Gerard Messadie
Gérald Messadié was the editor of *Science et Vie*, a top French science journal.
Gérald Messadié was the editor of Science et Vie, a top French science journal. In February 1960, his journal published an expanded version of Jacques Bergier's story about a secret government ESP program, titled "The Secret of the Nautilus"1.
Messadié stated in an interview that his information for the article came from Bergier and "other sources," who confirmed the story on condition of anonymity. The article identified J. B. Rhine of the Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory as the civilian scientist assigned to the project, reporting a high success rate for telepathic communication1.
Despite the U.S. Navy's denial of the story as a hoax, Messadié's publication contributed to the widespread attention given to the alleged ESP experiments aboard the USS Nautilus. This, in turn, had significant real-world consequences, as the Soviets used the news to stimulate their own parapsychology research. Leonid L. Vasilev, Russia's leading ESP researcher, claimed that Soviet parapsychology research was stimulated by the Nautilus reports1.
Sources
- Jacobsen, Annie. Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. Little, Brown and Company, 2017. ↩
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