According to a recent article in Wired Magazine, the Pentagon is once again throwing money at paranormal sounding research.
Unlike some previous attempts at battlefield psi ops, there is actual technology involved this time:
The project has three major goals, according to Darpa. First, try to map a person’s EEG patterns to his or her individual words. Then, see if those patterns are generalizable — if everyone has similar patterns. Last, “construct a fieldable pre-prototype that would decode the signal and transmit over a limited range.”
Neat stuff, for sure, and at least slightly more likely to be taken seriously than the well-known and much ridiculed Stargate remote viewing project that went on for years.
The success of Stargate is heavily disputed by many but its alumni spawned a private company or two shortly after the “official” project was discontinued.
The Farsite Instiute, the better known of the spin-offs, hasn’t done a whole lot to bolster confidence in remote viewing–or the people who offer training in such things. It’s been riddled with a bit of controvercy and in-fighting for years and some of it’s more public predictions (like the insitance that aliens would make themselves known “soon”–it’s been a decade or so since).
Psi Tech is a few years older than Farsite, but it’s history sounds no less like some fantasy spy novel. Their website does nothing to erase or dilute that “psi-fi” image.
Both organizations, though, do put forward an interesting set of theories and experimental control schems that should, eventually, allow some sort of independent verification of their claims.
The problem is, as is often the case with psychic phenomenon, no matter how tight your controls, repeatablility is always a problem. In a very soft science like remote viewing–which often requires heavy intrpretation of quick sketches and anecdotal descriptions of what the viewer is seeing–two outsiders looking at the same set of raw data can (and do) see very different things.
But, the new military “psychic” devices appear to be much more centered on the indisputable biological and electrical activity in the brain, so maybe we’re finally on the right track.
Of course, as much as I applaud the fringe research, I can’t help but think our money right now would be better spent in other areas of research. Save the government funded fringe research for when our coffers are full. Leave this stuff up to the eccentric private sector folks (like those mentioned above) and then, when the economic climate is a bit better, actually make use of their research and build upon it.
DARPA always leads in this kind of stuff. You should see the interesting research on augmented cognition. I even have video! While I agree with your original sentiment, I guess my thought is that private industry would not pick it up unless they had enough money to invest. As illustrated recently, many private sector companies do not. *shrug* I think I may actually try to get a PhD in this stuff if this effort goes forward. Sounds like funding goodness……
We have a couple of projects that deal with some of this. Biometric controls and such are probably the next level of interactiveness with cyberspace and various warfighter technologies.
Have you ever seen “Ghost in the Shell?”