On April 20, 1995, just one day after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the received a tip from the unlikeliest source - Dr. Ed May, head of the CIA’s research into psychic phenomenon. May claimed one of his remote viewers had a lead on the people responsible: five Arab men and somebody named Carl.

An unclassified excerpt from the DIA parapsychological monograph on “Soviet Offensive Behavior” from 1972 outlines some of the Agency’s fears over reports of Soviet psychic abilities - specifically, “Telepathic Hypnosis.” The section claims that Soviets had managed to telepathically put people to sleep and wake them up from over a thousand miles away, with Kotkov, a star Soviet psychologist, able to “telepathically obliterate an experimental subject’s consciousness.”

In 1988, as part of the Agency’s ongoing research into weaponized ESP, CIA psychics were tasked with identifying a photo of a famous individual inside of an opaque folder. That individual was Albert Einstein. The individual they came up was a moody hippie pharmacist named Alfer Aferman.

In October of 1982, the CIA’s crack team of psychics set their second sights on New Orleans, to catch the city in the height of bacchanalian revelry. What they got were squiggles. A lot of squiggles.

A classified government document warns of the possibility of psychics nuking cities so that they became lost in time and space. If this sounds like a plot out of science fiction, it is - but it’s also an NSA memo from 1977.

Buried in the STARGATE section of the CREST release is a letter from Congressman Charlie Rose, the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Evaluation, regarding the Intelligence Community’s psychic program. Although short, the letter highlights a concern that was to be repeated by many outside of government for decades - that the program was part of CIA “mind control” activities, where in some cases “the rights of individuals were violated.”

The now-infamous Remote Viewing program run by the U.S. Army during the Carter and Reagan years was one of the U.S. government’s most extreme examples of magical thinking. Under the impression that psychic powers might aid the American war effort, individuals were recruited to attempt long-distance exploration of enemy offices and operations. Art skills, apparently, were not a requirement.

Last week, we looked at the early days of the CIA’s foray into extrasensory espionage. Today we’ll be following up with the veterans of the NSA’s psychic wars, which they saw being waged into the ’90s and beyond.

Documents released through the CIA’s CREST archive offer new insights into American psychic spy programs. These documents claim specific successes by both the American and Russian/Soviet programs, as well as outline fears of a widening “psychic gap.”

Government research often pushes the boundaries between science and science fiction. Today, the proud bearer of that mantle is often DARPA, experimenting with robots, cybernetics, and more. But in the sixties, during the height of the Cold War, this research often went into more fantastical realms, even exploring whether ExtraSensory Perception was possible.