Army security review of the book 'Mind Wars'
In May 1984 the Army's secret remote-viewing unit assessed how much Ron McRae's book 'Mind Wars' exposed about government psi work.
1984 CE · 39.11, -76.74 · status: official
The account
The INSCOM memo counts 23 passages on remote viewing attributed to figures including Barbara Honegger, Hal Puthoff, Russell Targ, John Alexander, Ingo Swann and G. Gordon Liddy (p.1). It judged several of the book's broad statements highly reliable, including that remote viewing was being pursued by the CIA, Army, Navy and Pentagon and that SRI was the key research centre (p.1). Its enclosure lists the book's specific claims, such as psychics being used in the search for Gen. James Dozier and NSA testing remote viewing on code-breaking, without saying whether those were true (p.2-6). It warned that hostile services could use such books to identify people and projects (p.3).
The sceptical view
The memo assesses exposure, not accuracy; its rating of the book's general statements is not confirmation of each specific claim the book made.
Connections in the atlas
- Air War College paper 'Psychic Warfare: Exploring the Mind Frontier'
- Center Lane
- Ingo Swann
- SCANATE and the start of remote viewing at SRI