Annie Jacobsen: belief

Transcript context

…In some deep way, the mysteries of what’s out there when we look out to the stars are the same mysteries that we find when trying to understand the human mind and they’re coupled in some way. For me, thinking about alien civilizations out there is really the same kind of question, which is, what are we? What is this? What are we doing here? How do we come here? Why does it seem to be so magical and beautiful and powerful? Now, where’s it going? Because it feels like we’re really, perhaps for the first time in history, are in a moment where we can destroy ourselves. And so, naturally you ask, well, where’s others like us? Perhaps, are we inevitably going to a place where we’ll destroy ourselves? Is it basically inevitable that we destroy ourselves? We become too powerful and insufficiently wise to know what to do with that power? But like you said, probably the answers to that are in here. We don’t need to look out there. I’d love to ask you about the extrasensory perception. You’ve written, like you said, the book Phenomena on the secret history of the US government’s investigations into extrasensory perception and psychokinesis. What are some of the more interesting extrasensory abilities that were explored by the government, and maybe just in general, ESP. What is it? What do you know of it? The book was so interesting to report because I spend so much time dealing with mechanized systems, machines, war machines, and yet the military and intelligence were and continue to be incredibly interested in the human mind, in consciousness. And so, if one is called hard science, what we’re talking about now is called squishy science. It was really interesting to delve into that world. It just couldn’t be farther from weapons and war, or could it? And then, I really began thinking, well, before science and technology, sort of the supernatural ruled the world. The Oracle of Delphi in Greece exists before the common era rulers to go and beg to learn from the powers that be what was going to happen. All ESP programs, I think, pull from that origin story, the leader’s desire to know. And so, I really found it amazing that many people think these systems, or rather these programs, started in the ’70s. I learned they actually began right after World War II. That was because, and in my reporting, I find all things sort of always circle back to the Third Reich, to the Nazis. The Nazis had a massive occult program, an ESP program, psychokinesis program, astrology. Both Hitler and Himmler were deeply interested in these occult concepts. After I learned from records at the National Archives that after the war, half of everything went to the Soviet Union, and I’m talking about the trove of Nazi documents from which the superpowers were then going to learn to fight future wars, and half of them went to the United States. And so, we got this trove of documents about all of this, and the Soviets got the other. And so, it set off a kind of psychic arms race, which in a weird way paralleled the nuclear arms race, which we’ve been talking about, in as much that it led one side to constantly wonder what the other side had. Have they been able to find anything interesting in this squishy science analysis of trying to see how the human mind could be used as a weapon?…

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