Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, November 29, 1995 TAG: 9511290075
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICHARD COLE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO LENGTH: Medium
- For 20 years, the United States has secretly used psychics - to hunt down Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, find plutonium in North Korea and help drug enforcement agencies - the CIA and others confirmed Tuesday.
The ESP spying operations, codenamed ``Stargate,'' were unreliable, but three psychics continued to work out of Fort Meade, Md., at least into July, said researchers who evaluated the program for the CIA.
The program has cost the government $20 million, said Ray Hyman, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon in Eugene, who helped prepare the study.
He said the psychics were used by various agencies for remote viewing - to help provide information from distant sites.
Up to six psychics at any time worked at assignments that included trying to hunt down Gadhafi before the 1986 U.S. bombing of Libya, find plutonium in North Korea in 1994, and locate kidnapped Brig. Gen. James L. Dozier in Italy.
Gadhafi was not injured in the bombing. Dozier, kidnapped by the Red Brigades in Italy in 1981, was freed by Italian police after 42 days, apparently without help from the psychics. News reports at the time said the police were assisted by an undisclosed number of State and Defense Department specialists using sophisticated electronic surveillance equipment.
The study reported mixed success with the psychics. Hyman was skeptical, while co-author Jessica Utts, a professor of statistics at the University of California, Davis, said some of the results were promising.
``My conclusion was that there's no evidence these people have done anything helpful for the government,'' Hyman said.
Utts, however, said the government psychics were accurate about 15 percent of the time. In some tests, when given a series of four choices, they picked the right answer a third of the time.
``I think they would be effective if they were used in conjunction with other intelligence,'' she said.
CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield confirmed the existence of Stargate and the study.
``The CIA is reviewing available programs regarding parapsychological phenomena, mostly remote viewing, to determine their usefulness to the intelligence community,'' he said.
But he noted that when the CIA first sponsored research on the program in the 1970s, the program was found to be ``unpromising'' and was later turned over to the Defense Department.
The Defense Intelligence Agency made the psychics available to government departments that needed information, Hyman said.
using three methods. In one, a ``sender'' would travel to a remote site and view an object, while the ``viewer'' back in the laboratory would try to use extrasensory perception to describe and draw it.
A particularly talented viewer accurately drew windmills when the sender was at a windmill farm at Altamont Pass in California, and later a footbridge across a marsh when the sender went to a San Francisco Bay area wildlife refuge.
The government also looked at precognition - having psychics try to guess an answer that had not yet been reached. And they looked at clairvoyance - trying to discover something that has happened but is not yet known.
Both researchers also agreed that the psychics were not reliable enough to be used alone.
But Utts said the statistical results were promising enough that research should continue.
``I would like to see funding in the open science world - I think we're at the point that something needs to be explained,'' she said.
by CNB