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- [00:00]
A
You can't predict the future, but you can prepare for it. Arizona State University is building degrees for what's ahead. Programs designed around emerging fields, taught by faculty whose research is shaping our future, not just teaching about it. It's why we've been ranked number one in innovation for more than a decade. Your future is worth preparing for, and you don't have to prepare alone. Future proof your career. Explore more than 350 programs at ASUonline. ASU. EDU. That's a degree better.
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B
Hello, hello, and welcome to this week's Shorthand. Now, if I told you I could close my eyes and accurately describe the interior of a room on the other side of the planet that I'd never seen, set foot in, or been given any information about, you'd probably say that was impossible.
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C
I'd say you've been talking to Jon Ronson is what I say you'd be doing.
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B
Now. If I told you I could read your mind, Hannah, levitate, walk through walls, or maybe even make your heart explode in your chest, you'd probably either say I was crazy or maybe wait to hear the punchline of that incredibly shit joke. And you'd be right to do so. What if I told you that for over 30 years, the US government has spent tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money in order to create super soldiers who could do just those things? If you say I was crazy for telling you that, well, then you would be wrong.
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C
I wouldn't even dream of it.
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B
Because the US Government actually has been running numerous multimillion dollar projects trying to create psychic super soldiers of the future. And this is the shorthand.
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C
It all began with the retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon. Lieutenant? Lieutenant? Did we say Lieutenant? And the Americans say Lieutenant?
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B
I don't know. Pass.
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C
We'll call him Jim. Jim had served in Vietnam in the 60s, and his time in the jungle had a profound impact on him. On his first deployment, Jim and his unit found themselves pinned down by an enemy sniper. And to his shock, when Jim gave him the order to fire back, he saw that his men were deliberately missing. As a result, his unit suffered heavy casualties. Upon his return to the U.S. jim read a study which found that only 15 to 20% of U.S. soldiers in World War II actually shot to kill. The rest either fired high or. Or didn't fire at all. Jim knew that it wasn't a natural thing to shoot people, and he decided the army needed to find a way to defeat their enemies with love, not bullets. In 1977, Jim wrote a letter to the vice chief of staff for the army in the Pentagon and requested that they fund his investigation into new technologies that would help create this loving soldier of the future. And amazingly enough, he got the go ahead. Jim jumped in his car and set off on a two year long investigation which led to him visiting 150 new age organizations across California.
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B
Obviously this is so 70s, even the Pentagon are just like, you're right, here's some money.
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C
And these organizations he visited included everything from taekwondo, Fat Liberation, Gentle Wind healing and the Acelen Institute for the advancements of human potential.
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B
Scared?
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C
Yeah.
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B
So after Jim's fact finding mission ended in 1979, the US army was at a crisis point following their humiliation in Vietnam. The army was filled with uneducated, poorly trained, illiterate soldiers. And seven out of 10 divisions were found to be unfit for combat.
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C
That's not good stuff.
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B
No, it's very, very vast.
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C
70% even. I can do that Maths.
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B
They couldn't do the fucking math army. But Jim was doing it. And he now felt like he had a solution by using the lessons he'd learned from the human potential movement. I would press the soundboard button, but I'm too far away. And he decided that with all of this information he had gained, he was going to create the soldier of the future. Jim then wrote a 125 page manual on how to do so and sent it to his superiors in the Pentagon. And it was titled the First Earth Battalion Operations Manual. Jim believed that this was going to change the face of warfare by creating an army of psychic super soldiers that he called Warrior Monks. Jim's manual detailed how Warrior Monks would fight their enemies using psychic and spiritual abilities to engage in non lethal forms of ethical combat. The uniform of the Warrior Monks would include a pocket for ginseng, amphetamines for pep, food to improve night vision, like carrot sticks, I don't know. And acupuncture kits and even dowsing rods and most importantly, speakers were needed that would blast enemies with indigenous music and words of peace.
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C
Warrior monks deployed into hostile countries would also carry with them baby lambs and disarm enemy soldiers with what Jim called sparkling ice.
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B
What's happening?
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C
Have you seen the film?
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B
I have seen the film and I thoroughly enjoy the film, but I am like, what? Look, I'm not saying like how does somebody like Jim Channen end up saying the things that he's saying and believing that things are saying? This is the 70s, it's California. Everybody was fucking pepped up to the eyeballs.
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C
But the Pentagon, they've done weirder stuff.
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B
I mean, you're right, they did let that scientist fuck that dolphin.
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C
Yeah. And you know, MKUltra, the crack epidemic, you know.
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B
No, all of it.
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C
They've done more.
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B
All of it.
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C
All of it. So let's get back to those baby
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B
lambs and their sparkling eyes.
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C
Exactly. So what the warrior Monks would do was lay their baby lambs at the feet of their enemy and give them a hug. I don't know if it's the making the lamb hug with its little lamb arms or are they quite both? I don't know.
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B
Don't know. It's not clear. We haven't read the manual.
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C
And if these lamb cuddles fail to end hostility, then loudspeakers attached to the warrior Monk's uniform would blast harsh and unpleasant sounds to confuse and disorientate the enemies and probably the lambs, let's face it.
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A
Oh no.
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C
And then if this failed, the warrior monks would use what Jim called non lethal psychoelectronic weapons which would blast the enemy with positive energy. And only as a final resort would a warrior monk ever use a lethal weapon.
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B
So the manual reads, firepower is the weakest link in the hierarchy of force. Stronger than firepower is the force of will. Stronger still is spirit. And love is the strongest force of all. This is like some fucking interstellar bullshit, that fucking film. I was like, yes, I'm here for it, let's watch it. And then they're like, maybe it was all just about love. I'm like, no, it was meant to be about fucking cool science shit.
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C
It is about cool science shit. No, I don't think that's the message of interstellar.
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B
Is it not? That's what I took away from it.
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C
I took it as like everything is going on at the same time.
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B
I love that. But I'm like, no Anne Hathaway whispery love poems.
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C
Shush.
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B
Interstellar. But anyway, here coming back to Jim Channon, he goes on to state in this manual that warrior monks would attain the power to pass through walls, bend metal with their minds, stop their own hearts without dying, and also see the future. As well as being able to have out of body experiences and read other people's thoughts. And Jim presented these ideas to a group of real life actual paid up army leaders at Fort Knox in 1979.
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C
And they were so taken by his speech that Fort Knox asked Jim to create and command an actual 1st Earth Battalion. The hilarious thing is, Jim wasn't nuts. He didn't actually believe people could walk through walls or make hearts burst with their minds. The manual was meant to be more of a self help guide and the concepts he'd written about were to help soldiers think about warfare in a new way. So Jim, being offered his 1st Battalion, said no. But military men tend to be very literal minded people. And after Jim's manual was published, it became the subject of numerous genuine US military research projects on psychic warfare. Little did Jim know, though, this was an area the US military had already been interested in for quite some time.
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B
On 10 March 1970, in Leningrad, Russia, Nina Kulagina, a former member of the Red army tank regiment, stopped the beating heart of a frog using just her mind.
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C
Get it? Nina.
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B
Nina Kulagina. The freshly removed frog heart was floating in a solution which could keep it beating for up to an hour. It was hooked up with electrodes allowing observing scientists to measure the heart's bpm. The Soviet doctors reported that Nina had managed to stop the heart beating within seven minutes. And following this, she then attempted to elevate the heart of one of the doctors, but stopped when his heart rate reached dangerous levels. This entire experiment was filmed and footage of it reached the US Department of Defense. After two years of research, the CIA published a report stating that the Soviets were investing 60 million rubles a year into psychic projects for espionage and war. So there you go, that happened in 1970, which explains to you why then they spent the rest of the 70s spending millions and millions and millions of dollars trying to pursue the same exact thing. Tell the US that China or Russia are doing it already and they will do the same.
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C
Yeah, and they'll fake a moon landing.
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B
So yes, after they found out about Nina Kalagina, they couldn't stand idly by and do nothing when Soviet soldiers were developing the power to kill US soldiers with their minds, something that they called the Soviet psychoenergetic threat. Not only were they in the midst of a space race and an arms race with the ussr, but now the US had no choice but to close the psychic warfare gap. And what followed, like we said, was tens of millions of dollars being poured into 30 years of research into psychic warfare by the CIA and the US military.
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C
And the details of this, let's face it, pretty hilarious section of CIA history were all revealed in 2017 when the spy agency declassified 12 million documents about their psychic endeavours.
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B
Why?
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C
They only have so much space for top secret stuff, you know, and there was probably something going on in Congress that week that they didn't want anyone to think about. So they're like have this stuff about psychics instead.
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B
Sure, sure, sure, sure.
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C
Like when they released all of that UFO stuff. Look over there.
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B
Yep.
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C
So the CIA first set out to assess how serious this threat from Russia was. And they handed the task to two parapsychologists, experts in psychic phenomena from the Stanford Research Institute. And these guys names were Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ. And they started the program dubbed Scanate, as in scan by coordinate. And research into remote viewing began. Remote viewing is the ability to give information about an object, event, person or location that is hidden from physical view and separated by some distance. According to the declassified documents, it seems that the CIA believe that every single person had this ability hidden deep inside their subconscious minds. And it could be unlocked through adequate training in their eyes. Remote viewing was going to be their ultimate weapon. Not only was it cheap, there was no way it could be defended against. Puthoff and Targ started to test people they believed were gifted individuals and psychics, of which there were 30, many of whom, as it happened, were Scientologists as well. To be allowed to remain in the program, all trainees were required to demonstrate a 65% psychic accuracy rate. I can hear your eyes and your head from over here.
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B
I was just thinking a 65% psychic accuracy rate, that's like a D. I'm gonna get a D is what I mean.
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C
And Most of these 30 people apparently surpassed this percentage consistently.
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B
I mean it is below average.
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C
I mean it's a 2 1.
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B
65.
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C
And this is when we have to deal with Israeli Spoonbender and Michael Jackson's best friend, Uri Geller.
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B
So Geller had become a global celebrity in 1973, after his appearance on the BBC show the Dimble Bee Talkin', he shocked the world by bending spoons, restarting a stopped watch with his mind, and replicating a drawing that had been hidden in an envelope. And unlike every other TV magician, Uri Geller claimed his fantastic feats were not tricks, but they were displays of genuine psychic powers. For eight days in August 1973, the CIA conducted numerous experiments testing Geller's supernatural gifts. These tests involved Geller's ability to see hidden drawings, find buried metal, and of course, bend spoons with his mind. Puthoff and Hag claimed that the test was successful. And the CIA concluded that Geller's paranormal perceptual ability was convincing. In fact, they were impressed enough to say this in 1975. A large body of reliable experimental evidence points to the inescapable conclusion that extrasensory perception does exist as a real phenomenon. I mean, if I'd already pissed away, probably by this point, $20 million on it, I would say the same thing.
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C
However, before the invention of methamphetamine in World War II, would anyone be able to conceive that someone would be able to stay up for three days and still fight accurately from a plane? Probably not.
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B
Probably not. So this apparent success caught the attention of the U.S. department of Defense and Ray Hyman, a professor of psychology from the University of Oregon. Now, Hyman was called in and he personally evaluated Geller's abilities and dubbed him a fraud, causing the CIA to back out of the entire project. But the U.S. army, they weren't deterred quite so easily. So the project was moved to the US Army's Fort Meade in Maryland, and it became Operation Grill Flame and continued receiving congressional funding. Operation Grill Flame focused on remote viewing, with one representative of the Intelligence Committee stating it seemed like a hell of a cheap radar system. It doesn't seem that cheap or successful. And so, of course, indeed, there were more failures than successes. But there were some successes.
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C
The most incredible win for the military psychics was when one of their gifted individuals called Rosemary Smith helped find the exact location of a downed Soviet plane in the drc, Democratic Republic of Congo, which was called Zaire back then. Rosemary was given a map and using her psychic ability, she pointed at a coordinate and said that that is where she could see an image of the downed plane in her mind. The coordinates were then sent to the CIA station in Zaire, and two days later, the Soviet plane was found in that exact spot, allowing the CIA to extract the valuable Soviet tech from that plane. Another baffling instance of remote viewing seeming to work involved an army veteran and remote viewing trainee called Joe McMonagal. In September 1979, a US spy satellite had noticed suspicious activity in a building located 100 metres from a body of water in northern Russia, and the National Security Council wanted to know what was up. Joe was given nothing but the geographical coordinates and asked to describe the site. This is what he said. It was a cold location near a body of water with large buildings and smokestacks.
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B
They always say body of water, always.
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C
They then showed Joe an aerial satellite image of the building and asked him to tell them what was happening inside. Joe said, the interior is large and noisy with lots of scaffolding and girders. They're probably making a huge submarine. And then he drew out the dimensions on a piece of paper.
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B
At this point, the NSC agents lost hope. If Joe was correct, Then this would mean that the Russians were building the largest submarine ever made. But because Joe had tested higher than his fellow psychic spies, they asked him to tell them when it would be launched, to which he replied, in four months. Imagine the power trip you'd be on. And in January 1980, exactly four months later, spy satellites pictured the world's largest submarine being launched in that exact position. Information about the goings on in Project Grill Flame somehow then landed in the hands of Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper columnist Jack Anderson, who's also considered the father of investigative journalism. And after he wrote up a less than flattering article about the government's psychic endeavours in 1984, the army decided to terminate the project's funding that same year. Boo.
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C
Jack Anderson, you're a poor sport.
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B
But the shenanigans didn't end there. Don't worry, Hannah. Because the project was just renamed and transferred somewhere else. Thank God, by 1991, it had become the Stargate Program. Guys, that's too good a name. Call it something shit, like fucking Operation Paperclip. Call it something shit.
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C
What about the submarine?
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B
I mean, look, a broken clock can be right several times across the course of 30 years of research. So the Stargate program is what it was recalled. And it was now going to be run out of Fort Meade, Maryland. Funding was now being provided by the Defence Intelligence Agency, which is reported to have been around $20 million and involved 40 personnel and 23 remote viewers. Possibly the most interesting man involved in Project Stargate was the United States Army Major General Albert Newton Stubblein iii. And it's not just because of his fantastic name or that he had a master's in chemical engineering. And that during his 32 year career he went from Armour Officer to the US Army's Chief of Intelligence with 16,000 soldiers under his command. It was because he was also a huge proponent of psychic warfare.
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C
Stubblebine was majorly influenced By Jim Channon's 1st Earth Battalion field Manual and had been present during Jim's speech at Fort Knox back in 79. He was absolutely determined to create psychic super soldiers. And in his words, these super soldiers would have the ability to become invisible at will and to walk through walls. Things that Jim Channon literally never said.
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B
He was just talking about coats, lambs, Lambs, Lambs wear this coat that's the
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C
same colour as the wall. Stubblebein also required that his battalion commanders learn how to bend spoons, just like Uri Geller. And he himself did on countless occasions attempt to walk through walls, levitate and burst clouds with his mind. And when National Treasure John Ronson interviewed Stubblebine for his book Men who Stare at Goats, the major general described how he had attempted to run through the walls of his office. He began by telling himself, I am made of atoms. Atoms are made up of mostly space. I am atoms. What are walls made of? Atoms. He's not incorrect.
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B
No, it's all facts.
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C
And then he would just sprint at the wall and bust his nose open. And then he would do it again and again.
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B
Stubblebine was convinced if US Soldiers mastered walking through walls, there would no longer be any wars. He truly believed it was possible and that he was just not focusing hard enough, which is why he hadn't been able to do it yet. But then it occurred to Stubblebine that if anyone in the US army could learn to do it, it would be someone in the Special forces. And in 1983, Stubblebine drove to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and gathered an audience of Special Forces commanders to announce his big idea. He began by telling the highly trained killers that were in front of him that it was possible to learn to heal wounds on the battlefield with their minds. When the room fell silent, Stubblebine then pulled out a bunch of bent spoons from his bag and said, what if you could do this? When the silence didn't end and his audience began looking at him as though he were a madman, Stubblebine doubled down. He then told them that they could learn to burst the beating heart of an animal just by staring at it.
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C
I used to make stop motion videos of me and Liv Dryden bending spoons when we were at school.
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B
I love that.
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C
Stubblebein, who was a key leader in the US Military invasion of Granada that same year, was forced into early retirement shortly afterwards in 1984. Not only was he found guilty of violating security protocol and allowing uncleared civilian psychics into sensitive areas, he also offended the US Army Chief of Staff, General John Adams Wickham, Jr. When he offered to perform spoon bending at a formal military Ghana.
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B
Oh, stubble buying.
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C
Wickham was a devout Presbyterian and associated spoon bending with Satanism. As if Satan's got nothing better to do than bend some fucking spoons. And as we said. Stubblebine then went on to become a key sponsor of project Stargate at Fort Meade in 1991.
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B
For four years, the psychics and personnel at Project Stargate worked on numerous operations, including spying on the Soviet Union, bringing down Gaddafi, and even finding victims of kidnappings. Another guy also spent a considerable amount of time spying on the Loch Ness monster, who he concluded was just the ghost of A dinosaur. But in 1995, it all came to an end when the project was transferred back to the CIA, which then commissioned a report done by the American Institutes for Research. Their report shockingly concluded that remote viewing had not been proven to work by a psychic mechanism and that it should not be used operationally. The CIA quickly terminated the project and buried its $50 million, 30 year history of psychic espionage embarrassment.
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C
As for Stubblebine, there was something he was unaware of as he stood in front of that group of Special Force commanders at Fort Bragg talking about bursting animal hearts. And that was that. They actually loved the idea and they were going to try it.
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B
Search, poker face.
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C
Fort Bragg had a warehouse site filled with around 100 goats at that particular time. And they called it the Goat Lab. Just in case anyone's looking through these super secret files, they can't possibly mean a laboratory full of goats.
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B
That's what they should have called fucking operation. Operation Stargate, Operation Goat Lab.
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C
Officially, the goats were used to provide brigade combat team trauma training for frontline medical personnel. But according to Guy Savali, the owner of the Savali Dance and Martial Arts Studio in Ohio, that is not what the goats were used for at all. And Guy Savale told John Ronson that he received a phone call from Colonel Alexander, stationed at Fort Bragg in the summer of 1983, shortly after Stubblebine's quite embarrassing talk out there. Colonel Alexander, as it turned out, was another huge fan of Jim Channon's 1st Earth Battalion at Field Manual and was running a secret project out of Fort Bragg called Project Jedi.
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B
Guys, you're not getting it.
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C
I'm fucking here for it.
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B
You're not getting it. You want to name it something boring so no one comes sniffing around. So the Colonel was interested in Savelli's knowledge of the martial art kun Tao, which has a mystical element to it. And he wanted him to come and teach this to his soldiers. A week later, Savelli found himself at Fort Bragg teaching soldiers to break slabs of concrete with their hands and also mind tricks on how to make somebody forget what they were about to say mid sentence. And he went on to tell John Ronson that on his second day at Fort Bragg, he was asked to try and kill a goat by simply staring at it. And he agreed to give it a go. And it went as the goat was kept in a separate room from Savelli when he knelt on the floor and pictured the Archangel St. Michael stabbing the goat with a sword. And according to him, after 15 minutes, the goat collapsed, but it didn't die.
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C
On day three, Savelli had the soldiers herd 30 goats together and paint numbers on their backs. Then he picked number 16 and once again imagined St. Michael stabbing it with a sword. Only this time, he said his focus was interrupted by a soldier who shouted, kill the goat. And he accidentally killed goat number 17 instead of number 16. After this, he never attempted goat murder again, saying that he'd killed enough goats for one lifetime. Today, as far as we know, none of the CIA's and the US Army's psychic warfare projects are in operation any longer. Instead, along with Jim Channon's legacy, they remain a unique footnote in US Military history.
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B
Boom.
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C
I think there are goat labs aplenty is what I think.
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B
I do, too. I do, too.
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C
But.
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B
Yeah, that's it, guys. That is the shorthand.
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C
That is the shorthand. I hope it was delicious. And so is your lunch. I made it for you.
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B
Ah. Is it goat?
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C
It's an egg.
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A
Ah.
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C
One singular egg.
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B
No egg. No top. No top, no egg even. Goodbye, Sam.