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UK military experiments with ESP
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 LONDON. The Ministry of Defence has released a previously classified Report which shows that it financed ESP experiments in 2002.
The heavily censored Remote Viewing Report, made available in response to an application under the Freedom of Information Act, has excited a lot of media coverage and comment – much of it inaccurate (because it was based on a preliminary Press Association story that didn’t adequately reflect the significance of the research, rather than on the actual report).
Roy Stemman has read the Report and here provides the answers to the questions that are being asked, as well as putting them into paranormal perspective by discussing similar projects in the past.
 Who decided that ESP research was necessary?
We are not told. In fact, all names and other identifying information have been blacked out in the heavily censored public version of the Report – which was designated “UK Secret” when it was produced in June 2002.
What was its purpose?
The hope, clearly, was that it would eventually lead to a reliable means of acquiring information at a distance, presumably of known enemies or of hidden weapons. But it went about this in a rather strange way. This could be because the first phase of the project was meant to be limited to assessing gifted individuals’ abilities on tasks that were not “subject sensitive”. “The second phase,” says the Report’s introduction, “could involve the selection of one or more individuals who it is felt can be ‘trusted’ to be used for the sensitive targets.”
So someone, somewhere, had “sensitive targets” in mind when the project was suggested and financed at a cost of £18,000.
When did it take place?
Its inception was early November 2001, just two months after the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US, and it is tempting that to link the two. It is questionable, however, that an experiment of this kind could have been put in place in just eight weeks. The much-thwarted search for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, rather than a psychic hunt for Osama bin Laden, is more likely to have been the prime instigator for the research. Remember that during the 1990s weapons inspectors had found and destroyed a huge number of Iraqi missiles, warheads and chemical munitions, but it was widely felt the Iraqis had hidden far more.
That the project ultimately had specific targets is confirmed – perhaps accidentally – in the “Scope” section of the Introduction, which says: “Finally, the overall conclusion including recommendations for follow-up work including the search for XXXXXXX.“
Whoever or whatever it is that has been blacked out is meant to be a secret. But “weapons of mass destruction” would fit neatly over the obliterated words, which are of no more than 30 characters in length. But would the psychologists have used that term? Independent psychical researcher Mick O’Neill thinks not, suggesting “specific intelligence targets” or some other form of wording is more likely. He also points out that the code used alongside this particular deletion is S27 which indicates it relates to international relations. Had it been concerned with defence S26 would have been used.
 But Nick Pope (right), who worked for the MOD for 21 years, argues: “While Bin Laden and Iraqi WMD may not have featured in the original thinking behind the study, those involved are unlikely not to have thought about these as potential RV targets, as the work progressed. In a sense, the DIS will have regarded RV as just another potential means of gathering intelligence – and like any intelligence-gathering capability, the issue is how to focus your capability on current requirements.” [See Footnote.]
Who were the researchers?
They are not identified apart from being described as psychologists.
What form did the psychic experiments take?
Although they are described as “Remote Viewing” (RV) sessions, they were really no more than simple extra-sensory perception tests, involving the blindfolded subjects being asked to discuss and draw their impressions of images sealed in brown envelopes. This may be because the initial sessions were meant to identify which individuals were the most gifted. The second phase of the project would then have worked with them on more ambitious psychic tasks, like locating a person or an object at a distance. Of course, holding an envelope contain an image of, say, a nuclear weapon may have lead a gifted subject to “locate” where it was built or was stored. But simply describing it accurately was all that the researchers were looking for in phase one.
Why were they blindfolded?
Blindfolds or goggles were used by the subjects in all but two of the sessions, presumably to reduce distractions. For the same reason, the tests were conducted in a rented building at a secret location. These attempts to enhance the results were only partly successful. Each time a subject wanted to draw what he was “seeing”, he had to remove the blindfold – so it could be more of an encumbrance. And even with these precautions, the monitors note that session 13 was “interrupted by electricity meter reader”.
Who were the subjects?
Again, they are not identified. What we are told is that the psychologists attempted to recruit 12 individuals who had been trained, by others or by themselves, as “remote viewers”, but their approaches to such individuals, identified through remote viewing websites, were either ignored or declined. They therefore conducted the research with “untrained RV subjects”. Their defence of this strategy is that the results would establish a baseline for novices which could be compared with experienced RV performers in later tests. Finding suitable subjects was clearly a problem as two of the psychologists were used as subjects in one session “but were both unhappy about undertaking this task and refused to take part in further sessions”.
 What were the photographic targets?
Although not, apparently, “sensitive” all but three of the images have been blacked out in the report. Only pictures of Mother Teresa, a gas station and a half-open clasp knife, are published in the Report, but a question has been left under one of the obliterated photographs: “Asian individual (what colour is he wearing?)”
What were the results?
Not exciting, but not as bad as one might have expected under the circumstances, though parapsychologists will have no trouble picking holes in the protocol and especially the marking scheme used to judge the results. In the 18 reported sessions no one was judged to have “accessed the target” – so the success rate is nil – though in 28 per cent of the sessions it was felt that the subjects “may have accessed some feature of the target”.
However, Mick O’Neill tells me that the figure of 28 per cent, which has now been published around the world, as an indicator of the partial success of the sessions, is wrong. The Report reveals that one subject was judged partially successful on three occasions; another subject on two occasions; and a third subject on three occasions. So the partial success rate (six out of 18 sessions) is 33 per cent.
Is it true that one subject fell asleep during a session, as reported by some newspapers?
The monitors noted that one subject was breathing very heavily at one point and made a note: “Asleep?” But his session was judged partially successful and, indeed, it was this subject who scored highest overall, with three partial successes.
Was the Ministry of Defence aware of previous remote viewing experiments?
Aware, yes, but they appeared not to have learned from them, although the psychologists who conducted the experiments did visit several RV websites. It says that its system of generating a series of target images was “based on that devised by SRI [Stanford Research Institute] for the CIA programme”.
 This is a reference to the CIA’s massive $20 million study of remote viewing and other psychic abilities over a 24-year period – generally known as Stargate – to investigate its potential use within the intelligence community. Ingo Swann was one of its star subjects. At the end of this research project, the American Institutes for Research was asked to review the research and operations, and issued its report on 28 November 1995.
As a result, the CIA concluded that a statistically significant effect had been demonstrated in the laboratory, but that there was no case in which ESP had provided data that had ever been used to guide intelligence operations. Remote viewing has since become big business, particularly in the US, where a number of people offer courses to teach the technique.
What happens now?
The answer should be that the MoD is now planning to recruit high-performing RV subjects and conducts further experiments using geographical co-ordinates rather than photographs in envelopes. But that, we are told, is not going to happen. In a separate statement the MoD concludes that there is “little value” in using such skills in defence of the nation, adding: “The remote viewing study was conducted to assess claims made in some academic circles and to validate research carried out by other nations on psychic ability…. The cost of this study was modest compared with others of this size and complexity. It aimed to investigate theories on capabilities to gather information remotely about what people may be seeing and to determine the potential value, if any, of such theories to Defence. The study concluded that remote viewing theories had little value to the MoD and was taken no further.”
This conclusion, of course, is based on the use of untrained individuals who showed no signs of having a remote viewing ability in the first place.
But that, apparently, is the end of the matter. Unless, of course, a few years hence, someone applies under the Freedom of Information Act for publication of the Report on the follow-up research which the psychologists involved clearly felt was worth doing.
FOOTNOTE: Remote viewing has apparently been used in the search for weapons of mass destruction. According to an Associated Press report, published in The Washington Times (19 November 1991), the United Nations had turned to extrasensory powers in the search for Saddam Hussein’s hidden weapons sites:
“ In the satchel she took to Baghdad, US Army Maj. Karen Jansen carried sketches of two sites where the Iraqi leader has supposedly stashed biological weapons, said Edward Dames, president of a company called PSI Tech.
“Mr. Dames, a retired military intelligence major, and an associate drew the sketches through ‘remote viewing’ – the ability to locate and accurately describe unknown things and events from afar.”
Ed Dames is a retired US Army and CIA intelligence officer who was trained to remote view by Ingo Swann.
Major Karen Jansen was responsible for planning and implementing the chemical and biological inspections in Iraq. She also led four of the multinational inspection teams.
She and Ed Dames got in touch after Seattle television station KIRO reported on his Maryland-based firm’s use of psychics in gathering intelligence.
“Mr Dames said she called him and told him which suspected biological weapons site she was going to, what she was looking for, and whether he could help,” the newspaper reported. “‘I told her, sure,’ he said, and proceeded to ‘find’ two locations.”
Major Jansen does not appear to have confirmed or denied publicly the accuracy of the remote viewing data.
Seven years later, in the Spring of 1998, Dames says he was again asked to locate Iraq's hidden bio weapons facilities. He doesn't say who sought this help, but PSI Tech’s “Spot Report” of 2 March 1998 was addressed to the White House, the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] and the AFMIC [Armed Forces Medical Intelligence Centre]. It read:
Subject: A Key Clandestine Iraqi BW Agent Production Facility
The following information was obtained via Technical Remote Viewing:
1. The Iraqis have concealed a large scale BW agent production facility within a nitrogen fertilizer plant, located along the Tigris River, northwest of Mosul, in the vicinity of Zumma.
2. This "boiler room" operation is producing Anthrax or Clostridium perfringens.
3. We assess the Zumma area site to be the largest currently operating BW production facility in Iraq.
Attachments: Al Mawsil [Mosul]-Arbil Region tactical pilotage chart
There has, however, been no confirmation that a biological weapons production facility was uncovered at the site.
Ed Dames is no longer associated with PSI Tech, having sold his shares in 2000 to Dane Spotts, its current chairman and CEO, who has since sued Dames and another former employee for the return of property. Dames had already had a judgment against him of $435,000 for breach of contract with a PSI Tech customer. Dames is known as “Doctor Doom” for his prediction that a third of the Earth’s population will be wiped out by “the Killshot” – a series of deadly solar flares. Originally forecast to occur in November 2005, he revised the prediction four months before the expected event, saying it would occur within “a maximum of two years”. Any time now, in fact!
To visit the MoD website and download the Report, click here.
See also:
‘Remote viewing led to Saddam's capture’
Psychics help Israeli Army hunt kidnapped soldiers
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Posted on Friday, February 23, 2007
Category: Paranormal
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