Advanced Research Projects Agency

The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was a U.S. government agency responsible for funding and overseeing advanced technological research. It is now known as DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).¹

In the early 1970s, ARPA showed interest in psychic phenomena, sending a three-man team to observe Uri Geller at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in early 1973.¹

While ARPA's corporate stance was not to pursue further investigations into Geller, one of its team members, psychologist Robert Van de Castle, was reportedly impressed by Geller's abilities.¹

Long-Horizon Research and Military Psychology

ARPA was specifically designed to sponsor projects whose results would not arrive for ten to fifteen years, providing a funding mechanism for long-horizon military science outside standard procurement budgets. Its Arlington, Virginia headquarters sat in the same building complex as the Army Research Institute and other military psychological research organizations. In the psychological sciences its Cold War work concentrated on biofeedback research and early brain-weapon studies (including whether pilots' brain states could be linked to missile systems), and on the psychology of insurgent organizations, with Vietnam as the primary focus. The most prominent ARPA-commissioned psychological study was the Rand Corporation's Viet Cong motivation and morale study of the early 1960s, and ARPA also sponsored Project Agile, a series of Asian military-science studies that included the Battelle Memorial Institute smell-weapons research of 1966. A 1964 classified memorandum from the Director of Defense Research and Engineering placed ARPA in an integrating role for behavioral and social science research across the service branches.²