the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 122
necessarily prove that remote viewing was real, because researchers
lacked a theoretical model that would explain how it worked. Without
being able to measure the results against such an explanation, “any glitch
in the data can be used as evidence for ‘Psi’ [paranormal abilities],” Hyman
wrote.
In 1988, a National Research Council study threw cold water on
the military’s interest in the paranormal, concluding that such techniques
were “scientifically unsupported.” The NRC report also discounted other
army attempts to explore the New Agey frontiers of human potential, such
as a study in which marksmen were instructed to hum “Mary Had a Little
Lamb” while they shot, to test what effect such a cognitive distraction
would have on their accuracy.
After that, military officials tried to terminate the program. But
like some wraith from the spirit world, it refused to die. As the Washington
Post later reported, it was kept alive at the insistence of a handful of U.S.
senators, who were still worried that a paranormal powers gap might open
up between the U.S. and the Soviets. The psychic effort “didn’t make any
more or less sense than a variety of programs we conducted in the intelligence
arena,” C. Richard D’Amato, a staffer on the Senate Appropriations
Subcommittee on Defense, told the Post. “I would say that if the
Russians hadn’t had such a big program, we wouldn’t [have kept it
alive].”
Finally, in 1994, the military convinced Congress to transfer the
program back to the CIA, which had started it more than two decades
before. The CIA, in turn, hired the American Institutes for Research, a
nonprofit behavioral and social- science research organi zation, to evaluate
it. The AIR’s September 1995 report concluded that the information produced
by the government psychics was too “vague and ambiguous” to be
of any value, and that there was no compelling reason to continue the
project any longer. By then, the CIA had already shut down the program.