The Cold War, Psychic Phenomena, Psychokinesis and ESP

It’s a little chilling that there is so much deja vu talk these days about the Cold War and even about Nazis and the Third Reich.

You may recall that the race for space grew out of this period. The German rocket scientists, people like Werner Von Braun, who were responsible for the German V2 rockets, were after the war divided up between the Russians and Americans.

But there was another war that grew out of this period. The war for inner space. It was for drugs and for psychic phenomena that could give one side or the other a competitive advantage in the battlefield of the mind. Whether it was LSD, or the quest for what was called “remote viewing,” it was a serious part of the military's Cold War efforts.  Best selling author Annie Jacobsen takes us back in time in Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis

My conversation with Annie Jacobson:

Could we have won the space race without the German scientists?

Few questions occupy us more today than what do we need to know and when do we do we need to know it, with respect to what our government is doing. How much should we know, particularly in times of war and what might really jeopardize national security?

These questions haunt us today, but they are nothing new. In the closing days of WWII America recruited scores of German scientists that became the bulwark of our space effort. These scientists had shady pasts and were far more connected to the Third Reich than we were ever told.

If we knew, might the nation have objected, and if so, might the Soviets have beaten us in the space race and to the moon? And what broader implications might that have had for the cold war and for global geopolitics?

Annie Jacobsen is a journalist and author, and uncoverer of secrets. She’s the author the NYT bestseller Area 51 and now she turns her attention to the story of Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America.


My conversation with Annie Jacobsen: