IN SEARCH OF MODERN MERLINS: PSYCHICS GAIN WIDER CREDIBILITY

Document Type: 
Collection: 
Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): 
CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080027-5
Release Decision: 
RIFPUB
Original Classification: 
U
Document Page Count: 
3
Document Creation Date: 
November 4, 2016
Document Release Date: 
November 5, 1998
Sequence Number: 
27
Case Number: 
Publication Date: 
June 26, 1989
Content Type: 
NSPR
File: 
AttachmentSize
PDF icon CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080027-5.pdf575.77 KB
Body: 
Approved For Release 2001/03/26 : CIA-RDP 0OQ06080'27-5 Advice: Lipstick at the table?/7 Gardens: The joys of greenhouses/8 In search of mode sychics gaol wider creai Belief in psychic phenom- ena, on par with a be- lief in astrology a decade ago, is gain- ing new respectabil- ity. The most striking change is in the scientific commu- It is exhibiting a new willing- nit y ness to believe that some people can know things by inexplicable means and that others can will the behavior of physical objects. Psychologist Brenda Dunne, a member of a Princeton University scientific team which has conducted elaborate tests of psychic ability for tion is nearly over. "A survey taken about three years ago among scientists showed that a t e t in g, believe there as .come 14 . This isn,contrast to one taken about Marcello'Ilrn zzi of Fast Michigan University, who was chairman of the Comitiitteefor Scientific Investiga- Von of Cl ams o the l9aranormal. +lecided,his associates were inter ted only'in debunking phenomena. o he founded the Center for Scienti- Anomaly Research, which keeps ":':determinedly open mind. N ,,lf it,".t,,Ff has and truth. it has Abn vald 14qWPe9NF`g6.1/ the new acceptance a lin iage SECTION E 'U t .' 40r] 1 JCCL - it's Ms.-Ball. "If Jim and I -te things he says, peon us. But when he says it, wally broadens the show" '11, page E5 -as D. Frankfin!The Washington Times studios. Jim Wright, Texas Democrat, is an- other. roMd'oi Release'2W 1/0 ' staff take a detached, scientific and very supportive interest" in the work being. done by her and her col- leagues. Mr. Wright's office says he has at- tended lectures by Washington psy- chic Anne Gehman; Mrs. Gehman says she has discussed psychic phe- nomena with Mr. Wright and his wife, Betty, and has a friendly rela- tionship with them. Mr. Pell, perhaps Capitol Hill's most unabashed believer, has urged the National Science Foundation, the Defense Department and other gov- ernment agencies to increase psy- chic research funding: He has a full- time staff member, C.B. Scott Jones, whose exclusive job is to monitor re- ports of psychic activities. Rep. Charlie Rose, North Carolina Democrat, is the founder of the Con- gressional Clearing House on the Future, which has .met with psy- chics. He has urged the CIA to initi- ate a "psychic Manhattan Project" to develop its abilities to monitor Soviet military projects. The government's interest in psy- chic phenomena began in the 70s when the Pentagon and the CIA, with the backing of Congress, sponsored Washington psychic Anne Gehman cautions that any ' medium-' who' - guarantees physical phenomena is a "liara cheat and a fraud:" experiments on remote viewing at SRI International, formerly Stan- ford Research Institute, at Menlo Park, Calif. It continues today. In a report last year, the National Research Council said the Army and its advisers had considered if para- normal forces "might used to jam enemy computers, ematurely trigger nuclear wed and inca pacitate weapons and vehicles" It said "one suggested application" monks" who could exert long- distance influence over enemy per- sonnel. The cutting edge currently is fo- cused on less spectacular goals, the abilities of people to foresee coming events . -; 'reeogniitive emote Per- ception -:~ or, to stake ctu(rrept ones psycho~kineais. x .: , The , most intriguing sults have been those reporteS by scientists at was to form a, battalion of "warrior see PS;Y, I .Mtge E2 -TER / Hap Erstein :e a Face' iPPetry -i Paris gh we tend to relegate ?uppetry to the realm of hildren's entertainment, he French understand _rdly kid's stuff. an a birthday party di- ppets can be the conduit -tedy and chilling drama. se the faces of puppets aly immobile does not :hey cannot convey the emotion. -e among the unspoken y which a Parisian pup- -with the intriguing alulu operates. With its how, "Face a Face," a ling, moving and infer- ssing series of skits, Heracio Peralta and _colas expand the possi- heir art without over- it with spectacle or gim- 1J'an Puppeteers fade into the background once the performance starts. "Facea,Fce" manages the more difficult achievement of. transforming adults, at least those who are willing to accept the ex- perience, into children. The stage of the modern Matson Francaise auditorium is clad in black, as are 'the two puppeteers. At times they appear alongside the puppets they ' manipulate,. occasion- ally interacting with them and of- ten merely standing out of the light in a semblance of invisibility When they mask themselves completely, in black, all, it takes: from a cooperative viewe is the slightest squint nd the puppets are moving by themselves At one point, Miss Nicolas care- fully takes a puppet of an old woman out of a wicker basket, lays it down on the table-performance platform and leaves the stage. With a wondrous "touch of theatrical , magic, the doll then snaps to life- by itself or at least at the hand of. the unseen Mr. Peralta. The puppets move by the simple, almost imperceptible actions of th i t , ll the b r o - e r mas ers a ette t sus year under the umbrella of the Although billed as appropriate Marionette Performance Festival for both adults and children, one fain the illusion of self propelled Francais. If the other two compa- fears that today's television-trained creatures. Bululu strips puppetry ll roes areas inventive and awe- youngsters may not have the pa- ?-- -" .~ ""? ", " . ...~? .. appearance is the first inspiring, you should make a lustrated by the opening scene of a point tience or attention span for a how -ench puppet theaters to of pulling strings to go see them that evolve' in such delicate''' _e French Embassy this all. strokes and tiny touches. Instead, see PUPPETS, page E5 Approved For Release 2001/03/26: CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080027-5-, manta rwaslem Salon (2025 through Feb 11 might inspire b drs unction n unk ale U11 (U1tJl Y dace NW) in Dupory}~l g veditFOVRO 1L~1@A /03/26;rt~tCiA6oROl~98d7&7 ROO020OM02F tion for atmos- ly was intended to be women are depicted in art has be- tures of the women from Picasso's phere. As a result, we tend to read ion venture to Mrs. Has- come a subject of intense debate ';classical period, and such classical ragtime gallery on Seventh and analysis over the past decade, - subject matter as Botticelli's But as lease problems and women are Ms, Friedman's "Three Graces." ier to close the Seventh preferred subject matter. Ms. Friedman's "Three Figures :pace last December, the If her small portrait renditions on the Beach" translates this Re- of regular monthly exhibi- of heavy-lidded, porcelain-skinned naissance motif into a dream vi- -)w has fallen to the salon, beauties are innocuous enough, a sion; the cavorting women seem salon will continue to func- number of full-figure and multiple- oblivious to a severed foot on the newhat differently from a figure compositions display the sand before them. The intimation Her son and the salon's di- tense conjunction of innocence and of menace and prior violence that Hotel Terminus" NR (descriptions of Holocaust ~s) dictims, colleagues, employers, intances, observers of Klaus CTION: Directed, researched educed by Marcel Ophuls, _ive-produced by John S. ,an, Hamilton Fish and Peter . edited by Albert Jurgenson atherine Zins, associate :er Bernard Farrel, with Memory released by the Samuel ryn Company 4'/2 hours plus a brief -lission E: Cineplex Odeon Circle Outer -er, 4849 Wisconsin Ave. NW 1: Opens Friday IUM RATING: FOUR STARS K), his bodyguard in Bolivia, his ,ney in France, his U.S. employ- _n the postwar Counter Intelli- ::e Corps who used and pro- -2d Barbie for his information -ommunists. 1r. Ophuls also talked with Bar- s victims who have harrowing nories of his torture methods in its, with journalists'and Nazi ters who tracked Barbie, with -istance leaders, Auschwitz sur 3rs, Bolivian authorities and -des of others who knew Barbie Knew of him. they all have important stories, hearing them all in one big, =-straining (subtitles and IDs), pressing dose is a numbing, of- _ disengaging experience. I vote three 90-minute TV segments zl less of Mr. Ophuls' words and aug face on screen. PSYCHIC From page El SRI, Princeton and the Mind Science Foundation in San Antonio, Texas. In the precognition tests one per- son, the "precipient;' describes a randomly selected place that a col- league, "the agent," is about to visit. Miss Dunne says in a test which she conducted when she was at Mun- delein College in Chicago, the agent picked a sealed envelope from a. stack of 10 containing sites chosen by outsiders. The Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago was the site picked and the precipient, some miles away, described the chapel in extraordinary detail: "I am getting the little turrets around the building ... long windows in a row quite high . a heavy wooden door with a black bolt on it.... My feeling at the mo- ment is that it is a building like a church, and I can see the pews." Miss Dunne said that about 15 percent of similar tests at Princeton produced results equally rich in ac- curate detail. The main emphasis at Princeton, however, has been on psychokinesis, which can be more easily fitted into scientific controls. Robert G. Jahn, dean emeritus of the School of Engi- neering and Applied Science, Miss Dunne and others have reported the results of 78 million trials in which voluntary operators have tried to in- fluence the behavior of natural background static, called "white noise;" and the distribution of free- falling balls. In the first experiment an elec- tronic device produces 1,000 white% noise pulses a second. Left to chance, half would have positive electrical charges, half negative. . The participating volunteers try to influence the impulses by concen- trating on a desired outcome. The results over the years show a diver- gence from the norm 10,000 times greater than indicated by chance. In the second major experiment, called the "Random Mechanical Cascade;' a specially designed ma- chine drops 9,000 polystyrene balls through a matrix of 330 pegs. Left to chance, the balls would be distributed among 19 bins in a uni- form, perfectly balanced fashion, with a few at each end and most in the middle in what is known as a bell curve. Operators will the balls to one side or the other. And results over 15 years, according to Miss Dunne, have, again, been 10,000 times as great as anticipated. The other major psychokinesis experimenter, Helmut Schmidt, a quantum physicist formerly of Duke University and currently of the Mind Science Foundation in San Antonio, has achieved even more striking results. His subjects try to influence the clicks of a Geiger counter. The clicks, which measure the emissions of radioactive materials, come at predictable rates. Operators try to speed or slow them. Mr. Schmidt says they have outscored chance by 10 million to one. The scientific interest in para- normal events has a historical foun- dation. Thomas Edison was a firm believer in the paranormal, and physicists Albert Einstein, Max Planck and Neils Bohr took open- minded attitudes. In the 1920s, J.B. and Louisa Rhine were appointed to the faculty of the Department-of Psychology at Duke University, where they touched off a new interest in psychic phenomena. Reports by today's experimenters have received considerable atten- tion, but less than total acceptance, in the scientific community. John the paintings as patches of color on canvas even as we relate to their recognizable subject matter. Achieving this kind of tension between the formal and the repre- sentational has long been a concern of painters. Mn Koch, however, casts no new light on the matter, and here the picturesque remains just picturesque. Palmer, of the Foundation for Re- search of the Nature of Man, in Dur- ham, N.C., says in "An Evaluative Re- port on the Current Status of Parapsychology" (1985) that the ex- periments do support the existence of anomalies. A report by the National Re- search Council, "Enhancing Human Performance" (1988), which was funded by the Army, concluded that they "fall short of an experimental ideal" and do not "justify any conclu- sion" The report praised "the sin- cerity and dedication" of the investi gators and recommended that, tht Army continue to monitor the work at Princeton, SRI and San Antonio. Mr. nuzzi takes a more positive view. He says scientists prefer to de scribe test results as "anomalies;" o, abnormalities, and avoid such term as paranormal phenomena. He says he would prefer to hav their significance explained is terms of physical laws. If they tur out to be paranormal phenomena, h says, "it would shake my world to ii foundations." lvlrs, Gehman, a board it ember the National Spiritualist Associatic of Churches, who charges a min mum "gift" of $100 for a 60-minu session and who says she has mar people from Capitol Hill among hi clients, believes that she can cor municate with "those who have goi through the process of death:' and certain situations can heal and bei metal. But she says 99.9 percent of r ported physical phenomena - tat rapping, levitation and such a fraudulent and that any mediu who guarantees physical phenom ena is a "liar, a cheat and a fraud.' She says that if the scienti: eventually prove that their ano alies are rooted in natural law won't bother her at all. "Whatever the explanation;" s says, "I will be content."