Give me my money back, you bastards: MoD defends psychic powers study

[muriel_volestrangler]

:banghead:

The Ministry of Defence has defended a decision to carry out tests to find out whether psychic powers could be used to detect hidden objects.

The previously secret tests - conducted in 2002 - involved blind-folding volunteers and asking them about the contents of sealed brown envelopes.
...
During the tests, defence experts attempted to recruit 12 "known" psychics who had advertised their abilities on the internet.

However, when they all refused to take part in the research, "novice" volunteers were drafted in.

During the study, commercial researchers were contracted at a cost of £18,000 to test them to see if psychic ability existed and could be used for defence purposes.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6388575.stm

Send the wankers who dreamt up this idea to the front line - minus £18,000 worth of protective armour.

One thing it's proved: the psychics won't put their reputation on the line in a test.

[moggie]

1. Why did they need new research?

It's not like remote viewing hasn't been researched before this.

One detail I enjoyed:

However, most subjects produced guesses that were not close to the correct answer and one subject even fell asleep while he tried to focus on the envelope's content.

[SteppingRazor]

2. Thisis my favorite part:

"defence experts attempted to recruit 12 "known" psychics who had advertised their abilities on the internet.
However, when they all refused to take part in the research, "novice" volunteers were drafted in."

Ha! No shit they all refused.

[TheBaldyMan]

3. Ladies and Gentlemen, for my next trick I will locate Osama Bin Laden - Blindfold !

I saw the report on Newsnight, they had the MoD Ufologist on as an expert on all things Twilight Zone.

Un - fucking - believable .

[onager]

4. Welcome to the club! The U.S. DoD fell for this nonsense LONG ago...

That was the infamous Operation Stargate. Ever since, woo-woos have been trumpeting their ESP/Remote Viewing baloney as "proven by the Department of Defense." :eyes:

It's hard to believe your MoD would go wandering down this infamous blind alley after Stargate.

According to legend, Stargate originated with CIA concerns that the Russians were developing an army of "psychic warriors."

However it originated, the idiocy got an aggressive push from former U.S. Senator Claiborne Pell (D-RI)...a gentleman so firmly grounded in reality that his Washington colleagues often called him "the Senator From Mars."

The end result, as usual, was a colossal, embarassing waste of time and money that eventually sucked in the CIA, the Pentagon, and some of the "Beltway Bandits"--the big R&D firms around Washington.

I've had some dealings with engineers and scientists from one of those firms. (It was eventually bought out by my current employer.)

The few people willing to talk about their involvement with Stargate say they just got a government contract and fulfilled it to the best of their ability...while laughing all the way to the bank.

Some of them suspect that the whole thing was really a sophisticated disinformation campaign by the Russians, which caused our Department Of Defense and intellgence services to fritter away valuable resources on the Non-existent.

[varkam]

5. Can you give me any good info on that DOD Operation?

There's a friend of mine who keeps bringing it up in conversation, and I'd like something to say the next time he does so.

[onager]

9. No problem finding info!

But good info is another thing. Just googling "Operation Stargate" turns up thousands of hits. Most of them, like the operation itself, turn out to be a waste of time. But at least an often hilarious one.

You quickly find yourself stuck in a giant feedback loop of woo-woo's being quoted by boneheaded journalists, who are in turn quoted/linked by the 'woos as more proof of their claims. Argh!

Have fun!

This article by an admitted "fledgling" journalist, Judith Piazza, is a good example. I'm using this example because of the happy ending: after uncritically reporting every bit of nonsense horked up by the Remote Viewers, Piazza got a good shellacking from a real physicist.

And he introduced her to a fellow who is very familiar to the Remote Viewing community, though they could probably do without the familiarity--one Mr. James Randi. :-)

Here's an example of Piazza's splooge. Sorry, but I can't find enough ROFL icons to do these remarks justice:

When asked about this, McMoneagle said, “The project deteriorated as the military began letting any old kook into Stargate.” Other sources also began deploring the New Age twist given by the influx of spoon-benders and crystal gazers.

“Joe McMoneagle is considered to be one of the greatest naturals.” In the early 1970's Joe had a Near Death Experience (NDE), which seems to have given him the ability to achieve telepathic and altered states at will. Joe has stated that a viewer's ability to remote view is dependent upon each individual’s innate talent.

In other words, their achievements in remote viewing are limited by the amount of natural ability they are born with.”

McMoneagle said, “It’s important to withhold belief in any paranormal abilities until they’ve been fully demonstrated and replicated by science.”

This paragraph was especially entertaining:

Operation Stargate's crowning achievement came when remote viewers were able to describe in an incredible amount of detail the Soviet Union's construction of a secret missile base, which were not be seen by U2 flyovers or orbiting spy satellites.

OK, got that? The secret missile base couldn't be seen by U2 planes. Now here's the rest of the paragraph:

Remote viewers were able to draw highly accurate sketches of a large crane, which was constructed on railroad tracks as well as a large metallic domed structure. The drawings were substantiated by U2 spy plane flyovers and integrated human intelligence on the ground.

So details of the secret base that could not be seen by U2 flyovers were substantiated by...U2 flyovers!

Here's the text of Piazza's article and the rebuttals by that cranky skeptic:

http://www.thesop.org/index.php?id=68

[varkam]

10. Thanks for that.

:hi:

[Anarcho-Socialist]

6. you may laugh...

...but imagine when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wakes up one day to find all his spoonware mysteriously bent? Imagine his shock at this defeat by the victorious West. His future efforts of soup consumption will be most inconvenienced!

[moggie]

8. Of course, Uri Geller is ex-Mossad

The spoon-bending is just the declassified tip of the iceberg. Who knows what they're able to bend these days? Israel has some of the best scientists in the world.

[Ian David]

7. See: Imaginary Weapons by Sharon Weinberger

Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon’s Scientific Underworld (Nation Books, 2006)

How did a fluke experiment in 1998, involving a used dental X-ray machine and a dubiously obtained sample of radioactive material called hafnium, become the Pentagon’s number one pet weapons project within five years? And why did this occur in spite of objections from the nation’s top scientists?

In Imaginary Weapons, Sharon Weinberger—no stranger to harebrained military schemes from her years covering the Pentagon—takes us on a wild ride through the hidden underworld of official fringe science in America. From antimatter weapons to psychic warriors, Weinberger shows that the U.S. government is increasingly susceptible to outlandish claims. But the isomer weapon—a futuristic device that would rival the power of a nuclear bomb—may be the strangest case of them all.

The isomer bomb’s strange history is a detective story that begins in communist-era Romania and ends in the E-Ring of the Pentagon, the corridor that houses the inner circle of the Defense Department’s leadership.

Featuring exclusive access to original source materials—including interviews, internal Pentagon documents, and e-mails—Weinberger exposes the “true believers” in the military and intelligence community who thoughts the isomer bomb would be the super-weapons that would help win the War on Terror.

More:
http://sharonweinberger.com/?page_id=6


See also:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
http://www.tv.com/the-daily-show/sharon-weinberger/episode/828080/summary.html

C-Span Book TV,
http://www.booktv.org/feature/index.asp?segid=7303&schedID=443

Majority Report on Air America Radio,
http://www.majorityreportradio.com/weblog/archives/2006_07.php