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CIA Doc on Time Travel, Consciousness, and Existence of the Absolute (1983) [pdf]
- tbabb 8y agoUtter garbage woo. I'd say it's indicative of something, but should we be surprised that even large government organizations can be taken in by BS?
- taneq 8y agoI think it's less "taken in by BS" than "eliminating possibilities."
- Cheyana 8y agoExactly this. They had to at least say they TRIED knocking goats out by staring at them.
- mattkrause 8y agoBingo! And it works two ways. The far-fetched worst case scenario is that this actually works, and that some enemy figures that out first. The realistic nightmare scenario goes is a congressman going “DCI Casey, we’ve heard rumors that the Soviets/Qaddafi/Al Qaeda/baddy of your choice have developed methods for controlling minds. Yet we’ve heard little about how you plan to protect the US from such a threat.”
- taneq 8y agoYep. And once they were fairly sure this was difficult if not impossible, they could stop worrying about THEIR goats being knocked out by the USSR's psy-ops teams.
- dingaling 8y agoThe Stare Wars program
- williesleg 8y agoThe silence here is deafening.
- opportune 8y agoIf you go on some of the CIA FOIA tools you can also read about their experiments with astral projection. One of the more famous ones is about some guy astrally projecting on mars, in the past, and seeing aliens and buildings: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00788R001900760001-9.pdf https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00788... The CIA back then was all kinds of fucked up. Doing illegal experiments on US civilians, installing dictators, and selling drugs. Makes you wonder what terrible shit they're doing now that hasn't come to the surface yet...
- radicaldreamer 8y agoProbably something with manipulation of large populations using social media or predicting the future using user data and metrics.
- therein 8y agoIt categorically seems much more innocent if that's the case. Effective sure, but it just doesn't feel as advanced as as injecting subjects with brand new chemicals or exploring some advanced technology. My point is, I am pretty sure that's not the flagship project at the CIA or NSA.
- yeahitslikethat 8y agoCIAAI
- AngryData 8y agoI dunno, social manipulation is a pretty powerful tool. The difference between a peaceful loving society and an aggressive and warlike society is in large part controlled by social pressures and perceptions.
- wallace_f 8y ago>in large part controlled ompletely controlled. The intents of Nazis, Imperial Japanese, Crusaders, etc., can only be explained by their social pressures. Same people born in different place and time would have different intents. Control what people see and hear and you control what they think. Einstein quote: >Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions
- PinkMilkshake 8y agoThey weren't 'taken' by it. It was likely to investigate it on the off chance it was possible. They had to try because if an enemy did and it turned out to be real, the advantages they would have would be huge. It's easy to look back from 2019 and roll our eyes, but I think the truth was less obvious then and it's likely our now easy dismissal of these things came from those very studies.
- Rebelgecko 8y agoIf you read some of the declassified documents regarding how they set up their experiments it's pretty clear that the studies were not being conducted in a scientifically sound way[1]. The CIA let the studies be performed with questionable methodology for a while, but eventually stopped funding the program. Then the DIA picked it up for a decade or two. 1: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00791R000200180005-5.pdf https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00791...
- TomMckenny 8y agoAlternatively, it's handy to create and leak documents to get the other guys to waste resources competing with your supposed advances.
- PinkMilkshake 8y agoThat's certainly a possibility. I believe they did something similar with UFO sightings by publicly giving them more credibility to mask testing of experimental aircraft's?
- jacobush 8y agoThey did some research on "red mercury" and leaked plausible info on it, such that the other side would try it out, sink resources and get themselves killed (in the lab) in the process.
- MrLeap 8y agoIn 1983 the United States was spending 250 billion dollars on defense. Not sure if CIA spending is included in that piece of the spending pie, but regardless.. Lots of money gets dumped into the economy via that route. It's well known that some government agencies have a "spend it or lose it" funding model. If all your main budgetary needs are met and you have a few million dollars at the end of the year, why not throw some at researching wizard shit? No one wants to be the last super power to discover magical brain lasers. Weird stuff like this doesn't bother me probably as much as it should. Sure, I'd prefer if we spent that money on more reasonable endeavors, but this was probably a cheap waste of time all things considered. And who knows? Maybe the moonshot will pay off, and Americans everywhere will gain powerful psychic shields to reflect communist hexes. Government spending is a primary vector for new money into the economy. If it passes through a coven real quick, meh. Many think we should be spending more money on the arts, and I think the dark arts should count.
- aasasd 8y agoI now got stuck in my mind the vision of US vs Soviet secret agent psychic wizardry fights.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tbabb 8y agoThere are a million better long-shot scientific experiments that could be done with better rigor and better theoretical/experimental foundation than what's in that paper. The ideas there are 'not even wrong' in the Wolfgang Pauli sense; it is scientific-sounding words jumbled into a picture that isn't even coherent, let alone in agreement with reality. Just because you can think of it, or can imagine it being true, or are afraid of it being true, doesn't mean it's worth investigating. Should the CIA engage in leprechaun research?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- colechristensen 8y agoAny reasonable government needs to have a small outlet for things that seem crazy. In other words, you need X Files. Not because you believe everything, most things, or even any thing in them, but because having an open mind is important. If you think you know everything, you will miss a lot. Being open minded means spending some time at the tail edges investigating things that look like utter garbage woo, even if the result is that they are invariably utter garbage woo. Also, it is not complete nonsense. Altering conscious states is absolutely real and there are many avenues to it. Altered consciousness is also solidly in the interests of an intelligence agency and research is only natural. There is definitely a flavor of pseudoscientific nonsense that comes along with altered consciousness experiences, but you can look past that. Reports like this look to me very similar into pre-flight experiments. There were a whole lot of people making patently ridiculous flying contraptions but with hindsight many of them had some important ideas right. See also: alchemy as a precursor to chemistry Studying and treating the brain by developing methods to alter conscious states is, I think, going to be a major achievement of the 21st century, and things like this are precursors.
- ChristHamster 8y agoThis is a great point, having an open mind to these sort of things is very important. You never know what sort of things could come of experiments if they aren't done or pushed aside. Especially with the more widespread knowledge of the capability of psychedelics to change your mind. To ignore this avenue of very new and oft-misunderstood science would just be, to put it bluntly, ignorant.
- ataturk 8y agoExcept our tax dollars pay for these flights of fancy! Also, the CIA's credibility, were it a bond, would be rated junk. They flew cocaine into the US by the cargo-plane-load. They're a rogue organization, the deep state, and they don't follow any laws anywhere.
- everdev 8y ago> Studying and treating the brain by developing methods to alter conscious states is, I think, going to be a major achievement of the 21st century There's a great book called "Stealing Fire" by Steven Kotler & Jamie Wheal about this very subject.
- goombastic 8y agoWhile people say the CIA invested in woo woo, I believe science progresses this way. Reported edge cases of established theories need to be checked, validated and proved/disproved before moving on to modifying the theory or dumping the case as woo. As scientists we should not be pre-disposed to shutdown things we do not understand without putting said phenomena through a testing phase.
- whatshisface 8y ago>Reported edge cases of established theories need to be checked, validated and proved/disproved before moving on to modifying the theory or dumping the case as woo. There are literally an infinite number of possible violations of established physics. Momentum is not conserved inside this cubic inch. Momentum is not conserved inside this other cubic inch... The only reason one might prefer astral projection as a theory over the cubic-inch-ism of any particular volume is that astral projection fits a few preconceived notions about how the universe should conform to our psychological expectations. It might be surprising to hear, but exploding a goat with your mind is actually more psychologically familiar than any particular fact about quantum field theory. It involves explosions, minds, the exertion of will, and goats, while QFT involves unfamiliar components following unfamiliar rules to unfamiliar ends. In short, if your idea is to test for a violation of the known laws of nature, great. If your idea is to test for a violation of the laws of nature that is only motivated by the predispositions you acquired in the cradle, that's not so good.
- jfoutz 8y agoI think they were checking culturally popular predispositions. I may claim this one cubic inch is special, but who cares? If 5-10% of the country believes it, it sorta makes sense to look into.
- whatshisface 8y agoIf someone believes something that all people are naturally predisposed to believe (compared at least to other competing beliefs), then within the palette of explanations for why they believe it lies, "just because they're predisposed." As a result paranormal theories are actually less credible than cubic-inch-ism.
- pytyper2 8y agoI get the feeling that the budget for this project was actually spent on something nefarious and they only produced this document to claim they actually spent it on the task.
- jessaustin 8y agoThat seems likely. These horrible people lie constantly; why wouldn't they lie in this document?
- ransom1538 8y ago+Yes. The obvious answer is probably correct: it was just a front to fund more contras.
- mgarfias 8y agomore likely hookers and blow
- SubiculumCode 8y ago1. Try and see. 2. Leak program. 3. Get USSR to waste resources trying it themselves, and/or spying on the American program.
- yters 8y agoI think it's the other way around. We were anxious to get into this kind of research because we heard the USSR was well on their way.
- jacobush 8y agofeedback loop
- rosser 8y agoI think we woefully underestimate the amount and kinds of absurdity our governments get up to for counterintelligence purposes.
- cftm 8y agoThis exactly. The cold war was ended by the Strategic Defense Initiative - not because it worked but because we forced the USSR to pour resources into matching us and it bankrupted the country.
- mjevans 8y agoWhat an horrid war of attrition. The only winning move is to have deeper pockets.
- nradov 8y agoIt was less horrid than the alternative.
- SubiculumCode 8y agoYes it was resources used non productively. But winning a war with metal and bombs and radiation---priceless.
- libpcap 8y agoI believe this is CIA's method of diversion. Feed the enemy with some noise, disinformation, and false research focus. If they follow it through, they'll lose their attention on the genuinely important thing.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- botchedOps 8y agoYou figure, to gain a slot as a budget item, sometimes there has to be a deliverable, and when the deliverable is unspeakable, you get something like this. It's probably better than the alternative for spilled milk. Good, bad or indifferent, a creative writing exercise fills out a gap in unaccounted time and resources better than a mysterious blank spot that no one will talk about. Something like this probably fills in for things you couldn't even save with redactions. But then again, maybe it's cover for things that turned out to be uninteresting and wasteful, bad situations that resolved themselves on their own, people running off with stolen money, or perhaps those times when your entire spy ring is discovered and executed, and there's an unwillingness at the highest levels to document the botch in any detail, so make up whatever you want but make it N number of pages.
- lostpasswordz 8y agoWell this is kind of crazy. I saw the title and instantly thought "oh wow, this is totally in line topically with a recent activity". Read 1 page in and instantly realized they were going to the Monroe Insititue - where I just was. Great place TBH.
- nyc111 8y agoThe author quotes Niels Bohr who says "you are not thinking you are merely being logical." sounds like a nice saying, but what is really the difference between being logical and thinking? What does Bohr do when he thinks? (I was just reading Polya's How to Solve It, maybe Bohr had in mind methods of investigations studied by Polya).
- godelmachine 8y agoNazi's certainly had their $0.02 to contribute - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Glocke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Glocke They say Heinrich Himmler was a practitioner of Occultism and had influenced SS to a considerable extent.
- m463 8y agosome of the document is "out there", but there's one section I've had some experience with: biofeedback. Many years ago I tried a friend's biofeedback device - it used Galvanic Skin Response. It seems you can still buy approximately the same device my friend owned on amazon: https://amzn.com/B01IPSUIZ0 https://amzn.com/B01IPSUIZ0 (this is not a referral link and I have no association of any kind with them) So here is the idea: you lay down on the bed, put your fingers across the contacts and move the knob until you get a medium high-pitched tone from the device. If you relax, the tone will decrease in pitch. You cannot cheat. If you think you are relaxing but are not, the tone will not budge (or will rise in pitch). If you continue to decrease the tone you will eventually relax so much you will fall asleep. The first time I used this (~20 years ago) I learned how to relax in about 30 minutes. I have carried this ability all my life.
- equalunique 8y agoThe $76 investment is worth it if there is a 50% chance I could gain an ability to relax within 30 minutes.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]