part0033

F or many decades, the US and Soviet/Russian governments set aside money to study ESP, and to a lesser extent PK, in an effort to apply psychic abilities to various tasks. While the programs in the East spent significantly more money than the West, we’ve seen that the psychic arms race—a race that during the 1960s and 1970s it was thought the US might be losing—was really neck and neck. There were no psychotronic generators or weapons that worked, no strong influence of the minds of others, and not even the probing of the minds of enemies.

The opponents of the existence of psi have gleefully said “See, what a waste of money,” especially here in the West when the Star Gate program shut down. Undoubtedly some in the East would echo those sentiments, given the programs did not yield the weapons or energy sources they had been charged with developing.

Many would agree that neither country was ultimately successful as they would have liked given their goals. However, as you may have gathered from getting to know many of the individuals involved on both sides, we should be glad many of those goals were not attainable. After all, do we really want to have to worry about the enemy reading or controlling our minds? Or purely mental weaponry?

But as you also should have gleaned from the previous chapters, the programs were far from unsuccessful. While some of the accounts from our Russian colleagues, seem to have been somewhat dramatic in the telling, their successes and failures match up with or parallel research and research findings here in the US, both in the Star Gate program and contemporary psi research by parapsychologists. Let’s review the past a bit before moving on to present and the future .

There were two levels of the story of the remote viewing program in the US: what the viewers were tasked with/how they did on their “missions,” and how the unusual nature of the program was dealt with in the halls of the Pentagon and the Capitol.

We covered Edwin May’s personal history and how he got involved in what many in the mainstream considered (then and now) a “wacky” idea. After May became Star Gate’s contractor director in 1985, technical and administrative oversight increased sharply. Yet despite this scrutiny, the program proved even more successful than before, and on occasion sometimes influenced US policy and practices.

One early operational example was to see if the US’s MX missile system—the idea of randomly moving long range missiles to launch stations situated around a 60 km circler track—could be compromised by psychic spies. After all, if US remote viewers could do it, then so could the Soviet psychics. While the psychics were not totally responsible for the cancellation of this very expensive program, a letter from Senator Warner (R-VA) to then Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger indicated that the psychic program was a contributing factor.

As with any bureaucracy, a number of very dumb rules emerged. There was an in-built tension between corporate and project welfare, and SRI and SAIC were no exception to this rule. May’s story illustrated a few of these tensions and demonstrates how project tactical victories easily turned into strategic losses.

Joe McMoneagle, who became the project’s Remote Viewer #001, provided us with his story. Joe had a number of psychic experiences with his twin sister during childhood. During his US Military service in the Vietnam War, he turned his unconscious psychic ability to a most important use: aiding in his survival during that dangerous conflict. A near-death experience in Austria in 1970 also foreshadowed his unexpected new role in the military.

Joe described these experiences, how he was recruited for the Star Gate program, his first trip to SRI International as part of a “technology transfer program”—remote viewing trials—and the process that vetted him as the number one viewer for the Army in 1978.

We also looked at some of Joe’s psychic spying tasks, including a mission to rescue the US hostages in Iran in 1979, a lost Russian aircraft in Africa, and identification of the largest submarine in the world, which the West calls a Typhoon Class sub. All three of these cases produced useful intelligence data, some of which were briefed to the President of the United States.

A big part of the US program had to do with how success is measured for a complex program involving ESP, how one figures out the “usefulness” of information measured, and how the information gathered in Star Gate stacked up against other intelligence sources and their particular “usefulness.”

Mixed reviews were to be expected of the military and intelligence community’s use of ESP, given the controversial and complex nature of the program. In general, even for the best forms of intelligence collection, the quality of data is often separated from its intelligence usefulness. ESP-derived intelligence data is no exception. Even strikingly accurate data gathered by psychic means is useless unless it addresses and applies to the actual task.

Worse still, a controversial program tends to get the most unyielding and difficult problems that have not been resolved by more orthodox means. In other words, when all else has failed, what’s to lose by calling in the psychics? Thus, the operational psychic missions were for the most part impossible problems that could not be solved using traditional methods.

Given such questions and circumstances, it’s even more remarkable that the program garnered enough successes to survive for 20 years.

One indication of the program’s successes was Joe McMoneagle’s prestigious Legion of Merit award for excellence in psychic intelligence collection.

In another example, this time for law enforcement, data was supplied by remote viewer Angela D. Ford. Based on her psychic impressions, a US Customs agent who had gone “bad” was captured in an unusual and unexpected location.

Despite the successes, administrative and technical problems arose within the Ft. Meade psychic spying unit, and many problems arose when the SRI program was closed and before it was ceded over to a new contractor. The Senate Select Committee for Intelligence wanted to continue the funding at a substantial level, but there was no contractor to do the work. SRI was no longer interested and no government agency would agree to take on contracts in this controversial area.

The Defense Intelligence Agency was forced to accept funding from the Congress and to sole-source the funds to a new contractor, SAIC. Unfortunately this created a difficult atmosphere within its management. At almost every turn, the management set up the Ft. Meade group and SAIC for failure.

The application of ESP for intelligence gathering was clearly a success, and we discussed that. However, as you saw, internal politics and bureaucracy surrounding the program contractors seemed to make the end of the program inevitable.

At the end of the 1980s, the USSR disintegrated and strategic opposition from the West disappeared. The end of the Cold War eventually resulted in the end of the Star Gate program. Ed May discussed how the Star Gate program continued at the SAIC, and detailed his struggle with the bureaucracies of CIA, DIA, and Congress. We also looked at how an appearance on the TV show Nightline with CIA Director Robert Gates, and its fall-out, resulted in the end of the ESP program. The same politics and an ever-developing overt personal biases in and out of academia, coupled against psi research and applications kept the program from any sort of governmental reincarnation.

We also saw the development of a new understanding between the US and Russian counterparts where ESP is concerned.

Joe McMoneagle recalled his meetings with former Russian adversaries, now good colleagues. He describes the exceptionally successful remote viewing session in Moscow, which he conducted together with his counterpart, Russian psychic Dr. Elena Klimova.

Over in the East, the story that led to their program and that meeting was a little different.

The idea that so many had that the KGB was using psychics to spy on the West makes for a good suspense story. But the work that the KGB did with psychics was always more or less sporadic through the end of the 1980s. At the higher administrative levels of the KGB, no one would have dared to endanger their career by officially proposing such a program, due to the obvious “idealistic” bias against such non-materialistic things. However, elsewhere there were many attempts to develop so-called psychotronic weapons and naturally the KGB was indirectly involved.

The KGB held two opposing views of psychics at the same time: Officially, the KGB prosecuted them. Unofficially, they secretly used them.

The case of Edward Naumov was used to illustrate the official policy and the case of the famous Russian psychic Tofik Dadashev’s work with the KGB and other security services from the early 1970s to the present demonstrates how they employed psychics covertly. Two high-level KGB officers described how a hijacker was thwarted by an extremely risky decision based upon Tofik Dadashev’s psychic abilities. A second story involves Tofik Dadashev’s work catching spies for the KGB–psychic counter-intelligence operations.

We also related the history of the Popov Radio-Technical Society’s ESP Section, including stories of Brezhnev’s psychic miracle worker Djuna Davitashvilli and the Gulyaev-Godik Laboratory where she was studied by the best Russian scientists using the most sophisticated scientific equipment.

KGB Major General Georgii Rogozin describes a story how he studied with psychic Sergey Vronsky and became a psychic himself. General Rogozin was widely known in Russia as the Deputy Director of the President Yeltsin’s Secret Service, as the Kremlin parapsychologist and as the “Grey Cardinal” of the Security Service .

KGB Deputy Director, Major General Nikolai Sham, who contributed the foreword to this book, described how the KGB worked with psychics and discussed the USSR’s secret psychotronic weapon designs that were supervised by the KGB. We also discussed the demise of the KGB and the formation of a new security apparatus, and a new home for ESP in the Russian Military and Intelligence.

From there we moved on to a bit of an inside view of the Soviet and Russian Military and Intelligence community, which came to us from the personal experience of KGB Major General Boris Ratnikov, and his involvement with the ESP Wars.

Ratnikov spoke of his work for the KGB from his early years in the 1970s, which ranged from keeping people from defecting in European ports, to more serious work in Afghanistan, in aircraft security and finally as Alexander Korzhakov’s assistant in the Security Department for the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, of which Boris Yeltsin had recently become chairman. General Ratnikov was a participant of the events surrounding the coup attempts in August 1991 and had an insider’s view of the siege of the main Russian Government Building. He took over President Yeltsin’s duties and ruled the entire nation for a very brief period, sitting in the President’s armchair.

It was during Ratnikov’s analytical work on the real and potential threats to the President and his entourage as well as to the government and the populace that he first learned about parapsychology and potential applications of ESP to military/intelligence operations. The KGB recommended using Lt. Colonel Georgi Rogozin, an expert in psychic functioning, to develop mechanisms to neutralize the threat of these technologies. Ratnikov secured Rogozin’s transfer from the KGB to serve as an advisor in his service, and Ratnikov’s career underwent a drastic change of direction. Ratnikov’s initial skepticism about ESP began melting away under Rogozin’s tutelage, and we learned of situations where Ratnikov engineered President Boris Yeltsin’s schedule, in part, on the basis of psychic data.

Lt. General Alexei Savin had several near death experiences and discovered his own extrasensory abilities, creating experiences and an interest that would follow him to a position as the head of the top secret military unit 10003. In its prime, Unit 10003 had over 100 psychic participants, arguably making it the largest psychic program in the world.

Under General Savin’s supervision, many psychics have been trained for duty in the Armed Services, including Air Force pilots and missile specialists. We learned about Savin’s background and how he came to run Unit 10003. We were provided with Savin’s discussions of ESP-related issues with many high level politicians and academics .

Through Savin, we gained a unique historical sketch which describes the use of psychics during combat operations in Chechnya, as well as how ESP was used to clean up organized crime in Kalmykiya (one of the Russian regions), and to predict earthquakes and accidents at nuclear sites.

General Savin worked with seven Chiefs of the General Staff and gave us his inside, personal impressions about their take on ESP research and psychic spying. From an insider’s perspective, he told us about intrigues within the General Staff and the President’s Administration and about underground games in the Russian political world.

Just as we got the inside scoop about the shutdown of the US Star Gate program, General Savin provided us the insider’s view of the end of the military Unit 10003.

The psychic Tofik Dadashev discussed his work with the Security Services in the 1990s, including the case of the kidnapping of the wife of the President of the International Bank of Azerbaijan, and Dadashev’s prediction of who would be the Prime Minister of Turkey.

Vyacheslav Zvonikov, M.D., a research physician (and psychic) with the Ministry of Internal Affairs provided us with his own narrative of work with ESP and how the work of psychics, including from General Savin’s programs, fit into the shifting ideologies of the late 1980s into the 1990s. This was a time of change for as the Soviet Union fell officials were forced to consider new ways of thinking to deal with social problems, even if some of the ideas and approaches might have been on the fringe of what was previously and subsequently acceptable. Sadly, real openness to ESP in the Russian government ended for the most part in the mid-1990s.

Major General Nikolai Sham continued his account of the KGB’s comprehensive program in ESP research and development of new technologies, many of which simply did not work, and finally the restructuring of the KGB. He was unable to interest the new leadership in the projects that may have held real potential, and “left the system.” But he did continue his own work in the area of applied psi.

He concluded with his optimistic comments regarding possibilities for future development that could benefit Humankind, including the ones which are using ESP.

In general, while the politics of both countries were different, the approaches and amount of financial support and personnel involved also different, it seemed the results were quite similar. ESP provided a stream of actionable intelligence for a number of applications, from military situations to law enforcement opportunities to political issues. Unfortunately, ESP is also not able to provide actionable intelligence in all—or even most—situations. That the number of “missions” with the quality of information necessary was not really any better than other information sources already in place does somewhat undermine the use of ESP but also underscores weaknesses in those other information sources and intelligence gathering processes. Bureaucrats comparing the two (ESP vs. sources already in place) felt it was an “either/or” situation rather than considering that remote viewing was adding to the possible resources at our disposal. Any conclusion that it was duplicating effort based on the idea of the remote viewers providing similar percentages of actionable intelligence is a false conclusion. If remote viewing provided accurate intelligence in 15% of the missions, but other, in-place resources were about the same percentage, it does not automatically follow that it’s the same 15%.

In the case of the Star Gate program, that the “missions” were those that already had hit the proverbial brick wall meant they were starting with what others deemed impossible missions. In other words, it was already accepted that the in-place resources could not gain accurate information. Consequently, ESP provided an additional potential information stream that added to our knowledge base. It was not a duplication of effort.

In the face of a mission impossible, there were successes completely inexplicable by those in mainstream science. The successes point at many interesting possibilities going forward, especially combined with many public successes of remote viewing tasks conducted outside of the realm of government secrecy in the parapsychological field.

Though the government support is gone, both American and Russian programs and the research outside of those programs put a spotlight on something very important: at least some humans are capable of retrieval of “hidden” information that can be applied in very practical ways. That the programs are gone, is not a result of lack of success, though one could reasonably ask whether things might have gone differently if the remote viewers were anywhere close to as accurate as the claims of some psychics in the media.

With the events of 9/11 in 2001, the question came up in several quarters as to whether the remote viewing program was “reactivated,” or whether the US government was using remote viewers again to find terrorists.

“I think not,” said Ed May. “Joe and I and others spent a decade after our program shut down, up to 2005, trying to get something started again. We ran into a problem that was so persistent that we gave up. At the working level, intelligence officers who were tasked with figuring something out were in favor of doing something because it’s cheap compared to other things the government puts its money in to.

“But it was always turned down at the management level for its giggle factor,” he continued. “In our era, with the Star Gate program, it was the same thing. It wouldn’t have happened or continued if it weren’t for a few people who we unfortunately do not have permission to name in this book, those few heroes who acted as a shield against all the people who were terrified that someone would find out the program was happening.

“A large part of the reason the program was so highly classified had nothing to do with protecting the US against the Russians, it was protecting it against Congress.” This sounds familiar, especially given the political climate today.

“It wasn’t the case that everybody loved the Star Gate program. Everybody hated it. That, together with not having the heroes to protect it, has made it all go away. And it turns out that it was the same problem in Russia, as Savin was saying.” That leaves the future of research on the application of psychic abilities up to non-government funded researchers.

What lessons can be gleaned from a comparison of the US programs and the Russian/Soviet ones?

“One of them is how human the KGB guys seem,” said Ed. Based on his experience with our Russian contributors, and his own experience with various agency personnel in the US, it’s pretty clear that the Robert Ludlum/Ian Fleming kind of spies and agents are the rarity. Not every spy is James Bond, or a KGB assassin. Not everything such agencies do makes them the “bad guys.”

However, one bit of fallout from the revelations of the Star Gate program was that “some of our colleagues are still angry with me for working for ‘the bad guys’—meaning the US Intelligence community,” said Ed. “But in fact, this was credible and even ethical work.” The missions, while classified, were not directed at any offensive goal. “You cannot fight a war if there are no secrets. What we did was chip away at the secrets.”

One can certainly say there are “bad guys” in every agency and every area of the government. This is applicable to the Federal, State and even local levels typically. It’s applicable to many corporations and even many businesses. That’s what whistleblowers are for. It is unfortunate we often demonize the whistleblowers, though because of their reasons for exposing what they reveal some of them may indeed be “bad guys” themselves.

Another lesson to learn here is how much misinformation came from the Soviets during the height of interest in psychic research behind the Iron Curtain. Several books were published in the West about the “secrets” and observations a number of people from the West made when visiting the USSR’s psychics and parapsychologists. But in hearing from the Russians, it’s important—and very interesting—to note that the bad information, the false front, was not created or directed at Westerners visiting, but rather seemingly to keep the funding flowing to the various labs and programs that were researching ESP and trying to advance the ESP Wars. This is hardly an uncommon practice even in the United States—tell them what they want to hear so you keep your job and/or funding!

“General Sham told me in person that he funded 40 different institutes specifically for the purpose of building non-lethal psychotronic weaponry. They could not make it work. That’s pretty condemning,” said May.

From the start, the Russians were pointing at research by the US government, and we were pointing at the Russians work. Due to the milieu of the Cold War, they were using us to get money and we were using them to provide justification for funding for the US side of the ESP Wars.

Research and application of remote viewing continues today, though not at the request of the governments. In the US, several researchers including Ed May continue the work to understand how ESP might work. If you do research on the internet, you’ll find a number of people holding remote viewing training programs and seminars, some of them having been viewers within Star Gate and others trained by ex-Star Gate viewers. The programs are often based on what they learned from Ingo Swan during their tenure with the program, though they may have different methods from each other, with a favorite being Swan’s method, called coordinate remote viewing or CRV for short that evolved into Controlled Remote Viewing instead.

“Many of the people offering courses are well-meant,” said Ed May. “Nonetheless, with one exception, none of them are trained scientists. One of the things the government paid us to do was to figure out how to train others. The training process as Ingo defined it (CRV) did not produce actionable intelligence. It didn’t involve double-blind conditions and there were other problems which can extend to the training.” They were unable to come up with a training protocol that satisfied the conditions requested by the government.

“It turns out that not everyone has the aptitude to do remote viewing,” he continued. “It’s possible to train someone to reach their aptitude or skill level, but that’s really about training people what not to do rather than what to do. This is something you’d see in Joe McMoneagle’s book Remote Viewing Secrets.”

That leads us to some important points about ESP, about psychic abilities in general.

People tend to call ESP a “gift” or look at it as some kind of super-power. “We tried to get the government off the idea that ESP, remote viewing, was a miracle,” said May. “There are a lot of applications for miracles, but ESP is not a miracle.” The proper approach in searching for applications of ESP is to assume that the current, laboratory-verified aspects of ESP are true and find applications that can benefit from that level of functioning. For example, suppose you wanted to use ESP to find a missing child. If you expect that a psychic can stick a pin in a map showing where the kid is, then you are in for a major disappointment. For sure, something like this happens from time to time, but it is extremely rare. However, if you reframe the quest for the child and say can we reduce the time and resources needed to find that child then, as it turns out, it is possible to reduce these by about 10-15% using ESP! That is, at times, just enough to save the child’s life.

The late psychic Annette Martin, who worked extensively with our third author Loyd Auerbach, published a book that acts as a sort of workbook for people who wish to try all sorts of exercises with applications of ESP—with the rider that one will not be able to do everything, or even close to everything. (Discovering Your Psychic World by Annette Martin. Artistic Visions, 1995). Martin was not “good” at many of the things in the book, which is understandable: even the most psychic of psychics is only human. Most people miss the fact that we’re not all good at (or even have the aptitude for) all psychic abilities. In fact, humans simply can’t do everything they try to do. We all have a range of aptitudes for all sorts of physical and mental activities. That’s what being human is all about.

That said, it’s important to note that several people have been able to apply remote viewing to tasks like investing and archaeological research to some degree of success. More work needs to be done in this area to find the best ways to identify people who might be good at it, how to best bring out their talents and the information, and how to best understand the limitations of the information and set expectations with the people requesting the information.

There are two components to understanding ESP going forward. How the information gets from point A to point B is a physics problem. Once the data is on board (the brain), how it is processed is a neuroscience problem—though some in the field of parapsychology and other fields consider that consciousness is more than the physical structure of the brain, a point of disagreement with much of mainstream science.

Because what parapsychologists study has the “giggle factor” at so many levels of society and science, because there is a clear bias against even the possibility that ESP might be real in many academic quarters, and because the availability of funds to consider the question of ESP is so limited, the research suffers. “We are amateurs in our own future if we expect to really understand how ESP works from the perspectives of both physics and neuroscience,” said May. “We can’t really address the questions with the laboratory equipment and funding we have.”

The question is how do we get people from outside of our discipline to look at the problem? “Funding needs to be available to people outside the field to bring new ideas, equipment from physics and neuroscience, and people into the field. ”

Then there’s the problem of parapsychology’s negative definitions; that is, ESP and PK are what happens when nothing else could or did happen. That, of course, tells us nothing about what these phenomena are! We study phenomena, experiences and abilities that are currently unexplained otherwise by science. If we find the explanations for ESP, does that mean that ESP no longer falls into the purview of parapsychologists? Or does that mean parapsychology as a field must adapt to where the explanations lead us?

Currently, and for some time, parapsychologists have been focused on evidential studies—gathering data that shows that ESP and PK do indeed happen. Research has also been conducted to understand what it is about certain people who are more psychic than others are, but the research outside of Star Gate has generally been conducted with “average” people rather than people who seem to have more skill or talent or even aptitude for the tasks.

That focus on evidence may have a lot to do with the lack of acceptance by mainstream science, and the continual statements of “skeptics” who insist on “extraordinary evidence” then seem to either ignore that any evidence exists, refuse to look at it, or say it’s not good enough even when gathered under the best of controlled conditions. There’s this idea that the acceptance of the phenomena is proportional to how much data you get.

But do we really need the evidential studies going forward? We have enough evidence.

From both the US and Russian programs, it’s been clear that identifying and working with individuals with at least an aptitude for if not a prior demonstration of ESP skills leads to greater success. “It’s very clear that some element of parapsychological work needs to be directed at identifying people who might have an aptitude for specific ESP tasks and abilities,” said Loyd Auerbach. “How we do that without the test subjects hanging up a shingle that says ‘psychic’ when they are identified as having that aptitude is a difficult question. In the past, this has been a real concern, given examples of individuals participating even in standard experiments making claims after learning they scored ‘above chance.’”

“Once identified,” he continued, “we then have to figure out how to take those aptitudes and skills, bring them out, then apply them. Understanding how psi works is certainly part of this, though one can still apply a talent or skill without knowing how it works.”

On the explanation front, Ed May stated: “There really are some fundamental questions that need addressing. When does psi actually happen in the process? Does the information start coming into the individual’s brain before the participant steps into the experiment, or once the trials begin?”

It’s been shown that the capacity for the brain to process bits of information is limited (how many bits per second). “It would take much time, several months for example, for the brain to process enough precognitive information to guess specific lottery numbers on a particular date. Not the most practical process,” said May. Yet it’s clear that accurate precognitive information can come to conscious awareness. We just don’t know when the process happens, or even begins for that matter.

Consequently, another question is: What is the duration of psi? “If it comes in five millisecond bursts, how can we even measure it?”

Then we’re back to the question of to whom it actually happens. Evidence strongly suggests that the aptitude and even actual skill level has a genetic component, much like so many other human characteristics. Parapsychological research has provided us with some findings that other factors can affect the experience and expression of psi, including personality variables and personal beliefs, though these may support or suppress a genetically based aptitude. It may not be as simple as “nature vs. nurture,” as both seem to be involved; the former in the aptitude, the latter in bringing out the aptitude’s potential.

And finally, one of the most pesky problems of all. In experiments, who is the psychic? In parapsychology as well as in other human-oriented disciplines, it is generally assumed that the participant being studied is where all the action is and the experimenter is an objective observer. But what happens if the experimenter possesses an unconscious psi ability? That is, the experimenter makes decisions, which are slightly biased with that ability, in the design of the experiment including who will be the research participant? This could and has been seen in some psi research to mimic psychic functioning on the participant who, in fact, may have no ability at all. If this is true it raises a serious question for all statistically-based, human-oriented research!

G oing forward, the questions around ESP needs to be addressed by a spectrum of researchers including those from disciplines other than parapsychology. Funding to address those questions needs to be available to even attract those people—and the funding needs to be great enough to entice those people in the current atmosphere in mainstream science and academia of strong prejudice against those who even want to consider the questions around ESP, including the possibility that it might even exist.

Researchers who have come out of the proverbial closet and admitted their interest in the possibility of psi or in the evidence gathered by parapsychologists have been publicly denounced and even ostracized by colleagues in their field. The question of the existence of ESP and other psychic phenomena and abilities is a polarizing one. That so many scientists have denounced interest in reported psychic experiences is highly unscientific. Analysis of research and conclusions and criticism based on such analysis is scientific; dismissal of or bias against doing the research is not.

However there are many scientists from other disciplines who have privately expressed their interest and even their own psychic experiences to those in the parapsychological field over the years. Given the competition for funds in so many fields, if appropriate funding was available we might see some of those interested parties hardening their skins against the verbal onslaught from their colleagues for admitting their interest (and perhaps jealousy from those colleagues because the new research was getting funding instead of their own projects).

People have psychic experiences. What’s behind those experiences, whether ESP or something else, is the question that needs researching. To ignore them or dismiss them without research is unscientific.

Some people seem to have an aptitude for consciously initiating ESP. The results from the US and Russian programs during the ESP Wars, and results from psi researchers otherwise support this.

Some task-based conditions, such as used by the US and Russia, seem to bring out the talent embodied in the person’s ESP-aptitude.

ESP can produce useful, actionable information in a percentage of the attempts. Perhaps most important, ESP can produce information in some situations when no other source of information is available.

Going forward, we can take the lessons learned during the US and Russian programs to find people with an aptitude for ESP, to best work with them to bring out their potential, to bring them into situations and conditions where information is otherwise unavailable, and to apply information gleaned from working with them in a practical way. On the other hand, we must also always keep in mind that ESP is a human ability with limitations as to how often it’s able to produce significant information so as not to rely on it to any great degree, at least for the foreseeable future.

Until we know more about how (and even whether) we can bring an individual’s skill level up to the full potential of his or her aptitude, and how (and even whether) we can find people with an aptitude for greater continual success, ESP may still be a tool of last resort for many applications.

We must also garner support where we can, whether hidden in the closets of academia or government or amongst the general public—so many of whom believe in ESP—and mobilize them to open up, all the while pushing back at the outspoken opponents in science and religion who would have us ignore the research and experiences because understanding them might upset the status quo (something most of us in the field do not believe) .

That may sound pessimistic, but let’s consider what all the research and the US and Russian programs have actually shown: Some human beings can retrieve information without the use of their senses, without logical inference, and to a much higher degree of detail than any guesswork could provide. They can do it even if thousands of miles separate them from their “target.” They can apparently do it even though the target has yet to be decided upon (in other words through time).

Even if only a few individuals in millions can do this, even if they can only do it a small percentage of the time and attempts, is it not worth looking into how and why they can do so? Given the value of information, is it not worth finding those individuals and working with them?

Most important perhaps is this question: What do these abilities/experiences say about those individuals—and the rest of us—as Human Beings? We have long been on a quest to understand the Universe around us, and to understand ourselves and what it means to be Human.

The history of Science is filled with examples of people with “outside” or unconventional concepts that seemingly challenge part of the status quo being the subjects of derision and exclusion. Some have been shown to be wrong (often to the inappropriate glee of their opponents). But some have been proven correct, their concepts allowing us to expend our understanding of our Universe and ourselves. Imagine if people like Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Edison, the Wright Brothers, and others actually gave up because so many said they were “wrong” or even committing some kind of heresy?

What came out of the ESP Wars is much more than actionable intelligence: strong evidence that human beings are much more than we previously thought we were, that the limitations of being Human are not as restrictive as we thought.

To repeat General Nikolai Sham’s comments in our Foreword, and his final comments in the last chapter:

“I am convinced that it is precisely these results of our work that will most significantly contribute to strengthening the mutual understanding between people and will in some way help solve the difficult problems facing the human community as a whole today.

“We need to reconsider our objectives and concerns to change the patterns of our activity, both between people and toward the world around us.

“And ESP can help us a lot in this endeavor.”

Going forward, the ESP Wars will not be fought between nations or even nationality-based ideologies. The ESP Wars will be fought between those who wish to understand ourselves better and look into possibilities that may not fit the current paradigm of most in mainstream science and those who won’t consider certain “outside” ideas—including those who refuse to even allow others to consider the concepts.