The CIA and the Occult

How the US Government Came to Practice the Occult

Fans of the Netflix series, Stranger Things, are familiar with the idea. The government picks a top secret facility, takes subjects and places them in extreme isolation, then uses them to do what seems like magical things. They can travel outside of the body. They can move things with their minds. They can communicate telepathically. But this is all fiction right?

It is nothing of the sort. In fact, the truth is incredibly close to what you see in Stranger Things. The CIA and other government agencies did indeed seek to harness the powers of ‘parapsychology’, mediums, psychics, and mystics. And contrary to much of the press you hear on the subject, they concluded it was real. They concluded that people could stop hearts with their minds. They concluded people could bend objects with their minds. They concluded that people could remote view. They concluded people could see into top secret locations with their minds.

I have written already about the way that science and the occult have coexisted as a strange set of twins but the modern effort to weaponize the occult took on new urgency in the wake of World War II. As relations between the Soviet Union and the United States soured, both sides sought any possible way to gain the upper hand. The Soviet Union was able to develop the nuclear bomb. There was a race to get satellites in space to spy from the sky. There was a race to get undercover agents inside enemy operations. And there was a race to harness the power of hitherto unknown forces such as remote viewing, mind reading, and psychokinesis. These efforts were all part of the same idea: beat the Soviets and beat the Chinese. Don’t allow the means to get in the way of the end goal: national security.

The effort started in part after realizing that the Nazis had been attempting to harness the power of the occult. The Third Reich’s association with the occult went back to its founding by individuals from the Thule Society, an esoteric group dedicated to studying the mythological origins of the Aryan race. Hitler at times expressed reservations about the superstitious nature of occult efforts but others in his administration had fewer qualms. There is evidence that Himmler, Bormann, Goebbels, Goering and Hess all dabbled in it.

But then what kicked the desire to explore the occult into high gear was when the US intelligence learned that the Soviets were researching it. The Soviets had performed tests on people who could apparently use telekinesis to stop the hearts of frogs and perform other inexplicable feats. This revelation scared members of the CIA as they feared that the US might fall behind in cutting edge technology. Later, China also appeared to enter the field and this further accelerated the effort.

In what follows, I will give a few examples of tests that the CIA and other government organizations performed in this field. But what must be understood is that the CIA took the effort seriously, devoted money and resources to it, and concluded it was real.

Let’s start with the curious case of Uri Geller.

Uri Geller is an Israeli national who gained global fame for his apparently supernatural abilities. He has the ability to bend small metal objects with his mind. He has the ability to guess numbers that people are thinking of. He claims that supernatural abilities have accompanied him since his childhood. His mother once said in an interview that Geller’s strange psychokinetic effects were present from the age of seven when it was observed that watches would stop when he put them on. As a child he impressed friends by mentally bending forks. Geller in his teenage years impressed people with his ability to locate lost things and mentally discern inaccessible information including helping a man locate ancient artifacts in Israel, outing a spy by supposed mind reading, and other inexplicable acts of mental power. Geller has had some public failures and embarrassments including his appearance on the Tonight Show. He also has an overall style that is a bit showy (giving the impression of a magician rather than a mystic). For these reasons, many dismiss him as a charlatan.

But the CIA didn’t.

In fact, many within the CIA concluded that his powers in the paranormal were likely real. Declassified documents show that they were concerned that if his abilities were real such powers could represent a threat to national security. Among other skills, Geller’s apparent psychokinetic abilities were concerning. He could bend metal using his mind alone, remotely fix or disable electronic equipment, and cause objects to appear and disappear. While working with scientists in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Geller apparently caused computers to crash, magnetic tape to become demagnetized, and to place words in the minds of people.

In order to test his ability, the CIA conducted tests. In one test, they would see if Geller could interfere with the beam. Second, they would place magnetic computer cards inside a sealed lead container to see if Geller could affect them. The now declassified results were that “The magnetic pattern stored in the iron oxide layer of a magnetic program card was erased.” The conclusion of the scientists was, “from a close distance, Geller could affect matter and materials.”

They conducted other tests on Geller. In Annie Jacobsen’s Phenomena, she writes of another test conducted on Geller,

According to the scientists, Geller’s tests with dice were among the most statistically significant. In these tests, he sat sequestered in a room with Puthoff and Targ while an SRI researcher in a separate room placed a single square die inside a closed metal box. The sealed box was brought into Geller’s room, then shaken by a technician, and placed on the table in front of Geller. “Mr. Geller would then look at the box without touching it and call out which die face he believed was uppermost,” states the declassified CIA Progress Report. “Geller gave the correct answer each of the 8 times the experiment was performed. The probability that this could have occurred by chance alone is approximately one in a million,” the scientists informed the CIA.

In another experiment, Geller sat locked in an acoustically and electrically shielded room and researchers would randomly select a word from the dictionary. They would draw the word outside the room Geller was in and then ask him to draw what was on the paper. And while sometimes Geller failed other times he would almost exactly match what they had drawn.

One interesting thing about the Geller studies is the effect he appeared to have on the researchers involved. The Livermore scientists were required to report anything unusual that had happened as they entered the building each morning. As Geller was being tested, several of the engineers reported seeing highly unusual things. They listed things like items flying across the room, flashing lights, and orbs. Other hallucinations were more vivid with one person seeing a raven in his room and another seeing a floating arm (and shockingly this was also seen by his wife). The engineers were given tests to see if they were losing sanity but passed.

In the end, a CIA document concluded that Geller “demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner.”

Another amazing case of a psychic who was tested by the CIA under very controlled conditions and apparently passed was a man named Ingo Swann. Swann had already been tested in various states in which he showed apparent ability to remotely view things out of sight. But when the CIA paid for him to be brought into Stanford Research Institute in 1972, they wanted the test to be flawless. The test they devised to evaluate his telekinetic capabilities was this. They would use a magnetometer for quark experiments that was located in the basement of a building named Varian Physics Hall. In order to isolate the inputs to the machine, it was built into the floor of the basement, buried below five feet of cement. As Swann entered the hall, he was met by a roomful of interested scientists but had no ability to see the buried machine. Only a chart recorder that scribbled across a scroll of paper. Unperturbed, the magnetometer registered a straight line. The scientists then explained how it worked and examined the chart recorder’s print out for the past hour that showed no noise or variation.

Swann asked what the machine looked like. But they explained that it was buried and could not be seen. This angered Swaan who wondered aloud how he could be expected to affect a machine that he could not even see. But when he saw the smirks of skeptical scientists he decided to try anyway. He started by asking for paper and then tried to visualize the machine (that he had not seen, was classified, and he had no conceivable way to access naturally). He began to sketch the magnetometer. He pointed to his drawing and asked if it was it. He then said, “If so, I think I can see it quite well.” At that moment, the chart recorder gave a small jerk. For a moment, the pen paused and then began lifting again high above its previously uninterrupted line. The previously skeptical scientists gasped and let out exclamations. One of the doctoral students in the room got spooked and ran from the room.

As the CIA became more convinced of Swann’s abilities, they tried new tests of his “remote viewing” capabilities. This time, they decided to see if he could view things based on geolocation coordinates. The scientist conducting the test asked an unrelated government employee to choose geolocation coordinates that meant something to him personally. The man chose the location of his family’s cabin that he had spent summers in as a child. He wrote down: 38˚ 23′ 45-48″ N, 79˚ 25′ 00″ W. Swann was then placed in a Faraday cage and asked to describe what was at the coordinates. His initial description was,

““There seems to be some sort of mounds and rolling hills. There is a city to the north. This seems to be a strange place, somewhere like the lawns one would find around a military base, but I get the impression that there are either some old bunkers around, or maybe this is a covered reservoir. There must be a flagpole, some highways to the west, possibly a river over to the far east, to the south more city.”

Later he added,

“Cliffs to the east, fence to the north. There’s a circular building (a tower?), buildings to the south. Is this a former Nike base or something like that?…There is something strange about this area, but since I don’t know particularly what to look for within the scope of this cloudy ability, it is extremely difficult to make decisions on what is there and what is not. Imagination seems to get in the way. For example I seem to get the impression of something underground but I’m not sure.”

Swann’s remote viewing observations were strangely independently repeated (with even more detail) by a second psychic named Pat Price who added the additional information that there was an accordion door.

But when these observations were given to the man who had provided the coordinates, he laughed. This was nothing like his cabin. The psychics had failed.

That weekend, one of the scientists on the project happened to be near the coordinates as he traveled with his family on a weekend outing. He said,

“I found the cabin. I found the dirt road. Then I drove down the road a little further and I found a secure military facility. I saw the flagpole [described]. I saw the circular drive. I saw the building with the accordion door.”

He was looking at a classified military facility called the Naval Radio Station, Sugar Grove. This facility was run by the NSA and was established to intercept international electronic intelligence. It was right down the road from the family summer cabin. He had no idea it was there.

When the report was given to the CIA, the details given by Swann and Price were so accurate that they assumed an intelligence breach had occurred and they sent agents to investigate a possibly treasonous violation of espionage.

The second psychic in this study above was named Pat Price. Price became one of the most impressive psychics studied by the CIA. In a remarkable study, Price was asked to remotely identify numbers written down on a piece of paper by a researcher in an airplane. At a prearranged time, the researcher would write down three sets of three digit numbers and place them in his breast pocket. Price, from the ground, would try to perceive the numbers. Price got the numbers right.

Interestingly, Price stated that the task had been harder than expected because there had been a geometric shape or symbol blocking the numbers as he had been trying to see them. He said that it made him physically ill. When asked to draw the symbol, he drew a variation of a cross. As he said this, the researcher who had written the numbers pulled out a necklace that he had been wearing revealing a similar looking cross dangling from it.

There were many other remarkable efforts by other psychics that are thought to have helped find hostages, downed planes, and sunken ships. The purpose of what I have written above is not to say that any individual case must be viewed as real or not. Nor is it even my case that any of the cases were real (although I certainly lean that way). Instead, my point is that the CIA viewed these occult practices as real. They tried them and far from concluding that they were false, they concluded they were real. Even when they (supposedly) shut down the program in 1995, they didn’t state that they were doing so due to a lack of results but instead were doing so based on a lack of an explanation for the results. In the end, they never disagreed with the statement made in a CIA report on the program from 1975 that stated, “A large body of reliable experimental evidence points to the inescapable conclusion that extrasensory perception does exist as a real phenomenon.”

And perhaps most remarkable is that the CIA viewed these occult practices as just another form of science and technology. They clothed their language in scientific coverings, discouraged behavior that would seem too occultish, and tried to explain things using natural explanations as best they could. But questions of morality and the dark arts were never a significant barrier for those involved. They viewed the objective of staying ahead of Russia and China of more importance than any religious considerations. They viewed the ends much more important than the means.

Sources

1- Most of these accounts came from Annie Jacobsen’s excellent Phenomena. I highly recommend that anyone interested in government experiments in the paranormal read this book.

2- In 2017, the CIA declassified 12 million pages of previously unreleased records about the paranormal programs (eventually known as Project Star Gate). You can access those here: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/