CIA Files Reveal Decades of US Intel on Iran Came from Hundreds of CIA Psychics

In January, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) bowed to public pressure and published millions of once-classified documents online, so people could browse them “from the comfort of your own home.” On the face of it, this is a win for transparency, but in classic bureaucratic fashion, the documents say a lot without really telling us anything useful.

They are more like an amusing trip through the eccentricities and failures of a spy agency that gained immense power after WWII through virtually unlimited funding and little oversight. Assassinations, coups, drug running, torture, and economic sabotage are not the subject of these documents, but there is plenty about UFOs, a Penthouse interview that never happened, various banal diagrams, and psychics.

That last subject is interesting in light of America’s tumultuous history with Iran, beginning in 1953 when the US and UK overthrew the democratically elected Mossadegh government, installing a puppet dictator to serve western interests.

US intelligence agencies and the Pentagon got their first chance to use the psychic program, initiated in 1975, after Iranian revolutionaries seized the U.S. embassy and took 52 US personnel hostage.

According to the Miami Herald:

“In an operation code-named Grill Flame, half a dozen psychics working inside a dimly lit room in an ancient building in Fort Meade, Maryland, on more than 200 occasions tried to peer through the ether to see where the hostages were being held, how closely they were guarded and the state of their health.

Officially, the psychics worked for U.S. Army intelligence. But the documents in the CIA database make it clear their efforts were monitored — and supported — by a wide array of government intelligence agencies as well as top commanders at the Pentagon.

They were even consulted before the super-secret U.S. military raid that attempted to free the hostages in April 1980, which ended in disaster when a plane and a helicopter collided at a desert staging area.”

Apparently, the CIA was not dissuaded of its fascination with extrasensory mind abilities after Project Mk Ultra – which engaged in illegal human experimentation – was allegedly shut down in 1973.

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The psychic program was initiated in 1975 as a “foreign assessment” when the CIA heard rumors that China and Russia were experimenting with psychics. The program continued for 20 years under 10 different code names — ‘Grill Flame’ ws one of them.

It continued despite that fact the psychics had, at best, a questionable rate of success when officials were able to compare psychic reports with information from the freed hostages in 1981. According to an Air Force colonel, only seven of the 202 psychic reports were proven correct, while 59 reports were partly or possibly correct.

The degree to which this was ‘dumb luck’ is unknown, but Army officers contested the pessimistic view. They said 45 percent of the reports were partially accurate, and “that was information that could not be obtained through normal intelligence collection channels. The degree of success appears to at least equal, if not surpass, other collection methods.”

“The debate continues today. “The stuff that the CIA has declassified is garbage,” one of the Grill Flame psychics, Joseph McMoneagle, told the Miami Herald. “They haven’t declassified any of the stuff that worked.” Agreed Edwin May, a physicist who oversaw parapsychology research for government intelligence agencies for 20 years: “The psychics were able to tell, in some cases, where the hostages were moved to. They were able to see the degree of their health. … If you can sit in Fort Meade and describe the health of hostages who are going to be released, so that the right doctors can be on hand, that’s very helpful.”

Others are more skeptical, to put it mildly. “The intelligence agencies might as well get a crystal ball out and stare into space and hope they see something,” said James Randi, a former professional magician who turned his career into debunking ESP and psychics. “It’s a huge waste of time and money and it doesn’t help the hostages one bit.”

Directors of the psychic program scoured outside and inside the ranks of military intelligence officers to find people with a talent for “remote viewing,” or “the mental ability to see across vast distances and through walls and other obstructions.”

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An early success of the psychic program, prior to the 1979 hostage crisis, was being able to locate a downed plane in the Central African Republic to within 15 miles. The CIA recruited a self-proclaimed psychic from California who went into a trance and wrote down latitudes and longitudes, allowing them to find the plane.

But during the hostage crisis, the ‘remote viewing’ of psychics was often completely wrong, as the Miami Herald further details. Nevertheless, the program continued until 1995, employing 227 psychics and carrying out 26,000 telepathic forays.

The program was shut down after an outside review found that “remote viewing reports failed to produce the concrete, specific information valued in intelligence reporting.”

Intelligence agencies certainly use a great deal of ‘remote sensing’ today, but this refers to satellites or high-flying aircraft scanning the earth in ever-more detailed and diverse ways. With what we know – and don’t know – about the technological capabilities of US spy agencies, psychic powers may not even measure up today.

The CIA Just Declassified 100,000s of Files About Psychic Abilities and UFOs

January 24, 2017   |   Jake Anderson

(ANTIMEDIA) Paranormal research and investigations into UFOs are considered career killers in the academic world. In the field of journalism, mainstream publications rarely explore the topics as anything more than entertaining curios delivered with a chortle and a smile. However, a newly declassified cache of documents released by the CIA confirms the government has been researching — and actually employing — psychics for decades.

The STARGATE program, popularly known as the real-life government research lampooned by the film The Men Who Stare At Goats, was among the top-secret programs revealed in a recent CIA document dump that included 930,000 declassified files and 12 million pages. Much of this was previously available to the public only at the National Archives in Maryland. Thanks to freedom of information activist groups like Muckrock, which applied pressure on the CIA for years, these files can now be found in the CIA’s CREST searchable database.

The CIA’s mission statement for the STARGATE program, which contained a stamp specifying the materials should not be released to foreign governments, reads: “To establish a program using psychoenergetics for intelligence applications.”

The William A. Tiller Institute for Psychoenergetic Science defines psychoenergetics “as energy exchanges that can be influenced by consciousness.”

The study of whether human intention can have an effect on the material world around us has been the subject of several multidisciplinary approaches over the decades. It appears the government was deeply involved in this research and that local law enforcement agencies have extensively used psychics.

The cache of documents reveals that the CIA has been experimenting with psychic researchers for decades and, in some cases, actually conscripting them into the Cold War as potential spies.

Other documents revealed the use of psychics in spy operations conducted by the government. Articles from decades past, written by columnist Jack Anderson, describe the CIA project Grill Flame, which involved psychics using remote viewing to try to infiltrate military installments within the Soviet Union. Anderson describes the “Twilight Zone research” as “psychic warfare.” Multiple projects were funded by the Defense Department and the CIA, one of which involved trying to erect a “psychic shield” to block Soviet psychics, who were suspected of being more advanced in their ESP programs.

The files also elucidate the CIA experiments involving Uri Geller, a controversial celebrity psychic. In 1973, according to the new memos, Geller underwent multiple experiments to test his psychic abilities. In one test, the word “bunch” provoked test subjects to draw grapes. In response, Geller — who was completely isolated from the control group in a separate room — described seeing purple circles. This was just one of multiple tests that led CIA investigators to conclude that Geller “demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner.”

In the decades since, skeptics such as James Randi have attempted to debunk or disprove Geller’s abilities. Incredibly, the new CIA documents actually contain a formal rebuke of James Randi’s critique, debunking the debunker and further corroborating the fact the CIA firmly believed Geller had demonstrated evidence of extrasensory perception.

Organizations such as the Global Consciousness Project claim to have produced evidence that human consciousness affects physical matter in a way that we do not truly understand. On its website, the group states:

“When human consciousness becomes coherent, the behavior of random systems may change. Random number generators (RNGs) based on quantum tunneling produce completely unpredictable sequences of zeroes and ones. But when a great event synchronizes the feelings of millions of people, our network of RNGs becomes subtly structured. We calculate one in a trillion odds that the effect is due to chance. The evidence suggests an emerging noosphere or the unifying field of consciousness described by sages in all cultures.”

The book The Margins of Reality summarizes a series of experiments conducted at Princeton University that suggest human intention can have a measurable impact on random number generators.

The declassified CIA STARGATE files reveal that the government has invested considerable money and resources into programs operating on the premise that there are powers of the mind that transcend the five traditional senses.

Multiple files in the declassified trove also corroborate police departments all across the country routinely using psychics in criminal investigations. Detectives will often hire psychics to perform remote viewing in order to try to recover a missing person or apprehend a criminal. In a document entitled, “Use of Psychics in Law Enforcement,” the utility of psychic research was directly stated:

“All of the police officers said they had used a psychic in a case as described in the newspaper articles. Eight of the officers said that the psychic had provided them with otherwise unknown information which was helpful to the case. In three of these cases, missing bodies were discovered in areas described by the psychic.”

Alongside the STARGATE files, the new CIA documents also contain dozens of documents pertaining to UFOs. One file contains a report made by police officers in Moscow, who submitted eyewitness testimony of a UFO:

“They noticed a spherical object hanging and ‘pulsing,’ alternately shrinking and expanding.”

This is just one of possibly hundreds of files on UFOs released. Another file discloses a CBS Radio Network news bulletin from 1981 in which a news anchor (Dan Rather’s temporary replacement) addresses a UFO activist group called Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUSE). In 1977, the group sued the government over CIA/NSA documents pertaining to UFOs as a “military threat.” They believed the government possessed “tantalizing information….a report on a UFO which supposedly shot down a Russian MIG over Cuba.”

This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of government and military UFO reports. Thousands of such reports exist in the CIA’s real-life X-files.

Investigations into UFOs have intensified in recent years, as high-ranking government and military officials continue to disclose anomalous interactions, such as the following NASA report of a military encounter with a UFO:

“As the F-4 approached a range of 25 nautical miles it lost all instrumentation and communications. When the F-4 turned away from the object and apparently was no longer a threat to it, the aircraft regained all instrumentation and communications. Another brightly lighted object came out of the original object. The second object headed straight toward the F4.”

It will take a sustained effort by many independent investigators to weed through the files and stitch together the truths contained in STARGATE and other recently released CIA files. If nothing else, it’s a fascinating inside look into how one of our government’s most powerful agencies approached psychic research and the UFO question.

You can find the CIA database here. Please post any significant documents you find in the comments below.

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