Any reasonable government needs to have a small outlet for things that seem crazy. In other words, you need X Files.
Not because you believe everything, most things, or even any thing in them, but because having an open mind is important. If you think you know everything, you will miss a lot. Being open minded means spending some time at the tail edges investigating things that look like utter garbage woo, even if the result is that they are invariably utter garbage woo.
Also, it is not complete nonsense.
Altering conscious states is absolutely real and there are many avenues to it. Altered consciousness is also solidly in the interests of an intelligence agency and research is only natural.
There is definitely a flavor of pseudoscientific nonsense that comes along with altered consciousness experiences, but you can look past that.
Reports like this look to me very similar into pre-flight experiments. There were a whole lot of people making patently ridiculous flying contraptions but with hindsight many of them had some important ideas right.
See also: alchemy as a precursor to chemistry
Studying and treating the brain by developing methods to alter conscious states is, I think, going to be a major achievement of the 21st century, and things like this are precursors.
> If you think you know everything, you will miss a lot.
However, searching for low probability events in a large search space is not necessarily going to be a fruitful experience. For example, imagine that there is non-zero probability of a 20 karat diamond being on the beach somewhere, buried in the sand. You can look for it as much as you want, but you will still probably miss it.
Having a small outlet for things that seem crazy because they might turn out to be true is the same kind of logic as buying a lottery ticket because you can't win if you don't play. Yes, you will miss things, but you will almost certainly miss them anyway unless you expend more resources than they are worth -- and then you still aren't guaranteed to make progress.
On the other hand low probability risks that are likely to happen sometime are often worth investigating. For example, if there is a 1 in 1000 year earthquake event, it's highly unlikely to affect you in your life. But it will eventually affect someone so it may be work the effort to study what might happen. To get more esoteric, perhaps we can talk about large meteorites hitting the planet. Do we need a contingency plan for it?
To me, that's the main question you need to ask before you start: are we building up an understanding of something that will almost certainly affect us one day, or are we simply sifting through grains of sand on the beach hoping to find a diamond?
This is a great point, having an open mind to these sort of things is very important. You never know what sort of things could come of experiments if they aren't done or pushed aside. Especially with the more widespread knowledge of the capability of psychedelics to change your mind. To ignore this avenue of very new and oft-misunderstood science would just be, to put it bluntly, ignorant.
There’s also the issue that a lot of otherwise reasonable, educated people believe in the supernatural and woo science, or at least some of it. That means in a large organisation like the CIA, with dozens of senior officials over many decades, some of them will too and might act on it. Heck even as a doubter,I can accept it might be worthwhile investigating, just to prove it wrong.
If you go on some of the CIA FOIA tools you can also read about their experiments with astral projection. One of the more famous ones is about some guy astrally projecting on mars, in the past, and seeing aliens and buildings: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00788...
The CIA back then was all kinds of fucked up. Doing illegal experiments on US civilians, installing dictators, and selling drugs. Makes you wonder what terrible shit they're doing now that hasn't come to the surface yet...
The only thing I've really learned about these types of organizations is that their very nature makes them, as an entity, more like an octopus than a primate. They need to quarantine off information and seed it with falsehood to stop adversaries from making their way off with everything when they breach a system or trusting it all on the off chance they do.
There is no "CIA" in the way that there is a "Denver Broncos" because the CIA has no unity of perspective, purpose, or even vision.
That some of their hippie dippies studied stupid shit and some of their psychos experimented on humans isn't really emblematic of the agency as a whole. Not because they were mere outliers, but because the concept of "the agency as a whole" doesn't really fit.
Well, looks like these Monroe Institute activities segued into CIA interest into what was called 'remote viewing' for use as a possible supplemental espionage methodology. Apparently one H. E. Puthoff was one of the primary researchers in this activity and there's an online history of this CIA initiated RV Program at SRI that he authored which may be of some interest:
While people say the CIA invested in woo woo, I believe science progresses this way. Reported edge cases of established theories need to be checked, validated and proved/disproved before moving on to modifying the theory or dumping the case as woo.
As scientists we should not be pre-disposed to shutdown things we do not understand without putting said phenomena through a testing phase.
>Reported edge cases of established theories need to be checked, validated and proved/disproved before moving on to modifying the theory or dumping the case as woo.
There are literally an infinite number of possible violations of established physics. Momentum is not conserved inside this cubic inch. Momentum is not conserved inside this other cubic inch...
The only reason one might prefer astral projection as a theory over the cubic-inch-ism of any particular volume is that astral projection fits a few preconceived notions about how the universe should conform to our psychological expectations. It might be surprising to hear, but exploding a goat with your mind is actually more psychologically familiar than any particular fact about quantum field theory. It involves explosions, minds, the exertion of will, and goats, while QFT involves unfamiliar components following unfamiliar rules to unfamiliar ends.
In short, if your idea is to test for a violation of the known laws of nature, great. If your idea is to test for a violation of the laws of nature that is only motivated by the predispositions you acquired in the cradle, that's not so good.
Most of the things in this paper are pretty good abstractions explaining the truth. Science is moving in this direction, but giving an overview is scary.
That's what tenured professors are for. Compartmentalized intelligence organizations forever torn between the conflicting goals of oversight and secrecy are a terrible way to fund anticonventional research.
It was a Cold War battle between Russia and the US. RAND Corporation found in 1973 that the US was falling behind in paranormal research.
> (1) Soviet research is much more oriented toward biological and physical investigation of paranormal phenomena than is U.S. research, which is dominated by psychologists;
> (2) although visible U.S. and Soviet level of effort appear roughly equal, over forty years of research in the United States have failed to significantly advance our understanding of paranormal phenomena;
> (3) if paranormal phenomena exist, the thrust of Soviet research papers appears more likely to lead to explanation, control and application than is U.S. research;
The paranormal arms race between East and the West may have started with a 1960 French article describing how experiments at Duke University had established telepathic communication with nuclear submarines using Zener cards. The success rate was stated at 75%. The Navy later stated the story was a hoax, but it was likely deliberately planted by Western intelligence agencies to detract from real technological advances in communicating with submarines (such as Very Low Frequency Radio). But the Russians seemed to take the bait, wasting resources, yet later started reporting successes and publishing a wide range of high quality research (of which the CIA became aware). [1]
This in turn scared the USA into keeping up. Meanwhile the Russians promoted their own hoaxes and disinformation, such as Nina Kulagina, who was seemingly capable of telekinesis.
By the way, hypnosis and mass hypnosis are not woo woo, but legit toolsets of the intelligence agencies. Even the Stargate project had its use as a creative tool for scenario development and intuitive thinking. Interesting to note that its participants Harold Puthoff, Edwin May, Ingo Swann, and Pat Price were all involved with Scientology. Even the government may at one time been interested in the supposed powers of the OTO's.
> As scientists we should not be pre-disposed to shutdown things we do not understand without putting said phenomena through a testing phase.
Which is why Dr. Estabrooks (who the Russians knew was funded a big budget by US military to conduct research into the paranormal) wanted to know for sure if it was possible to hypnotize someone into committing murder and forget it ever happened. As real scientists such a test would be quickly shut down on moral grounds, so perhaps it is better to speak of military research when discussing this woo woo.
Given how disinformation and wasting the academic resources of foreign enemies ("eating carrots makes British pilots see at night", or the suggestion to drop the bandit problem over occupied France) is such a common trick, I wonder what current tricks are in use. I suspect that any country which focuses a lot of attention on fairness in AI will be at a disadvantage over a country that does not seem to care about this and just keeps automating no matter privacy or discrimination costs.
They weren't 'taken' by it. It was likely to investigate it on the off chance it was possible. They had to try because if an enemy did and it turned out to be real, the advantages they would have would be huge. It's easy to look back from 2019 and roll our eyes, but I think the truth was less obvious then and it's likely our now easy dismissal of these things came from those very studies.
If you read some of the declassified documents regarding how they set up their experiments it's pretty clear that the studies were not being conducted in a scientifically sound way[1]. The CIA let the studies be performed with questionable methodology for a while, but eventually stopped funding the program. Then the DIA picked it up for a decade or two.
In 1983 the United States was spending 250 billion dollars on defense. Not sure if CIA spending is included in that piece of the spending pie, but regardless.. Lots of money gets dumped into the economy via that route. It's well known that some government agencies have a "spend it or lose it" funding model. If all your main budgetary needs are met and you have a few million dollars at the end of the year, why not throw some at researching wizard shit? No one wants to be the last super power to discover magical brain lasers.
Weird stuff like this doesn't bother me probably as much as it should. Sure, I'd prefer if we spent that money on more reasonable endeavors, but this was probably a cheap waste of time all things considered. And who knows? Maybe the moonshot will pay off, and Americans everywhere will gain powerful psychic shields to reflect communist hexes.
Government spending is a primary vector for new money into the economy. If it passes through a coven real quick, meh. Many think we should be spending more money on the arts, and I think the dark arts should count.
There are a million better long-shot scientific experiments that could be done with better rigor and better theoretical/experimental foundation than what's in that paper. The ideas there are 'not even wrong' in the Wolfgang Pauli sense; it is scientific-sounding words jumbled into a picture that isn't even coherent, let alone in agreement with reality.
Just because you can think of it, or can imagine it being true, or are afraid of it being true, doesn't mean it's worth investigating. Should the CIA engage in leprechaun research?
The IC usually doesn't fall into the bucket of 'defense spending'. And individual agency budgets are considered classified, however the entire bucket is public information. https://www.dni.gov/index.php/what-we-do/ic-budget
some of the document is "out there", but there's one section I've had some experience with: biofeedback.
Many years ago I tried a friend's biofeedback device - it used Galvanic Skin Response.
It seems you can still buy approximately the same device my friend owned on amazon: https://amzn.com/B01IPSUIZ0 (this is not a referral link and I have no association of any kind with them)
So here is the idea: you lay down on the bed, put your fingers across the contacts and move the knob until you get a medium high-pitched tone from the device. If you relax, the tone will decrease in pitch. You cannot cheat. If you think you are relaxing but are not, the tone will not budge (or will rise in pitch). If you continue to decrease the tone you will eventually relax so much you will fall asleep.
The first time I used this (~20 years ago) I learned how to relax in about 30 minutes. I have carried this ability all my life.
The cold war was ended by the Strategic Defense Initiative - not because it worked but because we forced the USSR to pour resources into matching us and it bankrupted the country.
The author quotes Niels Bohr who says "you are not thinking you are merely being logical." sounds like a nice saying, but what is really the difference between being logical and thinking? What does Bohr do when he thinks? (I was just reading Polya's How to Solve It, maybe Bohr had in mind methods of investigations studied by Polya).
I get the feeling that the budget for this project was actually spent on something nefarious and they only produced this document to claim they actually spent it on the task.
[+] [-] colechristensen|7 years ago|reply
Not because you believe everything, most things, or even any thing in them, but because having an open mind is important. If you think you know everything, you will miss a lot. Being open minded means spending some time at the tail edges investigating things that look like utter garbage woo, even if the result is that they are invariably utter garbage woo.
Also, it is not complete nonsense.
Altering conscious states is absolutely real and there are many avenues to it. Altered consciousness is also solidly in the interests of an intelligence agency and research is only natural.
There is definitely a flavor of pseudoscientific nonsense that comes along with altered consciousness experiences, but you can look past that.
Reports like this look to me very similar into pre-flight experiments. There were a whole lot of people making patently ridiculous flying contraptions but with hindsight many of them had some important ideas right.
See also: alchemy as a precursor to chemistry
Studying and treating the brain by developing methods to alter conscious states is, I think, going to be a major achievement of the 21st century, and things like this are precursors.
[+] [-] mikekchar|7 years ago|reply
However, searching for low probability events in a large search space is not necessarily going to be a fruitful experience. For example, imagine that there is non-zero probability of a 20 karat diamond being on the beach somewhere, buried in the sand. You can look for it as much as you want, but you will still probably miss it.
Having a small outlet for things that seem crazy because they might turn out to be true is the same kind of logic as buying a lottery ticket because you can't win if you don't play. Yes, you will miss things, but you will almost certainly miss them anyway unless you expend more resources than they are worth -- and then you still aren't guaranteed to make progress.
On the other hand low probability risks that are likely to happen sometime are often worth investigating. For example, if there is a 1 in 1000 year earthquake event, it's highly unlikely to affect you in your life. But it will eventually affect someone so it may be work the effort to study what might happen. To get more esoteric, perhaps we can talk about large meteorites hitting the planet. Do we need a contingency plan for it?
To me, that's the main question you need to ask before you start: are we building up an understanding of something that will almost certainly affect us one day, or are we simply sifting through grains of sand on the beach hoping to find a diamond?
[+] [-] ChristHamster|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] everdev|7 years ago|reply
There's a great book called "Stealing Fire" by Steven Kotler & Jamie Wheal about this very subject.
[+] [-] simonh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] opportune|7 years ago|reply
The CIA back then was all kinds of fucked up. Doing illegal experiments on US civilians, installing dictators, and selling drugs. Makes you wonder what terrible shit they're doing now that hasn't come to the surface yet...
[+] [-] 3pt14159|7 years ago|reply
The only thing I've really learned about these types of organizations is that their very nature makes them, as an entity, more like an octopus than a primate. They need to quarantine off information and seed it with falsehood to stop adversaries from making their way off with everything when they breach a system or trusting it all on the off chance they do.
There is no "CIA" in the way that there is a "Denver Broncos" because the CIA has no unity of perspective, purpose, or even vision.
That some of their hippie dippies studied stupid shit and some of their psychos experimented on humans isn't really emblematic of the agency as a whole. Not because they were mere outliers, but because the concept of "the agency as a whole" doesn't really fit.
[+] [-] radicaldreamer|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KingFelix|7 years ago|reply
Watch it, go down that rabbit hole
[+] [-] escherplex|7 years ago|reply
URL = https://www.aestheticimpact.com/_pdf/AAestheticImpactCIABiof...
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tictoctec|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] goombastic|7 years ago|reply
As scientists we should not be pre-disposed to shutdown things we do not understand without putting said phenomena through a testing phase.
[+] [-] whatshisface|7 years ago|reply
There are literally an infinite number of possible violations of established physics. Momentum is not conserved inside this cubic inch. Momentum is not conserved inside this other cubic inch...
The only reason one might prefer astral projection as a theory over the cubic-inch-ism of any particular volume is that astral projection fits a few preconceived notions about how the universe should conform to our psychological expectations. It might be surprising to hear, but exploding a goat with your mind is actually more psychologically familiar than any particular fact about quantum field theory. It involves explosions, minds, the exertion of will, and goats, while QFT involves unfamiliar components following unfamiliar rules to unfamiliar ends.
In short, if your idea is to test for a violation of the known laws of nature, great. If your idea is to test for a violation of the laws of nature that is only motivated by the predispositions you acquired in the cradle, that's not so good.
[+] [-] thecupisblue|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] usrusr|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] princeofwands|7 years ago|reply
> (1) Soviet research is much more oriented toward biological and physical investigation of paranormal phenomena than is U.S. research, which is dominated by psychologists;
> (2) although visible U.S. and Soviet level of effort appear roughly equal, over forty years of research in the United States have failed to significantly advance our understanding of paranormal phenomena;
> (3) if paranormal phenomena exist, the thrust of Soviet research papers appears more likely to lead to explanation, control and application than is U.S. research;
The paranormal arms race between East and the West may have started with a 1960 French article describing how experiments at Duke University had established telepathic communication with nuclear submarines using Zener cards. The success rate was stated at 75%. The Navy later stated the story was a hoax, but it was likely deliberately planted by Western intelligence agencies to detract from real technological advances in communicating with submarines (such as Very Low Frequency Radio). But the Russians seemed to take the bait, wasting resources, yet later started reporting successes and publishing a wide range of high quality research (of which the CIA became aware). [1]
This in turn scared the USA into keeping up. Meanwhile the Russians promoted their own hoaxes and disinformation, such as Nina Kulagina, who was seemingly capable of telekinesis.
By the way, hypnosis and mass hypnosis are not woo woo, but legit toolsets of the intelligence agencies. Even the Stargate project had its use as a creative tool for scenario development and intuitive thinking. Interesting to note that its participants Harold Puthoff, Edwin May, Ingo Swann, and Pat Price were all involved with Scientology. Even the government may at one time been interested in the supposed powers of the OTO's.
> As scientists we should not be pre-disposed to shutdown things we do not understand without putting said phenomena through a testing phase.
Which is why Dr. Estabrooks (who the Russians knew was funded a big budget by US military to conduct research into the paranormal) wanted to know for sure if it was possible to hypnotize someone into committing murder and forget it ever happened. As real scientists such a test would be quickly shut down on moral grounds, so perhaps it is better to speak of military research when discussing this woo woo.
Given how disinformation and wasting the academic resources of foreign enemies ("eating carrots makes British pilots see at night", or the suggestion to drop the bandit problem over occupied France) is such a common trick, I wonder what current tricks are in use. I suspect that any country which focuses a lot of attention on fairness in AI will be at a disadvantage over a country that does not seem to care about this and just keeps automating no matter privacy or discrimination costs.
[1] https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/files/SovParap...
[+] [-] PinkMilkshake|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Rebelgecko|7 years ago|reply
1: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00791...
[+] [-] TomMckenny|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrLeap|7 years ago|reply
Weird stuff like this doesn't bother me probably as much as it should. Sure, I'd prefer if we spent that money on more reasonable endeavors, but this was probably a cheap waste of time all things considered. And who knows? Maybe the moonshot will pay off, and Americans everywhere will gain powerful psychic shields to reflect communist hexes.
Government spending is a primary vector for new money into the economy. If it passes through a coven real quick, meh. Many think we should be spending more money on the arts, and I think the dark arts should count.
[+] [-] tbabb|7 years ago|reply
Just because you can think of it, or can imagine it being true, or are afraid of it being true, doesn't mean it's worth investigating. Should the CIA engage in leprechaun research?
[+] [-] stevehawk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aasasd|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m463|7 years ago|reply
Many years ago I tried a friend's biofeedback device - it used Galvanic Skin Response.
It seems you can still buy approximately the same device my friend owned on amazon: https://amzn.com/B01IPSUIZ0 (this is not a referral link and I have no association of any kind with them)
So here is the idea: you lay down on the bed, put your fingers across the contacts and move the knob until you get a medium high-pitched tone from the device. If you relax, the tone will decrease in pitch. You cannot cheat. If you think you are relaxing but are not, the tone will not budge (or will rise in pitch). If you continue to decrease the tone you will eventually relax so much you will fall asleep.
The first time I used this (~20 years ago) I learned how to relax in about 30 minutes. I have carried this ability all my life.
[+] [-] equalunique|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SubiculumCode|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rosser|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cftm|7 years ago|reply
The cold war was ended by the Strategic Defense Initiative - not because it worked but because we forced the USSR to pour resources into matching us and it bankrupted the country.
[+] [-] yters|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nyc111|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lostpasswordz|7 years ago|reply
Read 1 page in and instantly realized they were going to the Monroe Insititue - where I just was.
Great place TBH.
[+] [-] pytyper2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ransom1538|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jessaustin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] godelmachine|7 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Glocke
They say Heinrich Himmler was a practitioner of Occultism and had influenced SS to a considerable extent.
[+] [-] botchedOps|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] libpcap|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] williesleg|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tbabb|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taneq|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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