This is another post in my series about mental illness (mental abilities) and spiritual experiences. Today, we are setting aside the “spiritual” and focusing on the “experiences,” i.e., regardless of the source, what is actually happening? Is the experience reliable? The U.S. Military spent decades investigating these types of experiences. Why? Because the Soviets were doing it. And if there was any sort of military advantage to paranormal abilities, the U.S. wasn’t going to let the Soviets get ahead. Then the Soviets and Chinese found out the U.S. was investigating these phenomena and so they redoubled the efforts. The upshot was a lot of government-funded research into paranormal experiences.
Military records are routinely declassified after a certain amount of time has passed, or once the need for secrecy is over. Many records about the military’s experimentation with paranormal experiences have been declassified. A well-respected journalist took all those declassified documents and wrote a book titled: “Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government’s Investigations Into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis” by Annie Jacobsen (Little, Brown and Company 2017). It’s 400 pages with another 100 pages of endnotes and bibliography. The author interviewed 55 scientists and psychics who were involved in the program. The book goes out of its way to avoid sensationalism and I found it credible. I’ll tell you how it ends: the experiments found that some paranormal experiences connected to the real world, but the information was not reliable. Because the paranormal was not useful for military purposes, the military eventually closed down the program.
A Life Changing Experience
Civilian physicist Dale Graff was chief of the Advanced Missile Systems Forecast Section at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in 1968 when he had a paranormal experience that changed the trajectory of his life. While on assignment in Hawaii, he took his wife and two children to the beach and went surfing when a storm was rolling in. He ended up in a fight for his life against the storm. He saved his wife, putting his own life at greater risk now that he had to keep his unconscious wife on his surfboard while trying to paddle his way out of a rip current. At this point, the paranormal intervened and Graff says that he saw himself from far above and could see how to navigate out of the rip current. Time became meaningless, his arms no longer hurt from exertion, and suddenly he was on the shore, right where his two children were waiting for him (Phenomena at pp. 205-209).
Instead of attributing this experience to God and becoming religious, Graff concluded that this experience had to be explainable by science. He began researching consciousness and anomalous mental phenomena and became frustrated that much of the research was not based on the scientific method. It took eight or ten years, but eventually Graff’s request for military funding to study extrasensory perception (ESP) was granted and he ended up writing a proposal about using “remote viewing” to locate missing airplanes. It worked. They found a downed airplane in Africa based on a sketch drawn by a “sensitive individual” in the USA who looked at a picture of the airplane [fn 1]. (Phenomena at 211-216).
Practicalities Instead of Mysticalities
This post isn’t a book report, but Phenomena is worth reading. What I liked about it was the focus on the real world application of these sorts of experiences. I’m not very interested in attempts to describe God, or the divine, or however people conceptualize the source of supernatural, divine, or paranormal experiences. We can’t understand that fully; there’s no way to prove anything. We’re all just sharing ideas and thoughts. But this research was aimed at finding out if there was a real world connection to these experiences.
Note that this focus leaves out the vast majority of spiritual experiences. Most Church-type spiritual experiences are simply feelings, like feeling peaceful after you pray. Gaining a testimony is a spiritual experience that can’t be measured. The “fruits of the Spirit” are love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness and temperance (Galatians 5:22-23). Most spiritual experiences are subjectively real to the person who experienced them, but cannot be tested and replicated by a scientific method.
This book also did not address any connection to mental illness or any symptoms. The people involved were all in the military, which necessitates a certain level of health, including mental health.
The military was trying to train people to have visions, essentially. They named it “remote viewing” and wrote up a training protocol to create this ability in military volunteers. The idea was that the human mind had latent psychic abilities and those abilities could be trained the same way you could train a human to be stronger, faster, more coordinated.
The Mormon Connection
Revelations slot easily into wars and politics in the Book of Mormon. Zoram, chief captain of the Nephites, asked Alma for a revelation about how to rescue their brethren who had been taken captive by the Lamanites. Alma prayed about and told them where to stop the Lamanites and rescue the prisoners (Alma 16:5-6). As another example, in the decades leading up to Christ’s appearance in the Americas, Nephi, the son of Helaman, solves the murder of the chief judge in Helaman 8-9 and that convinces some people that he’s a prophet.
Coincidentally, a Mormon named Paul Smith joined the remote viewing team in 1983 to be trained as a remote viewer. The author interviewed him and included several of his experiences in the book.
Lessons Learned: The Ratio of Signal to Noise is a Problem
You know how people struggle with getting answers to prayers? A person might feel they didn’t get an answer, or they can’t tell the difference between their own feelings and the guidance of the Spirit. Or they think they get an answer but, when they act on the prompting, things don’t go well. There isn’t a real solution to this problem. People come up with cutesy platitudes like “Heavenly Father answers every prayer! He says yes, no, or I have something better in mind.” Actually, sometimes nothing happens in answer to prayer, sometimes your feelings interfere, and sometimes you get an answer.
When the military analyzes intelligence from any source, they get a ton of information and have to classify it into useful and not useful. The useful stuff is “signal” and the not useful stuff is “noise.” You can get noise from any source. Sifting out the signal from the noise is a skill, but it is also sometimes guesswork and things get missed. Imagine someone listening to a certain radio frequency in hopes of intercepting enemy communications. The enemy isn’t going to be broadcasting actionable, accurate information all the time. Most of the frequency will be dead air, some of it will be chatter, some of it may be misinformation deliberately to confused eavesdroppers, and some of it may be real information.
Remote viewing had the same problem. The remote viewers tuned in and tried to view things the military could use. Much of what they produced was noise. Some of what they produced was good signal. The challenge was that it was even harder to sort out signal from noise in remote viewing than it was to sort out signal from noise from more traditional intelligence sources.
Lessons Learned: Don’t Expect Too Much
Remote viewers received impressions, bits of information without a whole picture. The information wasn’t usually a solid foundation to make decisions and take action. Finding an airplane by matching sketch drawn by a remote viewer to a topographical map was a solid result. Perhaps, if the military had stuck to using psychic abilities to find airplanes, they might have been satisfied with the result. But the military wanted more information in higher priority situations — to prevent terrorist attacks or assassinations, for example. The gap between finding an airplane that is already on the ground and prophesying about an attack that hasn’t happened yet is huge, but apparently the military thought that the two skills should have been comparable. And, well, it kind of worked.
The most spectacular example of precognition (prophecy) recounted in Phenomena was when a remote viewer prophesied that an official from the Pentagon would be kidnapped two days later, on December 17, 1981. The information was passed to the FBI, and based on that, the FBI issued a worldwide counterterrorism alert. The prophesied kidnapping took place, with details that were just as the remote viewer predicted. More remote viewers participated in providing information to find Brigadier General James L. Dozier. The victim was found alive and returned home safely (Phenomena at pp. 263-273).
But when Graff sat back and thought about this incident, he wondered how much good remote viewing actually did. The prophesy didn’t prevent the kidnapping, and the information from remote viewers that turned out to be accurate came along with a whole bunch of noise that didn’t help at all. Only in hindsight could Graff see what information was accurate and what wasn’t. There was no way to sort out the noise from the genuine information when they needed it.
Remote viewing wasn’t going to prevent disasters, nor was it going to hand out clear solutions. Did it make anything easier or better? Graff struggled to find a way to frame remote viewing as a solution that the military could use.
Do religious prophecies help? A lot of people got disillusioned with the Church failed to see covid coming. The April 2020 General Conference, which President Nelson had teased as an exciting and spectacular event, fell flat when social distancing made the Hosanna shout kind of lame. But if Nelson had prophesied covid, what difference would it have made? If he’d prophesied about covid and been right, that would have increased his credibility and strengthened some testimonies. That isn’t much of a global benefit, though it would have been meaningful for faithful Church members.
Lessons Learned: Hindsight Value Mostly
As with prophecies and promptings, evaluating information in hindsight was really the only way to verify the accuracy of remote viewing. The military could point to some information and note how accurate it was in hindsight in the same way I can point to a prompting that I obeyed and say it was inspired because look how things turned out. But can you tell the difference without the benefit of hindsight? Not really.
Lessons Learned: This Isn’t Reliable and It’s Weird
As the decades went by, Graff and others in the military were beginning to accept that remote viewing wasn’t reliable. Plus, the effort to separate scientific remote viewing from the woo-woo nature of it all was falling apart. The most successful remote viewer the military had was a self-described psychic who claimed she had a third eye (Phenomena at pp.309-329). Then one of the trainers in the remote viewing program, Ed Dames, turned out to be into the occult and the extraterrestrial. Instead of sticking to the standard remote viewing targets, he kept guiding remote viewers to the locations where things like alien abductions had been reported (Phenomena at pp. 300-301, 337-342).
It became public knowledge that Ronald and Nancy Reagan consulted an astrologer, Joan Quigley, and actually believed what she said, which shocked a lot of people and caused some backlash. Reagan reportedly replied, “I’ve found it difficult to write them off entirely. The Scriptures say there will be such people” (Phenomena p.336).
The fact that the military was trying to use psychic abilities was also becoming more public and causing protest. The Defense Intelligence Agency sat down and thought hard and concluded that, “The remote viewing phenomenon has no real value for intelligence operations” (Phenomena p.370). Note how that’s phrased. Remote viewing has no real value for military intelligence. But it doesn’t say that it wasn’t real, that people were making it up, that it doesn’t exist, or that it doesn’t have any use at all. Just that, for the military’s purposes, this isn’t something they can use.
Conclusion
The military’s experiences with the paranormal lined up nicely with how I was beginning to rethink the spiritual experiences in my life. Some of it was real; some of it was useful; when it worked it was pretty awesome; and relying on it too much was a bad idea.
[fn 1] This sounds like something out of the Netflix show “Stranger Things, doesn’t it? According to Phenomena, the experiments were all done with volunteers who came forward to say they had some sort of psychic sensitivity, or were willing to be trained to develop psychic abilities. Nobody experimented on pregnant women or children; no one forced anyone to take drugs. Stories like “Stranger Things” and Stephen King’s “Firestarter” rooted their plots in actual government interest in paranormal abilities, but getting children involved was entirely fictional.
Questions:
- Why do we expect paranormal or spiritual experiences to solve or prevent problems? Is that expectation realistic?
- Many people try to describe the God or power that causes these sorts of experiences rather than focusing on the experiences themselves. Do you think there is value to exploring the nature of the God/power? Do you think there is value in analyzing the experiences without worrying too much about where it came from?
- Have you had a spiritual/paranormal experience that connected to the real world and was useful? Did you then believe that should happen to you regularly?
