The CIA believes everything

2026-06-07

The Wikipedia page on James Vicary (The "inventor" of Subliminal advertising) mentions that the CIA investigated subliminal advertising and found it to be somewhat useful. After reading the source I found that the report is more skeptical than presented but it did tickle something in my brain; the CIA was (is?) interested in so much bunk! I've compiled an incomplete list of some pseudo-science the CIA was involved in. Lest you think they were just doing their duty and investigating all possible ways to get an edge, I will quote some of their findings where they seemingly 'fell for it'

List of involvements

Uri Geller

After experimenting with him for eight days the CIA concluded

As a result of Geller's success in this experimental period, we consider that he has demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner.

source

Dowsing

Maybe prof. Calculus was right after all! From the Discussions and conclusions section of a study on dowsing.

This is the third year in which a computer-assisted search experiment has provided evidence that psychic functioning may be of some use in meeting the military requirement of searching for hidden or lost targets. Although such functioning is not completely predictable, it appears to be robust enough, when selected subjects are used, to significantly reduce the average search time from what it would be if randomly located starting points were used.

"Interesting" theories of consciousness (Do your own research!)

In a 30 page document investigating the "Gateway experience" and hemi-sync, one can find all kinds of great paragraphs. Here's a choice quote.

According to the theories of Karl Pribram, a neuroscientist at Stanford University and David Bohm, a physicist at the University of London, the human mind is also a hologram which attunes itself to the universal hologram by the medium of energy exchange thereby deducing meaning and achieving the state which we call consciousness

Robert Monroe was the inventor of Hemi-Sync. If you want a more complete picture of his worldview, this is from his Wikipedia page

Loosh was a term Monroe coined to describe a type of 'energy' created by humans (and other living beings) experiencing intense fear, grief, or despair—Monroe argued non-human beings who control reality harvest this energy and feed on it.

Misc

I will not get drawn into MK Ultra, but there's a lot more thataway. I will add in passing that the CIA requires a polygraph screening for all employees until today despite all the research showing it to be ineffective at telling the truth from lies¹

What to make of it

On the one hand you'd like your government to research anything that might help them defend you. It wouldn't be as interesting if they investigated various forms of pseudo-science and concluded that it will not serve to advance the interests of the state. But they didn't do that, they found a lot of this useful.

What I think may be happening is that the Agency wanted to study a specific topic to find if there's any there there. There aren't many scientists capable and willing to do these experiments. The few that are, are people on the fringes, people who have risked their reputation and possibly destroyed it. You have to assume the reason they did is because they do believe in the theories being tested. Maybe a combination of belief plus the potential for more money for future experiments caused them to design faulty experiments.

If you have any better theories, let me know.