Psychic abilities

Psychic abilities are the faculties by which a person is said to obtain information the ordinary senses cannot reach — telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, retrocognition, psychometry and remote viewing, the family known as extrasensory perception — or to act on matter, energy and living systems without ordinary physical means, as in telekinesis and psychokinesis, together with the healing, projection and materialization powers that traditions attribute to the same capacity. The word "psychic" also names the person who exercises them, from stage performers and the paid advice trade to the remote viewers of the Stargate Project, one of whom, Joseph McMoneagle, says he wants everybody to know that "it's real and it works" and will work only under an absolutely double-blind protocol. In the context of ufology and exopolitics, psychic abilities are reported both as innate faculties of advanced non-human intelligent beings and as latent human capacities that can be activated through ET contact, training, or genetic factors.

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences concluded in 1988 that there is "no scientific justification from research conducted over a period of 130 years for the existence of parapsychological phenomena". The U.S. intelligence community nonetheless funded operational psychic research for over two decades, from Stanford Research Institute in 1972 to the closure of Stargate Project in 1995, and McMoneagle holds that modern humans have lost an ability that an earlier, more endangered humanity possessed.

The faculties

The table covers faculties attributed to real people, and leaves out the powers of fictional characters. Extrasensory perception is a set of abilities rather than a single ability, comprising remote viewing, dermo-optical perception, dowsing, precognition, psychometry, retrocognition and telepathy.

Psychics

A psychic is a person who exercises one of these faculties, and the word is also used as an adjective for the abilities themselves. Psychics fill a variety of roles. Some are theatrical performers, such as stage magicians, who use techniques including prestidigitation, cold reading and hot reading to produce the appearance of the abilities for entertainment; a large industry and network of people advertised as psychics gives advice and counsel to paying clients. Psychic powers are asserted by psychic detectives and in practices such as psychic archaeology and psychic surgery. Among the best-known psychics are Edgar Cayce, Ingo Swann, Peter Hurkos, Janet Lee, Miss Cleo, whom the U.S. Federal Trade Commission charged in 2002 with deceptive advertising, billing and collection practices, John Edward, Sylvia Browne and Tyler Henry.

Etymology and history

The word derives from the Greek psychikos ("of the mind" or "mental"), which also means "soul"; the maiden Psyche of Greek mythology was the deification of the human soul, and the Latin psȳchē comes from the Greek psȳchḗ, literally "breath". The French astronomer and spiritualist Camille Flammarion is credited with first using "psychic", and Edward William Cox introduced it to English in the 1870s.

Elaborate systems of divination and fortune-telling date to ancient times, the best known being astrology, in which the relative positions of celestial bodies were held to give insight into lives and predict circumstances. Some fortune-tellers were said to make predictions without these systems, or alongside them, by direct apprehension or vision of the future;[citation needed] these seers or prophets became, in later times, clairvoyants and psychics. Seers served in early civilization as advisors, priests and judges, as when Samuel is asked in 1 Samuel 9 to find the donkeys of the future king Saul; the priests of the sun deity Ra at Memphis acted as seers in Egypt, and Assyrian seers were called nabu, "to call" or "announce".

The Delphic Oracle is one of the earliest stories in classical antiquity of prophetic ability: the Pythia, the priestess presiding over the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi, was believed able to deliver prophecies inspired by Apollo from the 8th century BC until the last recorded response in 393 AD, when the emperor Theodosius I ordered pagan temples closed. It is often said that the Pythia delivered oracles in a frenzy induced by vapors rising from the ground and spoke gibberish that priests reshaped into the prophecies preserved in Greek literature, while other scholars read the records as showing that she spoke intelligibly in her own voice. Geological investigations raise the possibility that ethylene gas caused the Pythia's state of inspiration.

Nostradamus (Michel de Nostredame, 1503–1566) published prophecies in the French Renaissance, notably Les Prophéties (first edition 1555), whose collected writings contain at least 6,338 quatrains and at least eleven annual calendars, most of the quatrains dealing with disasters and all of them undated. His enthusiasts and the popular press credit him with predicting major world events, while most academic scholars hold that the associations drawn between events and his quatrains result from misinterpretation or mistranslation or are too tenuous to count as evidence of predictive power. The Englishwoman Mother Shipton demonstrated psychic abilities from youth and foresaw historical events in the 16th century, and belief in prophetic dreams was common and persistent in many ancient cultures, which regarded some psychic abilities as available to everyone on occasion.

Modern Spiritualism became prominent in the United States and the United Kingdom in the mid-nineteenth century on the belief that the spirits of the dead could be contacted by mediums to lend insight to the living, a movement fueled in part by anecdotes of psychic powers. Daniel Dunglas Home gained fame in the Victorian period for his reported ability to levitate and speak to the dead. The Theosophical Society, co-founded in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891), coupled spiritualist elements with Eastern mysticism, was influential in the early twentieth century and later shaped the New Age movement of the 1970s; Blavatsky herself claimed numerous psychic powers. Edgar Cayce (1877–1945) was a psychic of the twentieth century who made many highly publicized predictions. By the late twentieth century psychics were commonly associated with New Age culture, and paid psychic readings and advertising were common from the 1960s on, offered by phone, at home and at psychic fairs.

Belief in psychic abilities

In a 1990 survey of members of the National Academy of Sciences, only 2% thought extrasensory perception had been scientifically demonstrated and another 2% thought the phenomena happened sometimes; 22% thought research in the field should be discouraged, 63% that it should be allowed but not encouraged, and 10% that it should be encouraged, with neuroscientists the most hostile of all the specialties to parapsychology. A 2005 Gallup survey of the general United States population found that 41 percent believed in extrasensory perception, 26 percent in clairvoyance and 31 percent in telepathy or psychic communication. A 2006 poll of 439 college students by Bryan Farha of Oklahoma City University and Gary Steward of the University of Central Oklahoma found belief in psychic phenomena higher among seniors (31%) and graduate students (34%) than among freshmen (23%), and lower among science students than among social science and education students. Some hold that anyone can have psychic abilities activated or enhanced through meditation and divination, and others that the ability is hereditary, passed from a psychic parent to children.

Psychics in fiction

Psychic abilities are common in science fiction, often under the term "psionics": the "Force-sensitive" beings of the Star Wars franchise, some of the works of Stephen King, Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man, A. E. van Vogt's Slan, Anne McCaffrey's Talents universe, the Dune novels, the Scanners films, and the superhero comics of the X-Men.[citation needed] Where authors depict innate and heritable ability, others have it achieved by any human who learns the proper mental discipline, as in Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door and Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.

ET connection

Many contactees report the onset or enhancement of alleged psychic abilities following abduction or contact experiences. John E. Mack found that a significant subset of abductees described lasting psychological transformation — heightened ecological awareness and spiritual opening — which he argued was inconsistent with purely traumatic victimization. The Galactic Federation of Worlds framework describes telepathy as the standard mode of interspecies communication at fifth density and above, with physical speech considered a primitive limitation of lower-density civilizations.[citation needed]

Ingo Swann's long-term view — as reported by those who knew him — was that telepathy is the universal language of the cosmos: that all conscious beings at sufficient development communicate telepathically, and that verbal language is an evolutionary workaround developed specifically by beings whose psychic faculties have been suppressed or have not yet emerged. The J-Rod entity at S-4 communicated with Dan Burisch telepathically during their collaborative biological research — a form of communication described as direct and unambiguous in a way that verbal language is not.[citation needed]

Government programs

The U.S. intelligence community invested over two decades in operational psychic research through the Stargate Project, which employed remote viewers such as Ingo Swann, Pat Price, and Joseph McMoneagle for intelligence collection. Steven Greer says the agency calls such effects "WSFM" — "weird science and freaking magic."

The programme began at Stanford Research Institute in 1972 under Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ, with Ingo Swann as the primary experimental subject. Swann's remote viewing of the planet Jupiter — producing accurate descriptions of its ring system before its existence was reported by the Voyager probe — remains one of the most frequently cited pre-confirmation predictions in psi research.[citation needed] Pat Price contributed the remote viewing of Soviet military facility Semipalatinsk that was later reported by satellite imagery.[citation needed]

Joseph McMoneagle conducted over 450 documented remote viewing sessions for the U.S. military, targeting Soviet submarine developments, missing persons, and unexplained aerial phenomena.[citation needed] McMoneagle's work demonstrated consistent accuracy rates significantly above chance across thousands of trials.[citation needed] Major Paul Smith, who served as a Stargate Project remote viewer and later wrote its definitive operational manual, described the programme's ongoing relevance: former Stargate personnel were recruited after the programme's official closure in 1995 to form teams that remote viewed UAP incidents under NDA. McMoneagle's own account of how such viewers are found is that talented ones turn up where lives are at risk — the Army, the Marine Corps, the fire and police departments — because the capacity is a survival mechanism that tribes without it did not outlast.

Angela Ford, who served in the US Army's remote viewing unit at Fort Meade from 1985 to 1995 and describes remote viewing as simply a technical methodology applied to existing ESP — "remote viewing is nothing more than ESP" — and the Stargate programme as validating what psychics had always known about their own abilities, says the information is accessible regardless of whether the viewer works through coordinate remote viewing protocols or another method, and that what makes it remote viewing is the scientific procedure rather than a different faculty.

Pineal gland and psi

Multiple traditions — from the Theosophical to the biochemical — identify the pineal gland as the anatomical interface between ordinary sensory consciousness and psychic perception. René Descartes' identification of the pineal gland as the "seat of the soul" — the point of contact between the immaterial mind and the physical body — anticipates later proposals that the gland's production of DMT (dimethyltryptamine) during extreme states (deep sleep, near-death, peak experiences) temporarily opens perception to non-ordinary informational inputs.[citation needed] In Taygetan cosmology, human psychic suppression is explicitly linked to the calcification of the pineal gland through fluoride exposure and electromagnetic pollution — a deliberate programme of perceptual limitation.[citation needed]

Scientific investigation

Parapsychological research has used random number generators to test for psychokinesis, the mild sensory deprivation of the Ganzfeld experiment to test for extrasensory perception, and, under contract to the U.S. government, trials of remote viewing. The skeptic Ed J. Gracely holds that this evidence is not sufficient for acceptance, partly because the intrinsic probability of psychic phenomena is very small; the psychologist Ray Hyman and the National Science Foundation suggest that parapsychology has methodological flaws that can explain the results parapsychologists attribute to paranormal causes, a view resting largely on the lack of replication by independent experimenters, and Richard Wiseman and Matthew Smith explored possible sender-to-experimenter acoustic leakage in the Psychophysical Research Laboratories' autoganzfeld experiments. Parapsychologists, who generally believe there is some evidence for psychic ability, disagree. McMoneagle, who holds the faculty "real", answers the replication charge on method: he will do remote viewing only under an absolutely double-blind protocol and credits the scientists who worked with him with being harsher about protocol than anybody. A 2012 study by Stuart Ritchie, Richard Wiseman and Christopher French attempting to repeat reported precognition experiments, in which post-test information appeared to affect performance on a memory test, "failed to produce significant effects" and so did "not support the existence of psychic ability" of that kind. In January 2008 Moulton and Kosslyn published a neuroimaging study, designed with favourable conditions such as emotionally related participants like twins, that found no distinguishable neuronal responses between psychic and non-psychic stimuli, concluding that "these findings are the strongest evidence yet obtained against the existence of paranormal mental phenomena"; James Alcock cautioned the researchers against the wording of that statement.

Dean Radin, of the Institute of Noetic Sciences and earlier at Stanford Research Institute, and the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory under Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne ran decades of controlled experiments in which they found statistically significant mind-matter interaction effects.[citation needed] Radin's meta-analyses of psi research report effect sizes that, across thousands of trials, he holds cannot be explained by chance or methodological error.[citation needed] Rupert Sheldrake's controlled trials of telephone telepathy, in which subjects identified callers at rates significantly above chance under double-blind conditions, produced results Sheldrake argued constituted proof of telepathic communication.[citation needed] The Global Consciousness Project monitored a worldwide network of random-event generators for deviations correlated with large collective emotional events, finding anomalies around events such as the September 11 attacks and major public gatherings, which its proponents read as mass psychic coherence leaving measurable traces in physical randomness.[citation needed]

Stage magicians such as James Randi, Ian Rowland and Derren Brown have demonstrated techniques and results similar to those of popular psychics while presenting physical and psychological explanations rather than paranormal ones,[citation needed] and Richard Wiseman describes the cold-reading techniques — flattery, deliberately vague and ambiguous statements, and surreptitiously moving to another prediction when the audience seems unresponsive — by which the appearance of mediumship can be produced. A detailed study of Sylvia Browne's predictions about missing persons and murder cases by Shafer and Jadwiszczok found that, despite her repeated claims to be more than 85% correct, "Browne has not even been mostly correct in a single case". James Underdown states that testing television psychics in a studio is difficult because the psychic could be helped by anyone on the set and the editor can make a psychic look superior or ridiculous; the Independent Investigations Group's exposé of John Edward and James Van Praagh found that what was said on the tape day and what was broadcast were "substantially different in the accuracy". Over twelve years Richard Saunders and an international team of skeptics collected the published predictions of 207 Australian psychics made between 2000 and 2020; of more than 3,800 predictions, 11% were correct and 35% wrong, 19% too vague to characterize, 15% so obvious as to be expected and 2% uncategorizable, and the project concluded that "psychics are appallingly bad at predicting future events". McMoneagle recalls an Italian case in which police were swamped by responses from over 800 psychics and trusted first the two television psychics, one of whose raids outed a senator; the project's own material was sent out a second time by jet, and the State Department forced the Italians to use it.

Weaponization

The weaponization of psychic ability — known as psychotronics or psychic warfare — was pursued by both the U.S. and Soviet Union during the Cold War. MK-Ultra subproject research included experiments in remote influence: attempts to psychically alter the mental state or behaviour of targets at a distance.[citation needed] Soviet research, documented through defector testimony, reached comparable conclusions and produced operational remote-influence programmes under the GRU and KGB.[citation needed] The Montauk Project is alleged to have extended this work into the realm of consciousness-based reality manipulation, using psychically gifted operators to generate portal apertures and to broadcast behavioural influence through amplified psi fields.[citation needed]

Fraud in the readings trade

In a June 2024 CTV News report, an Ontario woman, depressed after selling her home, was told by a psychic calling herself Maha Dev that she was surrounded by "evil spirits" and that her life and her sons' lives could be in danger; she paid $46,000 before concluding she had been "duped", and the money was refunded in full the day after CTV contacted the psychic. The skeptic Rob Palmer cites a woman who gave a psychic $41,642 over ten weeks and whom he put in touch with the private investigator Bob Nygaard, who specializes in psychic-fraud cases, and says that when such victims report to law enforcement they are often turned away and told it is a civil matter; he discusses Thomas John and other well-known "psychics" proven to be frauds. The investigator Ben Radford says scammers use psychological principles on clients who are unhappy and looking for answers: the psychic tells the client not to confide in friends or family, warns that a curse-removal ritual will fail or worsen if the client does, and plays a long game over weeks, months or years, while victims too embarrassed to come forward often stay silent. The skeptical activist Susan Gerbic has summarized techniques she says psychics use to create their effects. Critics of psychics also attribute their powers to intentional trickery or self-delusion.

Psychic abilities in children

Childhood exceptional-function research

From 1979 to 1982 research into children with "exceptional functions of the human body" (exceptional human function, EHF) swept China, following the March 1979 report that a twelve-year-old from Sichuan, Tang Yu, could read words on paper placed behind her ears; dozens of children and adults with apparent supersensory abilities were then found in Beijing, Shanghai, Henan, Hebei and Heilongjiang, and from September 1979 the journal Ziran Zazhi (Nature Journal) published reports of children recognizing symbols and pictures by contact with their ears, hands or armpits. Visiting scientists including the physicist Lee C. Teng of Fermilab, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory researcher Chi-Kung Jen and the astronomer Tao Kiang observed demonstrations, and the children reported tingling or warmth in the hands followed by mental images forming gradually. The Chinese Academy of Sciences and affiliated institutions investigated hundreds of subjects, with results that, according to researchers involved, consistently demonstrated statistically significant performance far beyond chance but could not be explained by conventional sensory mechanisms.[citation needed] Qigong practice was associated with enhanced EHF in some subjects, suggesting a training component.[citation needed]

The Soviet Union's psychotronics research programme, which preceded the US Stargate Project by decades, included extensive work on children and adolescents identified as having spontaneous psychic ability. The Soviet programme studied healing effects, object identification at a distance, and the physiological correlates of psychic functioning. The threat of a "psychic gap" equivalent to the space race or missile gap is described by US researchers as one of the primary motivations for the CIA's investment in the Stargate programme: if Soviet children could be trained as psychic intelligence assets, US children would need to be identified and trained as well.[citation needed]

Spontaneous childhood onset

Angela Ford, a later US Army remote viewer, describes the spontaneous onset of psychic ability beginning at ages three to four — well before any contact with classified programs. Ford describes leaving her body fully consciously as a very young child, being able to direct her movement, and returning at will: "it's not a dream — you physically leave, you come out in like an aura or a spiritual form and your physical body is laying down, you can see your physical body laying down." She additionally describes prophetic dreams beginning at age six during the Cold War period, including predictions that Russia would eventually become an ally and that China would become the primary geopolitical adversary — claims she reports sharing with her mother at the time and later corroborated as accurate. Ford notes that as she entered school and became occupied with daily life, the experiences faded — though she remained drawn to parapsychology, taking an ESP class in college and later seeking out channels to join the Army's remote viewing program. Her account illustrates the commonly reported pattern in which exceptional childhood psychic experience precedes formal military or intelligence identification, and in which the abilities are native rather than induced.

Blind sight and non-visual perception

Research by consciousness scientist Dan Winter with children who can "see without their eyes" — with eyes fully covered — reveals a consistent phenomenological account: children report seeing a vortex pinhole appear inside the head, which resolves into a tube through which they can perceive the external environment. Winter treats this as evidence for the fractal field model of consciousness, in which perception is a coherence phenomenon of brainwave geometry rather than a sensory process.

Tony Rodrigues describes having been enrolled in a Talented and Gifted school program as a child, where he encountered a highly unusual child who arrived by limousine daily. Shortly after this contact, Rodrigues experienced his first abduction and was subsequently inducted into MK-Ultra and SSP programs — suggesting that identification through gifted education programs is a documented pathway for SSP recruitment of psychically able children.

Identification and classified recruitment

The identification process for military remote viewers included both formal selection from existing military personnel and the referral of individuals who had demonstrated anomalous ability in civilian life. Researcher Dalia Burgoin — whose own child demonstrated exceptional telepathic ability — argues that the capacity is universally present in children but conditioned away by social expectations: once a child is shown that their perception is real, the ability becomes stable; conversely, once they are told it is impossible, it fades.

The MILAB literature describes a covert identification pipeline in which children who have had ET contact — which typically activates or amplifies psychic ability — are subsequently identified through medical, educational, or surveillance systems and offered to classified programmes. Rebecca Rose describes her own trajectory as exemplary: ET contact from age four activated psychic capacity that drew the attention of both extraterrestrial and human military interests, leading to formal induction at age nine. Courtney Brown, founder of the Farsight Institute and a trained remote viewer, has applied remote viewing to targets including Ceres and Mars, demonstrating that the technique can be deployed by civilian practitioners to investigate subjects of direct relevance to exopolitics research.

See also

• Telepathy (ET communication)
• Psychic contact with non-human intelligences
• US Gifted and Talented Program
• Supersoldier programs
• Suppression of psychic abilities
• Psychic children

References

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