William H. Bowers was a [[U.S. Air Force]] Colonel and the director of the Biological Department of the [[Air Force Research Institute]]. He was identified by journalist [[Jacques Bergier]] as the man overseeing a joint-service [[Extrasensory Perception|ESP]] experiment conducted aboard the [[USS Nautilus]] in 1958[^1]. According to Bergier's article, "Thought Transfer, Weapon of War," the experiment aimed to test long-distance telepathic communication through significant barriers. The experiment reportedly involved a sender onboard the *Nautilus* and a receiver on land, using [[Zener Cards]] for simple sender-receiver trials[^1]. However, the Navy's response to Bergier's story was that it was a hoax. In a nationally syndicated Sunday magazine supplement in September 1963, Colonel Bowers was quoted as saying, "The experiment in which I was alleged to have participated never took place"[^1]. Despite the denial, the story had real-world consequences, as the Soviets used it to stimulate their own parapsychology research[^1]. ### Footnotes [^1]: Jacobsen, Annie. *Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis*. Little, Brown and Company, 2017.