part0021

In fact, they were shining the microwaves on electronic instruments to test their sensitivity to high-energy microwave radiation. For May, the pièce de résistance is the drawing in the upper left side of Figure 2. “Perhaps it is not as visually compelling as other examples, but for me, at least, ‘He nailed it!’ Not only did Joe accurately describe exactly what was going on, but also by his drawing indicated the spread of the electromagnetic radiation, which matched the known beam angle of the device.” The actual device is shown on the top of this figure.

The point in all this detail is important. They had developed a system of analysis with the potential of allowing an operations analyst looking at real psychic spying data to evaluate the results quantitatively. When combined with more traditional methods of intelligence collection, the military could assess more accurately whether or not to invest resources in solving the problem.

In short, did the psychic spying program work? “Yes,” said May. “I realize, of course, that the ‘official’ US Government’s response was ‘No.’ However, as I hope I have demonstrated here, the real answer is more complex.” We’ll see just how that complexity played out in the 1995 assessment of Star Gate and the closure of the project in Part 4.

To be healthy individually and keep the group’s morale high, the folks in the program played as hard as they worked. During the first year of the multi-million dollar contract, the budget was $1.875 million, spread across 38 separate tasks in the statement of work. Like military contractors everywhere, they had to endure substantial bureaucracy, and their struggles with typical silly corporate rules helped keep the serious work in perspective.

“For each of these 38 different tasks, I was required to provide quarterly reports and independent financial accounting,” said May. “By the end of the first year, I was $500 overspent. I considered this an accounting miracle. It was less than a 0.03 percent error, and almost anyone would have thought that should have been good enough even for government work. But no! Our resident US Army colonel demanded that SRI find the error, and all my pleading about how wasteful that was in time and money fell on deaf colonel ears. I even offered to pay the difference out of my own bank account, but was told that the US Army had no known mechanism of accepting money from an individual. After a few weeks and many more complaints, the SRI accounting office found the discrepancy. I feel sure that SRI had to spend in overhead costs many times the $500 to satisfy the desires of this Army bean-counter.”

As anyone in the corporate world can tell you, such mobilizations of resources to uncover errors or issues that cost far less than what the resources to uncover it had to spend is pretty common. It certainly should be no surprise that the military works the same way. However, such events always put undue stress on people, especially if they’re already working hard on their own assigned projects. The need to blow off steam with a little harmless fun can lead to silliness, even in top-secret programs.

Because the project was highly classified at SRI International, it existed behind a set of cipher-locked doors, the offices lining one external wall of the geophysics building. Since only a few people had security access to the project, they could get away with things behind the locked doors that others in the building could not. One of these was to celebrate the birthdays of project people in fine style. Normally, this involved a bottle of champagne, a beautifully decorated cake from a local bakery, a signed card, and usually a number of small funny gifts, and, perhaps best of all, the rest of the afternoon to play.

So on the occasion of the aforementioned Army bean-counters birthday, they had some fun at his expense. Jim Salyer from the DIA, who had for a long time been resident with May and company, had a wickedly delightful sense of humor. Jim called the colonel out of his office and informed him of the group’s usual birthday custom. Jim said, “To kick off the occasion, I put $5 into a hat and passed it around for contributions by the group. When the hat came back, it had $3.14 in it.”

May continues: “What Jim had done was to replace our usual pretty tablecloth with old newspapers duct-taped together. The birthday cake was replaced with a cupcake with a bite taken out of it. The champagne replaced with a small and very cheap wine cooler. Jim had taken a Christmas card that an aunt had sent him and crossed out ‘Merry Christmas’ with a crayon and wrote in ‘Happy Birthday.’ This card had all of our signatures. As my gag gift, I brought a large jar of jellybeans, so that after the ‘cake,’ we could run a bean-counting contest.

“It was apparent that the irony of all this was lost on our colonel. He was clearly trying his best to be a good sport, but his shoulders were starting to droop. A little later, we brought out the real cake and champagne, and a good time was had by all.”

Apparently, May was able to turn the tables on Jim Salyer, with a turnabout based on May’s life outside of SRI. “When my sister turned 50, I was responsible for getting the cake for the party. I pulled a practical joke on her by getting a piece of foam rubber and paying a professional bakery to frost it with an appropriate Happy Birthday greeting. You can guess what happened when it was time for her to cut the cake.

“I had told Jim Salyer this story, and knew that when it came for Jim’s 50th birthday, he would be on full alert. However, I got smart. I cut a corner out of the piece of foam rubber, asked the bakery to put a real piece of cake into the cutout corner, and frost the whole thing as above. The party behind closed doors went forward according to our custom.

May asked Jim to cut the cake and he balked.

“Are you kidding, May?” he said. “No way! ”

May accused Salyer of being a “dumb-ass skeptical government worker.” May proceeded to cut the real corner out for himself and began eating it. “I handed the knife to Jim to finish the job…GOT HIM!”

Regular social gatherings also helped with dealing with the stress of bureaucracy. Nearly every Friday afternoon, the group gathered in one of the laboratories that was a floor above their offices for something they called their psi video emporium. They brought in beer (violating SRI regulations) and popcorn, and rented a movie for the afternoon. On one such occasion, the group also included the aforementioned Army colonel, who believed he was “under cover,” since no one was supposed to know he was an Army officer.

One of our staff was fishing through her popcorn and innocently, but loudly, proclaimed, “Hey! Look at this shrunken little kernel!” Some of the attendees did know all about the Army officer for technical and administrative reasons and according to May, they “were all on the floor laughing!”

On the Job Training as a Project Director

The military folks were not the only ones who presented the group with issues, as May points out with some of the foibles of SRI management itself. The following are examples of this. The first example is trivial, but revealing.

As mentioned, the program’s suite of offices lay along one outer wall of the building. By definition, all of the offices had outside windows that offered thrilling views of other World War II-era drab office buildings and a freshly paved parking lot. In the group of twelve people, one was an administrative assistant—a formal SRI title for someone far more skilled than, say, a receptionist or secretary. A huge problem erupted with the management, as they were concerned that if the other administrative assistants in the building found out that the project’s assistant had a window, all hell would break loose! Apparently, none of the other admins was allowed such a luxury. In typical managerial style, May had been presented with a problem with no obvious solution.

“Experimental physicists generally believe we can make stuff up as we go along, so I came up with a solution that I knew was so silly that even our witless managers could see it. I suggested that we board up one of the windows! That did it. I won, and there were no more complaints. But I had to promise not to discuss the fact that our administrative assistant was so very special that she could actually have a window.”

May’s second example is a bit more chilling.

Near the end of the final year for the Army contract, May received a call from a staffer for the Senate Select Committee for Intelligence, telling him that the senior member of that committee wanted to visit the project and specifically May himself. “Who was I to say no to such an important visitor? ”

May continues, “As a loyal employee, I raced to my boss’ office to inform him of our good fortune. He was star-struck, and started planning an elaborate welcome ceremony and lengthy marketing briefings to convince this senator to throw piles of dollars toward SRI programs having nothing to do with ESP,” not exactly the reaction May had expected. May told him that this visit was unofficial, and that the senator merely wanted to review the ESP program. His boss then proceeded to lecture him about how the program was “small potatoes” compared to others at SRI, and that he fully intended to move forward as planned.

It is interesting to note that over the 17-year run of the psychic program at SRI International, the average amount of funding per year was a bit more than $750,000 USD. That this was “small potatoes” to other projects certainly puts the funding for ESP research in perspective, given that the amount was itself huge in comparison to publicly funded psi research.

Upon returning to his office, May called the Senate staffer. “As it turns out, I was the only person at SRI who was ‘read-in’ to a still highly classified aspect of our program, so I informed that staffer that the briefing would be classified at that particular level. And would he mind excusing any SRI personnel who might be in the room after the pleasantries were exchanged?” This was a very common practice in intelligence briefings.

During the visit, it all came to pass. Pleasantries were exchanged, welcoming speeches made, and then, like a punch to the gut of the management, they were all excused from the room given their lack of appropriate clearances. In other words, they were unable to do their marketing for other SRI projects/programs.

May found this was a bit of a shallow victory. His management was enraged at his actions, “But I could play innocent with some justification, in that I was not the person who made up our so-called ‘bigot list’ for our Special Access Program. But there was a bit of fallout.”

The briefing to this special senator went exceptionally well, and laid the foundation for a good working relationship and later a friendship. The senator said he would put six million into the supplemental authorization markup earmarked for the program. But if appropriated, the money would not be available for about nine months, long after the current contract funds would have expired.

Back he went to the management, asking that they support the project’s personnel for that period of time on overhead money, with the promise of six million at the end of nine months. The way both SRI and SAIC work financially is this: they are contract research organizations, so if the project director (May) was to land a big contract, his salary is paid via that contract even though his paycheck is issued by SRI/SAIC. They get the money from the contract. If he did not have a contract, he would still get paid for a while on what is called overhead funds that the corporations have accumulated over time as part of their fee structure. Usually they are not willing to support research staff for long from these accounts, but certainly for some time.

However, the circumstances of the senator’s visit provided an important lesson: “One should never provoke one’s bosses as I did by having them expelled from an important briefing.” Even though this prospect of six million made great business sense, they denied his request, so that the ESP research program at SRI International was forced to close in September 1989 for lack of funds.

However, after a nine-month period, the program rose again from the ashes, May was able to find another home for Star Gate, which prospered at Science Applications International Corporation for another four years. In other words, SRI management lost out on the next contract because they were mad at May for sabotaging their efforts to co-opt the senator’s visit–a visit specifically set up to spend time with May and his people.

For Ed May, dealing with the bureaucracy, the funding issues, and personnel–those involved directly in the program and those in management and other programs at SRI–many lessons were learned from his experience. “One is obvious: I learned to be a program manager with a substantial budget and a group of very bright people who often held firm and diverse opinions on nearly everything.” But something more important may have happened to him and his worldview.

Shifting Perspectives

In modern consciousness studies, there is a spread of ideas about the nature of consciousness, ranging from the dualist’s perspective— that some part of us, for example our soul or consciousness or some other non-material aspect, survives the death of our bodies —-to the materialist’s point of view that mind and brain are the same with death the end of an individual’s consciousness.

According to the latter view, our rich internal and subjective experience, the Mind, is an outgrowth (a.k.a. an emergent property) of the vast number of neurons in our brain and the even larger number of interconnections among them. “This is the view that I have arrived at based on the data, my experiences, and a growing accumulation of supportive research data,” would be a good summation of a proponent’s position. Currently this reductionist/materialist view is held by a very small minority of researchers currently active in trying to understand ESP, although it is easily the consensus within the neurosciences and research psychology communities.

During all this, the world itself was changing. The Soviet Union fell apart, and the Cold War was over. May’s experiences with Star Gate, combined with this fact, led to something new: a sharing of knowledge with the Russians involved in their side of the ESP Wars and a clear understanding of how the Russians view ESP differently than we in America do .

Said May, “I have had the pleasure of visiting Moscow maybe a dozen times by now, and these former ‘enemies’ have become good friends. During one of my many visits to Moscow, I was meeting with three of my Russian colleagues and our host in his office. Major General Nikolai Sham, Deputy Director of the KGB (Ret.) who kindly wrote the foreword to this book, had also joined us. All those present, other than myself, had been members of the Communist Party, which officially implied they were firmly atheists and materialists. From our discussion of the nature of consciousness, we realized that there was one, and only one, materialist-atheist in the room… me! The rest were hardline idealists and theists. We had a great laugh over the obvious irony.”

While atheism was part of the official Soviet dogma, on a working level it was simply ignored by many. Even the Russian Orthodox Church has its unofficial roots in Russian shamanism, and the good news is that in shamanistic traditions ESP is considered a good thing. Thus, May had no difficulty at all in getting the support of former very senior officials of the Soviet system, who were quite happy to come forward and admit their interest in ESP, which led to this book.

On the American side of things, however, we are generally a Protestant-influenced nation. In that tradition, ESP is too often considered the work of the Devil.

May and his folks have also enjoyed top level government supporters, which have include a Secretary of Defense and other agency directors, most all of whom have retired by now. None of them, however, are willing, as the spy stories say, to come in from the cold. According to May, “They will not allow me to mention their names, even though the evidence of their involvement in the programs is now part of public record.”

Psychic phenomena have been part of the human experience ever since we, as a species, could communicate, or possibly even before the evolution of language in other species. With some considerable justification, the skeptic might say that much of the putative psychic reporting has been little more than fantasy, selective memory, or some other form of self-delusion. Beginning with the founding of the Society for Psychic Research in London in 1882 and the later pioneering efforts of J. B. Rhine at Duke University, scientists have been challenged to determine what, if any, of these remarkable self-reports can be teased into the laboratory and studied according to the rules of the scientific method. Perhaps surprisingly, a great deal has passed that requirement.

As project leader for the research section of Star Gate, Edwin C. May subcontracted nearly one million dollars over the years to qualified researchers in the field. In one of those contracts, he asked Charles Honorton to conduct a detailed meta-analysis of the precognitive “Zener card” (standard ESP card) guessing data. Honorton and Diane Ferrari conducted a meta-analysis to examine all such experiments published from 1935 to 1987. Their assessment of all such experiments between 1935 and 1987 showed a cumulative statistical effect 11.4 standard errors over chance expectation. “In other words, a knock your socks off result,” said May. Moreover, they determined that neither selective reporting practices nor variations in study quality could account for the observation that, on average, human subjects were able to correctly guess the symbol of a randomly-determined future stimulus card (slightly but significantly) more often than expected by chance.3 These results stand to this day.

It is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide an assessment of all the anomalous cognition (a.k.a. ESP) research spanning the last eighty years or so. Perhaps the best evidence for the existence of anomalous cognition arises not from pure academic pursuits, but rather from successful applications. The intelligence community, for example, could not care less about the mechanisms of anomalous cognition. As you’ll see by the material in the next two chapters, it certainly worked well enough for them to keep the program alive for two full decades.

We realize, of course, that the cynical reader will simply observe that our stupid government kept many dumb things funded. Hence the Golden Fleece Awards.

The defense May offers against that accusation is simple. There were many people in the government who wanted to shut the program down even from its beginning. If it were not for a handful of heroes who put their considerable weight and reputations on the line supporting the project, these detractors would clearly have been successful. Would they have done so if there were nothing to the application of apparent ESP? Unlikely, given the already controversial nature of any claims of psychic abilities.

Ed May is often asked, “Is the government still involved?” As he has given up all his security clearances long ago in the spy versus spy game, “I simply cannot say for certain. In my opinion, I believe it is not funding further work. Given the state of the world just now in 2012, all I can do is hope that my assessment is incorrect.”

In this chapter, we focused on the Star Gate contractor’s perspective. There is another side to the story, regarding the formation of the Government’s own psychic spy unit at Ft. Meade, in Maryland from the perspective of one of the remote viewers. The project’s successes and failures, and thoughts on that of the program, are described in the next two chapters.