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Conference hydra::dejavu

Title:Psychic Phenomena
Notice:Please read note 1.0-1.* before writing
Moderator:JARETH::PAINTER
Created:Wed Jan 22 1986
Last Modified:Tue May 27 1997
Last Successful Update:Fri Jun 06 1997
Number of topics:2143
Total number of notes:41773

1163.0. "Interesting Thoughts on ESPionage" by CSC32::MORGAN (Cybernetic Society Arrives Today!) Tue Oct 31 1989 13:14

      In the back of the revised edition of P.E.I Bonewits REAL
 MAGIC is a section I didn't scan because of lack of time.

      REAL MAGIC is a book about mechanistic explanations and
 usages of what we call magic. But he has some other reasons for
 sharing it with us. <Snicker> You'll like this..

      "There are still more reasons why as many people as possible
 around the world should have access to the sort of information this
 book contains. Part of them have to do with a Top-Secret Government
 organization known, among other names, as the United States
 Parapsychological Corps. The Corps was an outgrowth of the teams of
 astrologers our generals hired during World War II to tell us what
 Hitler's astrologers were telling him. Then somebody found out that
 the Russians were doing experiments with telepathy between orbiting
 cosmonauts and the ground. And the British had the head start on
 everyone in psychial research. Suddenly the idea occurred that a SPY
 WHO COULD READ MINDS WOULD BE INVALUABLE, and the concept of
 "ESPionage" was born. Who came up with the idea first we will never
 know; but by this time, every major nation in the world has a PSI
 Corps composed of researchers and "volunteers" working upon
 applying parapsychological phenomena to international politics and
 international control." 

      What do you think? Is Issac tellin' us true or is he using
 Conspiracy techiques to mold our minds?
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1163.1Yes and no.CADSYS::COOPERTopher CooperTue Oct 31 1989 14:3341
    A little of both, I think.
    
    I doubt that we have a Psi Corps.  It is more than simply likely that
    various agencies have invested money and effort in parapsychological
    research, but this has been in the form of a number of small,
    independent, impermanant projects.  It is frequently considerd an
    "open secret" that much of the SRI work on remote viewing was financed
    by the CIA, and it is said that Chuck Honorton was approached with
    CIA funding and turned it down.  
    
    I do not believe that there is any high level commitment to a concerted
    project to investigate the potentials of psi for any purpose by any
    part of the government.  A recent report commisioned by the
    military came down hard against funding parapsychological research,
    and there are reasons to believe that they were instructed to reach
    that conclusion -- and I am pretty sure that this was not as a blind
    but because of antipathy to the possabilities.
    
    The Soviets, however, unquestionably have a relatively well funded
    effort under way.  The work seems, for the most part, to this
    parapsychologist and to others here, as ineffectual and committed to
    theoretical orientations dictated by politics rather than facts.  It
    has been proposed that this publically visible work is a screen either
    for 1) a more serious, more practical, much larger effort, or 2)
    Nothing at all (the whole thing being a sham to "trick" America into
    spending money on bogus research).  Martin Ebon has written a book
    entitled Psychic Warfare which strongly pushes the first possibility.
    The book is interesting but forces all the facts to fit the desired
    interpretation -- I suspect in order to force the government into
    funding a similar project of similar scale.
    
    Interestingly enough, Bonewits account seems to be the polar opposite
    of the truth.  In fact, the Soviets had declared quite some time ago
    that psychical research/parapsychology violated dialectic materialism
    and was therefore a Bourgeois trick and had outlawed such research.
    Then in the fifties, a French newspaper published a (false) story that
    American researchers had been doing experiments in using ESP to
    communicate with submerged nuclear submarines.  Psychical research was
    immediately declared OK and they launched their program.
    
    					Topher
1163.2CSC32::MORGANCybernetic Society Arrives Today!Tue Oct 31 1989 15:077
    Thanx Topher,
    
    Real Magic was written in the 70's. Some 15 years later things may have
    change quite a bit.
    
    But what of TASS's reported semi-constant interest with folksy type
    stuff? Say folk Saints and the like.