the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

DUBIOUS NOTIONS 117
amazing ability to become utterly, stubbornly enthralled with an idea, no
matter how nonsensical it turns out to be.
“From the Incredible to the Outrageously Incredible”
In fairness, the government’s pursuit of paranormal powers probably
doesn’t rank as the wackiest top secret project ever—that honor
probably belongs to “Acoustic Kitty,” the CIA’s ill-fated 1960s scheme to
use a cat equipped with a listening device and transmitter to spy on the
Soviets. (Unfortunately, the feline agent was run over by a car instead.)
And unlike, say, “Curveball,” the Iraqi defector whose revelations about
what turned out to be nonexistent mobile biological weapons labs helped
make the case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the psychic corps didn’t have
any significant consequences in terms of U.S. national security. In truth,
the 1970s effort wasn’t even the first U.S. attempt to wage paranormal
espionage. As former North Carolina congressman Charlie Rose (not to
be confused with the TV host of the same name) told the Charlotte Observer,
he once attended a CIA briefing on Capitol Hill at which he was
introduced to a psychic who had attempted to spy on former Soviet leader
Nikita Khrushchev, who was premier from 1958 to 1964. The man claimed
that he had projected himself inside the Kremlin so that he could peruse
documents on Khrushchev’s desk. Unfortunately, the psychic “couldn’t
read Russian, and it didn’t do him much good,” the congressman explained.
But the psychic espionage effort that stretched from the 1970s to
the mid- 1990s definitely was the most determined and prolonged government
exploration of phenomena that, in the words of a 1988 report by the
National Research Council, “range from the incredible to the outrageously
incredible.”
It began in the summer of 1972, when officials from the Central
Intelligence Agency went to California to meet with H. E. Puthoff, a former
navy officer and government intelligence employee who had moved