What the government found when it looked

Annie Jacobsen's Phenomena is a history of a strange fact. After the Second World War, parts of the United States government decided that anomalous mental phenomena, extrasensory perception, psychokinesis, map dowsing, remote viewing, were worth scientists and a clearance. In 1975 a CIA document she follows said a large body of evidence pointed to ESP as a real phenomenon. The mystery did not close when the public was told it was a carnival. I believe the knack is real in some people. I do not believe every stage act is the knack. Those are easy to tell apart if you are not performing a debunk for a living, and not performing a church either.

The action she dates to 1972. The CIA approached a small group of young scientists at Stanford Research Institute, then one of the largest Defense Department-funded independent labs in the country. The question was whether the phenomenon could be operational. Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ are the names. Coordinate remote viewing is the method that came out of that door. I like that the government did the grown version of what a curious person does. They tested the weird kid instead of sending him to the school counselor.

Around the same door stand names the public later treated as entertainment. Andrija Puharich, a neurobiologist, was hired by the Defense Department to lecture high-ranking Pentagon officials on ESP, at the same cultural moment Martin Gardner's 1952 Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science was founding the modern skeptic's brief and never mentioning that lecture. By November 1972 Uri Geller was inbound. Kit Green, assigned the matter by CIA director Richard Helms, had two worries in the declassified memos Jacobsen cites: Geller's celebrity, and Puharich's role as manager. Payments were routed so the Agency could keep Puharich at arm's length. Geller arrived already a press phenomenon. Spoons, telepathy, a meeting with Wernher von Braun that Puharich made sure a reporter attended. The enigma is not whether a stage act can be doubted. It is that the same months contain a celebrity, a skeptical publishing culture, and a classified interest that did not bother to tell the publishing culture what it was buying.

The later military chapter has its own names. Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ at SRI. Joe McMoneagle, whose memoir is the experiencer account from inside the unit. Ingo Swann. The Star Gate collection, declassified in pieces, is the paper. Viewers were tasked against hostages and against sites. Some of the sessions are embarrassing. Some of them are hard to file as luck if you actually read them. I am not going to average those into a shrug so I can sound safe. Uneven performance is what a real human knack looks like. Nature does not issue a machine tolerance. It issues people, and a few of them are strange in a way a program can try to hire.

I read that room as a mystery I am glad exists. Jacobsen does not ask me to kneel. She asks me to notice that scientists with clearances spent decades on a question the popular academy had decided was bad manners. The unelected laboratory is the staffing. This page is the phenomenon. The generated interface is a different speculation, about renders and cameras, and it does not get to swallow the viewers. If you have sat with something you cannot explain, you are welcome here. Bring the date and the details. I will weigh them with you. I will not laugh you out of the room to protect a consensus.