FOIA: Paranormal Briefing by RAND Corporation

paranormal_briefing.pdf
Paranormal Phenomena - Briefing of a net assesment study
A semi-brief report in very good quality that discusses and compares both Soviet and US Paranormal Research
Document date: 1973-01-00
Department: RAND CORPORATION
Author: P.T. Van Dyke and M. L. Juncosa
Document type: Report/assesment
pages: 33


Archivist's Notes: A very interesting cold war document that discusses the plausibility and proof of paranormal phenomena including but not limited to Clairvoyance, Telepathy, Dermo-Optics, pre-cognition to name a few.

The point of the paper is to determine wether these phenomena exist and if they have any use in military/warfare aplications.

Well it does not seem like a smoking gund perse there are certainly some interesting things in the document.

Both writers seem to agree that the soviets had a better handle on how to investigate the phenomena and that the soviet approach was the best bet at getting actual results.

While the document appears to take a skeptical approach to the subject the authors and contributors seem open to the possibility that the phenomena may be confirmable and subsequent applications found.

Though not in the document (of course) it is interesting to note that project grill flame began a few years after this document was submitted to DARPA.

Though there is evidence that the CIA's MKULTRA program was begun in the 1950's.

Perhaps if the report proves anything it's that black ops tend to be highly compartmentalized which leads to one hand not knowing what the other is doing.

While the entire document sounds mostly as if those involved are not ready to commit to the viability of paranormal research, there seems to be a serious undertone of the opposite.

I find the section on "Possible Military Applications" to to be disturbing. It would not be hard to imagine tests being run on unwilling or unaware US citizens. I also feel, that undertone again, that these studies might have been initiated out of fear that the USSR might be capable of using such advances already against the west in some manner.

A name of note in this is one Milan Ryzl, a defector to the west in 1967. Said to be active in certain areas of paranormal research, maybe having some ability in the area, this person was apparently "under wraps" and could not be used to aid in the research or assessment.

In general, the conclusions, while keeping a respectful distance from actual endorsement, seemed to be that the US was behind in the game, and needed to follow the leads of the Russians.

The Rand Corporation’s 33 page document on Paranormal Phenomena –
Briefing on a Net Assessment Study. By P.Van Dyke and M. Juncosa in January 1973.
The document was prepared for Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The Forward explains that they were looking at both U.S.
and Soviet Research but that Soviet Research made up the bulk of it.

The topics discussed in this document are as follows:
The Nature of Paranormal Phenomena, Possible Military Applications, Differences between Soviet and U.S. Research, Soviet Research in Parapsychology, Paranormal Research Centers in the Soviet Union and the United States, U.S. and Soviet Research Funding, General Conclusions of the Study.

The report attempts to classify the documented case studies into a matrix field that checks if they appear to be compatible with physical laws of science.

It is stated that their major concern is with paranormal phenomena that meet two criteria (1) They have potential military applications…, and (2) they are subject to experimental investigation.

They felt that telepathic communication would have benefits for the military with long and short distance information transfer, equipment such as torture or brainwashing control, system damage, man-machine interactions, body control and healing (the ability to resist normally intolerable conditions, in captivity, might be another application of these phenomena).

It is discussed that the Soviet research was better documented and scientifically grounded probably because scientists were doing the research, whereas in U.S. Psychologists and other related fields were conducting the research. However, once thoroughly investigated, the conclusion was that U.S. and Soviet information was roughly equal.

The part in bold got a bit dyslexic
and I was not able to edit (because it was moved straight away in the Discussion Forum)

here is the correction:

They felt that telepathic communication would have benefits for the military with long and short distance information transfer, equipment, system damage, man-machine interactions, body control and healing (the ability to resist normally intolerable conditions such as torture or brainwashing control , in captivity, might be another application of these phenomena).

Interesting to note that when you google the link WN-8017-ARPA in the
document it leads you back to this ATS document.

They actually note that yoga, spiritualism, acupuncture, various forms of autonomic nervous system (like breathing to slow down rapid heart beat) are all paranormal phenomena.

No wonder Russia was the leading authority on this subject in this report...

I cannot help but be concerned about the soviet 'twins' clairvoyant experiments, makes one question just exactly what happened to the alternate twin in the long distant tests, gauging from alleged tests run with mother rabbits hooked up to EEG's with her litter taken away and sacrificed, showing a marked response by the mother at the exact time of the kill.

Another interesting point in this paper is the fact the US government claims that they are far more advanced in their ability to fund and man this type of research, yet the report states that the USSR had as many as 20 of these formal testing facilities, each manned with as many as hundreds of men.

This leads me to question how many we had and just how much man power was spent in the US?

This report also admits that the soviet research emphasized the
biological and physical investigations, while the US used more of a psychological approach.

And in the concluding remarks the US states that after more than
40 years of research, their approach failed to significantly advance our understanding of the paranormal phenomena. And furthermore that several areas of US research had begun to track soviet research.

Could this have been because of peer pressure , on the part of US researchers to not be defined as abnormal themselves while conducting the psychological observations of these experiments? Perhaps it was the preconceived notions on the part of the researchers and psychologists themselves that actually stood in the way of a true subjective experiment outcomes.