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?
You are reminding me of one of my favorite New Yorker pieces .
I have a friend (never Mormon) who knows things she shouldn’t, but not reliably. She can’t pick what she knows, but when she knows, she knows. “Can you come to this concert with me?” she asked one day. “What?! You got tickets???” “No, but I will. There’s a contest I’m going to win.” Hundreds of people had entered, but sure enough, she won. She has done this a handful of times over the time that I’ve known her.
There is so much we don’t understand and can’t explain. But I kind of feel, from my own limited experience, that the thesis of the book is kind of right: it’s real, but we can’t rely on it.
Just like the military, I found that using paranormal stuff was not worth much for predicting anything that was not already in motion. Like the kidnapping experience with the military, it was already all planned and in place when someone “saw” it and they were powerless to prevent it. I never “saw” anything more than a few days or hours in advance and nothing could be changed anyway. Knowing what would happen is of questionable worth when you can’t change it, or even plan for it. Just how useful is it to be told that your spouse will be killed in an auto accident within an hour, when there is nothing you can do to stop it? I’d rather not be told stuff like that.
Like the far right religious idiots who think the war in the Middle East can be manipulated by humans to force Jesus to return sooner than he has planned. Nope, sorry, that is not how this kind of “seeing” works. I mean, the religious idiots have been trying to bring about the second coming for a couple of thousand years now and I suspect if human actions could control it, well, we would all be living in some kind of utopia run directly by Jesus himself. So, they are only establishing themselves as war mongers. Not how it works…Even if I did believe there is anything to that particular prophecy.
I did not know anything about the military experiments, but I am not surprised. Hard to sort out noise. Some of it may be “real” but still isn’t very useful.
I personally would disagree with “only in hindsight can you sort out what was real and what was noise. I knew that “voice” was different than my own thinking. But it was too weird to trust. Or tell anybody about. Now, I can see how the military got too much noise because getting the opinions of several psychics there are going to be several of them that are like the people in fast and testimony meeting, who base it on feelings. Or they think they are psychic and they are just crazy. For one thing, I could never do it on demand. Maybe I wasn’t as “trained” as the military people got, but I could NEVER locate a lost airplane. It was just too uncontrollable. But I *knew” it was a way different experience when it did happen. I could absolutely tell the real from the noise.
Like out of body experience and the guy on the surf board. He KNEW that he could not really fly up like a bird and see that rip tide from above. Impossible. But that was what happened and he saw which way the water was going and was able to maneuver the surfboard safely to shore with the information he got from that overhead view. The information he got was real, but there was no way in physical reality for him to get that information. He just can’t send his eyes up in the sky, but he did. He knows good and well there is something really weird about his experience. It was impossible. It was still real.
But bet you he can’t just do it on demand.
So, although there was no “noise” there was also no ability to control it. That guy on the surf board didn’t *plan* on seeing the ocean from above. It just happened.
And I bet he was praying like his wife’s life depended on it too.
But I also bet he would never willingly get in that situation again, because he cannot trust that he will get the information to save their lives. I just don’t see how it could ever be forced to find lost airplanes or anything useful.
It cannot be controlled or predicted.
I’m a skeptic. Isn’t it amazing that all these different brands of Christians all manage to find whatever they need to in the Bible to support their views? Even when they’re all contradictory. And when we look back on things after they’ve happened, we’re really good at picking out all the details that fit together to form a narrative that we like while diminishing all the other stuff. Life is complicated and our brains are excellent at distilling complicated interactions into simpler narratives.
It is interesting the way many Mormons hold spiritual experiences in a different category than other paranormal experiences. (I’m sure Mormons aren’t unique in this way.) Mormons are definitely trained to treat vague feelings or ideas as spiritual promptings, and are open to near death experiences or ancestors helping with genealogy. But we’re not likely to put much stock in apparitions in the graveyard, or spirits haunting the attic, or alien abductions because they don’t fit so nicely into the theology. It’s an interesting compartmentalization, that allows for healings but not mall psychics.
Personally, I tried to hold those distinctions for a long time, despite never having any spiritual experiences in my whole life that had connections to the physical world. (I’m differentiating here between a prompting that Johnny has fallen in the well vs a prompting that the BoM is true; one is verifiable (is Johnny in the well?) and the other is not.) I’m skeptical enough of my skepticism (Dieter would be proud) that I’ll still allow that I can’t know that the paranormal *isn’t* happening, though I have no faith that it is, in either the proscribed Mormon manner or other paradigms.
Margie – thanks for recommending that article; I look forward to reading it. Seeing the future wouldn’t be bad at all if it was nice things like knowing you were going to win concert tickets!
Anna – agreed and agreed again. You know what I thought was interesting about the guy on the surfboard? He didn’t try to train people for that type of experience at all. As you said, he wouldn’t deliberately put himself in that situation again, and stuff like that can’t happen on demand. Yet he went from that experience to believing that people could be trained to do remote viewing. I guess since he saw himself from above, he figured people could see something happening in another country? All those experiences are so different.
DaveW – yes, the way spiritual experiences are somehow in a different category from other paranormal experiences is such confirmation bias. Ghosts aren’t real, but the Holy Ghost is. The devil is real, but not poltergeists. A righteous woman can get a prompting that helps her find her ancestors, but a sinful woman can’t get a prompting that helps her find a job. In my life, my spiritual experiences were real, but my depression was a mental illness. We separate out what we want to believe, even though from someone else’s perspective, it’s all woo-woo.
Hmmm, I have always kind of put the paranormal stuff as an explanation for the spiritual or same thing, different names, instead of putting them into totally separate compartments. One is not real and religious while the other is just fake. If we have a spirit separate from our physical body, then NDE just might be real. And if NDE are real, then obviously there might be something to religion beyond socially acceptable superstitions. How does prayer work, if not exactly the same way ESP works. If I can communicate with God and brother x from my ward can communicate withGod, is it possible that with training or some kind of connection, I could also communicate with brother x at distance? Some identical twins have a special connection and can communicate some things to each other, and there have been experiments that show some people can communicate with each other by thinking at each other from separate rooms, although it is rather hard to control and often sporadic. If my spirit can separate from my body in death and I am still consciously “me” why can’t out of body experiences be real. Same thing only I don’t need to be dead. So, yes, I will admit to believing in ghosts and my dead ancestors and I think there can be some communication.
But there is also lots of fake stuff too. There are people who claim to talk to God for position or money and they don’t really talk to God. There are psychics that earn a living telling where dead bodies are hidden or telling parents of missing children what they want to hear. I don’t think one can trust these people. Ever.
Alien abductions have sort of been debunked as sleep paralysis, and there is the problem with them that they have never been connected to reality, that we know of. But,having never experienced that, I can’t really say. But personally, I don’t believe little green men can travel to earth because distances are just too great, and I just don’t think it is possible to travel faster than the speed of light. My husband used to have a top secret clearance and knows that the some of the most documented UFOs were experimental aircraft, ours or theirs. Only after they are unclassified 30 years later can he tell me that yes, that weird triangle shaped thing that wasn’t showing up on radar that was sighted all over Arizona was the stealth bomber, while still experimental.
Of course, there are things that are not explained too.
The other thing with the para normal is that people who have these experiences are not psychologically different than average. They are not weird, into woo woo, or crazy. But then of course there are those who are crazy and those who are fakes and the fakes are into woo woo. There is no one psychological profile for those who have NDE or out of body experiences. They are just normal average people who have weird experiences.
Now *religious* people do have a psychological profile.
I’ve heard or read interviews with a few Remote Viewers over the years. Some of the names you mentioned looked familiar. Some of the more outlandish claims I’ve found made by them include the following:
Mars once had a thriving civilization.
There is an Artificial SuperIntelligence on the horizon that essentially acts as a loyal watchdog.
Loch Ness Monster sightings are simply ghosts of prehistoric animals (the depth and overlap of paranormal activity here is pretty staggering when you think about it).
I do think LDS theology–at least how I was taught–provides a slight advantage with both accepting and/or rejecting the paranormal, because we teach (or at least used to more prevalently) that God Himself is subject to certain laws. That means all miracles and any number of other things have natural explanations, though the science and mechanics of it may go way over our head right now. Because of that, I’m generally just as willing to accept what others may find disappointing, in that a paranormal event might be explained by more mundane science. At the same time, I might also be more open to a paranormal event going beyond our current scientific understanding, because I know there is a naturalistic explanation for it that I currently do not have all the information for yet. I’ve heard other Christians state how God can suspend natural law or rewrite it, but I feel no less satisfied worshiping a Deity who simply conforms to it. In essence, there is no paranormal, just different levels and frequencies of normal. I guess the question then becomes, how involved was God with the experience that touched us in the first place? I’ve personally felt that distinction many times. It’s obviously not something I can demonstrate for others.
I’ve read of operating room table out-of-body experiences in which scientists have theorized that the body starts sensing the world around it on the cellular level when deprived of the functional nervous system, and that the brain simply translates that into images we can process. When I hear those stories in which they have gone into another room and described events that played out exactly as people in those room later confirm, I find it takes fewer mental gymnastics to state that the Spirit momentarily left the body than to say my cells can see through or around walls, but I obviously have the bias of the religion I was raised in.
Anna – oops, I think I miscommunicated what I meant! When I was responding to DaveW, I was phrasing things as a Mormon who is trying to explain away paranormal experiences, while validating spiritual experiences. I’ve also concluded that both paranormal and spiritual experiences have commonalities and overlap.
When I was a new missionary, we visited a recent convert who had been ill. A priesthood blessings didn’t help her, so she sought out different help. She essentially went to a mystic healer. And it worked! She asked us, the missionaries, for an explanation about why the priesthood didn’t work but this other mysticism did. We had no answer. We asked the mission president and he gave us some confusing stuff about how the priesthood was real and this other stuff wasn’t. I wasn’t satisfied with his answer but I still had to believe the priesthood was real but mysticism wasn’t. Now, I’m inclined to believe that they’re both pretty similar. It’s a placebo effect, or an accident of timing. She was sicker when she asked for priesthood help. Several days later, when her body had spent a few days recovering, she asked for the mystic help and that “worked” because she was already recovering.
Eli – that’s a very practical viewpoint about paranormal and spiritual experiences. I believe those experiences happen, and I believe some of them can be explained by science (confirmation bias and the placebo effect have been demonstrated scientifically) or will be explainable by science. And either way, practicality demands that we don’t try and center our whole lives around these types of experiences. That’s where I think people go off the rails – when they try to frame all their life experiences around them.
Janey, I was more addressing the idea in general that most Mormons think paranormal and spiritual are two very different things, one real and the other fake. So believing they were the same while still a more or less believing Mormon always made me weird. But if I was going to believe in prayer, why not ESP as how it works?
And Eli, having been raised in the same religious environment as you where God works through natural laws, I tend to agree that these things are natural and science may explain them someday. Or religion may already explain them and someday science will prove certain religious ideas correct. But something is going on that science cannot explain satisfactorily.
In fact, I get blurbs in my news feed for articles that are always behind a pay wall about how “science” has proven there is one universal consciousness and we are each part of if and quantum mechanics this and that, and our consciousness live after we die, and we can communicate at distance with others because of quarks or whatever. I can actually read the article (picked one up at a news stand) and not understand enough to tell if it is garbage science or over my head science. I mean, have you ever had string theory explained in any way that makes sense? Do you understand quantum mechanics?
So, maybe prayer works the same way ESP does, and our brain sends out something that other brains can pick up. And maybe that is why psychics pick up so much noise, they don’t know which of the billions of humans might have accidentally sent out which signal.
I think lots of Mormon “healing” blessings are placebo and others are like one my husband tells. After being up for 36 hours with a screaming baby with an ear ache, my husband got off his 3 day shift and got home about 2 am. Baby and I were totally exhausted and I was reaching the point of tense and losing patience and “tried everything” can’t comfort baby because I want to shake her. It was time for another aspirin & Tylenol dose, so I gave baby her medicine, handed her off to daddy (who slept in shifts at work, kind of like firemen, only fires were electronic emissions over East Berlin and Russia) and I went to bed. Well daddy joined me in an hour saying he gave her a blessing. Yeah, she was so exhausted that I didn’t know how she was not falling asleep, because I was while holding her, still screaming. Tylenol and aspirin and a fresh calm caregiver to comfort her put her to sleep. And of course she was awake screaming when the medicine wore off, but his blessing was a miracle. Whatever.
I will be excited to see if science does start explaining the paranormal.
I actually know Paul Smith. He lived in Maryland at the time and was working out of Fort Meade. He still does remote viewing training workshops, though he now lives in the west. The way I understood it was that the closer you were to an actual event, the higher the odds of it happening. I compare it to a tree. You start out and there are all these branches. As time passes and branches are lopped off, they decrease in number. The fewer there are, the more the odds increase which one will survive, or this specific event will occur. Remote viewing was never a definitive thing and there were strict controls on the parameters. It is a little “woo-woo”, but I also think there are a lot of things out there we could do with our minds that we have no idea how to tap into.