Abstract

In mid-March of 2017, colleagues on private discussion lists for scientific studies of parapsychological phenomena began discussing the forthcoming publication of Annie Jacobsen’s new book, Phenomena: The Secret History of the U. S. Government’s Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. Expectations were understandably high, as the jacket of Phenomena bills it as “The definitive history of the military’s decades-long investigation into mental powers and phenomena.” Knowing a lot about that important area, since I spent a year as a consultant of the Stanford Research Institute’s (SRI’s) original program on remote viewing, as well as having done many independent studies of parapsychological phenomena and related areas like altered states of consciousness (ASCs) and transpersonal psychology, I was very interested. But my colleagues’ main comments were about important distortions of the history in the book. McMoneagle’s (Journal of Scientific Exploration, 31(2):296–311) detailed refutation and correction of Phenomena in a book review in the last JSE issue is the start of many detailed articles on this.