SRI International

1978 - 1987

Beginning in 1978, I worked intermittently as a consultant and then two years full time, after the Canberra lab closed, for the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International). My task was to assist on a (now-declassified) government program sponsored by the Army, the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, and others to see if a thing that people called “psychic functioning” actually exists.  Essentially these military and intelligence agencies wanted to know a) if the capability for psychokinesis, clairvoyance, etc. actually exists and b) if so, determine if psychic functioning could be used for intelligence gathering. If you read Annie Jacobsen’s book called Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis it has all the characters and the stories of these different projects. 

The SRI work was a deeply classified effort, although if you have heard the term “remote viewing” you may know something about the program. I got a chance to be part of something for a while there that was really quite interesting.  Not something you find in your average space business.

Full disclosure, when I was a child and early teenager, before the music bug bit me, I was fascinated by magic and magicians from the golden era of the late 19th and early 20th century. I would spend hours practicing card tricks. This work at SRI was as close as I ever came to investigating a phenomena some would call magic and was directly related to my overall interest in life in the Universe. My early experiences also made me very aware of how apparent magic could be faked, so I was quite sensitive to any deception.

My role in the work at SRI was two-fold: One was to construct and conduct a set of high-tech experiments using radioactive decay random number generators to see if self-proclaimed sensitives or psychics could exert influence over the outcome of a natural process. I used all the skills learned at LBL and CSI to make the experimental setup as fool-proof as possible. In the end, none of the subjects could show any effects on the apparatus that deviated from expected random behavior. The sponsors were disappointed… but that’s the power of the scientific method.

My other role was as a subject in a so-called Remote Viewing (RV) training program. Jacobsen’s book, noted above, describes this effort in considerable detail which used techniques developed by engineer Gary Langford and artist Ingo Swann.

The essence of the experiments in which I participated utilized a set of hundreds of disparate photographs taken largely from National Geographic magazine. The photos were assembled by a member of the SRI staff, Gina Trask, and kept in a safe. A typical experimental session would proceed as follows: the experimenter, called a monitor, would request an image selected randomly from the 300 or so pictures sealed in envelopes. The monitor and the subject would sit together and follow a protocol meant to elicit a drawing and words from the subject that would describe the hidden picture, known as the “target”. At the end of the session, the subject and monitor would open the envelope and receive “feedback”.

Following the session, the subject’s response and the picture would be sequestered until the experimental sessions were at an end. That might be as few as five or as many as 25 “viewings”. Then a third, independent experimenter would use a variety of rating and ranking techniques to assess the degree to which the responses matched the images. Several of us RV trainees consistently scored well above chance outcomes in the experiments. This procedure seemed to be working, at least at a statistical level.

The actual RV response could at times be quite striking. An example is shown below followed by the actual picture that was the “target”.

One day in 1985 a Colonel representing one of the sponsoring agencies came to visit and demanded a demonstration. I was at the lab working on one of my experiments so got drafted to be the subject. We went through the process described above and in the presence of the officer and several other principals opened the envelope. My drawing and the picture are shown below. Make your own judgement, but the Colonel on the spot offered to give me $40 to bet for him next time I was at a casino in Lake Tahoe. I declined the offer.

The SRI program came to end of its major funding in 1987, so that chapter in my research life of investigating a highly controversial set of claims came to an end.

I have found in my life that as one door closes another will open. As the SRI program came to an end, I was alerted by a former colleague at LBL that NASA Ames Research Center was looking for experienced scientists and engineers. This would be an excellent fit with my early interests in space.

After one interview I was hired.