Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis
by Annie Jacobsen
View on GoodreadsJacobsen's history of the US government's serious, decades-long investment in psychic-research programs — remote viewing at SRI and Fort Meade, the Stargate Project — told as institutional history rather than as believer or skeptic narrative.
Core ideas
- The CIA, DIA, and Army ran funded ESP/psychokinesis programs from the 1950s through 1995; the operational claim — that remote viewers occasionally produced actionable intelligence — was taken seriously enough to keep funding flowing for decades.
- The Cold War context drove it: Soviet investment in parapsychology was real, and the US programs were partly mirror-imaging hedge — "if they're doing it and it works, we can't be left behind."
- Jacobsen presents the material without adjudicating whether psi phenomena are real; the book is about the institutional behavior, and the institutional behavior is itself the revelation.
Published2017
Pages544
ISBN9780316349369
ReadMay 2024
