The interest in using psychics for intelligence and planning operations by the three U.S. armed services during a period of 20 years was closely involved with work at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). They were used to try to hunt down Muammar Gadhafy prior to the 1986 U.S. bombing of Libya, to look for plutonium in North Korea, and to locate the kidnaped Brigadier General James L. Dozier in Italy. In none of these ventures were the psychics successful and, during 20 years and for $20 million, the return on the investment of time and money was virtually, if not actually, zero.
The military used six allegedly proven remote viewers, notably Ingo Swann and Keith Harary at SRI and Major Ed Dames and Sergeant Mel Riley. According to a BBC television program, Major Dames’s psychic powers were used in the attempt to locate Gadhafy, prior to the bombing raid on Libya. Testing of the remote viewers’ reliability ran into the problems that beset so much of parapsychology. In particular, because the program was primarily concerned with a virtually infinite number of possible visual targets and not with a limited number of cards, the scope for interpretation was great. For example, a viewer sees a skyscraper at the designated location and draws a rough picture; the analyst, whose mind is not focused on skyscrapers, interprets the picture as a rocket in a silo. As always with such programs, the perception of success depends strongly on expectations. Professional psychologists are well aware of this and take steps to protect their work from such undue influence. But the amateur enthusiast may be misled.