took as it expanded into a multi-year, multi-site, multi-million-dollar effort to determine whether such phenomena as remote viewing “might have any utility for intelligence collection” [1].
Beginnings
In early 1972 I was involved in laser research at Stanford Research Institute (now called SRI International) in Menlo Park, CA. At that time I was also circulating a proposal to obtain a small grant for some research in quantum biology. In that proposal I had raised the issue whether physical theory as we knew it was capable of describing life processes, and had suggested some measurements involving plants and lower organisms [3]. This proposal was widely circulated, and a copy was sent to Cleve Backster in New York City who was involved in measuring the electrical activity of plants with standard polygraph equipment. New York artist Ingo Swann chanced to see my proposal during a visit to Backster’s lab, and wrote me suggesting 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. Swann then went on to describe some apparently successful experiments in psychokinesis in which he had participated at Prof. Gertrude Schmeidler’s laboratory at the City College of New York. As a result of this correspondence I invited him to visit SRI for a week in June 1972 to demonstrate such effects, frankly, as much out of personal scientific curiosity as anything else.
Prior to Swann’s visit I arranged for access to a well-shielded magnetometer used in a quark-detection experiment in the Physics Department at Stanford University. During our visit to this laboratory, sprung as a surprise to Swann, he appeared to perturb the operation of the magnetometer, located in a vault below the floor of the building and shielded by mu-metal shielding, an aluminum container, copper shielding and a superconducting shield. As if to add insult to injury, he then went on to “remote view” the interior of the apparatus, rendering by drawing a reasonable facsimile of its rather complex (and heretofore unpublished) construction. It was this latter feat that impressed me perhaps even more than the former, as it also eventually did representatives of the intelligence community. I wrote up these observations and circulated it among my scientific colleagues in draft form of what was eventually published as part of a conference proceedings [4].
In a few short weeks a pair of visitors showed up at SRI with the above report in hand. Their credentials showed them to be from the CIA. They knew of my previous background as a Naval Intelligence Officer and then civilian employee at the National Security Agency (NSA) several years earlier, and felt they could discuss their concerns with me openly. There was, they told me, increasing concern in the intelligence community about the level of effort in Soviet parapsychology being funded by the Soviet security services [5]; by Western scientific standards the field was considered nonsense by most working scientists. As a result they had been on the lookout for a research laboratory outside of academia that could handle a quiet, low-profile classified investigation, and SRI appeared to fit the bill. They asked if I could arrange an opportunity for them to carry out some simple experiments with Swann, and, if the tests proved satisfactory, would I consider a pilot program along these lines? I agreed to consider this, and arranged for the requested tests.2
The tests were simple, the visitors simply hiding objects in a box and asking Swann to attempt to describe the contents. The results generated in these experiments are perhaps captured most eloquently by the following example. In one test Swann said “I see something small, brown and irregular, sort of like a leaf or something that resembles it, except that it seems very much alive, like it’s even moving!” The target chosen by one of the visitors turned out to be a small live moth, which indeed did look like a leaf. Although not all responses were quite so precise, nonetheless the integrated results were sufficiently impressive that in short order an eight-month, $49,909 Biofield Measurements Program was negotiated as a pilot study, a laser colleague Russell Targ who had had a long-time interest and involvement in parapsychology joined the program, and the experimental effort was begun in earnest.
Early Remote Viewing Results
During the eight-month pilot study of remote viewing the effort gradually evolved from the remote viewing of symbols and objects in envelopes and boxes, to the remote viewing of local target sites in the San Francisco Bay area, demarked by outbound experimenters sent to the site under strict protocols devised to prevent artifactual results. Later judging of the results were similarly handled by double-blind protocols designed to foil artifactual matching. Since these results have been presented in detail elsewhere, both in the scientific literature [6-8] and in popular book format [9], I direct the interested reader to these sources. To summarize, over the years the back-and-forth criticism of protocols, refinement of methods, and successful replication of this type of remote viewing in independent laboratories [10-14], has yielded considerable scientific evidence for the reality of the phenomenon. Adding to the strength of these results was the discovery that a growing number of individuals could be found to demonstrate high-quality remote viewing, often to their own surprise, such as the talented Hella Hammid. As a separate issue, however, most convincing to our early program monitors were the results now to be described, generated under their own control.
First, during the collection of data for a formal remote viewing series targeting indoor laboratory apparatus and outdoor locations (a series eventually published in toto in the Proc. IEEE [7]), the CIA contract monitors, ever watchful for possible chicanery, participated as remote viewers themselves in order to critique the protocols. In this role three separate viewers, designated visitors V1 – V3 in the IEEE paper, contributed seven of the 55 viewings, several of striking quality. Reference to the IEEE paper for a comparison of descriptions/drawings to pictures of the associated targets, generated by the contract monitors in their own viewings, leaves little doubt as to why the contract monitors came to the conclusion that there was something to remote viewing (see, for example, Figure 1 herein). As summarized in the Executive Summary of the now-released Final Report [2] of the second year of the program, “The development of this capability at SRI has evolved to the point where visiting CIA personnel with no previous exposure to such concepts have performed well under controlled laboratory conditions (that is, generated target descriptions of sufficiently high quality to permit blind matching of descriptions to targets by independent judges).” What happened next, however, made even these results pale in comparison.
Figure 1 – Sketch of target by V1
Figure 2 – Target (merry-go-round)
Coordinate Remote Viewing
To determine whether it was necessary to have a “beacon” individual at the target site, Swann suggested carrying out an experiment to remote view the planet Jupiter before the upcoming NASA Pioneer 10 flyby. In that case, much to his chagrin (and ours) he found a ring around Jupiter, and wondered if perhaps he had remote viewed Saturn by mistake. Our colleagues in astronomy were quite unimpressed as well, until the flyby revealed that an unanticipated ring did in fact exist.3
Expanding the protocols yet further, Swann proposed a series of experiments in which the target was designated not by sending a “beacon” person to the target site, but rather by the use of geographical coordinates, latitude and longitude in degrees, minutes and seconds. Needless to say, this proposal seemed even more outrageous than “ordinary” remote viewing. The difficulties in taking this proposal seriously, designing protocols to eliminate the possibility of a combination of globe memorization and eidetic or photographic memory, and so forth, are discussed in considerable detail in Reference [9]. Suffice it to say that investigation of this approach, which we designated Scanate (scanning by coordinate), eventually provided us with sufficient evidence to bring it up to the contract monitors and suggest a test under their control. A description of that test and its results, carried out in mid-1973 during the initial pilot study, are best presented by quoting directly from the Executive Summary of the Final Report of the second year’s followup program [2]. The remote viewers were Ingo Swann and Pat Price, and the entire transcripts are available in the released documents [2].
“In order to subject the remote viewing phenomena to a rigorous long-distance test under external control, a request for geographical coordinates of a site unknown to subject and experimenters was forwarded to the OSI group responsible for threat analysis in this area. In response, SRI personnel received a set of geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude in degrees, minutes, and seconds) of a facility, hereafter referred to as the West Virginia Site. The experimenters then carried out a remote viewing experiment on a double-blind basis, that is, blind to experimenters as well as subject. The experiment had as its goal the determination of the utility of remote viewing under conditions approximating an operational scenario. Two subjects targeted on the site, a sensitive installation. One subject drew a detailed map of the building and grounds layout, the other provided information about the interior including codewords, data subsequently verified by sponsor sources (report available from COTR).”4
Since details concerning the site’s mission in general,5 and evaluation of the remote viewing test in particular, remain highly classified to this day, all that can be said is that interest in the client community was heightened considerably following this exercise.
Because Price found the above exercise so interesting, as a personal challenge he went on to scan the other side of the globe for a Communist Bloc equivalent and found one located in the Urals, the detailed description of which is also included in Ref. [2]. As with the West Virginia Site, the report for the Urals Site was also verified by personnel in the sponsor organization as being substantially correct.
What makes the West Virginia/Urals Sites viewings so remarkable is that these are not best-ever examples culled out of a longer list; these are literally the first two site-viewings carried out in a simulated operational-type scenario. In fact, for Price these were the very first two remote viewings in our program altogether, and he was invited to participate in yet further experimentation.
Operational Remote Viewing (Semipalatinsk, USSR)
Midway through the second year of the program (July 1974) our CIA sponsor decided to challenge us to provide data on a Soviet site of ongoing operational significance. Pat Price was the remote viewer. A description of the remote viewing, taken from our declassified final report [2], reads as given below. I cite this level of detail to indicate the thought that goes into such an “experiment” to minimize cueing while at the same time being responsive to the requirements of an operational situation. Again, this is not a “best-ever” example from a series of such viewings, but rather the very first operational Soviet target concerning which we were officially tasked.
“To determine the utility of remote viewing under operational conditions, a long-distance remote viewing experiment was carried out on a sponsor-designated target of current interest, an unidentified research center at Semipalatinsk, USSR.
This experiment, carried out in three phases, was under direct control of the COTR. To begin the experiment, the COTR furnished map coordinates in degrees, minutes and seconds. The only additional information provided was the designation of the target as an R&D test facility. The experimenters then closeted themselves with Subject S1, gave him the map coordinates and indicated the designation of the target as an R&D test facility. A remote-viewing experiment was then carried out. This activity constituted Phase I of the experiment.
Figure 3 – Subject effort at building layout
Figure 4 – Subject effort at crane construction
Figure 3 shows the subject’s graphic effort for building layout; Figure 4 shows the subject’s particular attention to a multistory gantry crane he observed at the site. Both results were obtained by the experimenters on a double-blind basis before exposure to any additional COTR-held information, thus eliminating the possibility of cueing. These results were turned over to the client representatives for evaluation. For comparison an artist’s rendering of the site as known to the COTR (but not to the experimenters until later) is shown in Figure 5…..
Figure 5 – Actual COTR rendering of Semipalatinsk, USSR target site
Were the results not promising, the experiment would have stopped at this point. Description of the multistory crane, however, a relatively unusual target item, was taken as indicative of possible target acquisition. Therefore, Phase II was begun, defined by the subject being made “witting” (of the client) by client representatives who introduced themselves to the subject at that point; Phase II also included a second round of experimentation on the Semipalatinsk site with direct participation of client representatives in which further data were obtained and evaluated. As preparation for this phase, client representatives purposely kept themselves blind to all but general knowledge of the target site to minimize the possibility of cueing. The Phase II effort was focused on the generation of physical data that could be independently verified by other client sources, thus providing a calibration of the process.
The end of Phase II gradually evolved into the first part of Phase III, the generation of unverifiable data concerning the Semipalatinsk site not available to the client, but of operational interest nonetheless. Several hours of tape transcript and a notebook of drawings were generated over a two-week period.
The data describing the Semipalatinsk site were evaluated by the sponsor, and are contained in a separate report. In general, several details concerning the salient technology of the Semipalatinsk site appeared to dovetail with data from other sources, and a number of specific large structural elements were correctly described. The results contained noise along with the signal, but were nonetheless clearly differentiated from the chance results that were generated by control subjects in comparison experiments carried out by the COTR.”
For discussion of the ambiance and personal factors involved in carrying out this experiment, along with further detail generated as Price (see Figure 6) “roamed” the facility, including detailed comparison of Price’s RV-generated information with later-determined “ground-truth reality,” see the accompanying article by Russell Targ in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 10, No. 1. Click here to read the abstract.
Figure 6 – Left to right: Christopher Green, Pat Price, and Hal Puthoff.
Picture taken following a successful experiment involving glider-ground RV.
Additional experiments having implications for intelligence concerns were carried out, such as the remote viewing of cipher-machine type apparatus, and the RV-sorting of sealed envelopes to differentiate those that contained letters with secret writing from those that did not. To discuss these here in detail would take us too far afield, but the interested reader can follow up by referring to the now-declassified project documents [2].
Follow-on Programs
The above discussion brings us up to the end of 1975. As a result of the material being generated by both SRI and CIA remote viewers, interest in the program in government circles, especially within the intelligence community, intensified considerably and led to an ever-increasing briefing schedule. This in turn led to an ever-increasing number of clients, contracts and tasking, and therefore expansion of the program to a multi-client base, and eventually to an integrated joint-services program under single-agency (DIA)6 leadership. To meet the demand for the increased level of effort we first increased our professional staff by inviting Ed May to join the program in 1976, then screened and added to the program a cadre of remote viewers as consultants, and let subcontracts to increase our scope of activity.
As the program expanded, in only a very few cases could the clients’ identities and program tasking be revealed. Examples include a NASA-funded study negotiated early in the program by Russ Targ to determine whether the internal state of an electronic random-number-generator could be detected by RV processes [16], and a study funded by the Naval Electronics Systems Command to determine whether attempted remote viewing of distant light flashes would induce correlated changes in the viewer’s brainwave (EEG) production [17]. For essentially all other projects during my 14-yr. tenure at SRI, however, the identity of the clients and most of the tasking were classified and remain so today. (The exception was the occasional privately-funded study.) We are told, however, that further declassification and release of much of this material is almost certain to occur.
What can be said, then, about further development of the program in the two decades following 1975?7 In broad terms it can be said that much of the SRI effort was directed not so much toward developing an operational U.S. capability, but rather toward assessing the threat potential of its use against the U.S. by others. The words threat assessment were often used to describe the program’s purpose during its development, especially during the early years. As a result much of the remote-viewing activity was carried out under conditions where ground-truth reality was a priori known or could be determined, such as the description of U.S. facilities and technological developments, the timing of rocket test firings and underground nuclear tests, and the location of individuals and mobile units. And, of course, we were responsive to requests to provide assistance during such events as the loss of an airplane or the taking of hostages, relying on the talents of an increasing cadre of remote-viewer/consultants, some well-known in the field such as Keith Harary, and many who have not surfaced publicly until recently, such as Joe McMoneagle.
One might ask whether in this program RV-generated information was ever of sufficient significance as to influence decisions at a policy level. This is of course impossible to determine unless policymakers were to come forward with a statement in the affirmative. One example of a possible candidate is a study we performed at SRI during the Carter-administration debates concerning proposed deployment of the mobile MX missile system. In that scenario missiles were to be randomly shuffled from silo to silo in a silo field, in a form of high-tech shell game. In a computer simulation of a twenty-silo field with randomly-assigned (hidden) missile locations, we were able, using RV-generated data, to show rather forcefully that the application of a sophisticated statistical averaging technique (sequential sampling) could in principle permit an adversary to defeat the system. I briefed these results to the appropriate offices at their request, and a written report with the technical details was widely circulated among groups responsible for threat analysis [18], and with some impact. What role, if any, our small contribution played in the mix of factors behind the enormously complex decision to cancel the program will probably never be known, and must of course a priori be considered in all likelihood negligible. Nonetheless, this is a prototypical example of the kind of tasking that by its nature potentially had policy implications.
Even though the details of the broad range of experiments, some brilliant successes, many total failures, have not yet been released, we have nonetheless been able to publish summaries of what was learned in these studies about the overall characteristics of remote viewing, as in Table 5 of Reference [8]. Furthermore, over the years we were able to address certain questions of scientific interest in a rigorous way and to publish the results in the open literature. Examples include the apparent lack of attenuation of remote viewing due to seawater shielding (submersible experiments) [8], the amplification of RV performance by use of error-correcting coding techniques [19,20], and the utility of a technique we call associational remote viewing (ARV) to generate useful predictive information [21].8
As a sociological aside, we note that the overall efficacy of remote viewing in a program like this was not just a scientific issue. For example, when the Semipalatinsk data described earlier was forwarded for analysis, one group declined to get involved because the whole concept was unscientific nonsense, while a second group declined because, even though it might be real, it was possibly demonic; a third group had to be found. And, as in the case of public debate about such phenomena, the program’s image was on occasion as likely to be damaged by an overenthusiastic supporter as by a detractor. Personalities, politics and personal biases were always factors to be dealt with.
Official Statements/Perspectives
With regard to admission by the government of its use of remote viewers under operational conditions, officials have on occasion been relatively forthcoming. President Carter, in a speech to college students in Atlanta in September 1995, is quoted by Reuters as saying that during his administration a plane went down in Zaire, and a meticulous sweep of the African terrain by American spy satellites failed to locate any sign of the wreckage. It was then “without my knowledge” that the head of the CIA (Adm. Stansfield Turner) turned to a woman reputed to have psychic powers. As told by Carter, “she gave some latitude and longitude figures. We focused our satellite cameras on that point and the plane was there.” Independently, Turner himself also has admitted the Agency’s use of a remote viewer (in this case, Pat Price).9 And recently, in a segment taped for the British television series Equinox [22], Maj. Gen. Ed Thompson, Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, U.S. Army (1977-1981), volunteered “I had one or more briefings by SRI and was impressed…. The decision I made was to set up a small, in-house, low-cost effort in remote viewing….”
Finally, a recent unclassified report [23] prepared for the CIA by the American Institutes for Research (AIR), concerning a remote viewing effort carried out under a DIA program called Star Gate (discussed in detail elsewhere in this volume), cites the roles of the CIA and DIA in the history of the program, including acknowledgment that a cadre of full-time government employees used remote viewing techniques to respond to tasking from operational military organizations.10
As information concerning the various programs spawned by intelligence-community interest is released, and the dialog concerning their scientific and social significance is joined, the results are certain to be hotly debated. Bearing witness to this fact are the companion articles in this volume by Ed May, Director of the SRI and SAIC programs since 1985, and by Jessica Utts and Ray Hyman, consultants on the AIR evaluation cited above. These articles address in part the AIR study. That study, limited in scope to a small fragment of the overall program effort, resulted in a conclusion that although laboratory research showed statistically significant results, use of remote viewing in intelligence gathering was not warranted.
Regardless of one’s a priori position, however, an unimpassioned observer cannot help but attest to the following fact. Despite the ambiguities inherent in the type of exploration covered in these programs, the integrated results appear to provide unequivocal evidence of a human capacity to access events remote in space and time, however falteringly, by some cognitive process not yet understood. My years of involvement as a research manager in these programs have left me with the conviction that this fact must be taken into account in any attempt to develop an unbiased picture of the structure of reality.
Footnotes
1 – One example being the release of documents that are the subject of this report – see the memoir by Russell Targ elsewhere in this volume.
2 – Since the reputation of the intelligence services is mixed among members of the general populace, I have on occasion been challenged as to why I would agree to cooperate with the CIA or other elements of the intelligence community in this work. My answer is simply that as a result of my own previous exposure to this community I became persuaded that war can almost always be traced to a failure in intelligence, and that therefore the strongest weapon for peace is good intelligence.
3 – This result was published by us in advance of the ring’s discovery [9].
4 – Editor’s footnote added here: COTR – Contracting Officer’s Technical Representative
5 – An NSA listening post at the Navy’s Sugar Grove facility, according to intelligence-community chronicler Bamford [15]
6 – DIA – Defense Intelligence Agency. The CIA dropped out as a major player in the mid-seventies due to pressure on the Agency (unrelated to the RV Program) from the Church-Pike Congressional Committee.
7 – See also the contribution by Ed May elsewhere in this volume concerning his experiences from 1985 on during his tenure as Director.
8 – For example, one application of this technique yielded not only a published, statistically significant result, but also a return of $26,000 in 30 days in the silver futures market [21].
9 – The direct quote is given in Targ’s contribution elsewhere in this volume.
10 – “From 1986 to the first quarter of FY 1995, the DoD paranormal psychology program received more than 200 tasks from operational military organizations requesting that the program staff apply a paranormal psychological technique know (sic) as “remote viewing” (RV) to attain information unavailable from other sources.” [23]
References
[1] “CIA Statement on ‘Remote Viewing’,” CIA Public Affairs Office, 6 September 1995.
[2] Harold E. Puthoff and Russell Targ, “Perceptual Augmentation Techniques,” SRI Progress Report No. 3 (31 Oct. 1974) and Final Report (1 Dec. 1975) to the CIA, covering the period January 1974 through February 1975, the second year of the program. This effort was funded at the level of $149,555.
[3] H. E. Puthoff, “Toward a Quantum Theory of Life Process,” unpubl. proposal, Stanford Research Institute (1972).
[4] H. E. Puthoff and R. Targ, “Physics, Entropy and Psychokinesis,” in Proc. Conf. Quantum Physics and Parapsychology (Geneva, Switzerland); (New York: Parapsychology Foundation, 1975).
[5] Documented in “Paraphysics R&D – Warsaw Pact (U),” DST-1810S-202-78, Defense Intelligence Agency (30 March 1978).
[6] R. Targ and H. E. Puthoff, “Information Transfer under Conditions of Sensory Shielding,” Nature 252, 602 (1974).
[7] H. E. Puthoff and R. Targ, “A Perceptual Channel for Information Transfer over Kilometer Distances: Historical Perspective and Recent Research,” Proc. IEEE 64, 329 (1976).
[8] H. E. Puthoff, R. Targ and E. C. May, “Experimental Psi Research: Implications for Physics,” in The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World, edited by R. G. Jahn (AAAS Selected Symposium 57, Westview Press, Boulder, 1981).
[9] R. Targ and H. E. Puthoff, Mind Reach (Delacorte Press, New York, 1977).
[10] J. P. Bisaha and B. J. Dunne, “Multiple Subject and Long-Distance Precognitive Remote Viewing of Geographical Locations,” in Mind at Large, edited by C. T. Tart, H. E. Puthoff and R. Targ (Praeger, New York, 1979), p. 107.
[11] B. J. Dunne and J. P. Bisaha, “Precognitive Remote Viewing in the Chicago Area: a Replication of the Stanford Experiment,” J. Parapsychology 43, 17 (1979).
[12] R. G. Jahn, “The Persistent Paradox of Psychic Phenomena: An Engineering Perspective,” Proc. IEEE 70, 136 (1982).
[13] R. G. Jahn and B. J. Dunne, “On the Quantum Mechanics of Consciousness with Application to Anomalous Phenomena,” Found. Phys. 16, 721 (1986).
[14] R. G. Jahn and B. J. Dunne, Margins of Reality (Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, New York, 1987).
[15] J. Bamford, The Puzzle Palace (Penguin Books, New York, 1983) pp. 218-222.
[16] R. Targ, P. Cole and H. E. Puthoff, “Techniques to Enhance Man/Machine Communication,” Stanford Research Institute Final Report on NASA Project NAS7-100 (August 1974).
[17] R. Targ, E. C. May, H. E. Puthoff, D. Galin and R. Ornstein, “Sensing of Remote EM Sources (Physiological Correlates),” SRI Intern’l Final Report on Naval Electronics Systems Command Project N00039-76-C-0077, covering the period November 1975 – to October 1976 (April 1978).
[18] H. E. Puthoff, “Feasibility Study on the Vulnerability of the MPS System to RV Detection Techniques,” SRI Internal Report, 15 April 1979; revised 2 May 1979.
[19] H. E. Puthoff, “Calculator-Assisted Psi Amplification,” Research in Parapsychology 1984, edited by Rhea White and J. Solfvin (Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, NJ, 1985), p. 48.
[20] H. E. Puthoff, “Calculator-Assisted Psi Amplification II: Use of the Sequential-Sampling Technique as a Variable-Length Majority-Vote Code,” Research in Parapsychology 1985, edited by D. Weiner and D. Radin (Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, NJ, 1986), p. 73.
[21] H. E. Puthoff, “ARV (Associational Remote Viewing) Applications,” Research in Parapsychology 1984, edited by Rhea White and J. Solfvin (Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, NJ, 1985), p. 121.
[22] “The Real X-Files,” Independent Channel 4, England (shown 27 August 1995); to be shown in the U.S. on the Discovery Channel.
[23] M. D. Mumford, A. M. Rose and D. Goslin, “An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications,” American Institutes for Research (September 29, 1995).
Copyright 1996 by H.E. Puthoff.
Permission to redistribute granted, but only in complete and unaltered form.
Journal of Scientific Exploration
http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/articles.html
(pdf files)
An Assessment of the Evidence for Psychic Functioning
by Jessica Utts
Division of Statistics, University of California, Davis, CA 95616
Volume 10 Number 1: Page 3.
Research on psychic functioning, conducted over a two decade period, is examined to determine whether or not the phenomenon has been scientifically established. A secondary question is whether or not it is useful for government purposes. The primary work examined in this report was government sponsored research conducted at Stanford Research Institute, later known as SRI International, and at Science Applications International Corporation, known as SAIC. Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established. The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted. Effects of similar magnitude to those found in government-sponsored research at SRI and SAIC have been replicated at a number of laboratories across the world. Such consistency cannot be readily explained by claims of flaws or fraud. The magnitude of psychic functioning exhibited appears to be in the range between what social scientists call a small and medium effect. That means that it is reliable enough to be replicated in properly conducted experiments, with sufficient trials to achieve the long-run statistical results needed for replicability. A number of other patterns have been found, suggestive of how to conduct more productive experiments and applied psychic functioning. For instance, it doesn’t appear that a sender is needed. Precognition, in which the answer is known to no one until a future time, appears to work quite well. Recent experiments suggest that if there is a psychic sense then it works much like our other five senses, by detecting change. Given that physicists are currently grappling with an understanding of time, it may be that a psychic sense exists that scans the future for major change, much as our eyes scan the environment for visual change or our ears allow us to respond to sudden changes in sound. It is recommended that future experiments focus on understanding how this phenomenon works, and on how to make it as useful as possible. There is little benefit to continuing experiments designed to offer proof, since there is little more to be offered to anyone who does not accept the current collection of data.
Evaluation of a Program on Anomalous Mental Phenomena
by Ray Hyman
1227 University of Oregon, Department of Psychology, Eugene, OR 97403
Volume 10 Number 1: Page 31.
Jessica Utts and I were commissioned to evaluate the research on remote viewing and related phenomena which was carried out at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC) during the years from 1973 through 1994. We focussed on the ten most recent experiments which were conducted at SAIC from 1992 through 1994. These were not only the most recent but also the most methodologically sound. We evaluated these experiments in the context of contemporary parapsychological research. Professor Utts concluded that the SAIC results, taken in conjunction with other parapsychological research, proved the existence of ESP, especially precognition. My report argues that Professor Utts’ conclusion is premature, to say the least. The reports of the SAIC experiments have become accessible for public scrutiny too recently for adequate evaluation. Moreover, their findings have yet to be independently replicated. My report also argues that the apparent consistencies between the SAIC results and those of other parapsychological experiments may be illusory. Many important inconsistencies are emphasized. Even if the observed effects can be independently replicated, much more theoretical and empirical investigation would be needed before one could legitimately claim the existence of paranormal functioning. Note: This article is followed by a response from Jessica Utts.
Remote Viewing at Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s: A Memoir
by Russell Targ
Bay Research Institute, 1010 Harriet Street, Palo Alto, CA 94301
Volume 10 Number 1: Page 77.
Hundreds of remote viewing experiments were carried out at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) from 1972 to 1986. The purpose of some of these trials was to elucidate the physical and psychological properties of psi abilities, while others were conducted to provide information for our CIA sponsor about current events in far off places. We learned that the accuracy and reliability of remote viewing was not in any way affected by distance, size, or electromagnetic shielding, and we discovered that the more exciting or demanding the task, the more likely we were to be successful. Above all, we became utterly convinced of the reality of psi abilities. This article focuses on two outstanding examples: One is an exceptional, map-like drawing of a Palo Alto swimming pool complex, and the other is an architecturally accurate drawing of a gantry crane located at a Soviet weapons laboratory, and verified by satellite photography. The percipient for both of these experiments was Pat Price, a retired police commissioner who was one of the most outstanding remote viewers to walk through the doors of SRI.
The American Institutes for Research Review of the
Department of Defense’s STAR GATE Program: A Commentary
by Edwin C. May
Cognitive Sciences Laboratory, 330 Cowper Street, Suite 200, Palo Alto, CA 94301
Volume 10 Number 1: Page 89.
As a result of a Congressionally Directed Activity, the Central Intelligence Agency conducted an evaluation of a 24-year, government-sponsored program to investigate ESP and its potential use within the Intelligence Community. The American Institutes for Research was contracted to conduct the review of both research and operations. Their 29 September 1995 final report was released to the public 28 November 1995. As a result of AIR’s assessment, the CIA concluded that a statistically significant effect had been demonstrated in the laboratory, but that there was no case in which ESP had provided data that had ever been used to guide intelligence operations. This paper is a critical review of AIR’s methodology and conclusions. It will be shown that there is compelling evidence that the CIA set the outcome with regard to intelligence usage before the evaluation had begun. This was accomplished by limiting the research and operations data sets to exclude positive findings, by purposefully not interviewing historically significant participants, by ignoring previous DOD extensive program reviews, and by using the discredited National Research Council’s investigation of parapsychology as the starting point for their review. While there may have been political and administrative justification for the CIA not to accept the government’s in-house program for the operational use of anomalous cognition, this appeared to drive the outcome of the evaluation. As a result, they have come to the wrong conclusion with regard to the use of anomalous cognition in intelligence operations and significantly underestimated the robustness of the basic phenomenon.
FieldREG Anomalies in Group Situations
by R. D. Nelson, G. J. Bradish, Y. H. Dobyns, B. J. Dunne, and R. G. Jahn
Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research, School of Engineering/Applied Science,
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544
Volume 10 Number 1: Page 111.
Portable random event generators with software to record and index continuous sequences of binary data in field situations are found to produce anomalous outputs when deployed in various group environments. These “FieldREG” systems have been operated under formal protocols in ten separate venues, all of which subdivide naturally into temporal segments, such as sessions, presentations, or days. The most extreme data segments from each of the ten applications, after appropriate correction for multiple sampling, compound to a collective probability against chance expectation of 2 X 10^-4. Interpretation remains speculative at this point, but logbook notes and anecdotal reports from participants suggest that high degrees of attention, intellectual cohesiveness, shared emotion, or other coherent qualities of the groups tend to correlate with the statistically unusual deviations from theoretical expectation in the FieldREG sequences. If sustained over more extensive experiments, such effects could add credence to the concept of a consciousness “field” as an agency for creating order in random physical processes.
Anomalous Organization of Random Events by Group Consciousness:
Two Exploratory Experiments
by Dean I. Radin, Jannine M. Rebman, and Maikwe P. Cross
Consciousness Research Laboratory, Harry Reid Center,
University of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV 89154-4009
Volume 10 Number 1: Page 143.
Two experiments explored the hypothesis that when a group of people focus their attention on a common object of interest, order will arise in the environment. An electronic random number generator was used to detect these changes in order. Events judged to be interesting to the group were called periods of high coherence and were predicted to cause corresponding moments of order in the random samples collected during those events; uninteresting events were predicted to cause chance levels of order in the random samples. The first experiment was conducted during an all-day Holotropic Breathwork workshop. The predictions were confirmed, with a significant degree of order observed in the random samples during high group coherence periods (p = 0.002), and chance order observed during low group coherence periods (p = 0.43). The second experiment was conducted during the live television broadcast of the 67th Annual Academy Awards. Two random binary generators, located 12 miles apart, were used to independently measure order. The predictions were confirmed for about half of the broadcast period, but the terminal cumulative probabilities were not significant. A post-hoc analysis showed that the strength of the correlation between the output of the two random generators was significantly related (r = 0.94) to the decline in the television viewing audience.
Pentagon Curbing Public Data on “Star Wars” (NYT 26/1/1987)
The Pentagon office in charge of ”Star Wars” research is tightening the flow of information to the public, according to Government officials and experts outside the Government.
The trend toward restricting information about the program for developing a space-oriented defense against missile attacks comes as controversy is growing over a Pentagon proposal that the Reagan Administration consider the early deployment of defensive systems.
Under the new restrictions, the cost of specific projects is to be classified.
Some experts assert that such measures are inhibiting an informed public debate on the issue. ”They want to accelerate the program and avoid public debate over that,” said John E. Pike, associate director for space policy at the Federation of American Scientists, which is critical of the program Mr. Reagan has labeled the Strategic Defense Initiative.
Capt. John C. Dewey, the senior public affairs official for the Pentagon’s Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, acknowledged that the office currently makes less information public than in past years.
Research Effort ‘Maturing’
But he said that the new restrictions are needed to keep the Soviet Union from learning what technologies are being emphasized as the research effort ”matures.” He added that detailed cost information is still available to Congress on a classified basis.
Experts note that the Pentagon initially published considerable information about the cost of specific ”Star Wars” projects, citing an unclassified 1985
report to Congress. ”The 1985 document was an excellent report,” said Douglas C. Waller, an aide to Senator William Proxmire, the Wisconsin Democrat.”But after that, they started to turn the spigot tighter and tighter.”
In 1986, the organization’s report to Congress did not provide data on spending for specific research projects, even though that information was not officially classified.
The 1986 report noted, for example, that $991 million was being sought in the 1987 budget for research in the category of kinetic energy weapons, which
include ground- and space-based interceptor rockets as opposed to lasers or particle beams. But the report did not provided a breakdown of that sum. In
contrast, the 1985 report provided a detailed account of the specific research projects in this area.
Some of the unclassified information left out of the 1986 report was later ”leaked” to the press. And the newsletter Military Space eventually obtained
cost data through the Freedom of Information Act, but only after challenging the Pentagon’s initial refusal.
New Information Classified
Last week, apparently to guard against the disclosure of such budget information this year, the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization told Senator Proxmire’s office that cost information for specific projects should be considered ”for official use only,” the lowest level of Pentagon classification, Mr. Waller said.
The absence of specific cost information has been raised as an issue in the larger debate over ”Star Wars.”
Pentagon officials say there have been new breakthroughs that would enable the United States to begin putting space-based and ground-based defensive systems in place in 1993, years earlier than previously projected. Critics challenge this claim and assert that the Pentagon is pressing the early deployment plan to insure that some key decisions about the program are made during Mr. Reagan’s Presidency.
Government officials say the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization has shifted part of its 1987 budget to support this option of an early deployment,
but the agency will not provide information on what specific technologies are getting more money.
At a symposium in Colorado on Thursday, Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger expressed annoyance at critics who have said that the early deployment plan would cost more than $100 billion and could easily be countered by the Soviet Union. He said nobody was now in a position to make precise cost estimates and that critics who did so ”have the advantage of not knowing anything about it.”
Critics Say They Need Data
Critics say that release of the data would show where the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization is focusing its efforts, allowing them to better assess
the technical obstacles that now confront the program. ”You can’t have a public debate if the public does not have the information,” Senator Proxmire said.
But some supporters of the program say such information could alert the Soviet Union to gains that are being made by the United States.
In one noteworthy case last year, the Pentagon decided that a report by the General Accounting Office that was based on unclassified information should be classified as secret.
After Congressional complaints, Mr. Weinberger asserted that the Pentagon was correct to classify the report because the financial data and descriptions of programs in it ”formed a ‘mosaic’ from which emerged classified information.”
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