By today’s standards, the idea of ARPA, a technical agency, investigating spoon bending and ESP might sound outlandish, but even some of the conservative elements of the Defense Department and intelligence community were being swept up in popular enthusiasm for psychic investigations. Best-selling books like The Secret Life of Plants combined botany with New Age ideas to argue that plants were sentient beings, while The Tao of Physics merged quantum theory with mysticism. A cover of Time magazine was dedicated to the nation’s “booming interest” in psychics.
