14 THE UNBELIEVERS
When it came up, I was embarrassed to mention to my superiors that there were people in my part of the establishment who thought there was something to it.
- Lieutenant General Daniel O. Graham, DIA director, 1975-76, recalling his agency's initial involvement in psi research
That data could have been [fabricated] by anybody, at any place, at any time. . . . I think it was absolute nonsense.
- Sam Koslov, former scientific adviser to the secretary of the navy, explaining the reasoning behind his termination of an SRI contract in 1976
WHATEVER PSI HORRORS SOVIET BLOC RESEARCHERS PERPETRATED or planned, at least they believed in psi, and could talk about it freely with scientific colleagues. The same wasn't true in the West. Although most American and European scientists privately seemed open-minded about the possibility of psi (if questioned by poll takers), very few were prepared to stand up for the paranormal before their brethren. Psi might have been embraced by ordinary culture, but it had mostly been expelled from scientific culture. In fact, the mainstream scientists who were really evangelical on the subject of psi tended to be the unbelievers, the skeptics - for whom parapsychology as a whole was not a legitimate area of research but a "pathological science," full of fraud and delusion and sloppy experimentation.
One such skeptic was a CIA employee named Laura Dickens. As reports came in, from Richard Kennett and Ken Kress and others, of miraculous remote-viewing results out at SRI, she decided to investigate for herself. She flew out from Washington, and told Puthoff, up front, that she had come to debunk his research.
Puthoff, in his measured, mild-mannered way, decided that he would convert Dickens to a more positive view of psi. It wouldn't be easy. He began by allowing her to observe while Duane Elgin did an outbound remote-viewing session. Afterwards, with the transcript of Elgin's comments in hand, Dickens, Elgin, Targ, and Puthoff went out to the site. Elgin's description clearly matched the site, but Dickens wasn't impressed. "It's got to be a trick," she told Puthoff.
The following day, so the story goes, Dickens and Puthoff were the outbound experimenters. They took randomly chosen site directions from Bart Cox, and went out to the site.
Now, the previous day, Dickens had suspected that a car or even a helicopter had followed the outbound experimenters and had secretly conveyed the site data back to Elgin at SRI. So on this day, Dickens waited with Puthoff for fifteen of the thirty minutes they were supposed to stay at the site. She guessed that the car or helicopter would be long gone by then. Then she said, "Okay, let's get into the car and go to another site." Puthoff complained that Dickens was tampering with their standard protocol, but she insisted, and they drove over to another site of her choosing. When the thirty minutes were up, they returned to SRI.
Elgin, they discovered, had still been on target. He had accurately described the first site, and had noted the fact that the experimenters were unexpectedly getting into a car in the middle of the session. He had then gone on to describe the second site. Laura Dickens said she wanted to think about this overnight.
While Dickens pondered her next move, Puthoff and Targ conferred on the matter. They agreed that Dickens was going to be a hard sell. The seeing-is-believing treatment hadn't worked. It looked as if they would have to try doing-is-believing.
The next morning Dickens arrived at SRI. Puthoff and Targ were in the remote-viewing room, which was otherwise empty. "Where's the remote viewer?" Dickens wanted to know.
"You are the remote viewer," explained Puthoff.
"You've got to be kidding," said Dickens. "I don't believe in this bullshit. I'm not going to do this."
Puthoff and Targ argued that whatever Dickens's beliefs might be, this would be an ideal way for her to experience the experimental protocol from the viewer's end. After further protests, Dickens finally agreed to try it out. Puthoff went to Cox, got the site, drove out to it, and waited there for the requisite half hour. Meanwhile Targ sat in the viewing room with Dickens.
"Close your eyes and tell me what you see," said Targ.
"Okay," said Dickens. "My eyes are closed. It's dark. I see the backs of my eyelids."
"Come on, use your imagination."
"All right, I've got a great imagination. I see a bridge by a stream. But that's just my imagination."
Puthoff came back after a while, and he and Targ took Dickens out to the site. It was a bridge over a little stream in a park on the SRI campus.
Dickens seemed slightly upset. But after a while she regained her composure. She decided that Targ, in the remote-viewing room beforehand, had somehow subliminally cued her about the site. She told Puthoff and Targ that she wanted to do the experiment again, but this time she didn't want Targ in the room with her.
All right, said Puthoff and Targ. They left her in the room, and taped the door shut behind them, to make sure she couldn't accuse them of lax protocols. Puthoff got the directions from Bart Cox and went out to the site. It was a place called Baylands Nature Preserve, in Palo Alto. After the requisite interval, he drove back. He and Targ untaped the door and opened the remote-viewing room.
Dickens was huddled in one corner, her hands over her ears and her notepad tucked up close to her chest, to foil whatever video surveillance cameras or subliminal-suggestion speakers might be hidden in the room.
Puthoff and Targ looked at what she had drawn, smiled, and then took her out to the nature preserve. Again it was obvious that Dickens had hit the site.
Dickens looked unhappy again, but fairly soon her core unbeliefs reasserted themselves, and she decided she knew how the trick had been done. Puthoff and Targ had simply looked at her sketch and then had taken her to the nearest place that matched it.
She told them she wanted to do another site. This time she wanted Puthoff and Targ to go to the site, come back, and tell her what the site was before she showed them her sketches.
All right, said Puthoff and Targ. They taped Dickens into the remote-viewing room again, got a new site assignment from Bart Cox, and drove out to it. The site was a children's playground, about two miles from SRI. There were a number of items there, but one of the most prominent was a spinning circular platform with looping bars, the kind of thing that kids hold on to, screaming, while they try to resist the centrifugal force. It was a kind of mini merry-go-round.
They went back afterwards, and gave Dickens the site directions. It turned out that Dickens had sketched something that looked very like the mini merry-go-round with its looping bars - although as remote viewers often did, she had erroneously analyzed her sketch, deciding it was a cupola that might fit atop a house. However, the visual correspondence between her sketch and the little merry-go-round was so striking that when Puthoff and Targ took Dickens out to the site, she pointed to the little merry-go-round and said, "That's it, isn't it?" And then: "My God, it really works!"
Dickens proved to be one of the best remote viewers SRI ever tested, and soon joined a small in-house informal group of the CIA's own psychic spies.
Puthoff and Targ chalked up another victory, but the battle raged on many fronts, and most skeptics kept themselves at a safe distance from remote-viewing experiments.
Ironically, the two researchers were probably criticized most severely by skeptics inside SRI, who thought their research unseemly and tried - but failed - to have it stopped. Outside SRI, they were portrayed by the science editor of Time, Leon Jaroff, as gullible and sloppy. (According to former Time science writer John Wilhelm, Jaroff privately associated parapsychology with the occult beliefs that had helped give rise to fascism in Europe. Jaroff is said to have concluded that SRI's psi research should "be destroyed.") Even the editors of Nature, where Puthoff and Targ managed to get their first paper published, gave them a chilly reception. In an editorial accompanying the paper, Nature's editors made clear that they didn't regard Puthoff's and Targ's work as particularly solid or convincing. They deconstructed the paper in advance by summarizing the negative comments made by the paper's referees, comments that concerned relatively minor points, even though Puthoff and Targ had apparently addressed these in their final manuscript. This was, to say the least, rare treatment for scientists publishing in Nature.
Puthoff and Targ were kept on the defensive by other critics throughout the 1970s. Some clearly made valid arguments, and forced the SRI researchers to improve their data analysis techniques. (The most serious criticism involved the transcripts of outbound remoteviewing sessions, which judges carried around and tried to match to the list of target sites. It was pointed out that the transcript for a given target sometimes contained references to other targets in the series that already had been remote-viewed. Skeptics argued that this invalidated the experiments, because it enabled the judges to match transcripts to targets simply by looking for such non-psi-related clues in the transcripts. Puthoff and Targ, though admitting that they had erred, maintained that with the inadvertent clues to other targets removed from the transcripts, the rejudged data still suggested the existence of psi. They also pointed out that the compare-and-match procedure they had used, while it simplified the mathematics of the situation, grossly underestimated the real statistical significance of the remote-viewing results. For example, Pat Price had correctly named the Hoover Tower target; the actual odds against naming such a target purely by chance, they argued, had to be astronomical, if they were even calculable.) But no matter how dramatic the results the two men published, errors were always postulated, even if they couldn't be found, and the scientific consensus would always seem to be that remote viewing's existence was "unproved."
This popular scientific bias against psi made it easy for doubters to attack the SRI work on relatively non-scientific grounds. Some would even hint that there was a religious conspiracy afoot. As Leon Jaroff put it, in a Time cover story on psi in early 1974, Hal Puthoff and Ingo Swann were members of "the bizarre and controversial cult of Scientology."
It was true, although to be fair, both men had joined Scientology back in the sixties, a time when it had been much less controversial. (Scientology was invented by L. Ron Hubbard, the meaty-faced son of a Nebraska farmer. In his early years Hubbard drifted from place to piece, writing science fiction, spinning tall tales, performing outrageous occult rituals, and generally building a reputation as a ne'er-do-well. He eventually wrote a book, Dianetics, in which he argued, in effect, that most human ailments and inadequacies are psychological in nature. Suddenly, Hubbard was mobbed by followers who were eager to improve themselves by practicing Dianetics. In 1953, Hubbard turned his relatively loose Dianetics organization into a formal religion, the Church of Scientology. By the early 1970s, Scientology would be a major international operation, run by Hubbard from a ship called the Apollo which cruised international waters. By the late 1970s, the Church of Scientology had had various run-ins with the U.S. government, and was under attack from a variety of angry former Scientologists.) A Scientology "mission," in those days, would merely have seemed like one of many places where suitably inclined people could go to try to enrich their inner lives. Through a series of (expensive) courses, Scientology adherents were supposed to learn to get rid of phobias, repressed traumas, and other mental noise, freeing their minds and giving them irresistible confidence and power. Scientology seemed particularly attractive to people who were both spiritually and technically oriented, probably because it combined Eastern religious themes of reincarnation and introspection with Western themes of predestination, ethical rigor, and self-improvement through science and technology. It was, arguably, a severely mutated form of Protestantism, gone amok in the machine age.
Puthoff resigned his Scientology membership in the mid-1970s, and thereafter lent his support to a group of anti-Scientologists, who criticized the church for what they believed was indeed a conspiratorial, cult-like atmosphere. Swann would later resign from Scientology, too. Still, Scientology had a remarkably strong foothold among high-tech professionals on the West Coast. At SRI, there seemed to be Scientologists everywhere. Pat Price, up to his death, had been deeply involved in Scientology. That was how Puthoff had known him; they had met at a Scientology course in Los Angeles. One of Puthoff's lab assistants was a Scientologist. Astronaut Edgar Mitchell, whose private foundation had funded some of SRI's work with Geller, had briefly taken an interest in Scientology. Even Pat Price's coal company deal had Scientology connections. A senior company official had recovered from a serious illness, he believed, through the help of Scientological techniques, and later he had tried to use those techniques to "cure" his company of its corporate problems. He had heard about Price on the Scientology grapevine.
One of the central doctrines of the Church of Scientology was that human beings have innate psi abilities. Thus the view circulated, among some psi critics, that Scientologists should never be trusted to conduct psi experiments impartially. Negative results were against their religion. Puthoff, backed up by Targ, who was not a Scientologist, emphasized that in the laboratory he was a scientist first and foremost. Within a year or two of the Leon Jaroff article, Puthoff left Scientology anyway. But some of the mud stuck, and even two decades later, observers of the remote-viewing scene would still whisper in disapproving tones about the Scientology connection.
The heaviest blow in those years had little to do with anyone's religious beliefs. And it came from the otherwise supportive CIA.
As Agency analyst Richard Kennett saw it, remote viewing was clearly a genuine phenomenon. He himself had served as a remote-viewing beacon for Pat Price several times, and could never be a complete skeptic again. Still, Kennett wasn't sure it was wise to continue funding the remote-viewing program, at least not in its present form.
The problem, for Kennett, was that out of all the psychics evaluated at SRI and the CIA, only Pat Price had come close to being accurate and reliable enough for regular intelligence use, and even then, he had often been defeated by the giggle factor. In any case, as of the summer of 1975, Price was dead and gone.
Short of finding another super-psychic, Kennett believed, SRI would have to develop the remote-viewing phenomenon itself, making it more accurate and reliable even when used by relatively ordinary people. But he knew that getting to that magical point would require more than just a few years of off-the-cuff funding. The only thing he thought could be justified was a large-scale, long-term program, involving a lot of money, serious in-depth neuropsychological studies of psychics, and numerous, rigorous remote-viewing experiments.
As he knew, the CIA wasn't going to be able to handle that kind of program in the increasingly volatile political climate of the mid-1970s. Plans for large-scale experimentation on human subjects by the CIA, involving brain-wave monitoring and talk of ESP, would be on the front page of The New York Times, accompanied by howls of derision and protest, before SRI ever saw a dime of new funding.
The reason for this was simple. In the wake of the Watergate scandal, Congress had begun to exercise an unprecedented scrutiny over executive branch operations, particularly CIA operations. The CIA's "skeletons" were being dragged out of the closet, embarrassing the Agency with fantastically lurid revelations. For example, it emerged that in the 1950s and 1960s, under a group of about 200 projects collectively code-named MKULTRA, (MKULTRA subproject 136, oddly enough, had involved ESP research, under academic cover. Apparently it had been relatively inconsequential.) the CIA had tried to devise-and in some cases had used-exotic assassination weapons, including chemical toxins, biological agents, and even radio-guided animals filled with bombs.
In addition, believing that the Soviets had secretly devised some kind of mind-control drug, (At the Moscow show-trials of the late Stalin era, some celebrated defendants had behaved in such a way that CIA officials suspected they had been brainwashed and "re-programmed" to actually believe the false stones they were telling. Such fears inspired not only MKULTRA but also the famous novel and film The Manchurian Candidate.) the Agency had done extensive experiments of its own with strong mind-altering substances, including LSD. One group of subjects was kept on LSD continuously for seventy-seven days to see if they could be brainwashed. An Army researcher named Frank Olson took LSD at an informal gathering with CIA and Army officials, and later underwent strong personality changes; he committed suicide a few weeks later, jumping to his death from a New York hotel room. It was rumored that a number of suspected Soviet double agents also died after being subjected, without their knowledge, to experimental drugs while in CIA custody.
MKULTRA had been run by the Agency's Technical Services Staff and its bureaucratic successor, the Technical Services Division (TSD) - later known as the Office of Technical Service. One of the key figures in these projects was Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, still the head of TSD in late 1972, when the division awarded Hal Puthoff his first psi research contract.
Though Gottlieb's MKULTRA work had been approved at the highest levels, he would come to be seen, in congressional hearings in the mid and late 1970s, as the personification of a CIA running out of control. He had been the one who put LSD in Frank Olson's drink. He also had travelled to Africa in 1960 to try to assassinate Congolese nationalist Patrice Lumumba with a biological agent, and had later tried to kill an Iraqi colonel by mailing him a handkerchief soaked with a powerful toxin (both men had died before Gottlieb's gifts reached them). Gottlieb had also been the scientist at the center of the CIA's attempts to kill Fidel Castro; the weapons he had devised for those ill-fated attempts included pills with botulinum toxin, a poison pen, a poison dart gun, and bacterial powder that was to have been sprayed into the Cuban leader's scuba-diving wet suit.
In the summer of 1973 TSD was transferred out of the Directorate for Operations and became OTS, under the Directorate for Science and Technology. Gottlieb took the opportunity to retire from the Agency (John McMahon took his place as the head of the new OTS), but the storm over the CIA's skeletons was just beginning to break. William Colby, who became the director of central intelligence a few months later, spent much of his time trying to cope with attacks on the Agency from Congress, and eventually ordered the CIA to get rid of as many politically sensitive projects as it could.
OTS was still involved in a number of highly sensitive projects, not just the remnants of MKULTRA but other projects which even now have not been exposed. John McMahon was relatively enthusiastic about the potential of remote viewing, but by the time Pat Price died, it was decided that funding remote-viewing research was one potential liability OTS would have to do without. There were no further contracts for SRI from the Agency, and the CIA's informal group of in-house remote viewers gradually broke up. When McMahon moved to another post in 1976, he was replaced at the helm of OTS by a man named Dave Brandwyne, who was not at all sympathetic towards remote viewing. Brandwyne came down hard on OTS engineer Ken Kress for his involvement in the program and his attempts to arrange a new contract for SRI. He made it clear to Kress, and to Hal Puthoff, that he was not about to let OTS get back into the remote-viewing business. "If I say no a hundred percent of the time," he told Puthoff, "I'll be right eighty percent of the time."
More sympathetic CIA officials, such as John McMahon, Ken Kress, and Norm Everheart, managed to stay in touch with the SRI program, and later the Fort Meade unit. But in terms of political exposure, the CIA was to keep an increasingly low profile, encouraging other, less vulnerable agencies to take the lead in funding and promoting the espionage use of psi.
In late 1974, when the second and last CIA contract began to run out, Puthoff and Targ faced the prospect of a severe funding drought. They were forced to go on the road, giving presentation after presentation in Washington, displaying their results, virtually begging for funds. Sometimes their audience turned thumbs down on the spot. At other times they showed enthusiasm, made promises, but didn't have the political power to come through with actual budget allocations. And when they weren't doing presentations, it seemed, Puthoff and Targ were battling skeptics inside and outside SRI. Puthoff regularly worked eighty-hour weeks, and several times his (second) marriage nearly ended.
The two researchers also spent time collaborating on a book, a popular account of their work that they titled Mind Reach. Aside from the usual literary considerations, they hoped it would generate the large- scale funding interest that their presentations in Washington had not yet been able to do.
At one low point, word reached Puthoff and Targ, then in Washington, that their jobs at SRI were on the line. They had to return to Menlo Park with a promise of funding, or else.
Puthoff and Targ's literary agent was a woman named Roslyn Targ, who happened to be Russell's stepmother. She also represented Richard Bach, author of the best- seller Jonathan Livingston Seagull. She told the two scientists that Bach, whose book had been inspired by some unusual, out-of-body-ish experiences, might be interested in what they were doing at SRI. A meeting was arranged, and Puthoff and Targ flew down to Florida to meet Bach at his home.
It turned out that Bach had an amazing place, with model airplanes hanging everywhere from the ceiling so that one felt as if one were drifting with them through the atmosphere. Anyhow, Puthoff and Targ laid it out for him: They were doing some paradigm-smashing research, but just now money was tight. Could he spare some?
What Bach thought of this - two high-profile researchers from a respected think tank coming to him for a handout - is unrecorded, but in any case it seems he had a tender heart as well as deep pockets. He donated forty thousand dollars, stipulating only that he be allowed to participate as a remote viewer in an experiment. Puthoff and Targ, now reprieved from early retirement at SRI, agreed.
On his way to a speaking engagement in Hawaii, a few months afterwards, Bach touched his plane down in California and went over to SRI. He sat in the remote-viewing room and did a passable job of remote-viewing Puthoff and his car in Palo Alto. Afterwards he made the by now common observation that whenever he had tried to analyze what he was seeing, he had tended to be wrong. For example, when Puthoff had walked into a church, Bach somehow, through some wild mixture of metaphor, had mistaken the altar for an airline ticket counter, and a gold cross on the wall had been perceived as "the logo of the company . . . it looks like a big gold fleur de list"
When the session was over, Bach flew on to Hawaii, and Puthoff and Targ had their $40,000. That, and a few other similar sums from public and private sources, would be stretched to keep them going over the next couple of years.
One contract, for about $100,000, was sponsored by the Office of Naval Research and concentrated on further EEG-telepathy experiments, along with operational-type remote viewings of submarines and other foreign military targets. Puthoff and Targ and their Navy contract monitor, Lieutenant Commander James Foote, guessed that an obviously ESP-related project might trigger a bad reaction, so they cagily titled the contract "Sensing of Remote EM [electromagnetic] Sources (Physiological Correlates)."
One day in 1976 Sam Koslov, the scientific adviser to the Secretary of the Navy, was reviewing a group of contracts run by the Office of Naval Research when he saw the "Sensing of Remote EM Sources" contract. The title caught his attention. He read it again. Sensing of Remote EM Sources . . .
Koslov became angry. He suspected that "Sensing of Remote EM Sources (Physiological Correlates)" was someone's euphemistic way of describing an electromagnetic mind-control experiment, involving human subjects. The CIA's MKULTRA mind-control experiments were just beginning to explode into scandal. Koslov ordered a private briefing on the "Sensing of Remote EM Sources" project, to find out more about it.
When he got the briefing, he only became angrier. Although the good news was that the SRI experiments were not about mind control, the bad news was that they were about telepathy, with some operational-type remote viewing on the side. To Koslov, a decided psi unbeliever, it might as well have been called witchcraft. He ordered the contract cut off. And when it wasn't cut off as soon as he wanted, he ordered the Navy's inspector general to look into the matter.
Not long after the Navy contract was terminated, (Employees at a Navy lab in San Diego, advised by Puthoff, soon started their own in-house project to experiment with remote viewing - as an underwater communications technique, and as a method for hunting Soviet submarines. That project was eventually shut down too.) Puthoff landed a small contract with Dale Graff, a physicist at the Air Force's Foreign Technology Division. Graff wanted to try to replicate the successful psi communications work that the Soviet Navy - in the wake of the Nautilus story - had reportedly done. He also wanted to explore the leading Soviet hypothesis regarding psi-namely, that it was transmitted via extremely-low-frequency (ELF) electromagnetic waves.
An opportunity to conduct experiments covering both of these areas arose in July 1977, thanks to Stephan Schwartz, a former Navy officer who was now a successful Los Angeles businessman and psi enthusiast. Schwartz wanted to see if he could use remote viewers to find previously undiscovered shipwrecks off the California coast. He persuaded Ingo Swann and Hella Hammid to serve as his remote viewers.
Swann and Hammid started by psychically scanning maps that Schwartz had provided, to try to find anything interesting. They settled on a relatively small area near Santa Catalina Island, thirty miles southwest of Los Angeles, and sketched various shipboard items they thought would be at the site.
For the next part of the venture Schwartz hired a submersible from the University of Southern California's marine lab. He wanted Swann and Hammid to go down in the submersible, to help him zero in on the wreck site. They agreed to do so and eventually found some debris that suggested they had hit the right wreck. But by arrangement with Schwartz, they also used the submersible to conduct some experiments for Graff's secret Air Force contract.
At a prearranged time, an outbound experiment team at SRI went to a randomly chosen target site in the San Francisco Bay Area. Hammid, in the cramped submersible 550 feet beneath the Pacific, tried to pick up impressions of the site the team was visiting. "A very tall looming object," she said. "A very, very huge, tall tree and a lot of space behind them. There almost feels like there is a drop-off or a palisade or a cliff behind them."
At this point, the protocol diverged from the usual outbound experiment. Hammid, within the submersible, was handed a series of six envelopes, containing photographs of separate sites in the Bay Area. One was the target that the SRI team had just visited. Her task was to match her description to the correct target photograph. That turned out to be easy; she picked a photo of a giant oak on a hilltop in Portola Valley. Then she turned over the photograph; on the back, Puthoff or Targ had printed a simple submarine-type signalling message, such as "Surface immediately for satellite communication" or "Proceed to rendezvous A." The message wasn't meant to be acted upon; it was just a dummy message, meant to make the experiment seem more "real." The experiment was, in fact, a kind of associative remote-viewing exercise, in which the usual outbound target sites were associated with specific messages. The aim was to see whether such messages could be "transmitted" accurately through psi, just as in the Nautilus story two decades before.
Later Swann went down in the submersible, to a depth of about 250 feet, while the SRI team went to a new site. Swann described "flat stone flooring, walls, small pool, reddish stone walk, large doors, walking around, an enclosed space." Of the six possible targets, he chose a shopping mall with a pool of water in Mountain View, and copied down the dummy message on the back.
Despite the claustral confines of the submersible, and Hammid's seasickness, and a schedule of work they had quickly fallen behind on, both remote viewers had been right in their choices. America's first direct test of psi for submarine communication had worked perfectly.
After this initial round of experiments, a set of three other remote viewers back at SRI tried to pull information in the other direction. At agreed-upon times, they tried to remote-view photographs contained in envelopes inside the submersible. The target envelopes had been selected by Hammid and Swann, down in the submersible, from a larger set they had brought with them. Back at SRI, the remote viewers tried to match their descriptions of the targets to photographs from the same set. In three tries they got two right.
Aside from pointing to the possibility of psi as an emergency communications system for submarine crews, the experiments had more or less disproved the leading Soviet theory of psi - namely, that it somehow involved extremely-low-frequency (ELF) electromagnetic radiation. At the submersible's depth during the experiments, the seawater should have reduced such ELF waves, at the expected frequencies (which were supposed to be in the same range as brain-wave frequencies), to less than 1 percent of their strength above the ocean. Had the ELF hypothesis been correct, Swann and Hammid should have noticed a major reduction in their remote-viewing accuracy. But their sessions were as quick and as accurate as any they had conducted at short ranges on land. The ELF hypothesis for psi was dead, as far as SRI and its military clients were concerned.
Hal Puthoff soon wrote up the results, and he and Dale Graff briefed them to an undersecretary of the navy, pushing the associative remote-viewing technique they had used as a possible emergency communications system for Navy submarine crews. It wasn't 100 percent reliable, they admitted, but perhaps it could be improved upon, and in any case, it would be very cheap to research and develop.
With the help of the undersecretary, a briefing was arranged at higher levels of the Navy. But before the briefing could be held, Puthoff received word that the Navy was most definitely not interested in discussing remote viewing or any other manifestation of the paranormal. Puthoff later heard that Sam Koslov, once again, had personally intervened prevent any Navy involvement. (The Navy went on to spend billions for the development of a simple, one-way submarine signalling system. Under the project names Sanguine and Seafarer, the system used giant ELF electromagnetic transmitters buried across large stretches of Michigan and Wisconsin. The ELF waves, which were a bit like small-scale seismic waves, could penetrate even to moderate ocean depths, halfway around the planet; their chief drawback was that their frequencies were too low to allow much data to be transmitted at any one time. (It seemed to Puthoff and Graff that much more information was transmissible in a quick remote-viewing session.) At best, the ELF system sent extremely simple messages to submarines, ordering them to surface at such and such a time and location, to pick up more detailed information from a satellite. And the system worked only one-way, from base to submarine. Still, it was probably much more reliable than an RV-based system would have been.)
Late in that summer of 1977 The Washington Post published an article by a science writer named John Wilhelm about the government's attempts to do psychic spying research. Wilhelm cited a few sources who believed in it all, but he included few details, and his tone was cautiously skeptical.
The next day, CIA director Stansfield Turner was asked about the subject at a previously scheduled meeting with reporters. Turner admitted that the intelligence community had done some research in the area, largely in response to reports of Soviet psi research. But he too downplayed the idea of psi, making it sound like an interesting though fruitless escapade. Turner, clearly referring to Pat Price, said that the CIA had once worked with a man who seemed to have some psychic ability. This man had been able to draw pictures of foreign targets he had otherwise never seen, but the drawings, though reasonably accurate, had (Turner claimed) been quite rudimentary. In any case, added Turner with a smirk, "he died, and we haven't heard from him since."
That seemed to end the matter, and from then on, for another decade and a half, little more was said of SRI and psychic spying. One might have guessed that the program had lived, briefly and strangely, like some flower in a midwinter warm spell, but that the natural order of things had soon reasserted itself. One might have guessed that the proponents of psychic spying had been too far ahead of - or misguidedly behind - their time.
But the program lived still; it had merely become a deeper secret.