William H. Bowers
According to Bergier's article, 'Thought Transfer, Weapon of War,' the experiment aimed to test long-distance telepathic communication through significant barriers.
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 ESP experiment conducted aboard the USS Nautilus in 19581.
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 trials1.
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 research1.
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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