Kenneth A. Kress

Kenneth A. Kress was a physicist, engineer, and analyst with the CIA. He is considered by some to be the "father of America's remote-viewing program" as he was responsible for giving SRI its first Psi research contract in 1972¹. Kress, then a young, dark-haired engineer, was instrumental in bringing Hal Puthoff and Ingo Swann into the Central Intelligence Agency's orbit for psychic research¹.

Kress was the lead analyst assigned to the operation involving Pat Price's Remote Viewing of URDF-3, a highly classified Soviet research and development facility in Kazakhstan¹. In July 1974, after Price remotely viewed URDF-3, Kress compared Price's descriptions to classified satellite imagery. He found that reconnaissance photographs confirmed the presence of rails for railroad cars and a huge crane, as described by Price. However, some details, like the spheres Price mentioned, were not locatable, which agitated the Central Intelligence Agency¹.

Kress flew to SRI to brief Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ on URDF-3 and to get additional information from Price. When Kress met Price in person, he tested him by asking if Price knew him. Price correctly identified Kress by name and stated his occupation as working for the Central Intelligence Agency, which was significant as Kress was a covert employee¹. Kress also questioned Price about details he missed, such as four derricks. Price responded that he didn't see them because "they are not there anymore," a statement that was later corroborated when rechecked reconnaissance data showed the derricks partially disassembled¹.

Despite the accuracy of some of Price's information, Kress noted that Price also produced bad data. He also became concerned about the possibility of a KGB disinformation campaign, suggesting that Price could have been supplied data for disinformation purposes. This led Kress to question his own objectivity, as he observed that individuals who supported pro-paranormal data often had "conversion" experiences¹.

Kress played a crucial role in the early stages of the Grill Flame program, particularly as a handler for Pat Price. He was involved in presenting Price with targets and evaluating his remote viewing data. Kress, along with Peter Maris, was the Central Intelligence Agency official who tasked Price with remote viewing the secret Soviet military research facility at Semipalatinsk (URDF-3), a session that yielded remarkably accurate details later confirmed by satellite photography. Kress and Maris initially didn't know what to make of Price's descriptions of a large crane and metal spheres, but later confirmed them with satellite photos, which became a key piece of evidence for the program's effectiveness¹.

He also worked closely with Norm Everheart, encouraging him to explore how remote viewing could assist Staff D operations. Kress was present during Price's three tests for Staff D, witnessing Price's accurate remote viewing of the Chinese Embassy in Africa and the Chinese consular building in Rome. He also served as a liaison for Uri Geller's visits to SRI, and was the recipient of information from Hal Puthoff regarding Geller's activities and potential security concerns¹.

At Kress's suggestion, the Central Intelligence Agency contracted with an outside scientist to evaluate the psychic research program, who concluded that "a large body of reliable experimental evidence points to the inescapable conclusion that extrasensory perception does exist as a real phenomenon, albeit characterized by rarity and lack of reliability"¹.

The Documents

Kenneth A. Kress was a physicist in the CIA's Office of Technical Service. "By October, 1972, I was the Project Officer" for the agency's contract with Stanford Research Institute on parapsychology, he wrote; "I was chosen because of my physics background to work with the physicists from SRI," Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ. He "was then a covert employee."²

SCANATE

The office had spent 874 dollars on a few days' work in August 1972 and 2,500 more before it "funded a $50,000 expanded effort in parapsychology" on October 1, 1972. Kress carried the project through the review of April and May 1973, when William Colby sent it to the Executive Management Committee and the matter went to the director, James Schlesinger; "I was soon told not to increase the scope of the project," and into the joint program with the Office of Research and Development that began on February 1, 1974. He wrote that at one point "I began to have serious feelings of being involved with a fraud," and had the agency's computer office re-analyze the SRI random-number machine, finding "no evidence of nonrandomness." In July 1974 he designed the test of Pat Price against Semipalatinsk, choosing "the tall crane and the four structures resembling oil well derricks" as the checks, and concluded that "as proof of remote viewing, the data are at best inconclusive." When the program was reviewed in 1975 he was "judged to be a positively biased advocate of paranormal functioning" and removed from evaluation; the research support was dropped as "not productive or even competent." An OTS memorandum of January 1975 nonetheless recorded "definite potential for operational application of paranormal abilities demonstrated by persons in the program," and a dissemination memorandum recommended that Kress, "as project officer of the SRI investigation," control who saw the reports.²³

The Article

His review, "Parapsychology in Intelligence: A Personal Review and Conclusions," appeared in the classified Studies in Intelligence in the winter of 1977 and was declassified in 1996. It recorded the briefing of Director George Bush in 1976, Stansfield Turner's public acknowledgment of 1977, and the state of interest at DIA, DARPA, the Navy, and the Air Force, and ended: "This is not to say that parapsychology is a proven intelligence tool; it is to say that the evaluation is not yet complete and more research is needed." In a postscript of January 1999 for its reprinting he mentioned a later "secure line call from a person who identified himself as an FBI agent" and wrote: "Me, I remain a skeptical agnostic." Representative Charles Rose was briefed at OTS by its chief, David Brandwein, on February 9, 1978.²⁴