WASHINGTON POST ARTICLE, FROM DATA BASE SEARCH. 'THE PENTAGON'S TWILIGHT ZONE'

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: STARGATE
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP96-00791R000200230016-5
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: U
• Document Page Count: 5
• Document Creation Date: November 4, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 7, 1998
• Sequence Number: 16
• Publication Date: April 17, 1988
• Content Type: NOTES

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Copyright 1988 The Washington Post
The Washington Post
April 17, 1988, Sunday, Final Edition
SECTION: OUTLOOK; PAGE C3; THE MILITARY; OUTPOSTS
LENGTH: 2175 words
HEADLINE: The Pentagon's Twilight Zone
BYLINE: Sally Squires
BODY:
WHEN ITALIAN terrorists known as the Red Brigades kidnaped U.S. Army Brig.
Gen. James L. Dozier on Dec. 17, 1981, they set in motion a series of unusual
events -- even by terrorism standards.
Dozier's abduction from his home in Verona launched the largest manhunt in
Italy's history, and culminated six weeks later in his rescue in an apartment in
Padua.
But while Italian security and police forces scoured the country for Dozier,
the U.S. Army was trying its own ways of finding the general. Psychics. Seers.
Clairvoyance. The Army wanted him back and was willing to try almost anything.
Using a technique known as "remote viewing," the psychics thought they could
find Dozier in their minds and direct security forces to his location.
One seer arrived in Italy wearing long, flowing saffron-colored robes, much
to the consternation of American officials. According to a source who was
involved, the psychic asked the startled State Department employee who met him
at the airport to take him to the apartment where Dozier had been captured and
beaten so that he could get a better "reading" of where the general might be.
The use of psychics proved unsuccessful -- and it rankled U.S. intelligence
agencies, who were annoyed at having to operate with the psychics underfoot --
but it is only one example of the Army's willingness to try unusual avenues to
accomplish a difficult job.
In this so-called New Age, in which Shirley MacLaine speaks nonchalantly
about her other lives, people tout the power of the pyramid and high-ranking
U.S. military officers relax in Esalen hot tubs with their Soviet counterparts,
many people say that it is not even unusual that the military should be looking
at varied ways to enhance human performance.
"Can areas of emerging, nontraditional psychology offer the American soldier
an advantage over his adversary?" asked Gen. Marshall R. Thurman, then deputy
chief of staff for personnel, in a Nov. 5, 1982, memorandum to the principal
deputy assistant secretary of the army. "These include such areas as:
accelerated learning, inferential focus, previsualization, psychokinetics and
biokinetics, remote viewing, biophysical stress prevention, etc. Do any of these
areas hold potential value to the Army?"
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The Washington Post April 17, 1988
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The Army has tried to find out.
In 1984, the U.S. military launched a five-month experiment called Project
Jedi (named after the Star Wars knights who were able to use "the Force" to
perform unusual feats, including using a weapon blindfolded). It tested the use
of neurolinguistic programming, or NLP, as a new way of teaching recruits how to
shoot .45 caliber pistols. NLP is described in Project Jedi as "a specific
discipline developed to model human excellence."
In Project Jedi, the Army carefully dissected the way three expert marksmen
behaved during shooting. Their physical moves on the pistol range were
carefully documented, and so were their thoughts as they fired. They were asked:
When you shoot, what are you saying to yourself?
The researchers found, for example, that if they required the marksmen to hum
"Mary Had a Little Lamb," while they shot, their performance dropped
significantly. After gathering all this information, an independent contractor
developed an experimental training course based on the expert marksmen's model.
Twenty-three recruits were then chosen. Some were trained the conventional
way, while the others learned how to shoot from the experimental training
course. Training time was reduced -- almost by half -- for the experimental
group, although critics within the Army also point to some important flaws in
the experiment, including different weather and lighting conditions for the two
groups and use of different firing ranges and instructors -- all of which could
skew the results.
When tested for marksmanship, eight of the 11 recruits who were trained using
conventional pistol instruction qualified for shooting. Everyone in the
experimental group qualified. But the groups were so small that the difference
was not deemed statistically significant.
In 1985, the Army conducted a study of foreign-language instruction. Forty
junior enlisted Army personnel were randomly placed into two groups to learn
Russian. Half the group went into the conventional language course taught by
Army instructors. The other half went into a "Suggestopedia" group, where they
were taught not in a classroom, but in a pleasant living room-lounge.
Class sessions for the experimental group began with stretching exercises to
promote physical relaxation. The class engaged in mental relaxation exercises
and breathing techniques and then used "guided imagery" (Remember how you felt
when you took your best English test? Who was your teacher? How did your stomach
feel?) to enhance performance. After instruction in the day's Russian lesson,
the Suggestopedia class reviewed material while gentle, soothing music played in
the background.
But nyet was the bottom line. Despite these devices to make learning easier,
Suggestopedia "neither accelerated learning nor resulted in more overall
positive attitudes in students when compared to the standard" course, Army
researchers found.
In 1985, the Army also conducted a study of peak performance in sports. Led
by James L. Fobes of the U.S. Army Research Institute Field Unit in Monterey,
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Calif., the researchers concluded that teaching people to regulate certain brain
chemicals could be helpful for soldiers. In particular, they sought ways to
control the levels of endorphins, the chemicals that are thought to produce the
"runner's high."
The Army's interest in endorphins, meditation, the paranormal and other
out-of-the-ordinary means of improving performance is nothing new. For the past
quarter century, branches of the military and the intelligence communities have
looked into these controversial fields. In 1952, for example, Dr. J.B. Rhine --
considered the dean of American parapsychology -- conducted extrasensory
perception (ESP) tests for the Army. Ten years later, Air Force scientists
tested college women for ESP.
And in the 1970s, officers of the CIA and the National Security Agency
participated in experiments to see if certain people have psychic abilities. Run
by the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), the study tested whether a psychic
named Ingo Swann and a businessman named Pat Price could describe distant
locations merely by knowing which geographic coordinates to "look at." If it
worked, the intelligence services would have the perfect spy -- an agent who
could wander the world undetected (actually, without even being there). Whether
such mind's-eye-spying can work remains a matter of debate.
The trouble with remote viewing, clairvoyance, sleep learning, guided imagery
and other unconventional ways of enhancing human performance is that the
scientific proof to support them has always been controversial and slippery.
Critics charge that most of the scientific studies have flaws, making their
findings questionable at best, and they argue that until there is an adequate
scientific theory about why these phenomena exist, they will be impossible to
understand. But proponents point to the large amount of anecdotal evidence for
the existence of some of these phenomena, particularly ESP, which they say can't
be explained by other reasons.
There has also been concern among the military and the intelligence circles
that the Soviets might be moving ahead in the development of psychic abilities.
These concerns were fueled by reports from Soviet defectors of extensive
research into parapsychology. According to these reports, the Russians were able
to influence the behavior of others, alter emotions or health and knock people
out or kill them through mental telepathy.
A report by the Defense Intelligence Agency notes that Soviet tests of
parapsychology "included sending to the recipient the anxiety associated with
suffocation and the sensation of a dizzying blow to the head . . . . Some
Western followers of psychic phenomena research are concerned. . . with the
detrimental effects of subliminal perception techniques being targeted against
U.S. or allied personnel in nuclear missile silos. The subliminal message could
be 'carried' by television signals or by telepathic means."
Some of the Army's more recent interest in unusual means of enhancing
performance date from the First Earth Battalion, a proposal for a special type
of unit made up of warrior-monks. The First Earth Battalion itself originated
from the human potential movement popular in California in the 1960s and from
the Army's soul-searching in the wake of the Vietnam War. Tired and
disheartened, the Army put out the word that it was seeking a new way of
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training and motivating soldiers. That call led many different groups to propose
alternative forms of training -- no matter how bizarre they might seem.
A schism emerged between factions in the military whose primary interest was
high-tech machines and those who preferred developing the human side of the
military. The authors of the First Earth Battalion plan envisioned a
warrior-monk soldier who -- by mastering ESP, leaving his body at will,
levitation, psychic healing and walking through walls -- would be a kind of
super soldier.
In 1981, Lt. Col. Jim Channon of the Army's High Tech Light Division at Ft.
Lewis, Wash., wrote in a handbook for the First Earth Battalion that the
current balance in R-and-D funding allocates 99 percent of the total R-and-D
budget to machine systems and less than 1 percent to human system development.
This formula, if projected to the year 2000, will give us a 20-circuit tank
operated by a two-circuit soldier."
Channon and other authors of the First Earth Battalion were part of the Delta
Force, a loosely knit cadre of 300 officers who coined the Army's public
relations motto: "Be All You Can Be." The Delta Force (unrelated to the
antiterrorism unit with the same name) was formed and named by Gen. Donn Starry,
then a four-star general in charge of the Army's Training and Doctrine Command.
Starry concluded that as the U.S. and the Soviet union came closer to being
equal in high-tech equipment, the difference -- or delta -- in the superpowers'
armies would come down to the way soldiers performed.
But meanwhile, there was no comprehensive look at parapsychology or any of
these other techniques. There was no proven scientific evidence to show that
they existed, let alone might be harassed for the Army of the future, and no
clear review that would help place what little was known about these techniques
in perspective.
To solve that problem -- and to offer some guidance to the disparate groups
interested in these areas within the military, the Army commissioned a two-year,
$ 425,000 report from the National Research Council -- an arm of the
well-respected National Academy of Sciences. Among the wide range of topics
reviewed by the NRC committee were stress management, biofeedback, accelerated
learning, and such paranormal phenomenona as psychokinesis (the ability to
physcially move things with the mind), ESP and remote viewing.
The NRC report, called "Enhancing Human Performance," was released on Dec. 8
and concluded that most of these unconventional techniques were "scientifically
unsupported."
But the NRC report did find that sleep learning, guided imagery (in which a
task is rehearsed mentally before it is physically performed) and "super
learning" programs could be helpful for military training. While the report
found little evidence to suggest that super learning or accelerated learning
works because of its innovative components, the holistic approach it provides
may be beneficial, the NRC committee found. The report advised that the Army
identify which components of accelerated learning are most important and how
they could be best integrated for military use.
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Exactly what the Pentagon will do with the NRC recommendations is still
undecided. Some of the top level brass, including Gen. Thurman, have only
recently been briefed on the report's findings. Since many of the NRC
recommendations deal with basic research, the Army expects to fund more studies
in these areas.
one use of mental rehearsal could be in the manufacture of anti-tank
missiles, which requires some fine motor skills that might be enhanced by having
technicians rehearse their tasks in their minds before they ever thread a wire.
The trick will be for the Army to sift out what is worth following and what
is not, and to do that on the $ 200,000 annual budget currently allocated for
this area. "If there were a 200 percent gain in performance [with some of these
techniques], I would probably have people banging down the door, saying, 'Why
aren't we trying it?' " says Edgar Johnson, technical director of the Army
Research Institute. "But the opposite is true. Lots of data shows that this
doesn't work. Our job is really to put together the scientific evidence."
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