Can psychic powers be used for detrimental purposes? What are the limits of psychic ability? Certainly some inferences can be obtained by drawing upon the history, the literature, and the folk-wisdom of psi. I sometimes use the term "psionics," taken from the science fiction literature, to describe the applied branch of psi exploration.

Psionics is not particularly concerned with the truth value of scientific, pseudoscientific or religious theories about the nature of psychic functioning. It is concerned with the practical utility of such theories for individual practitioners. It is concerned with reliability, consistency and magnitude of psi effects, not in the laboratory, but in the world of business and professional affairs.
 

Harmful Purposes

Many traditions teach that psychic abilities can only be used for good purposes, for instance healing. Other harmful applications are said either not to work or to rebound back upon the evil-wisher. Dr. Louisa E. Rhine, who had made a lifelong study of spontaneous psychic experiences, took such a stance in responding to the question of a seventh-grade inquirer:

No Nancy, ESP could not possibly be used to hurt anyone physically or mentally. It is true that sometimes people get the false idea that someone is influencing them by ESP. They think it is by telepathy, but this is very unlikely. Telepathy seldom, if ever, works that way, for no one can send his thought to another and make him take it...

The only way a person could be hurt would be by his belief that he could be so affected. It is possible sometimes for a person to "think himself sick" for other reasons and in the same way he could think himself sick by believing that someone was affecting him by telepathy. But, if so, his sickness would be caused by mistaken suggestion, not by telepathy.

Mrs. Rhine's answer is reassuring and also reflects an understanding of the psychological mechanisms involved in mediating psi. It seems quite reasonable to think individuals can reject telepathic suggestions as easily as you, the reader, might reject any statement you read in this book. For an aware and enlightened individual this would certainly be the case. It is also the case that much of what we think of as psychic phenomena is merely due to suggestion.

The anthropological literature regarding tribal cultures indicates that the violation of a taboo and the placement of a hex can result in death within a few days. This has be attributed to an extreme operation of the stress-response syndrome by modern researchers. We might consider the reported instances of deaths, illness, and accidents from hexes, voodoo, spells, and curses to be the result of suggestion. Although, we might just as easily ask ourselves whether, if psi could heal people independently of suggestion, it could not also be used to harm them. Perhaps psi -- like electricity -- is a neutral force from a moral perspective? A number of apparent hexes seem to have occurred without even the knowledge of the victim. 

The research of the Soviet physiologist Leonid Vasiliev suggests that telepathic hypnotic induction may be occasionally instrumental in effective behavior manipulation over distances. Similar telepathic experiments have been used to awaken sleeping subjects, with slightly less success. However, few subjects are so susceptible and we have yet to understand the mechanisms that differentiate good and poor subjects. 
 

National Security Applications

The Bible. In the Bible as related in Kings II, vi, the prophet Elisha used clairvoyant abilities to inform the King of Israel about the battle plans which the king of Syria had formed against him. Informed of Elisha's abilities, the Syrian king sent a host of chariots and horsemen to capture the prophet. However, according to the biblical account, Elisha used his abilities to blind and confuse the Syrians so that they would be captured by the Israelites.

Similar and even more dramatic tales are told of the exodus of the Jewish nation from Egypt; of the original Hebrew conquest of Canaan; and of the subsequent military conquests of Saul, David and Solomon.

Asian Martial Arts. The earliest treatise on warfare, The Art of War, written in 500 b.c. by the Chinese general Sun Tzu, details the intimate link between success in battle and the skilled management of a "force" which was called ch'i. The basic principles are elucidated in this amazing document.

Sun Tzu argues that wars are won through a combination of conventional military tactics and a variety of extraordinary methods which involve the knowledge and control of ch'i, which flows through the body of the warrior and can be used to influence the mind of the enemy to produce illusions, deception and weakness.

The warrior cultivated ch'i through self-knowledge gained by following the mystical Taoist traditions. Mental stillness and other psi-conducive stated enabled the warrior to obtain a poise and concentration so intense that it was effortless in its deadly spontaniety. Such training emphasized the ability to maintain the meditative state in the midst of intense physical activity. The martial arts trained the warrior to take advantage of the slightest break in the enemy's concentration.

Joan of Arc. A peasant girl with no military training, followed her visions and voices to lead the bedraggled armies of France to victory against the English. Many ostensibly miraculous events -- the subject of continuing historical debate -- led to the French Dauphin's appointment of Joan as the titular head of his army. Joan was burned at the stake in 1431 as a witch. In 1456, an ecclesiastical court proclaimed the iniquity of her first trial and annulled its judgment. In 1920, she was cannonized as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church.
 
 

In June 1919, in an action against the Hungarian Republic, Czech soldiers were put into a hypnotic state and asked to clairvoyantly scan the landscape to determine the enemy's strength and position. A pamphlet titled Clairvoyance, Hypnosis and Magnetic Healing at the Service of the Military, written in 1925 by karl Hejbalik, reports that the information obtained through these non-normal means always proved correct when later checked through normal means. The contemporary Czech psychotronic researcher Zdenek Rejdak interviewed the individuals involved in the Czech psi maneuvers. According to Rejdak, they confirmed Hejbalik's account "in all details."

The Nazis are said to have assembled many powerful occult adepts from Tibet and Japan to train and advise them. One of the most important and powerful groups in Germany was the Nazi Occult Bureau, which attempted to use occult forces for espionage and the magical control of events including a conscious, pseudo-Nietzschean attempt to replace Christianity with the ancient Teutonic myth of the war god, Wotan. Coincidentally, in the early 1930s, the great Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung noticed a marked pattern of imagery of the war god Wotan in the dreams of his German patients. The situation was so dramatic that it prompted him to write, in an essay in 1933, that the German people were subconsciously preparing themselves for war.

Hitler obtained extensive occult training from the German nationalistic Vril Society and the adept circle known as the Thule Group. Teachings of these groups account for many aspects of Nazi culture which are inexplicable in terms of ordinary historical scholarship. 

Hitler's personal psychic abilities, especially clairvoyant and precognitive visions, were by some accounts instrumental in many of the dramatic tactical victories during the early period of the war. Eventually, his intoxication with power and the use of drugs so poisoned his mind that he compulsively followed instructions received through visions, and these led to disastrous strategic errors.

British and American intelligence employed astrologers and clairvoyants to anticipate the occult advice being given to Hitler and his forces. According to The Psychic Spy by Linedecker, the Allies resorted to using a group of out-of-body practitioners to scout key locations inside enemy territory from an island in the Atlantic.

Lord Hugh Dowding, head of the Royal Air Force during World War II, and often called "the man who won the Battle of Britain," had experiences during the war which led him later to become a major figure in the spiritualist movement. Released secret documents of the British Army reveal that Dowding's wife was a sensitive. Using methods now known among psi researchers as "remote viewing," she was able to detect enemy air bases that the army had not discovered through conventional surveillance. These abilities were coupled with a spiritualistic belief which so impressed Lord Dowding that he believed himself to be in contact with spirits of the British airmen who had been downed in battle.

Another of the great Allied commanders during World War II, U.S. Army General George S. Patton, reputedly possessed rare psi abilities. Patton believed himself to be the reincarnation of an ancient Roman general. General Omar N. Bradley, Patton's commanding officer during the war, has confirmed Patton's clairvoyant and precognitive abilities, referring to them as his "sixth sense." Bradley details a wartime example: after crossing the Moselle River near Coblenz with some three divisions moving south, Patton suddenly stopped his advance and collected his forces for no known reason. Questioned by subordinates about this strange behavior, Bradley expressed confidence that Patton had "felt" something that "was not apparent from the information we had at the time," which justified his action. The following day, Patton's forces were hit by a strong and otherwise unexpected counterattack which the general was able to repel only because he had earlier stopped to regroup.

Soviet interest in psi was kindled during World War II by a series of unusual events which transpired between Joseph Stalin and the well-known Polish psychic, Wolf Messing. By using telepathic hypnosis to suggest to Stalin's guards and servents that he was Lavantri Beria, the head of Soviet secret police, Messing was reputedly able to walk past them unchecked into Stalin's personal dacha and into the very room where Stalin was working. Stalin's subsequent tests of Messing's abilities were published in the Soviet Journal, Science and Religion.
 
 

In the 1920s, Professor Lionid Vasiliev, Director of Leningrad University's Department of Physiology, initiated a series of experiments into the effects of mental suggestion at a distance. Vasiliev was motivated in part by reports of the French physiologist Pierre Janet, and perhaps also by the extraordinary power which the monk Rasputin once held over the entire Russian ruling family. Vasiliev began by attempting to influence a hypnotized subject to move his arm, leg, or even a specified muscle on cue without verbal instructions. Eventually, the hypnotist achieved success in the experiments with subjects separated by distances as great as 1700 kilometers (i.e., from Leningrad to Sebastopol).

Contemporary Soviet interest in remote hypnotic manipulation has advanced considerably since this early research. Research and development now continues at the Institute of Cybernetics of the Ukrainian Academy of Science and the Institute of Psychology of the Moscow Institute of Control Problems. Experiments are no longer limited to influencing only trained subjects, but now also focus on hypnotic influence over untrained and unsuspecting persons, and occasionally even large groups.

In one Soviet study, reportedly conducted at Kharkov University, a telepathist is claimed to have been able to stimulate the brain of a rat for three minutes after clinical death. In another Soviet study, the psychokineticist Nina Kulagina is reported to have influenced a frog's heart to stop beating. In another Soviet experiment conducgted by Professor Veniamin Pushkin, at the Research Institute of General and Pedagogical Psychology, the same psi practitioner was reportedly able to influence the blood volume in the brain of other individuals. The subjects became so dizzy that they could no longer stand and had to sit or lie down.

The Soviets have also practiced the strategic application of telepathic manipulation. Engineer Larissa Vilenskaya, a Soviet emigre engaged in various forms of psi practice and investigation, reported on an NBC Brinkley Magazine television special that researchers recruited gifted subjects for the purpose of negatively influencing foreign political leaders while watching them on television.

The Czechoslovakian who pioneered the hypnotic method of training ESP, Dr. Milan Ryzl, defected to the United States in 1967 when he was made to understand that the Czech government wished to support his research for military and espionage purposes. Ryzl has written that secret psi research associated with state security and defense is going on in the USSR. One such project was for the purpose of using telepathic hypnosis to indoctrinate and "reeducate" antisocial elements.
 
 

As early as 1952, the U.S. Department of State used visualization exercises to train its operatives in the use of intuitive psi faculties. A number of CIA-funded secret reports are not available through the Freedom of Information Act on projects incorporating psi research, including Projects Bldbird, Artichoke and MK-ULTRA. One of the goals of each of these operations was to achieve reliable psi capability in laboratory subjects.

It was during the Eisenhower administration, according to knowledgable sources, that the CIA set up an interagency committee to follow psi research. This committee has been active for three decades, and has sponsored a number of international scientific conferences to which Soviet neurophysiologists and cyberneticists were invited. Counter-intelligence cases during this period led the CIA to infer that the Chinese military had achieved significantly superior mind control abilities -- presumably thanks to training by the Soviet Union.

There were some attempted applications of psi in the U.S. military during the Vietnam war. U.S. marines were trained to use dowsing rods to locate land mines during the war. The first report of such was was by the weekly, The Observer, published for the U.S. forces in Vietnam in 1967. The report summarized the situation: 

Introduced to the Marines of the 2nd Batalion, 5th Marine Regiment, the divining rods were greeted with skepticism, but did locate a few Viet Cong tunnels. 

Many reports have emerged from Vietnam of spontaneous ESP experiences -- often saving the lives of American troops under jungle guerilla war conditions. One marine sergeant has reported that entire platoons learned how to sensitize themselves to such intuitive signals, as a basic survival mechanism.

A significant acceleration of government-sponsored research in psychic research and related areas occurred during the Nixon administration. During this period, physicists at Stanford Research Institute, now SRI International, received increased funcing from a number of government sources, including NASA for psychic studies. They made the claim that select psychics, including scientologist "clear" Ingo Swann, Israeli psychic Uri Geller, and ex-police chief Pat Price (now deceased) produced clairvoyantly obtained evidence of remote physical sites (they called it "remote viewing") with such accuracy that the most secret reaches of any military installation of the surface of the earth -- or Mars for that matter -- were no longer safe from view.

These experiments persuaded the Office of Naval Research and the intelligence community to continue supporting the effort. In 1973, according to knowledgable sources, the CIA and the National Security Agency -- responsible for the codebreaking and the codemaking efforts of this country arranged a top secret demonstration of clairvoyance, or "remote viewing," at SRI. Swann and Price, given only geographic coordinates, sketched the target site accurately -- an island in the Indian Ocean. The SRI research apparently demonstrated that secret military targets, in the U.S. and overseas, can be described in great detail. Objects as small as the head of a pin have been described by remote-viewers over distances of many kilometers. Other experiments have successfully described military targets, such as airports, from distances of several thousand kilometers.

From the military's point of view, such capabilities have clear application for obtaining otherwise unavailable information about enemy locations and operations. From the point of view of the intelligence community, a trained, accurate psi practitioner would be an ideal agent. He or she could use psi skill to break secret codes, penetrate guarded military installations and reveal strategic plans. Another important use of remote viewing could be for safety inspection of military equiupment.

In 1972, according to John Wilhelm writing for the New York Times (1977), it sent a team of scientists, under the auspices of DARPA (Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency) to SRI to "objectively evaluate" the claims of researchers Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff. DARPA was particularly concerned over the interesting coincidence, if that is what it was, that its multi-million-dollar computer at SRI went inexplicably haywire while Uri Geller was attempting psychokinesis in a nearby lab. DARPA sent Ray Hyman, a noted psychologist, magician and skeptic; Robert Van de Castle, a psychologist and expert in sleep and dream research from the University of Virginia and also past-President of the Parapsychological Association; and George Lawrence, a second psychologist/skeptic. The report of the investigation was negative. Nevertheless, reports that "remote viewing" replication was underway at Fort Mead, an important center of the National Security Agency, suggest that the military and intelligence communities do not take the certainties of either proponents or skeptics at face value.

Before becoming President, Jimmy Carter reported sighting an Unidentified Flying Object near his home in Georgia, and, as is well known, requested a full report of the phenomena upon taking office.

According to Uri Geller's report, while living in Mexico he developed a relationship with the wife of the President of Mexico, Mrs. Lopez-Portillo, who had a fascination with psychic phenomena. Researchers at an institute under the direction of the Mexican President's sister, Margarita Lopez Portillo, conducted some investigations of Geller 1977. President Carter, during a visit to Mexico, heard of the Mexican interest in psychokinesis and immediately ordered an extensive Defense Intelligence Agency investigation. A report resulted, titled Parapsysics Research and Development -- Warsaw Pact which was the third major report on psi research released by the Defense Intelligence Agency.

In 1978, a survey of 14 active psi research laboragtories by Dr. Charles Tart revealed that five of those laboratories had been officially approached by officials or agents of the U.S. government who were gathering information on psi. The total known figure, at the time, for funding to mainstream psi researchers amounted to several hundred thousand dollars a year. Almost all the researchers surveyed maintained that using psi for espionage or military purposes was a very real possibility, and several were certain it was being done.

Probably more than in other areas of scientific investigation, it is information about who funds psi research research that is classified, not only what is being done. Former White House staffer, Barbara Honegger reported, for instance, that the very word "parapsychology" was classified at the CIA -- that is, a directive existed that it is not to be used in telephone conversations except over secure lines; and that any report with the word in it is automatically classified.

Of all the services, the Navy has historically been the most open-minded about taking psi research seriously and funding it. In 1975, the Navy reportedly funded SRI to see if psychics could detect sources of electromagntic radiation at a distance; and, in 1976, to see whether they could influence a magnetometer at Stanford University. The SRI scientists reported that they could. Critics of this set of results, however, argue that the project was guilty of "optional stopping" to achieve its results. The Navy was interested because magnetometers, which measure magnetic fields, are important in detecting submarines.

The Navy, according to knowledgable sources, also tested self-professed psychics to see whether they could accurately describe maneuvers of a foreign Navy. A New York self-professed psychic, Shawn Robbins, has reported working with the intelligence community to track the movements of foreign nuclear submarines. Robbins was originally tested at the Maimonides Hospital Psychophysics Laboratory in Brooklyn, New York. (However, her psi abilities were not determined to be significant at that time.)

Columnist Jack Anderson claims the navy also funded the controversial research by polygraph expert, Cleve Backster, on the alleged ability of plants to detect and respond to unspoken thoughts and feelings of living organisms, ranging from humans to brine shrimp. However, according to other sources, it was the army that funded Backster's research, in the hopes of "training" plants to cost-effectively detect intruders in dangerous, security-sensitive areas.

According to information revealed to Barbara Honegger, during the Reagan administration for the first time the CIA officer in charge of keeping abreast of psi research noted in his periodic report to the National Security Council that there is growing reason to take the field more seriously.

The fundamental reason for this increased interest is initial results coming out of laboratories in the United States and Canada that certain amplitude and frequency combinations of external electromagnetic radiation in the brainwave frequency range are capable of bypassing the external sensory mechanisms of organisms, including humans, and directly stimulating higher level neuronal structures in the brain. This electronic stimulation is known to produce mental changes at a distance, including hallucinations in various sensory modalities, particularly auditory. The analogy of these results to some spontaneous case reports in the psychical research literature has not escaped notice by the CIA, which is following the research.

A development during the first months of the Reagan administration was the release by the House Science and Technology Subcommittee, chaired by Representative Donald Fuqua, containing a chapter and supporting appendix on the "Physics of Consciousness" (mispelled "conscience" in the table of contents). The report recommends that psi research deserves serious attention by Congress for potential future funding. It states that "general recognition of the degree of interconnectedness of minds could have far-reaching social and political implications for this nation and the world."

The primary sources cited in the report are the research studies of Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ at SRI International, and a report prepared by William Gough, Technical Director of the office of Program Assessment and Integration of the U.S. Department of Energy. Gough published the cited report under the auspices of the Foundation for Mind-Being Research.

A statement of U.S. government interest in psi-war scenarios appeared in the private publicjation, Military Review, by Lieutenant Colonel John B. Alexander. Alexander asserted that psychotronic weapons already exist and that their lethal capacity has been demonstrated. He was referring here predominantly to the claims of Lt. Colonel Thomas E. Beardon that third-generation psychotronic weapons, including what he called a "photonic barrier modulator: which induces physiological changes at distances, near or far; the 'hyperspatial howitzer," which allegedly can transmit nuclear explosions to distant locations; and a radionics-type device which, Bearden contended, sank the U.S. nuclear submarine Thresher in 1963.,

Alexander's claims were unnecessarily alarmist in nature and a number of them are known to be either exaggerated or erroneous. He stated, for instance, that research in the Transcendental Meditation Sidhis Program has produced evidence that individuals are taught in the program to levitate. Investigations into this claim have found it unsupported by any valid observations or measurements.

In 1988, the U.S. Army commissioned a study on a variety of techniques purporting to enhance human performance.
 

End Part 1