The best exhibit at the National Cryptologic Museum is the WWII-era ENIGMA (3-rotor, but still!) machine that is on display.
In the open.
With instructions on how to encode/decode messages using it.
And little slips of paper and tiny golf pencils right there encouraging you to use it.
This and the National Electronics Museum (colocated with the System Source Computer Museum [which also houses most of the DigiBarn collection]) about an hour north have more hands-on exhibits of actual vintage technology than practically every other museum in the country combined.
>Project Star Gate was used by the U.S. Government during the Cold War. Many of the psychic spies were at Ft. Meade, tasked with collecting intelligence, locating enemy agents and determining American vulnerabilities by using “remote viewing.” Remote viewing is mentally viewing a distant location they have never visited to gather insights on a person, site, or specific information. As outrageous as it sounds, the secret program was very successful and was in use until 1995
Checks calendar..... nowhere near April!
My understanding of "remote viewing" is it's actually about time travel, and recall of the future. In order for a "viewing" to work, it was found that there needed to be a report to the "viewer" at the end of a given "run", which included all the details were needed to make the mission successful.
This could have been a parallel construction mechanism, if they had sources too sensitive then they could feed data via this project and have it successful.
Bonus points for having enemies trying to replicate the technology and observing that progress and espionage around it.
But disinformation doesn't accomplish much if the adversary disbelieves it, and ignores it—as anyone with an ounce of common sense would. If you're trying to deflect from your real information source, it helps if the fake one you invent is a plausible distraction.
Hanlon's razor says the unfireable career bureaucrats overseeing this project were genuinely incompetent, and authentically stupid.
I think a lot of it was Cold War paranoia. The US government got into a lot of weird stuff like MKULTRA just because there were rumors the Soviets were working on the same thing, and no one wanted to risk the possibility, however remote, that there might be something to it.
Also probably money laundering. Apparently there were a lot of connections between the USG's various psi programs and Scientology.
There is a book about it, called PSI. They started it because the Soviets also leaked info that their telepathy program, necessary for submarine comms, was successful. Also their aura viewer and what else.
So they assembled a team of scientists and psychics and learned that the success rate resembled the random sample. Some psychics were also good magicians and scammers
It seems that the American efforts were the victims of disinformation rather than the instigators. They were started after reports that the Soviets were already engaged in such research.
There are countless repeatable psi experiments that show unusual deviations from probability, but very few that have been conducted with a large number of viewers by institutions. My favorite is the Ganzfeld experiment:
Unfortunately the more it's replicated, the smaller the deviation seems to become. But if there is a deviation above random, say 1%, then we could use a large number of viewers and an error correction coding scheme to transmit a binary message by the Shannon-Hartley theorem:
At 1 impression per person per second, it might be on the order of 1.44*(1/100) or roughly 1 bit of data per minute per viewer. I'm sure my math is wrong. But a few dozen people might be able to achieve primitive Morse code-style communication across the globe or even space.
It would be interesting to see if/how results differ when participants are shown the answers after the experiment, like with your comment about time travel.
Governments probably worked all of this out decades ago if there's anything to it. But it might mean that aliens have faster than light communication. We can imagine petri dish brains or neural nets trained for remote viewing. Sort of an FTL dialup modem.
As long as we're going off the deep end, I think this works through the magic of conscious awareness, that science may never be able to explain. Loosely it means that God the universe and everything fractured itself into infinite perspectives to have all subjective experiences and not have to be alone with itself anymore. So rather than being a brain in a box/singularity, source consciousness created all of this when something came from nothing. Consciousness is probably multidimensional above 4D and 5D, able within the bounds of physics to select where it exists along the multiverse, like hopping between the meshing of gears that form reality. Or Neo in The Matrix. So thought may make life energy ripples like gravity waves on the astral plane where time and distance don't matter. So feelings may be able to affect the probability of quantum wave collapse.
This has all sorts of ramifications. Time seems to have an arrow even though quantum mechanics is mostly symmetric in time. If we assume that free will doesn't exist, then people would make the same choices if we got in a time machine and watched them choose repeatedly. But if we assume that free will exists, then people would seem to choose randomly with a probability distribution, which would make time travel impossible since no sequence of events could be replayed with 100% accuracy. Similarly to how the 3 body problem can't be predicted beyond a certain timeframe. So we could have time travel or free will, but not both. This latter case seems to more closely match how the universe works with observing stuff like the double slit experiment, and our subjective experience of having free will that so-called experts tell us is only an illusion.
It could also mean that synchronicity and manifestation are more apparent to someone having the experience than to the rest of us in the co-created reality. So the subject and conductor of an experiment might witness different outcomes from their vantage points in the multiverse, with echoes of themselves in the other realities, even though the total probability adds up to one. Like how you are still you now and one second before now or after now. It's unclear if subjective mental efforts can hold sway over the shared reality. That gets into metaphysics and concepts like as above, so below.
Wall of text above. Response is wall of text. TLDR; Lots of acceptance issues that bias towards lack of exploration/acceptance.
Read through the Ganzfeld experiments, and many of the same issues with the field jump out fairly readily.
1) The opinion from society at large, is generally negative and dismissive. Therefore, much of the work is to discredit, rather than to positively try to replicate or support.
2) There's a chilling effect on those who might actually possess any such ability. Per above, the societal response is mostly negative. Much risk, little reward, and generally a promise of being a social outcast, pariah, or weirdo. Possibly an experimental guinea pig forever with needles in your skull as the only reward.
3) Social antagonism, since almost nobody likes the idea somebody else is wandering around thought scraping them like LLMs pulling your website design. Historically , mostly shown negatively (possibly for good reason) in literature, TV, movies, video games. Governments don't like you, even your own. Corporations don't like you. Most have not civilians don't like you. If it's positive (there's some lately) you're usually that wacky eccentric who solves cold cases or talks to ghosts.
4) Jealousy / envy / greed. One of the most reliable responses of having almost anything unique in human civilization is desire for others to take what you have.
5) For those that can demonstrate such abilities to themselves, there's an Extreme benefit for not reporting, and not socially revealing. Chief example, like always, money. If someone can thought scan your plans for corporate, or stock choices, then why ever report? Better to read the thoughts of Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, ect... executives, buy or sell before anybody has the information without any risk of insider trading accusations, get rich and powerful, and never, ever tell anybody anything.
6) There's a liar's dividend issue. Any group that might possess such abilities (espionage obviously a strong candidate) gains far more by spreading false debate, causing the argument to be about lies or red herrings, and maintaining their secret edge.
7) There's a weaponization issue. What did the government immediately do? Try to weaponize. If you're opposed to being used as a government weapon, there's not much motivation.
Has many of the same issues that animal coginition, animal conciousness, and animal language had for years. An implied threat to the researchers that they may not be the most superior, or that humanity may not be all that special. Up until the early 2000's, most animal consciousness or intelligence work that proposed anything other than severely sub-human was heavily dismissed.
Personal favorite was Alex the parrot [1], that asked questions I'm not sure most humans would ask about objects and the world. Yet, general academia response ... mostly negative. General subject has gotten much more attention lately though, and so maybe some of the ESP / PSI ideas will eventually also. Mishka Wants Waffles!
Oh come on! You must expand on your theories of remote viewing. Did you mean that after a remote viewing session the subject is shown a true report of the target location?
For example, a subject is told to do a remote viewing of Trumps toilet. After the session or sometime later they are shown evidence of Trumps toilet. Or even get a vip tour. Is that the gist?
I love that museum; try to visit whenever I'm nearby.
During Covid, the new director of the museum changed policy substantially -- primarily focusing on original artifacts, rather than the "displays" which had been built before to illustrate concepts (when something wasn't available, or where the original artifacts weren't impressive or illustrative enough). As someone fairly familiar with the field, seeing the actual objects is much more worth a trip than seeing a museum display illustrating a concept which I could see better in a wikipedia article or a book.
Both approaches work for museums, but I'm glad his one changed. The most striking thing for me was seeing the actual computers used in SIOP and nuclear war initiation a couple decades earlier (fairly run of the mill high end DEC Alpha boxes).
This museum, just outside of DC, is worth the visit if you enjoy encryption and learning about code breaking. They even have a pair of enigma machines that let you encode a message on one and decode on the other. It is small but packed with some unique artifacts including some of the earliest super computers.
What seems to be a related project, Project Scan 8, is mentioned briefly in this 1980's Nova episode about scientific research into ESP. See it at about the 44 minute mark.
“Remote viewing” is a scam, debunked time and time again by psychic debunkers like James Randi and others.
The people doing the “remote viewing” use vaudeville tricks but pass it off as real.
Sadly the US government has spent millions on programs like this. The programs always fall apart when someone, usually a professional magician, steps in and shows the researchers how they’re being fooled.
In other news, the lady isn’t actually sawed in half.
This oversimplifies decades of research. While early remote viewing studies at SRI had methodological flaws, later experiments at SAIC addressed these issues and produced statistically significant results that haven't been adequately explained. Randi's million-dollar challenge isn't considered scientifically valid - it's more publicity stunt than proper experimental protocol. The circumstances and rules for awarding his prize were opaque, controlled by Randi, and has nothing to do with how science tests hypotheses.
The government programs (like STARGATE) actually produced some compelling results according to their declassified documents. The issue wasn't that they were "debunked" - the programs ended largely due to inconsistent results and questions about operational usefulness, not because of exposed fraud.
I'd encourage looking at the peer-reviewed research rather than relying on stage magicians' critiques. While healthy skepticism is good, dismissing the entire field based on cherry-picked cases misses the nuance in the data.
The book "Phenomena" by the investigative journalist Annie Jacobsen is a fantastic and fascinating starting point.
Randi literally walked in, showed how vaudeville magicians do spoon bending (spoiler alert: the spoon is swapped for one that’s already bent using sleight of hand) and the researchers blushed in embarrassment.
They’d been HAD!
Cite this so called research you claim to have.
ps: your uncle didn’t actually steal your nose. That’s his thumb.
Phew... where to start? I think before randomly citing research, it's best to approach this subject theoretically first.
Assume "psi" exists. Purely as a thought experiment. What does this mean?
One key implication would be that consciousness can somehow access information beyond normal sensory channels. If this ability exists, it would likely be influenced by psychological factors - just like any other cognitive function. This leads us to a fascinating paradox: Our beliefs and expectations about psi would logically affect our ability to demonstrate it.
This is exactly what researchers have found with the supposed "sheep-goat effect" - where belief in psi correlates with performance in psi experiments. While skeptics often dismiss this as special pleading, the ultimate cop-out for negative results, it's actually a logical consequence of the initial premise. Strong skepticism could act as a psychological barrier, while openness might facilitate the phenomena.
This creates an interesting epistemological challenge. Unlike testing a new drug where belief shouldn't affect the chemical reaction, testing psi inherently involves consciousness - and therefore belief systems. The field has faced intense scrutiny because of these challenges and its implications. When Bem published his precognition studies in 2011, it sparked unprecedented criticism and launched psychology's replication crisis.
However, this scrutiny has led to increasingly rigorous methods in the field - despite this controversial topic being a potential career-ender and underfunded (although there are some private initiatives...).
So, having said all that as an important preface, in my opinion... One answer to your question: a recent example is the 2023 study in Brain and Behavior examining CIA remote viewing experiments (Escolà-Gascón et al.). Using extensive controls and blind conditions, they found significant above-chance results in high emotional intelligence participants. The authors - who describe themselves as skeptically oriented - conclude their data shows "robust statistical anomalies that currently lack an adequate scientific explanation and therefore are consistent with the hypothesis of psi." They argue for continued rigorous research while acknowledging the philosophical challenges these findings present.
This isn't hard proof of psi, yet, but it's evidence that there may be more going on than skeptics may think. We shouldn't dismiss it out of hand, just because it's so controversial, and because it seems incompatible with a materialist worldview that says "mind" must be spatially and temporally localised, and cannot access or manipulate information elsewhere.
That sounds like a gigantic pile of rationalization for why proof is unobtainable. It sounds a lot like my religious school teachers telling us about “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” This powerful being is totally real and definitely takes visible actions in the world but don’t try to check this fact because it stops working if you try to check it.
Tons of human abilities are affected by our belief in them. Medicine is more effective when the patient believes it’s effective, to the extent that pills with no medicine in them can still have an effect if the patient believes it will. Do we just throw up our hands and say, crap, it’s super hard to figure out of any of this medicine actually works? No, we sit down and design experiments that account for it and end up with a massive library of proven drugs.
We don’t dismiss this stuff because it’s controversial and seems incompatible with a materialist worldview. We dismiss it because there’s no good evidence for it and no proposed method of action despite decades of trying. Arguably millennia of trying; “remote viewing” and similar things are just new framings of ancient religious ideas. There’s no actual difference between attempting “remote viewing” and praying for a vision.
And sure, it’s possible this stuff is real. But when there’s no conclusive demonstration of it after thousands of years, the burden of proof is firmly on the people who think it’s real, and it is definitely not the job of the rest of us to take this stuff seriously.
> And sure, it’s possible this stuff is real. But when there’s no conclusive demonstration of it after thousands of years, the burden of proof is firmly on the people who think it’s real, and it is definitely not the job of the rest of us to take this stuff seriously.
Yeah, I've got a simple way to test this:
Go win the powerball lottery using whatever techniques you believe in. Then, even if nobody believes you, you have the proof in your wallet.
Just to play devil's advocate, perhaps it has already been done (multiple people have won more than one ’1 in XX million chance' lotteries). And perhaps none of those who have the capability of something that specific/difficult (I.e. masters of the craft) want or care to have people know how real their abilities are.
I think it's all bullshit, but it doesn't hurt to play the other side sometimes.
I don’t think the lottery is where to look. Look at hedge funds instead. If this stuff were real, hedge funds would be hiring them at insane salaries. There would be a pipeline for identifying, recruiting, and training people with the ability.
They give 347 nonbelievers and 287 believers a set of 32 locations. They must clasify them as (a) military bases, (b) hospitals, (c) schools (or education centers), or (d) cemeteries. The expected average is 8 but they get 8.31 and 10.09 respectively.
[I'm skiping a lot of confusing parts, like figure 4 and 5 that I can't understand what they mean and how are they related.]
Anyway, 8.31 for believers vs 10.09 for believers is interesting.
But ... from the article:
> A total of 347 participants who were nonbelievers in psychic experiences completed an RV experiment using targets based on location coordinates. A total of 287 participants reported beliefs in psychic experiences and completed another RV experiment using targets based on images of places.
These are two different tasks! It's impossible to know if the difference of the result is cused by nonbeliever/believer or cuased by coordinates/images.
As a technical opinion: This inmediately invalidates the whole study. I don't understand how this was even published.
As a personal opinion: It's obvious that the guys/gals with the photos would get better results than the guys/gals with only the coordinates. The CIA should build more spy planes and satelites.
The secret programs with lots of money little oversight, and the normal bureaucratic inertia. Plus, people in that realm like to play political games where they imply that they have access and power to things other people aren't even allowed to know the names of the programs. Secret squirrel stuff goes to their heads.
"Major Dumbass is researching what?" "Well we didn't have any actual useful work for him so we figured this was harmless"
Just another comment that this small, niche museum is worth a visit. I’ve been twice, once when visiting Ft. Meade on business and once when passing through DC.
The thing that impressed me is the typewriter-size Enigma machines of legend, and the multiple-refrigerator-size Bombe nearby that decoded the Enigma output. Seeing the actual hardware makes an impression that reading stories can’t get to.
In the open.
With instructions on how to encode/decode messages using it.
And little slips of paper and tiny golf pencils right there encouraging you to use it.
This and the National Electronics Museum (colocated with the System Source Computer Museum [which also houses most of the DigiBarn collection]) about an hour north have more hands-on exhibits of actual vintage technology than practically every other museum in the country combined.
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