Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History

by Andrew Carroll

In a follow-up piece on remote viewing, Jack Anderson claimed that former CIA director Stansfield Turner and General William Odom, the Army’s intelligence chief, were concerned that the Soviets might surpass the United States in psychic research. “Inside the Pentagon, [Odom] has raised the question of whether the Soviets could use psychics to penetrate our secret vaults,” Anderson stated in a sober tone. “This has led to talk in the backrooms about raising a ‘psychic shield’ to block this sort of remote viewing.” Anderson recognized how crack-potty this all seemed but still defended it: “At the risk of being ridiculed over a ‘voodoo gap,’ advocates like Rep. Charlie Rose (D-N.C.), support continued research into the more promising areas of this mysterious field. After all, the atomic bomb was once thought to be a harebrained idea.” And Grill Flame was an idea with consequences. Whether the program led to actionable intelligence (and there’s debate about this) or was really just a major disinformation campaign to spook the Soviets, it consumed tens of millions of federal tax dollars and thousands of manpower hours that critics argue could have been used more productively. By the mid-1990s remote-viewing operations were shut down and declassified. After reading through hundreds of pages