This book goes over the history of the US military + CIA’s involvement in psychic research. Similar to the US involvement in rocketry (see Operation Paperclip), a lot of this got it’s start at the tail end of WWII when the military rushed to capture Nazi paranormal researchers before the Soviets could get them. Research really took off in the 1970’s, with a strong focus on remote viewing. In the end, some were convinced that a special few did have some ability, but generally the methods are not teachable – either you have it or you don’t. Research efforts died off in the 90’s … or did they?!?

The author explicitly states she is not out to prove or disprove the validity of paranormal claims. Must have seemed plausible enough that somebody though, given the decades of research dollars spent looking into it. But, the military is kind of obliged to investigate rumors of powerful new technologies. Part of me wonders if a lot of claims are intentional disinformation fed for whatever reason – like some speculate the British did by feeding astrologers what to tell Rudolf Hess, which supposed led to his flight to Scotland. Or if it’s essentially sharpshooter fallacy to claim extraordinary results some of the time. One of the remote viewing tests involved asking subjects to describe structures at a given lat/lon … but they picked very well known targets like the Eiffel Tower or Great Pyramid; surely a sufficiently gifted geography auteur could do as well as the “psychics” at this test??

There’s a good definition of pseudoscience in here: something that doesn’t follow scientific method, ie. not testable and/or repeatable.  To be fair though…doesn’t necessarily mean something isn’t real; maybe we just don’t know how to properly test things yet. Maybe we are all in a simulated universe after all, and these psychics are really hackers into that true reality…

Some of the people discussed:

• Anrija Puharich – early scientist in the field who got the military interested
• Uri Gellar – true psychic/spoon bender, or talented magician/Mossad spy? Maybe the Israeli govt is “in” on it, but uses him as a valuable intelligence gathering tool?
• James Randi – debunker of Gellar and others
• Edgar Mitchell – Apollo 14 astronaut who tried to send thoughts telepathically back to Earth
• Ingo Swann – remote viewer
• Pat Price – remote viewer
• Qian Xuesen – Manhattan Project scientist who got deported as a big thanks from the McCarthy USA. Got involved in Chinese aerospace research and later paranormal.