| 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
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