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Psychic Dogs and Enlisted Men: the Military's Research Into ESP (muckrock.com)
v3rgEz writes: Government research often pushes the boundaries between science and science fiction. Today, the proud bearer of that mantle is often DARPA, experimenting with robots, cybernetics, and more. But in the sixties, during the height of the Cold War, this research often went into more fantastical realms, even exploring whether ExtraSensory Perception (ESP) was possible. Thanks to FOIA, MuckRock looks back on the paranormal history of American surveillance.
Let us not forget the psychic spying program of the 70s, The Stargate Project. As mentioned in the linked WP article, this program was much of the plot of the film The Men Who Stare at Goats , though not actually mentioned by name in the film. When the project concluded in 1995, the report stated that "a statistically significant effect has been observed in the laboratory," but of course also that "it remains unclear whether the existence of a paranormal phenomenon, remote viewing, has been demonstrated."
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Thank goodness the government dosent have a way to see into all of our daily lives with striking detail. That would have been a nightmare!
Understandably, many of us are reluctant to give this long-held tradition up.
The widespread dissemination of information provided by our present technology is an abomination to a long human history of superstition.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
...any sensible military would look into the possibilities of something like that, even if they knew full well it was highly unlikely to pay dividends; the advantages of your having it and the enemy not - or the disadvantages of the opposite - are just to large to ignore.
On the other hand... it doesn't take a genius to work out that ESP was always almost certainly going to be a wash-out. Why? Because evolution. The randomness that drives evolution is an unbelievably powerful tool for solving problems - try out any and all tweaks that are available, hone in by competition on the ones that work better than others, and keep refining. When it comes to senses, we already know of many different ways in which organisms interact with their environment: pressure waves (including sound); electrical fields; magnetic fields; electromagnetic radiation (including, obviously, the wavelengths of "visible" light, and even including quantum effects). If so-called ESP (by which I mean the sort of "seeing at a distance", and similar, effects that projects such as these were looking for), it would still, ultimately, have to exploit some underlying mechanism grounded in physics. Over time, it is utterly, mind-bogglingly unlikely (given the equally-mind-boggling number of mobile living organisms that have come and gone during the full, "deep time" history of life on earth) that no organism would have even begun to exploit such a mechanism - because any organism able so to do would potentially have a significant competitive advantage over its peers. And getting humanocentric - in particular, any early human hunter able to "know", even slightly, where his or her prey was, or what it was doing, would have had a significant competitive advantage over similar people with no such ability, and have been likely to pass that ability. Over time, we'd expect to have seen the ability strengthen and refine. By now, we'd expect most of humanity to have it. And, of course, we do HAVE such abilities - sight and hearing. But another, useful remote sense that we don't recognise? Even if WE hadn't developed it - if, say, it was of such a nature that it unavoidably came with disadvantages that outweighed its competitive usefulness - we'd expect to find it being used in SOME ecological niche where that disadvantage wasn't such a problem. Anecdotal stories of animals "knowing" what is about to happen notwithstanding, so far there's not a shred of evidence that that's the case; whenever we look deeper, we find out that what's happening is (to use Tim Minchin's well-chosen words) "not magic".
Put simply - if we actually have to ask whether such an ability exists... ...it doesn't.
In a world where the vast majority of people are _not_ out to get you, it simply doesn't matter if they could see some things in some cases. Maybe they're very good at it, so they see 10 true things bad guys are doing and 1 false thing bad guys aren't doing ... plus 100,000 false things good guys aren't doing. Insofar as you have corroborating evidence, the psychic evidence is probably not useful, and if you don't have corroborating evidence, the psychic evidence is too noisy to be actionable.
It would work well if your psychics where absolutely spot on almost all the time, like 99.99% (if you have many thousands of them), and they could do directed seeing so you could have them check each other. But, honestly, in that case a cabal of psychics would already run the world, either through being very wealthy or by being able to blackmail the people who actually do run the world.
ESP and similar phenomena inhabit an interesting place in our history. There have been accounts and claims throughout history and undoubtedly prehistory as well. But as far as my 5-minute Googling tells me, these claims were never tested with scientific rigour until late 1800s.
So I wonder if there was some justification in doing these studies. Does anyone know if ESP had been scientifically ruled by the time these studies were done, or if these were the first large-scale studies with the appropriate level of rigour?
It seems foolish to us now, but at some point, we had no evidence of the null hypothesis. I'm just curious at what point in the timeline that changed.
Last post!
In the case of ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood, their ideology is laid out precisely (Koran and hadith and life of the barbaric Mohammed, which they are emulating exactly), yet the US Government's principle action is to prohibit any association of Islamic "jihad" with "Islam". Obama refuses to utter the words - which is strange since he's not an authority on Islam, only Allah and Mohammed are (and they agree with ISIS on what it is).
My point is - no matter how good the US could have gotten with remote viewing, they still will not act on it - just as they have not acted decisively on the information gained in the Holy Land Foundation trial which laid out exactly what the Muslim Brotherhood and Organization of Islamic Cooperation were up to - and as a result we have the 'leadership' of the West aiding the agenda of these groups against the citizens of the World. We live in a time of mass insanity.
Obviously, officers weren't good enough.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
More accurate to say -
There was an (observed) effect, but the effect was small and too unpredictable to be 'useful'.
The psychic 99% garbage, 1% possibly or probably real..
Analysis of physical effects implies very strongly that psycho-spiritual (religious) models of the world are not correct. To the layman this could be interpreted as proof of the non-existence of god. . .
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..