9/1/2013 6:33 PM! Parapsychology in Intelligence: The Rise and Fall of the CIA's Psychic Spies

Page 1 of 5http://dagmar.lunarpages.com/~parasc2/ds/articles/CIAparapsychology.htm

Parapsychology inIntelligence:The Rise and Fall of the CIA's Psychic Spies

by Jon EllistonDossier Editorpscpdocs@aol.com

It is the summer of 1974. In Langley, Virginia, justoutside Washington, DC, a handful of CIA officersventure to the edge of espionage, launching the firstdocumented psychic spying mission in U.S. history.

The target: a secret research center in a remote regionof the Kazakh Republic, USSR. At the CIA, wherelittle is known about the facility, the Soviet site isreferred to as URDF-3 (Unidentified Research andDevelopment Facility Number 3). Pat Price, a "remoteviewer" working on a CIA contract, is handed thecoordinates of the target. After clearing his mind,Price peers out mentally in search of the site, andclaims to observe it. A striking feature of the facility,he says, is the presence of a "damn big crane."

A CIA officer assigned to the unorthodox operationhas seen the latest reconnaissance photos of URDF-3,and he marvels at what he later calls "some amazingdescriptions" furnished by Price. There is indeed anunusually large crane at the site, one that Price is ableto sketch in startling detail.

The day of the psychic spies had arrived.

9/1/2013 6:33 PM! Parapsychology in Intelligence: The Rise and Fall of the CIA's Psychic Spies

Page 2 of 5http://dagmar.lunarpages.com/~parasc2/ds/articles/CIAparapsychology.htm

Price's remote viewing (RV) operation, and the strangedevelopments in the U.S. intelligence community that set the stagefor psychic spying, were described in detail as far back as 1977.But the astonishing story of the CIA's plunge into the paranormalwas then available to a limited audience -- in fact, it was restrictedto CIA eyes only.

A classified history of the CIA's attempts to utilize RV forespionage purposes appeared in Studies in Intelligence, theagency's internal journal on the tricks of the spy trade. Released tothe public in 1996, the report has gone largely unnoticed in its filebox at the National Archives facility in University Park, Maryland.

Titled "Parapsychology in Intelligence: A Personal Review andConclusions," the report was authored by Dr. Kenneth A. Kress, aCIA engineer with the agency's Office of Technical Services(OTS). Kress managed the day-to-day operations of the project,and became one of the best known CIA parapsychology buffs.Working in this capacity, Kress held what might be the rarest ofCIA jobs, that of paranormal project officer.

RV was a natural choice for theintelligence officer with a yen for weirdscience. The technique is a form of extra-sensory perception (ESP), a purportedpsychic phenomenon that has stirredheated debate among scientists. If RVcould be verified as a viable way of"seeing" far-off people and places, Kressand others reasoned, the CIA (or perhapsthe KGB!) would have the ultimate spy weapon in hand. Mentalpowers, properly focused, could circumvent the enemy's secrecyand security measures completely.

Jim Schnabel, an investigative reporter from England, notes in hisbook Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's PsychicSpies that Kress was "in some ways the father of America'sremote-viewing program." Who better, then, to recount the originsand demise of the CIA's RV program? Kress' report is richlydetailed, offering not only his own observations as a key player inthe program, buy also the analysis of several other CIA officerswho became involved.

After briefly reviewing CIA-sponsored explorations ofpsychokinetics (the ability to affect physical objects with mentalpowers), Kress devotes most of the report to RV matters. Hereveals some interesting background by mentioning that the CIAhad ventured into the study of ESP a decade before his projects

9/1/2013 6:33 PM! Parapsychology in Intelligence: The Rise and Fall of the CIA's Psychic Spies

Page 3 of 5http://dagmar.lunarpages.com/~parasc2/ds/articles/CIAparapsychology.htm

began. He notes a 1961 study of the phenomenon secretlycontracted "under the auspices of Project ULTRA" -- the CIAprogram of mind and behavior control experiments morecommonly known as MKULTRA. The study, by OxfordUniversity's Stephen Abrams, "claimed ESP was demonstrated butnot understood or controllable."

As Kress tells it, it was Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, twophysicists in the employ of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI),who "re-awakened CIA research in parapsychology." SRI, aCalifornia-based research group that has long handled scientifictasks for military and intelligence agencies, would conduct muchof the CIA's RV work. The ball got rolling in early 1972, whenTarg and Puthoff convinced the Office of Technical Services toinvest $874 in a small psychic research project.

The test went well, and soonOTS had committed andadditional $2,500. By the endof the year, OTS was fully onboard with the psychicresearch effort, upping itsinvestment to $50,000.

Eventually the CIA would spend some $750,000 on research anddevelopment of psychic spying skills, according to news reportspublished in the 1990s.

In Kress' account, we can see the rancorous debates that fundingsuch projects caused at CIA headquarters. In the mid-1970s, topofficials were so beleaguered by scandal that they had littleenthusiasm for weird-sounding endeavors like the RV spy ops. Atone important juncture in the experiments, Kress writes, WilliamColby, then the CIA's Deputy Director of Operations, and CIADirector James Schlesinger decided that "the project was toosensitive and potentially embarrassing" to pursue. With the agencyunder heavy fire for its role in the Watergate scandal, this strangeform of spy craft was seen as yet another risky political liabilityfor the agency.

Looking back on the context of his RV work, Kress would notewith a bit of humor: "As Project Officer, clearly my sense oftiming had not been guided by useful paranormal abilities!"

Yet the RV project went forward, albeit in halting, unsure steps.Operational experiments using Pat Price, the psychic spy Kresscalled "our best subject," produced some arguably useful results."In general, most of Price's data were wrong or could not beevaluated," Kress reported. "He did, nevertheless, produce someamazing descriptions."

In late 1975, Price's CIAhandlers asked him to envisionseveral sites in Libya using RV.

9/1/2013 6:33 PM! Parapsychology in Intelligence: The Rise and Fall of the CIA's Psychic Spies

Page 4 of 5http://dagmar.lunarpages.com/~parasc2/ds/articles/CIAparapsychology.htm

In November 1976, CIADirector George Bush

became concerned aboutSoviet advances in

parapsychology and calledthe agency's RV

researchers for a briefing.

Price spotted clandestinetraining centers for guerrillafighters and underwaterdemolition teams. His findingswere confirmed byreconnaissance photos, and theCIA's RV unit was hopeful thatthe program would survivebased on the success of theLibya operation. But just whenthings were looking up, the RVintelligence collection programwas dealt a fatal blow: Pricesuffered a heart attack and died,and the program waseffectively shut down.

The CIA/RV story did not endwith Price's demise, however.Some senior officials kept aneye on the phenomenon. Kress reports that in November of 1976,CIA Director George Bush became concerned about reportedSoviet advances in parapsychology, and called in the agency's RVresearchers for a briefing. (Such concerns often provided theimpetus for U.S. government parapsychology research; the fearthat the Soviets were getting ahead in the mind-war game waswidespread among paranormal enthusiasts at military andintelligence agencies.)

In late 1995, the CIA finally fessed up to its secret involvement inparapsychology projects, and commissioned a report by privateanalysts to evaluate the merits of the RV method. (Click here toread the report and an overview by Enigma editor D. Trull.) ACIA public statement on the matter said that the agency'sexperiments with the technique were "always consideredspeculative and controversial."

Though the CIA seems to have all but abandoned RV in the mid-1970s, various Defense Department offices picked up thetechnique and examined and employed it much more extensivelythan the agency had. Since the 1995 revelations a number of mediareports, memoirs, and investigative history books have revealedthat several government agencies used psychic spying, withoccasional apparent successes, to search out far more than justenemy research facilities. RV targets included U.S. hostages inforeign countries, Soviet submarines under the sea, and evensecrets stashed in U.S. government filing cabinets (an effort todetermine if the Soviets could conceivably do the same thing).

Psychic spying even caught the attention of the White House. In1996, former President Jimmy Carter revealed that during thisadministration, the government used RV to locate a downed U.S.spy plane. (Click here for a report on Carter's comments.)

9/1/2013 6:33 PM! Parapsychology in Intelligence: The Rise and Fall of the CIA's Psychic Spies

Page 5 of 5http://dagmar.lunarpages.com/~parasc2/ds/articles/CIAparapsychology.htm

By the time the programs ground to a halt, the DefenseDepartment had invested an estimated $20 million in RV andrelated pursuits. While the military's interest in the programs hadfluctuated over the years, the Pentagon was prodded on by a packof paranormal-minded politicians in the U.S. Congress.

So is there real potential for parapsychology in intelligenceoperations? Kress' final analysis of the CIA's short-lived RV workwas both hopeful and regretful. "Tantalizing but incomplete datahave been generated by CIA-sponsored research," he concluded.The agency never definitively determined if psychic spying works,he wrote, because "circumstances, biases, and fear of ridiculeprevented CIA from completing a scientific investigation ofparapsychology and its relevance to national security."

Want to know more?Click here to read Kress' full report, "Parapsychology inIntelligence." Two excellent Web resources contain extensiveinformation and declassified documents on government RVprograms: see the Remote Viewing/Mind Control Index and theStar Gate Documents page.

© Copyright 1998 ParaScope, Inc.

Document: Parapsychology in IntelligenceRelated Article: Operation Star GateDossier: Covert Ops & Secret Documents

ParaScope site jump