Many of you may have heard stories about the CIA spending tax dollars on “remote viewing” and other paranormal spook activities during the cold war. Incredibly, many of these stories turn out to have been true.

Some senior officials kept an eye on the phenomenon. Kress reports that in November of 1976, CIA Director George Bush became concerned about reported Soviet advances in parapsychology, and called in the agency's RV researchers for a briefing. (Such concerns often provided the impetus for U.S. government parapsychology research; the fear that the Soviets were getting ahead in the mind-war game was widespread among paranormal enthusiasts at military and intelligence agencies) [source].

Not to be outdone, the military may have pursued avenues that were even more bizarre.

In 1979 a secret unit was established by the most gifted minds within the US Army. Defying all known accepted military practice - and indeed, the laws of physics - they believed that a soldier could adopt the cloak of invisibility, pass cleanly through walls and, perhaps most chillingly, kill goats just by staring at them. Entrusted with defending America from all known adversaries, they were the First Earth Battalion. And they really weren't joking. [Emphasis mine, source].

Despite substantial effort and investment, none of this produced one single verifiable, reproducible result. Surely, the agencies involved have wised up.

Right?

Well, I wouldn’t bet the farm on that just yet.

It has recently emerged that the source for the New York City subway terror scare passed a polygraph test. Reading this I was, in a word, livid.

What does a polygraph test have to do with psychic spies? Although it probably is not apparent to readers familiar only with Law & Order, both of these instruments have about the same degree of accuracy.

(Please don’t email me about Law & Order. I love Law & Order. I am not throwing Law & Order under the bus.)

Polygraphs may be very popular on television, but there are legions of pretentious whores on television. The National Academy of Sciences agrees (in substance, anyway), giving this recommendation regarding the use of the polygraph by the government:

We have reviewed the scientific evidence on the polygraph with the goal of assessing its validity for security uses … Overall, the evidence is scanty and scientifically weak. Our conclusions are necessarily based on the far from satisfactory body of evidence on polygraph accuracy, as well as basic knowledge about the physiological responses the polygraph measures [source].

The fact that this instrument is being relied upon to safeguard American civilians should infuriate anyone even remotely scientifically literate. The government may as well be identifying terror suspects using a dowsing rod.

“Insane,” responded Drew Richardson, one of the FBI’s top polygraph experts until he retired a few years ago, in an e-mail to SpyTalk. “I would say placing any significance on an examinee passing some portion or all portions on eight out of 15 CQT polygraph exams with all exams having covered the same subject(s) is, in a word, insane” [source].

Further reading:

• Polygraph (“Lie Detector”) – Skeptic’s Dictionary
• Polygraph is Quackery

Tags: Angry, Science, Skepticism

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