Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Psychic Warriors

Back in the olden days, as I was working on my doctoral degree, I spent a lot of time in the University of Iowa’s psychology library doing research. While there I noticed that, at one time, there were a number of peer reviewed journals devoted to parapsychology and there were many universities, some of them quite prestigious, that had majors in parapsychology and related fields. I also noticed that many of those journals were no longer published and that now very few universities and colleges offered courses of study in parapsychology. Most of them were not top flight schools.

I note all this as preamble to something I read in the newspaper in the last few days which is to say on February 13. It seems (and many of us already know about it) that various governmental agencies had, at one time, employed psychics as intelligence agents which is to say they were gathering information using their psychic abilities in an attempt to learn more about what our enemies and often our allies were doing.

Fort Meade, Maryland
Now the CIA has released many once classified documents that relate to this period in our history. According to a story in the Miami Herald, there was an operation known as Grill Flame based at Fort Meade, Maryland, in which they attempted to locate where the hostages taken in Iran after the embassy was seized were being held. A dozen psychics tried more than 200 hundred times to gather intelligence about the situation including how closely the hostages were guarded and what their general health was.

Although the psychics apparently worked for the Army, it was in the CIA documents that this was revealed. These documents made it clear that the psychics efforts were monitored by a number of intelligence agencies and the top officials, civilian and military, at the Pentagon. They also showed that before the attempted rescue of the hostages in April 1980, the psychics were consulted by an officer representing the Joint Chiefs of Staff in an effort to ascertain if a situation existed that might require the mission be aborted. All of this, including if the psychics had been of any useful information, became a heated debate.

Once the hostages had been released and debriefed about their experiences, that information was compared to what had been developed by the Grill Flame psychics. According to the story published by the Miami Herald, “‘Only seven reports’ were proved correct wrote an Air Force colonel on the staff of the Joint Chiefs.”

He also noted that more than half were entirely incorrect but that 59 contained information that was partially correct or that might have been correct, but they also contained information that was wrong.

Army officers who supervised Grill Flame responded by claiming that 45 percent of the reports by the psychics contained some accurate information. They added that such information was unavailable through normal intelligence channels… except, if you are saying that 45 percent of the reports contained some accurate information, how do you decide which information is accurate? I suppose the argument is that you couple this with information through other intelligence sources, which might also contain inaccurate information or might be wholly inaccurate to draw proper conclusions. It would be just one more tool in the arsenal of intelligence weapons.

According to the Miami Herald, one of the psychics from Grill Flame, Joseph McMoneagle said that the stuff declassified was garbage. He claimed that they hadn’t declassified the stuff that worked.


I will note, apropos of nothing, that any excuse using the cloak of classification as the reason for disbelief or failure seems to be just that, an excuse. We are unable to evaluate the success, or lack thereof of Grill Flame because the good stuff is allegedly still classified. That may or may not be true, but until or unless more information is released, we simply don’t know how successful this might have been… or maybe do because it seems that this program has been concluded.

6 comments:

albert said...

The military/Intelligence community(IC) is unlikely to release details of, or even the existence of, any technique that is useful for intelligence gathering. In the cyber arena, they have publicly stated that they have secret techniques.

Depending on the amount of 'leakage':
1. We don't use psi-systems.
2. OK, we investigated psi-systems.
3. OK, we investigated psi-systems, but the results are classified.
4. OK, we investigated psi-systems, but the results were inconclusive.
5. OK, we investigated psi-systems, but the results were useless.

Despite releasing records, psi-systems may still be in use. Lacking serious leaks, the only recourse is publicly available research.

If I had a system that could help find hostages, I'd keep it secret, for the 'good guys' to use.

The problem is preventing the -abuse- of such systems.
. .. . .. --- ....

Paul Young said...

KR..."According to the Miami Herald, one of the psychics from Grill Flame, Joseph McMoneagle said that the stuff declassified was garbage. He claimed that they hadn’t declassified the stuff that worked."

I expect this McMoneagle chap is 100% accurate on that.
Anything gleaned from "de-classified" information are simply tidbits that were always mainly irrelevant. (Possibly only put on the classified shelf in the first place so that, later, it could be de-classified and everyone would get a nice warm glow over the government showing some transparency over something...)
Incidently, I have to wonder, has anyone ever requested an FOIA and actually gotten something back that they were absolutely shocked that it was given?

Personally I'm not at all convinced by this psychic business... though I must admit to have enjoyed watching (on youtube) Jim Marrs take on Remote Viewing.
He reckons that ANYONE can do it...not just those claiming to be natural clairvoyants/psychics, or whatever they call themselves. (He makes the analogy along the lines of if you just come in off the street, sit at a piano and try to play it, then obviously you'll fail...but practise enough, then sooner or later, you'll manage it! (I still can't play a tamborine.)
Either way...if our countries intelligence services have mastered remote viewing to a meaningful degree, then they won't be telling us about it.
As McMoneagle says above, the good stuff inevitably stays secret.

Mr. Sweepy said...

I have a different thought about this. This is that the CIA and military had a major lack of human intelligent in the field. Back in days of the Iran hostages, the internet was just being created and signet was weak then. The CIA was grasping for anything to could get back then.

If these psychics were real, they wouldn't be working for the CIA. They would be buying lottery tickets.

Brian B said...

There's no solid evidence these techniques have consistent results or are effective. Here's a summary from another source:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2013/05/psychic_sylvia_browne_said_amanda_berry_was_dead_why_do_police_consult_psychics.html

"Are psychics ever actually useful in missing persons investigations?"

No. Academics have repeatedly tested the abilities of psychics to provide any useful information in a crime investigation, and the results are damning. A British study published in 1996, for example, pitted self-proclaimed psychics against undergraduate psychology students. Each participant was handed an item that was involved in a solved crime, such as a scarf or a shoe, and the subjects simply uttered whatever notions popped into their minds. They were also given a list of statements about the crimes, only some of which were true. The psychics were no better than the students at making predictions, and neither group performed better than chance. Those results have been replicated in dozens of studies.

There’s one finding that comes up in nearly all of the studies: Psychics make lots of predictions, far more predictions than the control groups. That’s no coincidence. After the facts of the test cases are revealed, the psychics typically ignore their inaccurate predictions and emphasize their more relevant guesses. The more predictions you make, the more likely you are to get a random hit. But, taken as a whole, psychics’ visions are true just as often as anyone else’s.

While not especially good at making predictions, psychics are typically quite skilled at self-promotion. At the conclusion of the 1996 study in England, the psychics gave themselves high marks, even though they fared no better than the students, who admitted their performance was poor.

Markrud32 said...

It worked The program was transferred to the NSA: This says it all: McMoneagle was one of the original Intelligence Officers recruited for the Army program now known as STAR GATE. While there, he earned a Legion of Merit award for providing "...critical intelligence reported at the highest echelons of our military and government, including such national level agencies as; The Joint Chiefs of Staff, DIA, NSA, CIA, DEA, and the Secret Service, producing crucial and vital intelligence unavailable from any other source. Jim Marrs tried it and was featured at Skeptiko Alex Tsakiris: You actually tried it, didn’t you?
Jim Marrs: Oh yeah, and then I’ve done it myself, yeah. In fact, the very first time, my first effort at remote viewing, I drew a floorplan for an office building that was 100% accurate and the thing hadn’t even been built yet, I was looking into the future. But then a year later, when I went to Albuquerque and I went to this place, I’m going, “Holy cow, that’s kind of how I envisioned it,” and they gave me the official floorplan for this place and it was 100% accurate from what I’d drawn the year before.
This is what I like today, if you ask them, “Is there a remote viewing unit within the US Army?” they’re going to just say, “No,” okay?
Alex Tsakiris: Right.
Jim Marrs: And technically that’s true, but what they’ve done is, instead of having one unit where they put all their psychic spies into, they’re spread out and they are embedded and a lot of these different things like, Navy SEALs and Army Rangers, you know, I mean what commander would not like somebody at hand who can tell him what’s on the other side of the hill. So they’re still using it, but they’re using it in a diffused manner. United States

TheUFOGuy said...

Last time I talked to Joseph M, he said the program went basically went black, with the 'official word' is that it was cancelled. He told me it continues to this day. I also have personally had accurate readings doing remote viewing. I had gotten the Monroe Institute Hemi-Sync tapes a long time ago and they kind of tune you into the realm of remote viewing, along with other meditative practices. It does work, and I personally have experienced a detachment of my perceptions leaving my body to witness events. The comment about the Lottery has been addressed, it simply does not work for that type of activity. Now whether it taps into the Archaic Overmind that Freud mentioned is hard to say. But I would recommend not bashing its reality if you have never tried it yourself. For an interesting slant on this subject, get the extended version of "The Men Who Stare at Goats" with Stubblebind's comments at the end about how well it worked. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Il07ok_Ah8U