A Psychic Power Outage : Pentagon’s parapsychology program is no threat to old-fashioned spying

Not content with spending billions on reconnaissance satellites, communications intercepts and secret agents, the U.S. government for nearly two decades has also funded a program to try to divine information using people who claim to have psychic powers. The negligible results should have been, well, foreseen.

An independent review panel has now recommended scrapping the program, code-named Stargate, which was run by the Defense Intelligence Agency. The program has cost about $20 million. For that kind of bucks the Pentagon could have hired Johnny Carson to put on his turban and do his Carnac the Magnificent act. The benefits to national security would have been about the same.

The psychics were asked over the years to provide specific answers to specific questions--for example, where North Korea was hiding its plutonium, or what routes drug boats in the Caribbean would follow. A key question was posed in 1986, just before U.S. planes bombed Libya in retaliation for its suspected sponsorship of terrorism. U.S. officials wanted to know where Libyan dictator Moammar Kadafi was. According to Michael D. Mumford, who co-authored a report for the American Institutes for Research that evaluated Stargate, a psychic answered with something less than pinpoint precision. “I see sand. I see water. I see a mosque.

Parapsychology is of course an area for legitimate study, and you almost have to admire the person who got this one past the stiff Pentagon bureaucracy. On the other hand the military’s psychics are said to have been right only 15% of the time, meaning they were wrong 85% of the time. Sometimes crystal balls are less than crystal-clear. Carnac: The answer is a waste of $20 million in tax money.