[This is the headline over a report published today on the website of The Scotsman. It reads as follows:]
Newly available declassified documents appear to reveal US Central Intelligence Agency tests to see if a psychic could replicate key aspects of the Lockerbie bombing.
The Scotsman reported last week how some 13 million pages of files were released online for the first time – including CIA interest in Edinburgh paranormal research.
Now it has emerged the 930,000 files also include asking a subject to describe a photo of the reconstructed baggage carrier which held the plane’s bomb.
Filed under “special access required”, the notes are headed: “Warning notice: Intelligence sources and methods involved.”
Pan Am Flight 103 was brought down by the device on 21 December, 1988, killing all 259 passengers and crew on board and a further 11 on the ground. The CIA’s psychic tests relating to Lockerbie were carried out on 7 June, 1990 at an unknown location and filed under Project Sun Streak, successor to the controversial Stargate project.
Another released CIA document outlines Sun Streak’s mission as “dealing with the use of psychoenergetics in the collection of intelligence information”.
It describes “Psychoenergetics” as psychokinesis – physical actions performed by mental powers – and perceptions which cannot be explained by non-sensory means, such as telepathy. Parameters of the Lockerbie test outline using “tangibles and intangibles of more than one word”, as well as “probing sketches”.
What follows is 22 pages of photocopied scrawled notes and drawings together with a typed account of the session.
The subject first describes the “target” as a “cylindrical shape that is clear and see-through” with “something inside it that seems to be moving through it and out the other end”.
Included in the test papers is a newspaper article with a photo of the reconstructed baggage container. The article refers to the cassette player in which Semtex explosive was hidden. “The stuff inside it is light, smooth, stringy, air, and it is moving down, making a ‘whoosh’ sound,” continue the typed notes from the session kept by the CIA. “It is speeding up as it goes down and out. It makes me want to throw up.” Describing the cylindrical shape in a box, the account goes on: “There is a bomb in the box and it explodes. It makes me think of a bomb blowing up a person. I can see red, fire and jagged flames. “Something about the target makes my eyes burn.”
[RB: This is not a new story: the documents have been in the public domain since 2003 and were referred to on this blog in July 2015.]
OK, now I've seen everything. My ghast is officially flabbered. Psychics, telepaths, remote viewers and assorted fruitloops.
ReplyDeleteAnd all anyone with a brain that functions in the normal manner had to do was look at the photos of the damaged suitcases and one or two other bits and pieces and you don't need to be psychic or telepathic or anything else, it's blindingly obvious where the bomb was situated.
The forensics people gathered all the bits of the plane together, then they fitted them together like one giant jigsaw puzzle. That showed that the hull had been pierced from the inside out in one very specific place. They gathered all the bits of the baggage container that was recorded as having been loaded right behind that hole, then they fitted them together like a jigsaw puzzle. That showed that the baggage container had been blown apart from inside and that the centre of the explosion had been very near the lower left-side horizontal strut.
They gathered all the bits of the blast-damaged suitcases together, then they fitted them together like a jigsaw....
.... no wait they didn't.
They asked a bunch of psychics instead.
Please find me a convenient wall to beat my head against.