Are you intrigued by the possibility of psychic powers? You’re not alone.
The first recorded demonstration of psychic “second sight” took place in a darkened room — a theater — in 1785. A man named Chevalier Pinetti exhibited the clairvoyant powers of his wife, who sat blindfolded near the front of the stage, describing articles in the possession of the audience.
Before Mrs. Pinetti got into the act, her magician husband did a similar trick with an 18-inch-tall automated figure he called Grand Sultan or sometimes Wise Little Turk. It answered questions by striking a bell.
The wooden-headed Turk probably had more sense than the U.S. intelligence officials in the 1970s who put hundreds of “psychics” on the government payroll over two decades. Their job: to “see” with psychic powers while sitting in a house in Maryland.
With just a little bit of research, these intelligence officials would have known that “second sight” has been debunked, as well as performed, by many fine magicians. The best performers used multiple methods in the same act, which helped to keep the audience baffled.
But you’d hope that intelligence professionals, of all people, would not be baffled by the long-published secrets of “second sight” trickery. It ought to be part of the job to distinguish reliable sources of information from deceitful ones.
The record says otherwise.
In January, the CIA put its archive of declassified documents online. Now everyone can read about the psychic sideshow that was known by various code names over the years, including “Stargate” and “Grill Flame.”
In 1979, after Iranian militants took Americans hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, the Pentagon’s intelligence services turned to the psychics for help. “Remote viewing” sessions were conducted in an attempt to gain useful intelligence about where the hostages were being held, whether they were in good health, and even how a planned rescue mission could have a greater chance of success.
The hostages were finally released in January, 1981, and they were interviewed extensively by intelligence officers about their ordeal.
The “remote viewing” reports from the psychics were compared with the real facts.
An Air Force colonel on the staff of the Joint Chiefs wrote a scathing summary, pointing out that of 202 reports from the Grill Flame psychics, “only seven” turned out to be correct. More than 100 were “entirely incorrect.” About five dozen reports had a mixture of right and wrong information.
But the intelligence officers running the Grill Flame operation pushed back against criticism, insisting that 45 percent of the reports contained at least some accurate information. “The degree of success appears to at least equal, if not surpass, other collection methods,” they wrote.
That should make everybody feel safe.
The taxpayers were fleeced for another 14 years before the psychic intelligence program was finally shut down in 1995, probably because the Washington Post heard about it. If not for the Post’s sources, we might still be paying spoon-benders like Uri Geller to read the minds of intelligence officers four blocks away.
If the military didn’t make everybody get up so early in the morning, they might have seen Uri Geller’s credibility totally destroyed in 1973 by “Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson, who, acting on a tip from magician and skeptic James Randi, gave Geller a different set of spoons and metal objects than the ones he brought with him. No spoon-bending or psychic phenomena happened that night, as Geller squirmed for two segments.
Fake sorcery isn’t harmless when it pretends to be real. “Psychic” Sylvia Browne tormented grieving families with bogus “visions,” like the time she told a woman that her abducted six-year-old granddaughter was alive but had been sold into sex slavery. Or the time she told a mother that her missing daughter was dancing in an “adult entertainment nightclub” in Los Angeles. She caused fresh anguish for many families by telling them, usually on television, that their missing loved ones were alive. None of these victims were alive.
One study in 2010 of Browne’s accuracy rate found that in 115 cases, she was right zero times, wrong 25 times, and in 90 cases the outcome was still unknown.
That’s enough wiggle room for people who want to believe it’s all real. Even the Grill Flame program is defended by some who participated in it, like Joseph McMoneagle, who told the Miami Herald the CIA hasn’t yet declassified the records of their successes.
Well, we’ll keep checking. The archive is online here: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/crest-25-year-program-archive
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