Phenomena

by Annie Jacobsen

  “Laid out on a large table in this room was a large topographical map covering an area of two hundred by two hundred square miles,” recalls Graff. “I was surprised when I realized I was looking at a map of Zaire, in Africa.” He was told that the Tu-22 bomber was being flown by a member of the Libyan air force before it crashed. Wanting to defect, the pilot chose to bail out of the aircraft while it was in flight. The plane continued to fly on autopilot until it ran out of fuel and crashed in the jungle somewhere in Zaire. After the pilot made contact with U.S. officials, they realized that a gold mine of foreign technology had landed in their lap, if only they could locate the aircraft. Without fuel in the tanks it was likely that the plane had not exploded on impact, but U.S. officials had no leads as to where the bomber may have gone down. There had been no local reports about an airplane crash. Graff says the CIA dispatched a helicopter team to search for the missing Soviet aircraft but the remote jungle was dense. The search team quickly concluded that without an intelligence lead, they were unlikely to find the downed bomber.

  With the topographical map laid out in front of him, Graff reviewed the terrain. He noted that Rosemary Smith’s map was also being studied by the team. And he saw that what she’d drawn on her map lined up symmetrically with several of the lake-and-mountain patterns on the map before him. A decision was made to read Smith onto the program. She was brought to the briefing room and asked to look at the map. Could she home in on a spot where she perceived the aircraft might have gone down? Using an impromptu map dowsing technique, “She marked a spot,” remembers Graff. “Map technicians converted her notation into a geographical coordinate, then sent that coordinate to the CIA station chief in Zaire.”

  Graff headed home feeling excited and apprehensive. He sensed that the future of an Air Force phenomena program hung in the balance. On earlier trips to SRI, and in his work with Puthoff and Targ, Graff had learned that combining information from two or more psychics working the same target often led to better results. Given the significance of the Zaire operation, Graff asked the Air Force to allow him to travel to SRI and work with another remote viewer. If he could have another day, he could likely deliver a second set of coordinates, Graff said. Air Force officials agreed.

  In Menlo Park, Graff sat down at SRI with a remote viewer named Gary Langford, a former naval officer. “He came up with a sketch very close to Rosemary Smith’s,” says Graff. “As learned later, this sketch bore a resemblance to the general environment of the crash site. But Gary’s data could not be sent to the field since the operatives in that remote area could only receive brief sentences or numbers due to the encrypted secure communication that had to be used.” In the end, it was Rosemary Smith’s coordinates that were used.

  “These geographical coordinates were sent to the CIA station chief in Zaire, who turned them over to a search team made up of in-country clandestine officers and other people,” Graff explains. He returned to Wright-Patterson, and with his participation in the search operation over, he wondered whether he would ever learn more about what had happened in Zaire.

  Two and a half days later, there was a knock on Graff’s door. “We found the airplane,” he was told. The CIA’s helicopter team landed in the village nearest to the coordinates provided by Rosemary Smith. The briefer told Graff that shortly after touching down, the team spotted a villager emerging from the jungle with an airplane part under her arm. This person led the search team back to the airplane. “The unit was able to extract valuable foreign technology” from the Tu-22 Blinder, says Graff, making the Zaire mission an unprecedented success.

  On March 28, 1978, Graff was flown to the Pentagon to deliver a classified briefing to the acting chief of the Air Force and several other Defense Department officials. In a declassified Staff Meeting Minutes memo, officials learned of “a recent interesting case in which an Air Force ‘sensitive’ individual may have aided in the location of a plane which crashed in Africa after its crew members bailed out. Following intensive and unsuccessful efforts to locate the plane wreckage by other means, the sensitive [provided] coordinates.” “Acting upon this information,” the memo noted, “the Air Force has located an area corresponding to that described by the sensitive and is investigating what appears to be a crash site.” The Zaire situation was now escalated to the commander in chief.

  At the White House, President Carter was briefed by CIA director Stansfield Turner. Years later, in September 1995, Jimmy Carter publicly confirmed the incident as having taken place. He was impressed, Carter told a group of college students in Atlanta, that after spy satellites failed to locate the wreckage of a downed airplane, a psychic had pinpointed the location of the missing aircraft. “[She] gave some latitude and longitude figures. We focused our satellite camera on that point and the plane was there,” the former president said.

  Dale Graff experienced a moment in the limelight. As part of the intelligence community’s Exceptional Analyst Program, he applied for a prestigious sabbatical that is awarded annually by the director of Central Intelligence. As a scientist, he was interested in locating evidence of the origins of anomalous mental phenomena. As a physicist he did not believe the answer lay in the supernatural but in the natural world. In his research proposal to the CIA, Graff laid out plans to study the electromagnetic effects that extrasensory perception might have on the brain, and whether the phenomenon had to do with electrical signals inside the human body.

  While Graff waited to hear about the sabbatical, he was assigned to an Air Force program related to the MX missile basing system. In the late 1970s no issue was perceived to be more critical to national security than the threat of a Soviet preemptive nuclear attack, a first strike. America’s land-based, nuclear-tipped ICBMs were stored in hardened underground missile silos across the country. Because of rapidly advancing satellite technology it was generally accepted in the intelligence community that the Americans and the Soviets knew the location of the other side’s missile sites, and given that precision targeting technology had also advanced, strategists now feared the United States was vulnerable to a Soviet first nuclear strike. If this were true, then in a worst-case scenario the Soviets would be able to launch an attack that would cripple the American military and knock out its ability to respond.

  As part of a program called Insuring Survivability, the Air Force devised the MX missile basing system (MX was an acronym for “Missile, Experimental”), and as bizarre as it may seem to modern readers, the proposed system worked like a shell game or confidence trick. Instead of keeping America’s arsenal of nuclear missiles inside fixed storage facilities located underground, the new idea was to have actual nuclear-tipped ICBMs scattered among mock-ups of ICBMs, and to shuttle both the real and the fake missiles around a classified rail system built inside a 24,000-square-mile section of federal land in eastern Nevada and western Utah known as the Great Basin.

  Those who were against this system said the idea was flawed, expensive, dangerous, and easy to defeat. But proponents of the MX program alleged that randomly shuttling an abundance of these missiles from shelter to shelter would “ensure location uncertainty,” making it significantly harder for Soviet military planners to identify exact targets. Real missiles needed to be included in the mix because America had to be prepared to launch in a matter of minutes in the event that the president gave the order for a nuclear strike. One of the program’s strongest supporters was General Lew Allen, the powerful Air Force chief of staff and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Allen was also the boss of Dale Graff’s boss.

  By 1979, plans for 200 road loops and 4,600 MX missile shelters were under way. With General Allen at the helm, the Pentagon was pushing the idea through Congress, with an estimated start-up cost of somewhere between $20 billion and $26 billion ($65 billion and $85 billion in 2017) and an annual operating cost of $440 million ($1.5 billion in 2017). Other divisions of the USAF were assigned to conduct operational security (OPSEC) diligence, in other words, to look for holes in th
e MX missile basing system. At Norton Air Force Base, in California, OPSEC teams developed theoretical schemes that might allow the Soviets to defeat the system. These teams then went out into the field to test viability. No idea was considered unworthy of investigation. After one team determined that cockroaches were attracted to materials in the ICBMs, another team studied desert insects. Dale Graff participated in satellite tests to determine whether their Soviet counterparts, using Soviet satellites flying over the Great Basin, could sense an abundance of cockroaches, thus indicating the real ICBM payloads.

  As head of the Electro-Optic Threat Assessment Section, Graff was also involved in an array of brainstorming ideas designed to beat the MX missile basing system as part of an official Air Force vulnerability assessment team. He wondered whether remote viewers using ESP could determine which transport vehicles were carrying the real missiles and which were carrying dummy warheads. He contracted with Hal Puthoff to conduct a study. Using a computer-generated shell game, Puthoff’s colleague Charles Tart, of the University of California, Davis, collected data from a group of psychics tasked to try to beat the shell game. Random guesses would produce a correct guess 10 percent of the time. On average, remote viewers trained in SRI protocols were correct 25 percent of the time. One “sensitive” individual in the group produced exceptional results, Graff learned. After fifty shell game trials times, she had guessed the location of a marble with an accuracy of 80 percent. Hal Puthoff’s report for Graff indicated that remote viewers could significantly increase the odds in determining the location of the real ICBMs. This report was sent to the Pentagon.

  “General Allen was furious,” remembers Graff. The powerful general sent Graff a letter ordering him to immediately stop work on any programs that involved extrasensory perception, paraphysics, or parapsychology. Coming on the heels of the success of the Zaire operation, “it felt like a blow,” Graff says.

  A letter arrived in the mail. Its letterhead indicated it was from the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). “Congratulations on your selection as one of the 1981 DCI Exceptional Intelligence Analysts,” the letter began. “I can tell you that the competition this year was very keen. Your selection should be a source of pride both to you and to the Air Force.” Not only had Graff won the prestigious yearlong CIA grant he’d applied for, but he and his family had been invited to CIA headquarters for a ceremony recognizing his selection. Graff collected his CIA-issued airline tickets and made preparations for the upcoming trip. He felt elated, he recalls.

  The day before his departure Graff received another letter, this one informing him that General Lew Allen had, on Graff’s behalf, stepped in and declined the CIA’s Exceptional Intelligence Analyst award and its yearlong sabbatical program. “It was unheard of,” recalls Graff. “But the decision could not be reversed.” Allen was one of the most powerful figures in the U.S. military and at the Pentagon. “Here I was this little guy at the Foreign Technology Division getting squashed like a bug by the generals at the Pentagon,” remembers Graff. He felt crushed and overwhelmed. A voice inside him told him to stay the course. That conviction paid off.

  The following month he received an unexpected telephone call from the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Dr. Jack Vorona, who was assistant director for scientific and technical intelligence. Vorona was putting together a classified program called psychoenergetics, he told Graff, with the project’s main goals “to evaluate the threat that foreign psychoenergetics achievements might pose to US national security, and to explore the potential of psychoenergetics for use in US intelligence collection.” Vorona wanted Graff to come to Washington, D.C., and help him run this secret program.

  Graff could hardly believe his good fortune. This was a real opportunity. There was a growing body of evidence demonstrating that extrasensory perception and psychokinesis were real phenomena, albeit rare and difficult to reproduce. With his access to classified information about the CIA program, Graff knew that part of the reason the Agency had canceled its remote-viewing contract was because its analysts had concluded that “there exists no satisfactory theoretical understanding of the phenomena,” and that present theories were “speculative and unsubstantiated.” Here, now, with the power and resources of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Scientific and Technical Intelligence behind him, Graff believed there could be genuine progress toward a general theory. This was his quest.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Psychic Soldiers

  At the Fort George G. Meade Army facility in Maryland, Second Lieutenant Fred Holmes Atwater read Dale Graff’s Paraphysics R&D—Warsaw Pact report and felt a deep sense of foreboding and patriotic alarm. Atwater served in the 902nd Military Intelligence Group, a division of Army Intelligence called Operations Security, or OPSEC. As a member of the SAVE (Sensitive Activity Vulnerability Estimates) team, it was Atwater’s job to visit Army facilities around the country in an effort to locate every possible security hole that the Soviets might try to exploit. Graff’s monograph posited that the Soviets could be using extrasensory perception to conduct espionage against Army facilities and psychokinesis to potentially disrupt the delicate electronics on weapons systems. This was not something Atwater had ever seriously considered.

  As an OPSEC officer, Atwater routinely conducted on-site surveys of Army facilities and attended security briefings with commanding officers. The procedures were routine. For example, if he was denied access to a classified area, he might come back later with a fake badge and try to get in. One of the nation’s top targets for Soviet infiltration was the Army’s Missile Research and Development Command Center at Redstone Arsenal, in Huntsville, Alabama. In the fall of 1977 the facility’s commanding officer formally requested OPSEC support. The way Atwater remembers it, the missile command was concerned about security because so much of their testing involved ground-to-air missile telemetry, i.e., the radio signals that guide a land-fired missile to a target in the air. “Redstone wanted to know the actual hostile-intelligence threat posed and what OPSEC measures should be taken to counter this threat,” recalls Atwater—in other words, how to plug holes.

  Atwater went to Huntsville to examine the situation. After conducting the on-site survey, he sat down with a group of project managers to go over OPSEC suggestions, including counterintelligence options and physical security measures that could be implemented by the team. The men sat around a conference table taking notes on Army-issue yellow legal pads. Just as Atwater was finishing his part of the exit briefing, one of the missile managers abruptly placed his briefcase on the table and dramatically opened it. He pulled out a book and slid it toward the center of the table for all to see. It was Mind Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Ability, by Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ, which had been published the year before. The book discussed remote-viewing experiments at SRI, operations scrubbed of all CIA affiliation. Atwater was familiar with the book. After reading Dale Graff’s classified Paraphysics R&D—Warsaw Pact report, Atwater had sought out and read all the unclassified material he could find on the subject.

  “How are we supposed to protect ourselves from this?” the apparently alarmed Redstone missile manager asked Atwater.

  The room fell silent. Atwater looked over at the commanding officer. “Based on the chief officer’s reaction, I suspected the missile project manager had surprised him,” Atwater says. He picked up Puthoff and Targ’s book. The way he recalls it, he then said something to the effect of, “This subject is beyond the scope of this survey and today’s briefing. I will have to get back to you later on this, sir.” With that, Atwater and the SAVE team left Redstone.

  Back at Fort Meade, Atwater met with his boss, Major Robert E. Keenan, and told him that, having reviewed the book and related subject material, he was concerned that the threat could be real. He’d looked through the outstanding Intelligence Collection Requirements (IRCs) to determine what, if anything, was being done to defend against possible Soviet parapsychology threats. Atwater cited Graff’s re
port, which originated with the Defense Intelligence Agency. If the Soviets had research and development programs in this area, he told Keenan, OPSEC had an obligation to address countermeasures.

  What was even more interesting, Atwater told Keenan, was that the DIA had been responding to an IRC on psychic phenomena, and that the original request had come from the CIA. Apparently the Soviets were heavily invested in paraphysics research, including ESP and PK, and had reportedly demonstrated experiments that showcased covert infiltration techniques against not only Redstone but numerous Army installations, operations, and facilities. The only way to establish the veracity of these reports, Atwater insisted, was to try to replicate them. He suggested the Army hire some of the so-called sensitives who were working with Puthoff and Targ at SRI to see whether they could access information about U.S. Army facilities using extrasensory perception. Places like Redstone Arsenal. This information could be helpful in future OPSEC vulnerability estimates, Atwater said.

  Impossible, Keenan replied. These sensitives did not have security clearances, nor were they military trained. Atwater wondered whether the Army should create its own unit. From his personal investigation he had learned that one prevailing idea was that extrasensory perception was latent in all people but strong in certain individuals, and it could be learned if certain protocols were followed. The Army could ostensibly train its own people, Atwater said. It could teach intelligence professionals who already had security clearances and who were already trained in counterintelligence operations to become remote viewers. The plan was to create a small, low-profile unit, assemble it here at Fort Meade, and try and intercept signals from targets chosen by OPSEC. “Just as we use other intelligence-surveillance assets such as satellites, communications intercepts, and facility penetration agents to demonstrate OPSEC vulnerabilities to army commanders, we could use these trained remote viewers to demonstrate vulnerabilities to this unique form of surveillance,” Atwater wrote.