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We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created.
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As a member of Congress, I get to have a lot of really interesting people in the office, experts on what they're talking about.
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This is the podcast for insights into the issues.
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China, bioterrorism, Medicare for all. In depth discussions, breaking it down into simple terms. We hold. We hold. We hold these truths. We hold these truths. With Dan Crenshaw.
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The eagle has landed.
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Welcome back, everybody. This is the first of many special sub episodes, or let's call it a sub series associated with the podcast. We're going to call it Science Fiction or Fact. So this gives us an opportunity to really just explore some of the things that I'm interested in. One of these interesting subjects is the. And of course this has a tie in to my role as a representative and what we use taxpayer money for. What the government has been up to also has a tie into my former career. I worked a lot in the intelligence community, especially after I was injured when I couldn't really deploy with the platoon anymore. And as it turns out, there's some really interesting history on the paranormal within the CIA and then the army from the early 70s into the mid-90s. And there was a number of programs and they were in conjunction with the Stanford Research Institute. And they especially centered around remote viewing as a, basically as a. Another tool in the toolkit, Another. Another pillar of intelligence. Okay. Because oftentimes you have human intelligence, which is source reporting, you have signals intelligence with this, which is, you know, intercepting calls and things of that nature. You have open source reporting kind of intelligence, and there's all of these different types of intel. And there was an exploration in the US government as to whether people with extra abilities, let's call it, could use remote viewing to see into a target. So we've been trying to track down a lot of the scientists that worked on this and especially nail down what is the connection to science and what are the experimental and clinical observations that took place that would indicate that there's really even something going on here. And it turns out there's a lot. I remain pretty skeptical about the whole thing. It seems very difficult to reproduce. It seems difficult to find some real smoking guns here. But listen to this conversation. It's pretty fascinating. My first guest is Dr. Dean Radden and. And he has a Ph.D. in psychology and a master's in electrical engineering. Written a variety of books on this subject and it's pretty fascinating. Here it goes. Dr. Radin, thank you so much for being on the show.
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Thanks for Asking me.
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So, you know, as I explained a minute ago, have you on. Because I've, I've gone. I've gone down a bit of a rabbit hole, and this is something that has always interested me, and it especially interests me because, look, I, I run a policy podcast or a political podcast, and, and I am a representative. So, you know, it, it, I, I do care about where taxpayer dollars go, and I find this entire subject really fascinating. And I came across your book Entangled Minds as I was researching the. The government's involvement in ESP programs. And you do a good job in your book of at least trying to ground some of this in science, in theory at least, and explain why you're getting some of the results that you're getting. And I think that might be a good place to go, actually. Let's start here. Early on in your book, you make some interesting. You point out some interesting things, which is that a lot of our modern science and our modern scientific method is derived from humanity's attempts to try and figure out what's going on with the paranormal.
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Yeah. If you look back in the history of science began with magic. Right. So alchemy was partially magic, partially science, and eventually evolved into chemistry. Astrology evolved into astronomy, and herbalism evolved into the pharmaceutical business. You don't have to go back too far just a couple hundred years when the distinction between magical ideas and esoteric ideas and science were very tightly mixed. This name, in historical terms of the Enlightenment was when it began to split. It began to split partially because people recognize that there was enormous amount of superstition. We didn't know very much at the time. So when people don't know something, they tend to attribute it to spirits because they don't know any better. So as science became more and more successful in turning especially into technologies, then our worldview changed as well. So the worldview concept is really important here because our world today is, the philosopher would say, it's materialism. We assume, and students are taught, that the entire world, everything, including our sense of experience and all of our beliefs and our sense of self and everything else, is ultimately made out of matter and energy. So this is why in the modern world, the neurosciences in particular, the phrase comes up sometimes that you are a machine made of meat. You are your neurons, you are your brain. That's it. So from that perspective, somebody's talking about something like telepathy, which is communication between minds, not necessarily brains, but at least minds, or clairvoyance or remote viewing, which is ability to perceive something. From a distance? Well, we don't know how the brain can do that. Right. The brain is inside your head. It only has ordinary senses as a way of. Of contacting the world. So if somebody comes along and said, well, I had a precognitive dream of something that came true, or I had an intuition, especially from Navy seal, you would know that if you're out in combat or in danger, your situational awareness has to be really operating well, otherwise you're dead. So it's very difficult then to say, given our current materialistic perspective, how do we begin to understand those kinds of experiences which, by the way, happened to the majority of people on the earth. Four billion people report these things. So what do we do with it? Unfortunately, from a mainstream academic perspective, it's pretty much ignored.
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Yeah, and it's hard for us to reproduce it too. I mean, I bet everybody listening probably has some kind of story, or it's like they just. That was weird, you know, I felt it, or I knew it before it happened, or I knew what he was thinking. You know, twins have it all the time, but they can't reproduce it, you know, so we're left with, what the heck is this?
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Right? So that's where science comes in. Because science is all about measurement and reproducibility. So over the past century or so, there have been maybe a dozen different classes of experiments that have been conducted. And of course, the goal is reproducibility, not only reproducible, but independently reproducible. And so you take something like precognition as an example. So not even necessarily cognition in the sense that you know something's going to happen when, but more a term that I like to use, which is presentiment. You feel more of a feeling something is wrong about something. So the way we test this in a laboratory is we take somebody, put them in front of a computer screen, and then measure aspects of their physiology. So we might use skin conductance or heart rate or pupil dilation. All kinds of things in your body reflect what's happening at an unconscious level. So it's pre feeling. What we do is you sit them down, you wire them up, you measure their physiology continuously, and you present pictures, some of which are calm and some of which are very emotional. You just do maybe 30 or 40 pictures in a row. The protocol would be I tell you what's about to happen. The pictures are selected completely at random, so nobody knows what you're about to see. You, you press a button five seconds later, pops up for three seconds, and then it goes away for maybe 20 seconds, and you just go through this cycle, and then you get another subject and you do it again. So you can do this with many people, many, many repeated trials. And the idea is that if you somehow can feel what you're about to experience, that your body might behave differently if you're about to see a very calm picture, like a rowboat on an empty lake, or a very emotional picture, like a car wreck or an explosion or something like that. And so we're looking for a differential effect in physiology before pictures. And this is a reproducible effect. We know this through a method called meta analysis, which looks at the result of many different experiments. And you can see that most of your physiological parameters change before emotional pictures differently than they do before calm pictures. So this is a way of taking something that in the real world happens pretty frequently, lots of different contexts. People feel something bad, typically is going to happen, but we bring it into the lab in an artificial way and we can create a protocol where we can test this without putting people actually in danger. And you can see it as a reproducible result. So this tells us, in principle, we know that some of the things that people say in the everyday world are true, or at least that they can exist. But of course, in the laboratory, it's a much weaker effect, but we can still show that it's a real effect.
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Yeah. And you go into these experiments in the meta analysis that you talk about and maybe explain to people why that's actually significant. Because there's a couple things to note here. You're not taking people who claim to have any psychic abilities. Right. You're taking regular people who volunteer for a study.
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That's right, yeah.
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Okay, so that's the first thing. And, and the second thing is it's, you know, there's, there's a degree of chance, of course, associated with all of these, with all of these choices that people are making, whether it's the pre, the presentiment that you're talking about. You guys, you've looked at other studies where it's, you know, might, might involve, you know, I don't know, choosing, choosing the right card out of four, or, you know, trying, trying to impose somebody's will on a dice or something, get the right number over times. There's obviously a degree of chance associated with that. And when you do the meta analysis from, from a percentage of perspective. So if chance was 50, 50, usually you come up. What, what you show in some of these meta analysis is you come up with a number that's not that far from 50, 50. I mean, it's like 55, 45. Is that usually the case? But you point out that statistically speaking, that's extremely improbable and therefore a significant finding. Like there's something going on here is what the claim is.
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Right. So one of the difficulties here is that people, people pay attention to big stuff things that don't require statistical analysis. And it's completely understandable. I mean, we're impressed by something big that happens to us. But the fact is that in virtually every area of science, whether it's physics or medical research or whatever, everything is always, every measurement that is taken has error in it. So that you automatically have to use statistics in order to decide whether what looks like a small effect, like even a 1% effect, is that a meaningful effect or not? Was it due to chance or not? So just to make a simple case here, let's say somebody claims that they can influence the toss of a coin to land more heads than tails. Say so they do it once and they got it right. Well, is that going to convince you? Wouldn't convince me because it's a 50, 50 chance. Say, okay, do it 10 times in a row. Well, would you require every single time, 10 times in a row to come up the way that they said? That would be amazing. In fact, the probability would say, well, it's about 1,000 to 1. That's pretty good. Every time you do these kinds of tests, you have to decide where's your cutoff, where you would start to say, this didn't look like chance. Well, a mild cutoff is a probability of 0.05 odds against chance of roughly 20 to 1. That's the point where just traditionally people start saying, well, that didn't look like chance. Some of the experiments they talk about in that book and other books, we're talking about millions to one, billions to one, and way beyond that, trillions to one against chance. So in science, we never say that we prove something to be true, but what we can say is that the, we can have high confidence that the results do not look like chance. We still have to answer the question, well, if it's not chance, what is it? What else could it be?
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So that's part of the challenge, something going on there. So even if it's just 55% because somebody like a layman like me would say, okay, it's 55%, big deal, that wouldn't impress me very much. But I suppose the statistical counterargument is that, yeah, but we did it 50,000 times. Yeah, right.
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Not only us, but others have done it too. And we keep getting the same kind of result. So that's how we know it's real.
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Okay, so let's actually back up then and talk about. Okay, so, you know, like this, this is, this has been a mystery for humanity forever. I, for me, I'm just, I'm curious about it. I'm fairly neutral on it, but I, but I do find it interesting, and I find it especially interesting that we had government programs associated with this stuff, so. And you were a part of that. You spent a year at Stanford Research Institute, which had a program in conjunction with the CIA. So will you walk the audience through the history of that really quick and how that started and what your involvement was like? And what does a day at the office look like?
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Yeah, what does the day at the office look like? When you're doing something that's classified, which most of the people outside of the building don't even believe in, and yet you go inside and now you're working on it.
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And it was declassified in when?
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95.
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95.
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Most of it was declassified in 95. What remains classified are the same sort of things that never get declassified, which has to do with methods and people just for their own protection. So this program started around 1972, continued until 1995. And the popular mind, it was funded by the CIA, which was true in the beginning, but the vast majority of it was. Was the army and administered by the dia.
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Yeah. So they were looking for a psychic leg up to compete with the Navy, which makes sense.
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Well, the Navy funded parts of it as well. In fact, of all of the services, the Navy has probably been the most interested, really.
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Okay.
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In this topic. And I talked to Naval officers about this, and my impression was that I've met people from all of the services and there's a stereotype of what a Marine looks like and a stereotype of what a Navy person looks like. I'm much more like a Navy guy. I'm a small guy. I would not be a good Marine.
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Stereotypes are generally true.
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Yeah, yeah. So the people that are in the Navy, especially if they're on the ships, it's almost like being in a meditative state. If your job is to. You have the night shift and you're looking out over the ocean and there's nothing there, you're basically by yourself in the universe. There's nothing anywhere you look at and everybody else is asleep. So it lends itself to people who would Be naturally more contemplative, let's say, for people on ships in particular, and maybe submariners as well. The program was partially stimulated because of reports mainly out of the Soviet Union at the time. This is during the Cold War, where the reports that the Russians or the Soviet Unions had a program where they were developing psychic abilities mainly for use of in espionage. So somebody brought that to our attention. Some intelligence people found it and decided to at minimum to do threat assessment. So is there something that we need to worry about? So part of the threat assessment is you get documents that have been taken and translated, or you find people have defected and you interview the defectors and also you try to do experiments to see if you can replicate what you've heard about elsewhere. So that's some of what I was doing was then threat assessment. Some of it was experimental work. The reason why I was recruited for the program in the first place is because at the time I was working at Bell Labs. So Bell Labs at the time was the largest industrial lab in the world.
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You're a psychologist, you have a PhD in psychology.
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But my master's is in electrical engineering. So one foot in the hard science world and one foot in the soft science world. But I've always been interested in these kinds of phenomena and using the skills that I learned to test them, you know, because I'm skeptical too. I've read lots of stories talking about these psychic abilities, but, you know, stories are stories. So I started doing experiments when I was at Bell Labs. And the reason why I got permission to do that is because part of the program that I was involved with at Bell Labs had to do with the security of machines because there were computers that used to switch the telephone network. You make a call somewhere, it's not humans anymore doing it, it's computers all the way across. So these machines are triple E redundant. They're designed that they cannot fail because if they fail they'd lose like a million dollars a minute or actually much more now. And yet they do fail. And the question then is, well, how could these triple redundant machines fail? And I propose that based on what I was reading, that maybe there's something about anxiety, like human operators in the vicinity and they're very anxious or angry and it somehow causes the machine to fail. So this of course is Murphy's Law. And every laboratory environment has the same laboratory law, that there's some people who are jinxes. You don't want them in the lab because whenever they're around something's going to break. So I Started doing experiments. I found I was able to replicate what I had read about on psychokinetic effects. And so I gave a talk on this at a conference. Well, I didn't know, but how did
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you replicate a psychokinetic effect? I mean, is there, what's the most impressive thing, I think that, that you've seen with, with respect to that especially telekinesis. So moving things with your mind or affecting matter.
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So we're talking about moving microscopic things, not macroscopic objects. The way I did it was, the device I was using was a random number generator where the task was to influence the rate at which radioactive particles were emitted. So that's a nice target to use because the emission rate is considered to be fundamentally random on a quantum scale. Nothing can influence it. That's like, that's a part of the dogma of quantum mechanics, that nothing can influence these emission rates. And yet that was the task. Could you influence it to go slower sometimes and faster sometimes? And I found that the answer was yes, we were able to do that in their own lab. Again, small statistical effects, but statistically significant effects. So it got me really interested in this and it did to my boss as well at Bell Labs. So anyway, so, so I gave a talk. People in the audience were working at the SRI program and they asked if there was an opening, would you be interested in working with us? Well, there were rumors at the time that there was a classified program, but it wasn't public knowledge at that time, just rumors. And so I said, yeah, that would be great. So about nine months later I got the invitation. And that's the sort of offer you cannot refuse. So it took a long time to get all of the clearances because I didn't have a security clearance at that time. And so I joined that program. So the most impressive thing, in fact, the reason this was 1985, the reason why I've since then have continued to work in this field is, is because up to that point I had been spending a couple of years doing experiments on my own. Some at Bell Labs. I'm at home. And I was sort of convinced that it looks like something was going on. But it was being inside that program then that I realized, holy smoke, these abilities for people who are experts at it is way beyond anything that I imagine could be real. And so I'm talking about remote viewing. And these were people who were doing remote viewing tests both from experiments and in an operational missions, usually requested by the army or by some three letter agency that was almost like they were getting a Photographic image, and then able to draw their image of something that was on the other side of the planet. That at least as far as our intelligence was concerned, they didn't know what was going on there. It's like inside a building. We think there's something inside that building. Can you tell us what it is they would do remote viewing. They draw a sketch, and then later, in many cases, we get human intelligence in the building and it would confirm that what they were saying was correct. When we did an experiment, eventually we didn't have to wait for intelligence to tell us. Somebody would have a picture. There'd be a random location or something like that, and we'd be able to get feedback pretty quickly. But it was the level of accuracy that really I found shocking that people are actually able to do this. So how many people?
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Yeah, did you just read my mind right now?
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A
So the rough percentage then is about a half of 1%. So, you know, or even a tenth of 1%. So like one in a thousand people has some talent, and then maybe 1 in 10,000 people have the level of talent if they also have drawing ability, because they have to be able to express what their impression is. Like 1 in 10,000. 1 in 100,000 people are really, really good at these kinds of tasks.
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They can kind of cultivate that skill.
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They practice constantly. I mean, you could lose this if you don't do it a lot. But what's important here is that not only could they get good results in an experiment, but it was operationally valuable and that, that's why the program continued for so many years.
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B
Wow. Interesting. So who were some of the famous ones? And you know what got me thinking, so I know I'm off the top of my head, right? The famous, the famous one that was associated with this program is Ingo Swan. Yeah. Supposedly one of the best. And he created a whole training program. So he, he believed that you could actually train people to get to his level. And did you guys, did you guys find that to be true? I mean, because, because it's like, okay, you can't train me to be Tom Brady. I'm a pretty athletic guy. You cannot train me to be Tom Brady. So, you know, I don't know. Anyway, what, what do you think about it?
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Can you, can you take Joe Six Pack off the street and train them to become military level accuracy? The answer is no, because you're right. You need natural talent too. So the talent here is probably similar to musical talent or sports talent. The combination of mind and body have to be Compatible to the task. So yes, there was a training program created, but it wasn't simply choosing people from the army at random. There were already selections going on to find people who are probably talented and then training them.
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B
Bring your psychology experience into this a little bit. What kind of personality is best suited for something like this?
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Well, the easy way to select somebody is if you have 100 people in front of you. You do an experiment. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to try to describe this picture. I'm going to show you a picture in 30 minutes. It'll be randomly selected. I don't know what it is. Just make a sketch of what you think. I'm going to draw. Some people by chance will sketch something that's pretty good. And so you say, okay, you guys stay with us, the other everybody else can go away. So out of 100 people, you might have 10 say who by chance or otherwise close to that. Yeah, yeah, you do it again. So you do two or three passes like this and by the time, the time you, you get down to maybe the third pass, these people are probably talented. When you do a psychological profile of such people, they may or may not know that they have these abilities, but they're probably have some artistic or creative endeavor. They're open minded more often than not. They will have had some experiences like this before, but they may or may not not pay much attention to them. Those people will have like what I would, I would say is like a level one talent. They're fairly easy to find. You know, if you had 10,000 people in a stadium and you went through this process and you resisted it maybe four or five times, those people are going to be very talented. So that's more or less that's. This is more complicated than the way that the army selected their initial viewers. But it was something like that. It was a selection process like that.
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B
And as far as abilities go, it seems to me from what I've read on this, that remote viewing was the thing to do. I'm not aware of any stories of anybody, you know, picking up a tank with their mind. That would be rather useful. But I've only seen that in the movies. Yeah, and what do you think about on the telekinesis? I mean, what do you even think about that? So, you know, you said that there's some experimental data to show that you might be able to affect at the microscopic level matter. Affect matter at the microscopic level, but not the macroscopic. So what about a guy like Uri Geller, who is famous for bending spoons. What do you think about that?
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Well.
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B
And why is it always spoons?
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A
Yeah, it. Well, no, it's not always spoons. It's. It's hunks of metal.
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B
Okay.
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A
Like rebar. Rebar occasionally, and other kinds of things. Wrenches and other tempered metal. It. It's very, very tricky to understand what's going on there. Let me first go back to microscopic things. So. So microscopic effects are usually. In today's world, we use things like electrons. So there's this phenomenon called electron tunneling, which is important in semiconductors. So an electron tunneling effect is a quantum effect. It means that an electron is getting through an energy barrier that if it was a classical particle, it would never be able to get through. Didn't have enough energy. But nevertheless, sometimes an electron will pop through an energy barrier because it is also a wave. So it's a quantum phenomena. Waves can get through things that particles can't. An electronic random number generator that produces truly random events based on this electron tunneling. That's the kind of target that seems to be most susceptible. In many, many hundreds of experiments have been done with these kinds of targets, fewer with things like radioactive decay, which is what I started with way back when. So there we can see statistical evidence.
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B
So you're instructing the person to think about what exactly? And then how do you.
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A
Well, so you might produce a computer display where you see a squiggly line moving along the screen, which is showing how many ones and zeros are being pumped out by the device. Okay, maybe it's producing 1,000 bits per second, and you'll have an average between one and zeros, which is about 0.5. And so your task then to say, when you press the button, you're going to see a line grow across the screen, which is the result of hundreds of thousands of bits being produced in real time. But your task is to make the line go up, which would mean there has to be more ones being produced.
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B
I see.
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A
And then they do it again. You say, okay, now your task is to make it go down. And now your task is to do nothing, just let it go by itself.
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B
I see. So the random number generator is just zeros and ones.
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A
Zeros and ones in this case.
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B
But what does that do with the electron tunneling?
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A
Well, because the randomness, the thing that makes a 1 or 0, is ultimately based on the movement of electrons.
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B
Oh, I see. Okay.
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A
The electron tunneling effect. So the experiment they just described with aim high, aim low, aim Nothing. That was done for 20 years at Princeton University in the engineering department. And they showed very clearly that by having hundreds of people do this over a very long period of time, that, yeah, it does begin to bias the output of these random number generators. And when you don't have anybody trying to do anything, it pretty much fluctuates around chance. So as I said, that was one experiment, a very long term experiment, but hundreds of experiments like that. So that's how we know with pretty high confidence that something is happening. Yeah, at this point, it looks like we're able to manipulate probabilities of things we're not. There's no force beams coming out of the head like in a comic book.
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B
Right.
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A
It's that something about intention or consciousness is able to manipulate probabilistic events in the world. So you now have a large object, like a, like a hunk of rock. Well, probabilistically you may be able to move it a couple of atoms, but you'd never see that.
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B
Right.
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A
Because when you have something with a large amount of mass, it's very difficult to move. Okay, so now we go back to spoons and forks and pieces of metal. So if you look at the metallurgy, the metallurgy of what's going on inside something like a spoon, it's stamped into place, right? You have a flat thing and you have a big die or something come along and bash it into place. That means that the metal grains around, especially on the neck of the spoon are formed. They're formed into that shape by the pressure of the press. And that's weaker generally than the rest of the spoon unless you temper it and then it's different. So if you can imagine then just from a mundane perspective that if you keep. If you rub it really hard and you put a little bit of pressure on it that you probably can make it bend there, it's pretty easy to bend a spoon. So that's why I was very skeptical for many years that this was a real phenomena, because it sort of looks like people are bending it and it's not that difficult to bend anyway, including what Uri Geller was doing. Until one time I went to what was called a spoon bending party, where 50 people get together and they're going to all do this. And I decided that I wasn't interested in watching somebody bend the neck of a fork or spoon because it's too easy to do it by force. But I would be interested in watching somebody take a large soup spoon and bend the bowl in half, because very Few people do that. Yeah. It'd be really hard to do it with your hands.
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B
You can't do that.
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A
No, you can't. So I sat down next to a woman who claimed to be able to do that. And I was trying to mimic what she was doing. So I was holding a big soup spoon and kind of holding it the way she was. And I'm watching her and nothing's happening. Somebody behind me says, oh, look what you did. So I'm looking around to see who did something, and it turned out to be me. I had bent the bowl of a soup spoon in half. I have no idea how I did it. I've not been able to do it after that. It was cold throughout. I was not dissociated because I immediately looked to see if my fingers had dents in them because of too much force being used. So after that experience, and sometimes it takes a personal experience like this. I don't know how I did it, but what I can tell you is when I was. I was on. I flew to this place to go there. I was flying on the plane coming back home, and I was trying to bend the spoon like the one I had before. And I suddenly got really frightened because I had no idea how I had done this in the first place. And now I was thinking, well, maybe I'm going to bend the wings of the airplane in half, because I don't know. How far does this stuff go? So I have a better sense now from a psychological perspective that the idea that real psychokinetic stuff can happen. Bending large chunks of metal and raising a tank into the air is frightening unless you had extremely high control of it. And when I talk to people who claim that they've. They've bent the rebar, for example, they have no idea how they do it, and so it's frightening. So we.
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B
There's the people like Uri Geller who can supposedly do it on command, and he does it at shows. And I don't know if he's still alive.
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A
Oh, he's alive.
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B
Yes.
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A
And he's still doing it, so. Oh, yeah, yeah. So you could go to magic shops and buy all kinds of things that allow you to bend sports spoons and forks and all kinds of stuff.
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B
Okay, so that's maybe what it is most of the time.
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A
I would say anybody who is doing it on demand and reliably is probably doing a trick.
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B
So you think Uri Geller is doing
- [36:12]
A
a trick in his case? I really don't know. Like, in everything that humans can do, some People are exceptionally talented, so they're going to be rare and they can do things that other people simply can't. So maybe he's the one in a billion people who has a talent that is able to do it on demand. So I don't know.
- [36:33]
B
And it's like, are these spoon bending parties? Are they using real spoons? How the heck do you get invited to a spoon bending party? What is that?
- [36:42]
A
Like you hang around with the right people and you hear things.
- [36:45]
B
Yeah.
- [36:48]
A
This one, by the way, this took place at a meeting of the irva, which is the International Remote Viewing Association.
- [36:56]
B
Okay.
- [36:57]
A
So people who have both been military remote viewers and people are doing it as a hobby and so on. And it was just a fun party as part of that, that conference.
- [37:06]
B
So, you know, going back to look, you can, I can drive down the highway here and I see a bunch of psychic mediums signs and you know, they'll tell you your future or something. I've actually never been to one. But you know, they're offering a certain service here and, and maybe that's reading your mind, maybe it's telling you your future future. I think that's generally the service offered here that seems to be different than what was happening under this program. The, it does look like the golden child of, or the, the main tool in the toolkit was remote viewing. And I'm curious why that is. I mean, I can, from an operational perspective, just being in the military, I can see sort of why that is. That would have the most operational value. And you know, we, from my perspective, I did a lot of intel in my time and I need something to be repeatable. I need it to be accurate and. But I mean, I certainly would like to read somebody's mind also. But it doesn't seem like that was within the capabilities of what you guys did.
- [38:22]
A
That was not part of the program at all. As you know, working in intelligence, you never take a single piece of intelligence and just go on that. I mean, even human intelligence can be wrong. So the remote viewing intelligence was one part of a constellation of pieces of intelligence that an analyst would put together and say, well, these things are sort of compatible with each other. And looks like the constellation of information is right. And remote viewing was simply a part of that. It was never taken by itself. But in cases where something was truly unknown, of course the intelligence analyst does a tough job, then I don't know where to start. Right. So you take bits of information and in this case the bits coming from the remote viewers turned out in many Cases to actually be valuable to be operational.
- [39:19]
B
And what was the most impressive feat on remote viewing that you ever saw? What was something that made you think like, wow, this guy or gal, whoever's doing this is the real deal. There's no persuading me otherwise.
- [39:38]
A
For me, it was mostly the experimental work because it's controlled. And you know what the answer is? The operational missions are much more difficult.
- [39:47]
B
Yeah. Because you don't actually know. Sure.
- [39:48]
A
Well, sometimes you find out, but you find out much later. And so it's not the same as working in a controlled environment. So there are interesting cases of operational missions that are now all in the public domain and they're talked about in remote viewing books and that sort of thing. It's by people like Pat Price, who passed away, and Joe McMonagle who's still with us, that they're exceptionally talented. They're able to be given a satellite picture and there's a building and say what's inside that building? And they'll draw a sketch of it and give information about it. Which turned out to be correct. Well, how in the world did they do that? Well, they don't even know how they do that. They're able to use the skill. But from a theoretical perspective, then, like give me a, like a physics explanation of how they did that. We don't know yet. Yeah, I mean, we make guesses about what's going on, but we don't know.
- [40:48]
B
So why, why was the program ended in, in 1995 and who, who, who was running it by then? CIA started funding it. Eventually the army took it over and I believe it went to the diary which eventually ended it. Is that correct?
- [41:03]
A
It was, it was DIA. This was a time 95 when the Aldrich Ames problem came about in the CIA. So he was a long term CIA employee and turned out to be a double agent spy. And so the CIA was very concerned about their image and they were getting a lot of attention about that. And the program had been turned over to the CIA. CIA wanted to get rid of it because they didn't want people to pay attention to something which they felt would have a giggle factor associated with it. Because at that point most of the classified work was not known. So what would have come out in the press was television service using psychics. And as you've already pointed out, that most people, in terms of their visible way of seeing psychics is somebody has a shingle outside their door saying psychic and neon lights. Well, that's not what this is. And so, because that is the public way of seeing what's happening, simply wanted to avoid it. So they had a review, one of many reviews that had been done, but a review that was basically set up in advance for political reasons, which you well understand that sometimes you want a certain answer. Well, the answer in this case was we don't think this has any operational value. That wasn't true. We now know that it's not true because of the number of times that agencies had tasked operational missions from these people. And they came back again and again. And so if you're tasking somebody to give you valuable information and they give you nonsense, you're not going to go back. But agencies went back many times. So this is where sometimes technology and science and politics intersect. And if the political climate is such that people want to avoid, goes away.
- [43:09]
B
And that's what happened, I can understand that. Walk me through what a remote viewing operation looks like. Is it a team effort? Do you rely on one person? How long does it take? Like, what instructions do you give them? How does it all work?
- [43:27]
A
Well, so as a scientist, I primarily work with experimental tests. I'll, I'll send someone to you as one of the military remote viewers who can tell you in detail what it would be like to, to be working at Fort Meade, like next to the nsa, who would get a request from somebody for information. He can talk you through what that's like. What I can describe is what it's like if you're doing it as an experiment. The earliest remote viewing experiments were called outbounder experiments. This was a case where you would beforehand set up, say, five different locations where somebody was going to go. The remote viewers task then was to describe what the person was seeing when they went to one of those locations. That's why it's called remote viewing. You're like looking through their eyes. So five places are set up. You as the remote viewer have no idea what those places are. You know the name of the game, but you don't. You don't know where. So you're, you're in a skiff. May have to describe to your listeners what that is.
- [44:35]
B
Yeah, you're in a skip. Yeah, I should. It's a, it's a room. I think it's. I can't remember what it stands for. Secret compartmentalized information facility or something like that. In any case, it's a place where only secret information can be right.
- [44:51]
A
And in this particular case, it's electromagnetically shielded and acoustically shielded. So then nobody on the outside can tell what's happening. On the inside and vice versa for security purposes. So you're inside the skiff, you have a blank piece of paper. You might have somebody with you who will act as an interviewer who also doesn't know what the target is. And your job is draw pictures and give me impressions of where you think the person is. Now, meanwhile, the other side of the experiment is you have the five pictures. One of them is randomly selected through in the early days, maybe a toss of a die. But later, a true random number generator would choose one of the five places you take people and then send them to that place and tell them to hang out there for 30 minutes and just walk around, take pictures, experience what it's like being there. And while that is happening, remote person's at target. Now draw where they are, whatever it is that you think, what's happening, anything, just draw it and write down things. So they do that person comes back home. You now have captured the impressions of the remote viewer on paper. And sometimes also you do an audio recording. The interviewer is there because when the remote viewer is in that strange altered state, it's not an ordinary. They're not thinking in an ordinary way. They're being impressionistic. And so the interviewer can say, well, you just mentioned something like a creaking noise. Tell me more about the creaking noise. So the interviewer is acting as the analytical part of the team. The remote viewer is more like the impressionistic in general, like the right half of the brain and the other person's the left half of the brain. So they have this information, they come back, they put all of the information that the remote viewer created into an envelope. They now give to a judge that envelope with that information, along with pictures of the five locations that the person could have gone to. Of course, the judge has no idea which of the five. And the judge's task is to match the place that they think the remote viewer was talking about with one of the five places. A hit would be that the impressions of the remote viewer closely matched the actual location that the person went to. That's one experiment. We're talking about numerous people, hours worth of effort to come up with one result, which is it's a hit or a miss. On that basis, at SRI and leader SAIC Science Applications International, they did well over 1,000 experiments like that of this what I just described. The results leave no question at all that at least from a statistical perspective, the odds against chance are like a billion to one that they were getting more hits than expected by chance. That was then later replicated at Princeton that used a very similar method of remote viewing experiments and again ended up with about the same result. So people can do that task.
- [47:59]
B
And are there some people who are, like, knocking it out of the park every time?
- [48:05]
A
Not every time, no. Even the best in the world don't get it every single time, but they get it way beyond chance. And so what's interesting is that the best in the world can't tell when they're getting ahead versus not getting a hit, which is. But think about this. That the reason that we watch sports is that the best people in the world doing a particular sport are. Are not going to always win. Right? Otherwise, why watch the Olympics or anything else? We're dealing with human performance. Human performance is always variable. And even though people in the Olympics are trying the very best that they can and have trained like crazy, they're still not going to win.
- [48:46]
B
Was there research into how to make people better at this, whether through training or is there a drug? Is there a meditation technique? Is there something. Was their experimentation on that?
- [48:59]
A
They tried everything known at the time to tell the difference between an expert remote viewer and Joe Sixpack, and they found nothing interesting. But that was. That was then and this is now. So now we think there probably are some personality correlates. And more importantly, just recently, colleagues and I published a study looking at the genetics of highly talented psychics from psychic families at least claim to be psychic families versus people who have no psychic ability at all. And we did find a difference.
- [49:32]
B
Really.
- [49:33]
A
So this is. This is using modern genetic techniques, which were not available back then. We now think that there are probably multiple biomarkers, not only genetics, but other morphological changes or differences in somebody who's highly talented versus people who are not really.
- [49:51]
B
So you could name certain biomarkers or genes in particular, that might be correlated with that ability. Interesting. This is getting weirder and weirder.
- [50:04]
A
Yeah, well, I mean, this is a great story about how science marches on. You go back 500 years ago. All of this was about witches and spirits things. Well, as we begin to learn more and more about the natural world and about what human experience is like, we're learning that some of those old wives tales were probably true. Some of them were witches with special ability. But you know what we know now, we know much more than we did then. And 20 years from now, we'll know even more.
- [50:37]
B
What about you write a lot about the. I mean, your book's called Quantum or, sorry, Entangled Minds, which is, I am assuming, a reference to quantum entanglement and this idea that there's a Jungian collective unconscious and this idea that everything's connected when some kind of energy field that physics is still yet to explain. And you kind of go through a bunch of the current theories and theoretical physics, the many worlds theory and multi dimensions, all this is very mainstream. It sounds crazy, but it's extremely mainstream in physics because nobody knows anything yet. So what's your best guess? As if you're going to try and connect this phenomena with modern physics. How do you make that connection?
- [51:30]
A
Yeah, so I would not say that we don't know anything because there are technologies that are coming out now, cryptography and quantum computing and so on. These are applications. So what you're referring to is the interpretation of quantum mechanics.
- [51:45]
B
Yeah, yeah, I am, yeah. The kind of theory of everything. That's what I mean by we're still, we still don't know. We know what is happening. We can predict it, but we don't know why.
- [51:56]
A
We don't know why. Yeah. And then, and we like to know why. We like, we want to. Well, how, how is it possible to, to have things that are connected through space and time, like quantum entanglement? How is that possible? We don't know exactly how it's possible, but we just know that it is. My best guess at this point is that the development of quantum mechanics and living systems called quantum biology used to be considered laughable that any living system would have any kind of quantum properties, because most of what we see in the laboratory are effects that are extremely cold and extremely small. And that's how we work with quantum mechanics in the lab. So the idea that a hot wet living system would show quantum properties would say that's ridiculous. Now it's not long, it's not ridiculous anymore because we know that things like photosynthesis and some protein folding and magneto navigation and things of that sort, they do appear to have quantum properties in hot wet living systems. So we project ourselves 10 to 15 years from today, and I would predict that we will eventually find that there are aspects of the brain that are operating in a quantum fashion. This should not be too surprising at this point, partially because we already have evidence of quantum biology. But more importantly that there are all kinds of things happening in the brain that are at the quantum scale, like ions between synapses and so on, those are microscopic and have properties that ought to be quantum. So, okay, so imagine that part of the brain, like every other physical system, has elements in it which are not located in space. Or time. That's the strange property of quantum mechanics called nonlocality. It's what makes quantum entanglement so strange. Well, that means that we evolved.
- [53:49]
B
Do you want to explain what quantum entanglement is real quick for the audience?
- [53:54]
A
So quantum entanglement is referring to the fact that when elementary particles interact after they have gone on their separate ways, there are properties that are still in common. So this is very different than a correlation between things. So two particles can interact with two billiard balls, and then their motions will be correlated afterwards, but they're not really connected to each other. They're correlated because they came out of a common cause. They interacted, and then you can predict what's going to happen afterwards. But when photons or electrons or other things, small things, interact, it's not only that that they came out of a common cause, but there are properties of each particle which are now connected, and they're connected through space. As far as we can tell, space doesn't matter anymore, regardless how far apart they are. And they're also appear to be connected in time, which is very bizarre. Don't think about it too much. It'll make your brain hurt. But so when you use the term nonlocality, it's talking about this. This idea that at a elementary particle level, and presumably all physicality starts at elementary level, it's connected in ways that look like from our eyes, we would look and see something as being separate, two separate photons, but they're not separate and they're, They're. They're connected in some way. So we use terms like correlation because it's not connected. Like they're still a single thing, but in some ways it is a single thing. There have properties of part. Every. Every object has properties. The properties are entangled. They become inseparable. So we. So now I lost where I was going with this.
- [55:38]
B
Oh, well, how that relates to the mind.
- [55:41]
A
Okay, so we didn't create quantum mechanics. We discovered it, which means that it's always been here. We evolved, including. Our brains have evolved for millions of years with these quantum elements in it. So some element of the processing that goes on in the brain is not local. Local means it's like classical physics. It's all inside your head. Some properties then of the way that information is processed in the brain is a little bit like a quantum computer today, where it involves connections that transcend space and time. And so when you look at the strangeness of quantum mechanics, often called the weird part of quantum mechanics, are these connections that transcend space and time. They're not bound by space and time. And now look at psychic phenomena. What's weird about that? It transcends space and time. That's the only thing that's weird about psychic phenomena. All of them. They somehow transcend space and time. That's what remote viewing is all about. So the question arises, is this a coincidence that the best theories of physicality that we know have elements that are non local and the best elements of psychic phenomena, as best as we understand it, are non local? Is that the same non locality? I would claim that it is. The argument against that is you're using one form of weirdness to explain another form of weirdness. I say, yeah, except that they're the same form of weirdness. And is that a coincidence? I don't think it is.
- [57:17]
B
Yeah. And. And there's arguments within the physics community about whether consciousness plays a role or does it only appear to play a role when you're collapsing that probability wave, the wave function of a particle. Because there's this idea out there in quantum physics that you can't know the position of this particle until you observe it. And there's a conscious observer that therefore affects matter. But not all physicists agree with that.
- [57:46]
A
That's right. And yeah, you know, surveys among physicists that are asked these questions, One of the questions is, do you think that consciousness plays a significant role in the way that quantum mechanics works? And then other questions are, do you think it makes no role at all? And so on. Different interpretations, 25% of working physicists who deal with this say, yeah, I think consciousness really does have an important role. So this is not an insignificant number of physicists who believe this. But the fact remains, we don't know.
- [58:20]
B
Yeah. What's your. What's your. I know you're not a physicist necessarily, but what's your favorite theory between something like many worlds, multi dimensional, and I guess doesn't matter as it applies to your research with psychic phenomenon?
- [58:40]
A
It doesn't matter.
- [58:41]
B
Yeah.
- [58:42]
A
No. And in many ways, I'm not a theorist, I'm an empiricist. I like to test things and see what works. And so the way that I deal with. And people say, well, how do you explain this stuff? I explained it kind of like I just did that maybe it's quantum mechanics, but there's another way of explaining it which I think is actually better than taking a quantum mechanical approach. And that is to go back to what I started with in the very beginning when talking about worldviews, our worldview is materialistic. Materialism is extremely successful in science. It leads to all of the technologies that we have, so we can't throw it away. We don't want to replace materialism with something else. But materialism is a relatively new way of looking at the world, of understanding the world, the worldview that has been around much, much longer A philosopher would call idealism. And so the difference between the two is in materialism, everything, including consciousness, emerges out of matter. It's all based out of matter and energy. Idealism turns it up upside down. It says everything that exists actually emerges out of consciousness. So it puts consciousness first, says this is primary. That's what all of the esoteric traditions say. That's what basically all of the religions say as well, at least from the mystical side of the religions and their philosophers, of course, have been arguing about this for thousands of years. So in the usual way of thinking about idealism as a worldview simply to everything, like the only thing we will ever know as individuals comes out of our awareness. Everything else is an inference. Everything we know about physics, everything we know about anything is an inference that is coming out of our awareness. So one way then that is argued against idealism. It says, well, what, There's a truck coming at you and if you don't believe it's there, it's not going to hurt you? Well, no, because materialism is real. It's a real thing, but it is also a special case. It is a real aspect of the world, but it does not account for everything, accounts for a lot of it. That's where technologies come from, but it does not account for consciousness.
- [61:03]
B
Yeah.
- [61:04]
A
And so a major problem in science today is how do we account for the fact that we're aware? How do you take a hunk of presumably non consciousness tissue in your brain, but it's aware of itself. Not only is it aware of itself, it can describe itself, it can describe the physical world. We don't know how that happens.
- [61:27]
B
And in Christianity we call that the soul, call it consciousness, the soul. I'm not sure what the difference would be. And that's philosophically how I personally come to religion is I think it takes a lot more faith to believe that we're a walking ball of meat that happen to evolve by accident. I find that to be an excruciatingly low probability for my existence. And so I just. It seems intuitive that there's got to be something else going on there. And even, even if that were true, it still doesn't explain consciousness and how dynamic it is. And the essence of the soul.
- [62:08]
A
Well, it does in the sense that if you take a scientific perspective and say, well, why is there anything here at all? Like why is. Why are there stars in the universe and everything? The only answer that science can give at this point is because it is. I mean, it's not a. It's not a satisfying answer. But we're getting down to these really important questions about why. Why is that? Well, science doesn't answer why questions. It can only do its best in answering how sometimes and what, but not why.
- [62:40]
B
And no matter how many layers you go, you're still just answering what. Right. Sometimes people will say, you know, this is usually in the context of debating the truth about God or religion. It's usually in that context. And they'll say, well, eventually we can't explain exactly why you exist right now, but eventually we will be. And I'm like, I, I mean, offer me a plausible explanation of what that, of what that would look like. And I don't. And they don't have one because science is always describing what it's. It's the unmovable mover philosophy.
- [63:18]
A
Yeah. Science is, is limited. There are probably aspects that we will know a lot more in the future than we know today, because that's. The entire history of science shows that. The question is, will it ever get to a point where we know everything? Is there a real theory of everything, which is like the holy grail of science? And I think the answer is no, that the, the one thing you find in any discipline of science is the more you learn about any particular thing, what you really are finding out is how much you didn't understand.
- [63:51]
B
Yeah, that seems to be true. Quantum physics is, is certainly a highlight of that.
- [63:59]
A
Yeah. And, but see, we're still able to figure out how to use it. So that science in many ways then is. Yeah, it's their basic science is about understanding the nature of reality and our role in it. And we're doing a pretty good job. And we can oftentimes figure out ways of using the knowledge that we got too. Knowledge is power. We can make. Make stuff out of it. Unfortunately, we can also make things that will make us extinct, which may or may not be happening now. I think it actually is. The climate change looks like it's a real thing. And yet there are people debating as to whether that is the case or not. And it's partially because science is never 100% on anything. But as we learn more and more, our confidence grows that, yeah, we're beginning to understand how this thing works. We still not be able to say why necessarily, but. Yeah. So I believe in climate change.
- [64:54]
B
I do too. I don't think it'll ever make us go extinct or even close to it. I've got a lot of podcasts on that if you want to listen to those. It's. It's one of my. One of my biggest issues that I focus on. We, of course, can debate that at other time, but I think that was a pretty fascinating discussion. Dean, thank you. Thank you very much for, for coming on. I think the audience has a lot to think about after that one and we're going to get more of your colleagues on, hopefully. It's hard to get, you know, this is hard to get a hold of them, but really appreciate you being the first on this new series of what I think I'm going to call science fiction or fact and. And why the government was. Was looking into these things. I think it's really interesting stuff.
- [65:42]
A
Good. So if you want to listen to a more recent one of my books which, which is read by a professional reader, then. Then get my book called Real Magic.
- [65:52]
B
Real Magic. Okay.
- [65:53]
A
I didn't get that one because that book is. Is tying together these ancient esoteric ideas with science as we see it today.
- [66:02]
B
Great.
- [66:03]
A
And. And it's all about. It brings the psychic evidence up to date as well.
- [66:08]
B
Okay, that would be good to know. There you go. For the audience. If you're interested in this topic, check it out. Dean, thanks so much for being on.
- [66:17]
A
Thanks for asking.