The CIA’s Secret Psychic Program: Science, Spies, and the Truth About ESP

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1:00Just a quick reminder before we get into it the conversation you're about to hear is for informational and Entertainment purposes only we are discussing theories around physics psychology and consciousness Please always consult with a qualified professional before making any decisions regarding mental health psychological practices or medical care Absolutely always good to keep that in mind right So welcome to thrilling threads. I want you to like put yourself in a very specific mindset for a moment here Just imagine you are a high-ranking American intelligence official, okay? Okay, setting the scene. I like it. Yeah, and we are at the absolute peak of the Cold War I mean the geopolitical tension is just it's suffocating you are dealing with daily existential crises You have American hostages being held overseas in these totally unknown locations high stakes extremely high You have these elusive dangerous fugitives operating in the shadows. You have stealthy heavily armed drug-running boats You know slipping past the Coast Guard right into territorial waters the stakes in every single one of these scenarios are

2:06Literally life and death Right and you need actionable intelligence like yesterday Exactly you needed immediately and your best asset for this mission is not a billion dollar reconnaissance satellite it is not some deeply embedded spy risking their life behind the iron curtain No, it's something way weirder way weirder. It is a person wearing completely normal civilian clothes sitting quietly in a windowless room in California Closing their eyes and like literally trying to look into the future. I mean it sounds completely Antithetical to how we understand military intelligence right you picture the Pentagon you picture these massive mainframes and wiretaps You don't picture someone sitting in an armchair Basically waiting for a vision right it sounds like a movie But for two decades that exact scenario was a heavily funded highly classified reality for the United States government It really was and our guide through this world today is Dr. Edwin May I recently I fell down this

3:06Massive rabbit hole while watching a fantastic interview he gave it was on Dr. Mayem Bealex YouTube channel Hosted by Mayem and Jonathan Cohen. Oh, yeah, that interview is fascinating. It really is Dr. May is one of the foremost authorities on parapsychology and Crucially he was the former manager of this government initiative which was known as the Stargate program Stargate Yeah, such a cool name for a program honestly. I know right But what caught my attention wasn't just the wild stories of you know psychic spies But the sheer scientific rigor that may brought to the table We are going to explore whether gut feelings and premonitions are just like cognitive biases or lucky guesses or If they are literal physical data broadcasts from the future and to frame this properly We really have to look at the scale of Stargate because I think people hear this and think oh it was just a fridge thing Right like a couple of guys in a basement exactly But we are not talking about an off the books pet project We are looking at an operation that absorbed millions of taxpayer dollars and conducted over

4:12500 separate highly classified intelligence missions 500 that's just wild Yeah, and the data produced by this program was actually utilized by 19 different federal agencies And the paradox at the center of all this which I think is so interesting is Dr. Edwin Mayem's self Right because he's not what you'd expect not at all. He is not a mystic. He doesn't you know Retero cards on the weekend. He is a staunchly materialist physicist which is so funny to me It is his foundational argument is that extra-sense repurception or ESP is merely an undiscovered unmapped branch of Neuroscience and quantum mechanics. I mean he demands data not faith Which honestly makes him the perfect lens for us to view this through because to understand how the American intelligence apparatus got into the business of like Paranormal espionage We have to understand the man running the science. We have to look at his origin story exactly So let's wind the clock back to the early 1970s Dr. May is 35 years old He is a post-doctoral nuclear physicist at UC Davis in California

5:16So he's deep in the hard sciences. Oh completely his daily life consists of particle accelerators massive data sets the concrete rules of thermodynamics He is dealing in the most tangible Quantifiable physics imaginable up to this point in his life He has never given a single thought to ESP remote viewing out of body experiences none of it He is entirely entrenched in the traditional scientific method But you know academia in California in the 70s was a unique environment very unique You've had the counterculture movement really bleeding over into university campuses and one afternoon Purely had a boredom. May spots a flyer for a lecture right the Bob Monroe lecture. I love this part It's so good the flyer advertises a talk on out of body experiences and may figure you know, it might be good for a laugh So he attends he just wants to see the crazy people basically pretty much So he sits in the audience and listens to Bob Monroe spin a story that to a nuclear physicist sounds like pure hallucination

6:22Obviously Monroe tells the crowd that he managed to intentionally separate his consciousness from his physical body Float across town and pinch his girlfriend on the rear end. I mean you can't make this up You really can't and he claimed he pinched her so hard in this ethereal state that it left a physical weld on her actual body Which is just I mean if I'm doctor may sitting there. I'm rolling my eyes so hard. They might get stuck Exactly may is sitting there Applying the laws of physics to the sannic note and naturally concludes the man is just a total charlatan But something sticks right? Yeah, there is a tiny seed of curiosity planted Monroe had published a book called Journeys out of the body detailing these specific step-by-step techniques He supposedly used to achieve these states So may actually buy it he buys the book he takes it home and reads the entire thing in two sittings But more importantly he treats it like a lab manual. Oh, that's interesting So he doesn't just read it he tests it right

7:25He attempts the techniques himself actively trying to induce an out-of-body state and I'm guessing nothing happens Absolutely nothing happens. He lies there follows the breathing exercises tries to visualize Separating from his physical form and he just stays exactly where he is the experiment fails So he probably feels totally vindicated in his skepticism. Oh 100% He dismisses the entire concept as new age nonsense puts the book away And assumes that is the absolute end of his brief foray into the paranormal That's just the funny anecdote for cocktail parties at that point exactly But it would have been the end if not for another chance encounter Sometime later may is doing some work down at UC Berkeley and he sees another flyer on a bulletin board Another flyer. This guy loves bulletin boards. It was the 70s. That was social media back then Fair point fair point So this one is advertising a lecture by a researcher named Chuck Honerton And the title of the talk is the science of extra sensory perception

8:26Oh, you put the word science in front of that and a physicist is going to take it personally Exactly the inclusion the word science in that title acts like a red rag to a bull for May He goes into that lecture hall ready for a fight He's ready to debunk this guy live on stage. He sits down fully intending to mentally dismantle Honerton's arguments Assuming he's gonna hear more stories about astral projection and ghostly pinches right but instead Honerton stands up and search presenting statistics. He talks about double blind studies standard deviations control groups and rigorous laboratory methodology applied to parapsychology Wow, so he's speaking May's language exactly May is genuinely taken aback He approaches Honerton after the lecture and essentially demands they go to dinner so he can interrogate him I can just imagine that dinner a nuclear physicist interrogating a parapsychologist Oh, that dinner lasts for two hours May throws every complex methodological trap. He can think of it Honerton

9:28He asks about sensory leakage experimental bias the file dwarf effect where you know negative results are just hidden away All the classic ways that bad science happens right and he asks about statistical anomalies But for every single rigorous question may ask Honerton has an equally rigorous Scientifically sound answer that must have been mind blowing for him. It really was Honerton isn't asking me to believe in magic He's presenting a data set that shows a statistical anomaly that literally cannot be explained by chance And that's what gets him hooked that dinner changes the trajectory of May's entire life He ends up taking Honerton on as a mentor see the philosophical tension here is just thick because even today after decades of running the Stargate program doctor may considers himself a strict materialist like in that interview with Mayan biolic He is incredibly explicit about his worldview. Oh, he pulls no punches none He does not believe in the survival of human consciousness after bodily death He flat out rejects the concept of a soul or angels or any sort of spiritual afterlife

10:30Right he views human beings as incredibly complex biological machines exactly when the machine breaks down and the brain stops functioning The lights go out permanently for him if ESP is real it must be a biological function of the physical brain And it has to be bound by the physical laws of the universe Which greets a really profound paradox when you look at the field he actually operates in yeah, how does he square that circle? Well think about it Here's a man managing an intelligence program where individuals are reportedly closing their eyes and drawing Accurate schematics of hidden Soviet nuclear submarines on the other side of the planet right which sounds like magic It sounds totally supernatural He is swimming in data that suggests the human mind can transcend space and time Yet when Jonathan and Mayam ask him about near death experiences You know where people whose hearts have stopped reporting above their bodies and observing their own recessions Mayer just shuts it down. He doesn't buy it at all not even a little He points to a massive five million dollar scientific study that concluded near death experiences are just a quote

11:37Standard biological procedure a standard biological procedure that's such a clinical way to describe something so profound Right he views them as a well-documented trick played by a dying brain Fleeting with specific neurochemicals It's not evidence of a soul departing the vessel. It's just Biology failing I found myself really wrestling with his stance on that honestly because you spend 20 years watching human beings pull Classified intelligence out of thin air Predicting events before they happen and breaking every known rule of classical physics. Yeah, but then when someone says they saw a white light While their heart was stopped you draw a hard line and say nope That's just a neurochemical dump in the visual cortex It does seem a little hypocritical on the surface right and the host in the video actually push back on this bringing up documented cases of patients Accurately describing medical tools. They had never seen while clinically dead But may refuse us to yield he insists it's just biological But you know by maintaining that rigid materialist boundary

12:37Doctor may inadvertently makes the stargate data incredibly robust How so well consider the alternative If the head of the government's psychics spy program was a deeply spiritual mystic seeking to prove the existence of the human soul Every single piece of data he produced would be tainted by confirmation bias. Oh critics would have a field day Exactly they would dismiss the entire program as the wishful thinking of a true believer But may is the exact opposite He is a physicist dragging an utterly bizarre seemingly impossible anomaly into the harsh unforgiving light of the scientific method He isn't seeking spiritual validation. No, he's hunting for data points that disrupt current physics models When a hardened materialist looks at the statistics and admits I don't know how it works, but the math proves it's real I mean that carries immense weight It really strips away the crystal ball aesthetic and leaves us with raw undeniable statistics Which actually brings us to the operational reality of stargate because the United States government is not exactly an institution known for its

13:45Open-minded embrace of the paranormal Understatement of the century they are risk-averse highly pragmatic and totally driven by results So what was the internal environment like for this program to survive for two full decades? It couldn't have been easy Oh the environment was incredibly hostile The stargate program officially ran from 1975 into the mid-90s And during that period the intelligence community tasked May's team with over 500 operations And this wasn't just limited to like one curious director at the CIA, right? Not at all the tasking orders came from 19 separate federal agencies We are talking about the national security agency the central intelligence agency The drug enforcement administration the state department and the secret service That's a massive footprint. It is but the program operated under intense secrecy Not just because of the sensitive nature of the targets, but because of the deep internal stigma against the actual methods they were using

14:46Oh the stigma was palpable and sometimes it threatened to kill the program entirely May shares this wild story about an undersecretary of the Air Force. Oh this story is crazy It's nuts So stargate had actually managed to secure a massive $1.5 million funding block from the Air Force to expand their research which was a huge victory for May's team Yeah, that's a lot of money in the 70s and 80s Exactly But when this specific undersecretary found out what the money was actually being used for He went totally ballistic He unilaterally pulled the funding and demanded the program be shut down immediately And his reasoning wasn't even about the data, right? No, his reasoning wasn't that the science was flawed or that the intel was bad He literally stated on the record that the program was quote the work of the devil Unbelievable, but that reaction really highlights the dual threat the program faced every day On one side you had hardcore scientific skeptics who thought it was a complete waste of money on pseudoscience Right

15:46And on the other side you had religious fundamentalists within the military brass Who genuinely believed it was demonic So you're fighting battles on both flanks exactly Blackouts empty shelves rising prices the world is unpredictable That's why my family is prepared with a three-month survival food kit from four patriots And right now you'll get two bonus months absolutely free Hardy shelf stable meals that last up to 25 years Ham packed right in the USA When disaster hits I won't control not chaos Take action today get your three-month survival food kit plus two months free at four patriots calm before this deal is gone Right now at Subway try the 499 sub of the day get a different six inch sub every day for just 499 each like neat ball marinara on Mondays tuna on Tuesdays and the BMT on Saturdays It's a different six inch sub every day packed with protein and your choice of chopped veggies for just 499 each Or make it a meal with chips and a drink for just two dollars more

16:47But hurry it's only for a limited time and only it's Subway Participating restaurants prices higher in Washington, Alaska and Hawaii and on third party delivery add on taxes and fees for delivery additional Blackouts empty shelves rising prices the world is unpredictable That's why my family is prepared with a three-month survival food kit from four patriots And right now you'll get two bonus months absolutely free Hardy shelf stable meals that last up to 25 years Ham packed right in the USA when disaster hits I won't control not chaos take action today Get your three-month survival food kit plus two months free at four patriots calm before this deal is gone So to survive in that bureaucratic crossfire for 20 years requires an operational success rate that is simply beyond reproach Doctor May uses a very pragmatic analogy to explain how they justify their existence to my am a Jonathan He calls it the restaurant analogy I love this analogy because it cuts right through the theoretical debate and focuses purely on consumer behavior

17:51Which you can't fake right? It's just about the bottom line So imagine you decide to open a brand new restaurant in your town It's an intimate exclusive spot seating only 19 people you invest in a phenomenal chef a curated wine list a beautiful dining room Sounds great opening night arrives and it's a massive success 19 people walk through the door fill every single seat and eat the food that is a great opening night It is but in opening night only really measures your marketing You know and the initial curiosity of the public The true objective measure or the restaurant's quality is what happens the following week exactly Over the course of the next few weeks 17 of those original 19 customers make a reservation and return for a second meal Some of them return a third and a fourth time and if 17 out of 19 people come back You don't need a food critic to tell you the chef is a genius the behavior of the customers proves the product is exceptional Right, they vote with their wallets So apply to stargate

18:53The 19 seats represent the 19 separate federal intelligence agencies that initially tested the remote viewing program They tried it once maybe out of desperation on a cold case or just bureaucratic curiosity But out of those 19 agencies 17 of them returned with new independent intelligence missions The CIA an agency renowned for its extreme skepticism and ruthless pragmatism regarding intelligence gathering They returned to the stargate program for 41 separate missions 41 times yeah Intelligence directors do not allocate their tightly controlled budgets on repeat missions Unless the intelligence being provided is accurate actionable and literally saving the money or lives You don't go back to the psychic 40 times if they're just guessing exactly So to understand why the CIA kept coming back We have to look at the actual people doing the viewing the case studies are astonishing take Pat price for example

19:53Oh, Pat price is a legend When you picture a psychic spy you might picture someone in like flowing robes burning incense right But Pat price was the police chief of Burbank, California just a normal tough guy Yeah, he was a pragmatic experienced law enforcement officer who just happened to possess an anomalous Terrifyingly accurate ability to see things he shouldn't be able to see price is such a legendary figure in the annals of remote viewing In the early 70s before he was heavily involved in the government side He demonstrated his abilities by picking suspects out of massive books of mug shots solely using his intuition Just flipping through pages and pointing yep his accuracy rate caught the attention of the researchers at the Stanford Research Institute Who eventually brought him into the government fold and price was so effective at describing the interiors of Soviet facilities I mean facilities he had never seen and that were completely classified That he actually left the core Stargate research team to work directly as an operational asset for the CIA

20:54Which is wild right and prices personal life reads like a John Lakeray novel He was secretly a high-level member of the Church of Scientology right which adds a whole other layer of crazy to this It really does because it was later discovered or at least highly suspected That he was allegedly feeding classified intelligence data that he had gathered psychically back to the Church's leadership Oh the CIA must have lost their minds over that CIA was understandably Furious and deeply concerned about this massive security breach I mean, how do you even secure a leak when the guy is getting the intel with his mind? You can't put a wiretap on a brain exactly So price eventually tells his CIA handler that he was taking a trip to Las Vegas And he made this incredibly grim prediction. He told his handler that he was going to die on that trip He saw it coming He travels to Vegas checks into his hotel and within days he mysteriously drops dead No definitive cause no foul play explicitly proven just a dead psychic spy in a Vegas hotel room

21:58I mean, it's a narrative so bizarre That if you pitched it to Hollywood they would reject it as way too unbelievable They'd say it's too cliche exactly Yet it sits right there in the declassified operational files of the CIA just incredible And then there's another towering figure in the program Joe McMonigal He holds a distinction of being remote viewer number one. Oh Joe McMonigal is fascinating The interview brings up this specific massive scandal in Washington DC that perfectly illustrates How traditional investigation intersects with remote viewing A prominent congressman was accused of murdering a young woman High profile case very high profile The local police and federal authorities through massive resources in the case But they hit a total brick wall They couldn't find a single shred of physical evidence And more importantly they could not locate the victim's body anywhere So the father of this missing woman is just frantic I mean the traditional avenues have just completely failed him

22:58So out of pure desperation he contacts Joe McMonigal And Joe takes the case He takes it He sits down in a quiet room He focuses on the intent to find this woman And he just lets his mind work So he looks at a topographical map of the entire region surrounding Washington DC He takes a pin and he drives it into a highly specific coordinate on the map A huge map mind you A huge map And he tells the authorities she is right here So the police deployed to the exact coordinates Joe provided They find the missing woman's body less than 30 feet from where Joe put the pin 30 feet Consider the statistical probability of that event You have a search radius encompassing thousands of square miles of dense woods Waterways and urban sprawl It's a needle in a haystack The odds of randomly placing a pin within 30 feet of a hidden body are functionally zero It just doesn't happen by chance For a traditional homicide detective this completely breaks their paradigm Because detectives are trained to follow linear causality

24:00Exactly You find a witness who gives you a description which leads to a suspect Who leaves a fingerprint which places them at the scene It is a chain of physical evidence But make monogal bypass the entire chain of causality He didn't use deductive reasoning He used an entirely different mechanism to arrive at the conclusion Which is just baffling for law enforcement It has to be Imagine being a cop and having to write that in your report A guy with a map told us where to look Right, it doesn't hold up well in court But it finds the body Exactly And as the geopolitical landscape shifted over the years So did the program's objectives When the Cold War thought and the Soviet threat diminished Stargate didn't just shut down, they pivoted They adapted to the times Yeah, they began taking tasking orders from agencies operating out of Alameda, California Their new primary target was drug interdiction Cartels are using highly stealthy boats to smuggle massive quantities of narcotics And to state territorial waters And the Coast Guard has this massive ocean to patrol and limited cutters They obviously can't board every single vessel

25:02So the utilized Stargate The remote viewers ran 171 separate operational missions Dedicated solely to identifying which incoming ships were carrying hidden narcotics Instead of the Coast Guard burning fuel and time conducting random searches They just ask the viewers Right, the viewers would provide specific descriptions And locations of the ships carrying contraband This highly targeted approach saved the government millions of dollars in operational costs And drastically increased their interdiction rates Okay, so we have established a pattern of immense operational success We know it worked well enough for 19 agencies to rely on it But this leads us to the most crucial question of this entire deep dive into the subject The how? The how? How did it actually work? If you are Dr. Edwin May, a physicist who rejects magic, spiritualism and the supernatural You cannot simply shrug your shoulders and say Well, it's a mystery No, you have to figure out the physical mechanism

26:03And to figure out what ESP was They first had to definitively prove what it wasn't And this requires us to look at the geopolitical paranoia of the era The Soviet Union was heavily invested in paranormal research And they approached it from a vastly different cultural baseline than the West This cultural difference is so interesting to me It's key Dr. May points out a critical historical divergence In the Western world, particularly following the Protestant reformation Spearheaded by Martin Luther Our cultures systematically stripped mysticism Out of our religious and intellectual traditions Right, we leaned hard into rationalism, Text-based theology, physical evidence But in Russia, the cultural roots are deeply intertwined with the Intense mysticism of the Russian Orthodox Church If you attend a traditional Russian Orthodox service There are no pews The Congregation stands Wow, really Yeah, and the police often faces the altar Away from the people Mumbling prayers to icons lit by candles

27:04heavily utilizing incense and ritual That cultural comfort with the unseen, the mystical, and the atmospheric deeply influenced their scientific approach to the paranormal So the Soviets were not just dabbling They were building actual theoretical physics models around psychic phenomena Oh, they were very serious about it In 1969, a prominent Russian scientist named Ipilette Moisevich Kogan published a major paper that sent ripples of absolute panic through the Western intelligence community Because he claimed he solved it, right? Yes Kogan claimed that he had mathematically solved the mechanism of telepathy The concept that Soviet operatives could sit in Moscow and literally read the real-time thoughts of American generals in the Pentagon was a doomsday scenario for the CIA Oh, that would be terrifying So what was Kogan's theory? Kogan's hypothesis was known as the AM radio theory And it sounded entirely plausible within the framework of 1960s physics He proposed that the human brain, which operates using electrical impulses,

28:08generates brain waves Which we know is true Right Specifically, he pointed to the ten hertz beta rhythms Kogan theorized that these low frequency electromagnetic waves acted as a carrier wave, functioning identically to the 550 kilohertz frequency on your AM radio dial Okay, I'm following So when a person had a thought That thought would modulate the ten hertz carrier wave Broadcasting the information out into the physical environment Another person with a brain tuned to the correct receptive frequency could pick up that wave and decode the thought Wow So it framed telepathy as just a straightforward biological radio transmission Exactly It's an elegant theory And it terrified the West enough to heavily fund Dr. May's research To figure out a defense against it But it turns out there was nothing to defend against because years later After the Cold War tensions eased up Dr. May finally had the opportunity to meet Professor Kogan in person

29:09Right May sat down with him and delivered a crushing blow to a lifetime of Soviet research May explicitly told Kogan I have bad news for you Your model is completely fundamentally wrong Ouch That's got to hurt Yeah, and the reason may new it was wrong was based on a massive startling conclusion His own team had reached telepathy to find it's the real time reading of another person's thoughts Simply does not exist Which usually stops people in their tracks Because telepathy is the most common cultural assumption about psychic abilities We see it in movies all the time But May's data indicated that mind-to-mind communication in the present moment Just wasn't happening Blackouts Empty shelves Rising prices The world is unpredictable That's why my family is prepared with a three-month survival food kit from four patriots And right now you'll get two bonus months absolutely free Hardy shelf stable meals that last up to 25 years Ham packed right in the USA

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31:09When disaster hits I won't control Not chaos Take action today Get your three-month survival food kit plus two months free at fourpatriots.com before this deal is gone Wait hold on I need to pause here because this is where my brain starts to shorts or get a little bit Dr. May is saying that reading someone's mind right now in the present is scientifically impossible Correct But in the next breath he argues that reading the future is scientifically plausible Yes that is his argument You're going to have to explain the physics of that to me because on its face it sounds completely backwards I mean we assume the present is tangible and the future is unwritten How can you read something that hasn't happened yet but you can't read a thought happening right in front of you? I know it's the most counterintuitive leap in this entire field of study And to explain it Dr. May walks the hosts through a slightly morbid but brilliantly illustrative thought experiment Okay lay it on me Imagine Dr. May is standing in front of you He says I am thinking of a number between one and one hundred

32:12I want you to use your psychic abilities to guess it You concentrate and you say thirty seven Okay I make my guess Thirty seven The moment you make your guess Dr. May pulls out a pistol and tragically shoots himself in the head dying instantly Whoa Okay that is morbid I warned you But because he dies he carries the real answer to his grave In that scenario because he never revealed the answer You can never ever know if your guess of thirty seven was correct The data loop is permanently broken Right because there's no way to verify it I just have to live forever wondering if I was right Exactly Now let's look at the alternative scenario Dr. May ask you to guess the number You say thirty seven Dr. May smiles and says You got it right It was thirty seven Okay much better outcome Yes In that moment you receive feedback

33:13You get the answer Dr. May argues that in the second scenario You did not reach into his mind in the present moment to read the number thirty seven Then what did I do? What actually happened is that your brain reached forward in time To the exact moment in the future when he revealed the answer to you You read the information from your own future experience of hearing him say you got it right Oh wow You didn't read his mind you read the future He refers to this as the answer book theory It posits that pre-cognition seeing the future is the only actual form of extra sensory perception being utilized Every instance of supposed telepathy or clairvoyance is actually just a person peaking ahead in time to see the eventual outcome Right, it is exactly like taking a brutal final exam in college If you break into the professor's locked off as the night before the test and read the answer key You are going to score a perfect 100% the next day And you didn't need to read the professor's mind to do it

34:14Exactly The remote viewers in the Stargate program were doing the exact same thing But instead of picking a lock They were using a latent biological ability to peak at an answer book that hadn't even been printed yet They were looking at the confirmed intelligence feedback they would inevitably receive from their CIA handlers Days or weeks in the future Yes, if we accept the premise that pre-cognition is the sole mechanism at play It leads us to the next massive hurdle Right the physical mechanism How does a biological organism detect information from the future Dr. May approach this by analyzing the big five human sensory systems Site hearing touch taste and smell just standard biology right And he observed a universal constant across all these biological systems They are entirely designed to detect change or gradients in the environment Oh, I can give a perfect example of this I used to live in an apartment right next to a busy elevated train track in the city

35:16Oh, that sounds loud It was deafening the first week I lived there every time a train word pass the window It sounded like a jet engine in my living room I couldn't sleep I couldn't watch TV I was miserable But you got used to it Completely After about a month my brain just habituated to the noise I would have guessed over a train would go by the windows would literally rattle And my guess would jump out of their skin And I wouldn't even register that it happened My auditory system just stopped processing the constant noise And only cared about a change in the baseline environment Exactly habituation is a survival mechanism Your brain filters out constant stimuli to save processing power for sudden changes Like the snap of a twig that might indicate a predator It makes perfect evolutionary sense So Dr. Bay hypothesized that if ESP is a genuine evolved biological sensory system It must obey the exact same rules It shouldn't be good at reading static unchanging targets Right It should respond best to massive changes in a target system

36:20So he began measuring targets using a concept from information theory called Shannon Entropy Okay, for those of us who aren't quantum physicists What exactly is Shannon Entropy In simple terms Shannon Entropy is a mathematical measure of unpredictability complexity and dynamic change within a specific system Okay A blank white wall has very low Shannon entropy It's static, it's predictable, nothing is happening Right But an active volcano erupting with massive thermal changes Kinetic energy, visual chaos That has incredibly high Shannon Entropy Got it So how did this apply to the remote viewers? Dr. Bay analyzed the stargate data and found a definitive correlation Remote viewers were vastly more successful at describing targets that possessed high Shannon Entropy Because it was a louder signal Yes Their psychic senses were detecting the sharp gradients and massive changes in the information of the target

37:23This was a monumental breakthrough Because it took ESP out of the realm of magic and firmly planted it in the realm of biological sensory processing It proved the psychic sense acts exactly like your eyes or your ears Exactly Which brings us to a massive imposing wall in our understanding We've established that pre-cognition pulls data from the future answer book And it acts like a biological sense detecting information gradients Right But how does data from next Tuesday travel backward Through the fabric of time to hit the squishy gray matter of a human brain on a Thursday afternoon It sounds like science fiction It really does But Dr. May divides this enormous question into two distinct halves The physics problem and the neuroscience problem Let's tackle the physics first Which involves a concept called quantum retro causation Retro causation That just sounds intimidating When a late person hears information traveling backward in time They immediately think of HD wells and time machines But within the highest levels at theoretical physics

38:24Retro causation is a deeply serious, heavily debated mathematical domain So it doesn't require a belief in the supernatural It's a structural question about how the universe fundamentally operates at the quantum level Precisely If you look at the fundamental equations of physics Newton's laws of motion, Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism, Einstein's relativity and the Schrodinger equation in quantum mechanics The heavy hitters The foundation of all physics Almost all of them are time-symmetric Meaning what? This means the math works perfectly Whether time is moving forward or backward There's no mathematical arrow of time in those equations Wow really Yeah In Feynman diagrams which maps subatomic particle interactions A positron is mathematically identical to an electron moving backward in time Furthermore Experiments like the delayed choice quantum eraser Oh that one hurts my brain It's complex but it suggests that an observation made in the present can retroactively determine the state of a particle in the past

39:25Physics allows for the possibility that the arrow of time is not a one-way street At least for information So if we grant that theoretical physics provides a viable highway for information to travel backward from the future We run into the second half of the equation Which is the neuroscience problem Right the meat computer in our heads Exactly Assuming this quantum information arrives at the human body How does the physical brain actually receive and decode a signal from the future Dr. May admits they don't fully understand how the signal breaches the skull But they are making wild cutting-edge progress on identifying the actual biological antenna Inside the brain And he points to research currently being conducted in Brazil using incredibly advanced imaging technology Yes the researchers are utilizing something called diffusion tensor imaging or DTI It's a highly advanced MRI technique Standard MRIs give you a static picture of brain tissue But DTI actually maps the directional flow of water molecules Along the neural pathways in the brain's white matter

40:28And what exactly is white matter doing in this context? White matter is essentially the vast network of insulated cables that connect different regions of the brain Allowing them to communicate The Brazilian researchers have formed a working hypothesis These complex bundles of white matter tracks act as a biological antenna for quantum retrocausal signals This makes so much sense to me when you think about hardware Like if I try to download a massive 4k movie using an old 1990s dial-up modem It's gonna fail The copper wire just cannot handle the bandwidth Right the infrastructure isn't there But if I use modern fiber optic cables it downloads in seconds The researchers are suggesting that people who are exceptionally gifted remote viewers And people like Pat Price or Joe McMonical Might literally possess a denser, more highly interconnected Physically superior white matter network They physically have a better antenna for picking up the signal from the future Which is just it's incredible They are attempting to move

41:29Parapsychology completely away from psychological guessing games and into quantitative anatomy They want to literally measure the physical quality of the biological receiver Blackouts, empty shelves, rising prices The world is unpredictable That's why my family is prepared with a three-month survival food kit from four Patriots And right now you'll get two bonus months absolutely free Hardy shelf stable meals that last up to 25 years Ham packed right in the USA When disaster hits I won't control, not chaos Take action today Get your three-month survival food kit plus two months free at fourpatriots.com before this deal is gone Kitchen and bathroom professionals know What goes behind the tile matters That's why trade pros trust Fiber cement, party backer board To keep tile firmly in place, resist cracking, and help block moisture For more information visit jameshardy.com Slashhardybacker

42:29Kitchen and bathroom professionals know What goes behind the tile matters That's why trade pros trust Fiber cement, party backer board To keep tile firmly in place, resist cracking, and help block moisture To keep tile firmly in place, resist cracking, and help block moisture To keep tile firmly in place, resist cracking, and help block moisture Chosen over 40 million kitchens and bathrooms Party backer board What the best build on Shop now at participating Home Depot, Lowe's, and floor into core stores For more information visit jameshardy.com slashhardybacker Which naturally leads to the ultimate cynical skeptics question The original host asked it and I guarantee everyone listening right now is thinking it Oh I know what you're going to say If this is a real biological ability and people can accurately see the future Why aren't these remote viewers winning the Powerball lottery every single week

43:31I mean why would you sit in a windalous room or working a government salary for the CIA When you could be a multi billionaire lounging on a private island It is the most common aggressive argument level against the existence of ESP And dr. me defuses it with a brilliant purely engineering-based explanation Based on information theory he calls it the bitrate limitation Explain that one to me Okay to understand this Imagine you want to listen to a complex beautiful performance by a symphony orchestra But instead of sitting in the concert hall or listening through a high-end stereo system You're forced to listen to the entire concert through two tin cans connected by a taught piece of string Oh man the audio quality would be absolute garbage You might hear a muffled rhythmic thump when the timpani drums play or a faint high-pitched screech from the violins But you would never be able to distinguish the individual notes or the melody or the complex harmonies Exactly And the reason for that is the bitrate

44:32The sheer volume of data that can be successfully transferred through that string per second is a bit mildly low Most of the acoustic information is just lost as static Right dr. me explains that the biological channel for ESP acts exactly like that tin can and string The data transfer rate between the future event and the present brain is Incredibly low and highly prone to noise and interference Okay, so apply that biological limitation to the lottery the lottery is a massively complex data set It is a specific sequence of numbers drawn from tens of millions of possible combinations Exactly to successfully guess a winning lottery ticket A remote viewer would have to pull an enormous amount of exact sequential bits of data Through that tiny static filled biological channel That sounds exhausting Dr. May actually ran the math on this because the bitrate is so low A remote viewer would have to maintain a state of perfect uninterrupted psychic focus for 50 continuous hours

45:35Just to pull enough data bits through the channel to assemble the winning numbers 50 hours Yes, the human brain cannot sustain that level of intense concentration It is biologically exhausting and functionally impossible You can't download a terabyte file over a dial-up connection before the connection times out It's a totally compelling explanation, but it invites an immediate logical counter argument And Jonathan one of the original hosts spots the loophole instantly Oh yeah, he caught it right away He says wait a minute There are Tibetan monks, Kabbalistic scholars, and ascetic yogis who literally meditate for days at a time They sit in deep, unbroken, trance states for 50 hours or more If sustained focus is the only barrier, why aren't these master meditators the ultimate psychic spice? It's a brilliant logical leap It assumes that if you can train your mind to hold focus for that long You can overcome the bitrate limitation But Dr. May responds with cold, hard data that completely ruins the theory He really does May points to extensive controlled studies showing that individuals who've spent 30 years isolated in monasteries

46:41engaging in deep meditative practices are fundamentally no better at remote viewing than a random novice pulled off the street Who has never meditated a day in their life So the monks don't have a higher hit rate at all? Not at all The only statistical difference the data shows is that the monks are significantly less anxious people when they fail the test They're just more chill about being wrong Exactly And that data point forces a hard pivot into the great debate that fractured the entire remote viewing community Can this ability actually be learned? If some brains are just genetically wired with a denser white matter antenna Can the rest of us upgrade our hardware through practice? Can a normal person be taught to be a psychic spy? Dr. May's answer is an infatic categorical no He is incredibly firm on this And he isn't just offering an academic opinion He is speaking from the painful experience of having spent millions of taxpayer dollars Trying to develop training protocols for military officers Right because the military assumes everything can be trained

47:43You can train a farm boy to fly in f-16 Why can't you train a lieutenant to remote view? But the training programs failed miserably The ability could not be manufactured Dr. Ray likens it to elite athletics Specifically track and field Imagine you hire the greatest Olympic high jump coach in human history To train a completely average person Okay The coach works with them on their approach Their form their diet and their explosiveness The person will undoubtedly improve They might eventually clear a bar set at five or six feet But they are never ever going to jump ten feet in the air Right because physics and biology get in the way Yes They will eventually hit a hard biological ceiling Dictated by their genetics, muscle fiber density, and skeletal structure ESP operates the exact same way If you don't have the biological hardware No amount of training will give it to you You cannot train a natural biological anomaly But that reality hasn't stopped people from trying And it led to the creation of what Dr. May rather bitterly refers to as

48:44The Ingo Swan Cult Oh the Ingo Swan era Yeah, Ingo Swan was a pioneer in the early days of remote viewing He was a brilliant highly eccentric artist in researcher Swan invented a highly rigid, heavily structured training procedure Called Coordinate Remote Viewing or CRV And he was very dogmatic about it Very Swan famously declared content be damned Structure is all that matters He passionately believed that if a person followed his exact multi-stage protocol focusing on lines, textures, and specific coordinate decoding Absolutely anyone could be trained to successfully remote view But Dr. May argues that Swan had it completely backwards For the intelligence agency's funding stargate, structure was totally irrelevant The only thing they cared about was the content The accurate intelligence that could save lives Obviously, the CIA doesn't care about your process They want the submarine location Exactly In fact, may found that forcing structure onto remote viewers

49:45actively ruined natural talent To prove this, he points to the top five best remote viewers The Stargate program ever employed These were the absolute elite, the ones generating the most accurate intelligence And absolutely none of them worked the same way This is where the individual variations become so fascinating to me You had one viewer who got all of his accurate intelligence strictly through dreaming He would be given a task, go to sleep, and wake up with the answers Right Then you had Angela Ford, who the host had interviewed in a previous episode on their channel She used a method called automatic writing She would sit with a pen, scribble furiously and unconsciously on a piece of paper Turn the paper over and the answers would emerge from the chaos And then you had a guy named Nevin Lance Nevin Lance was completely different, right? Totally different He was a psychologist and his method was highly specific He would sit formally across a desk from Dr. May in a brightly lit room looking totally normal and awake May would say, access the target

50:46And then he would say a specific trigger word Which was Now At the exact moment he heard the word now Lance would spontaneously spit out a single, highly accurate sentence describing the target That is wild The lesson here is that individual biological differences are paramount If you take a natural dreamer and force them to sit at a desk under fluorescent lights waiting for the word now, they will fail And if you take an automatic writer and force them to follow Ingoswan's rigid multi-stage coordinate protocols Use stifled their natural biological mechanism The structure suffocates the signal So if you cannot train the ability itself and you shouldn't force a specific structure onto a viewer What can you actually do to improve the signal? Interestingly, Joe McMonigal, remote viewer number one, wrote an entire manual on remote viewing And Dr. May points out a hilarious irony about this book It contains almost zero instructions on what you should do The entire book is a comprehensive guide on what not to do

51:48And what's the absolute overriding rule in the book? Do not worry Anxiety and overanalysis are the ultimate enemies of the psychic signal Dr. May uses a deeply relatable analogy about his own golf game to explain this Because May is a highly trained physicist When he stands over a golf ball on the tee, he can't just swing the club He's doing math in his head Exactly His brain immediately starts calculating when resistance vectors angular momentum The torque of his spine, the kinetic transfer of energy He completely over thinks the mechanics of the swing And as a result, he hits a terrible shot Kitchen and bathroom professionals know What goes behind the tile matters That's why trade pros trust Fiber cement, party backerboard To keep tile firmly in place, resist cracking And help block moisture Chosen in over 40 million kitchens and bathrooms Party backerboard What the best build on Shop now at participating home depot, lows, and floor into core stores

52:50For more information visit jameshardy.com slashhardybacker The intellect ruins the physical execution They call this the intellect trap in remote viewing Early on the program tried recruiting candidates from Mensa, the high IQ society Which makes sense on paper, you want smart spies The assumed the smartest people would make the best psychic spies Well, if you did well, generally being highly analytical with a massive hindrance An analytical brain cannot tolerate raw abstract data It immediately tries to logically deduce the target It wants to solve the puzzle too fast Right, if an analytical viewer sees a flash of red and feels heat They're bringing instantly says it's a fire truck But the target might actually be a brick pizza oven They are too busy thinking and deducing To actually listen to the faint signal coming through the biological channel This sparks a truly fascinating tangent from the original hosts

53:51While they accept dr. mace premise that you cannot train a biological capability Past its physical ceiling They wonder if you can train your receptivity to the signal Like tuning the radio Exactly They aren't talking about building a bigger antenna They are talking about learning how to lower the noise floor And Jonathan brings up his experience with holotropic breathwork Holotropic breathwork is a very intense practice It involves rapid deep rhythmic breathing designed to hyper-oxygenate the brain And induce profound altered states of consciousness Similar to psychedelics but purely through oxygen manipulation And Jonathan shares this wild very vulnerable story He was participating in a holotropic breathwork session And as he entered this altered state His hand completely froze up It locked into a claw-like position And he was struck by agonizing pain in that hand Out of nowhere Well it turned out the physical position his hand frozen to Perfectly mimicked the exact position of a severe hand injury

54:52He had suffered over a decade prior Wow The intense breathing had bypassed his conscious mind And unlocked a deeply buried frozen somatic memory stored in his physical tissues So Jonathan argues that perhaps techniques like this Or deep transcendental meditation Don't give you psychic powers But they might help you temporarily shut off the Overwhelming static of our daily anxieties Our ego and our intellectualizing So we can finally hear that faint tin can signal coming from the future It is a highly compelling counter theory If the signal is always there But obscured by the noise of modern life And lowering the noise floor allows the signal to emerge And we see evidence of this natural spontaneous receptivity And everyday people who have no training whatsoever The hosts share a delightful anecdote about the actress Lisa Kudrow Oh the story is great Right, Kudrow was completely untrained New absolutely nothing about Stargate protocols But decided she wanted to try and tune into her husband

55:54Who was supposed to be on a rugged tent camping trip out in the Joshua Tree desert So she sits quietly in her home Focuses her intention on her husband And waits to see what images come to her mind She obviously expects to see a tent, sand, scrub brush Normal camping stuff Instead, she gets a vivid impression of a sturdy building A large fire pit, comfortable chairs And people smoking cigars And she immediately breaks her concentration and thinks Well, I completely failed He is in a sleeping bag in the desert And I'm seeing a cigar lounge But the very next day, she speaks to her husband And finds out his plans changed at the last minute They scrapped a desert camping idea, went to a nice restaurant sat around a fire pit and smoked cigars She saw exactly what was happening But she assumed she was failing the entire time Because her logical brain expected a tent And Dr. May's reaction to the Lisa Kudrow story is wonderfully pragmatic

56:54He doesn't act shocked, he doesn't call her a prodigy He simply says, she is a remote viewer Like it's just a matter of fact He firmly believes that pre-cognition is a latent, evolutionary human capability that we all possess To varying degrees And we use it unconsciously on a daily basis Just to navigate our lives and avoid danger He actually shares a story about himself That illustrates this perfectly He was running an hour late to meet a friend at a hotel He was dreading the angry confrontation stressing the entire drive over there Oh, I hate that feeling The same He finally pulls up to the hotel An hour late only to watch his friend pull up at the exact same moment His friend had also been inexplicably delayed by exactly an hour May have used this not as coincidence But as our unconscious minds constantly reading the gradients of the future To maneuver us safely and efficiently through the present We are all psychic Most of us just aren't paying attention Exactly Let's zoom out a bit And try to wrap our minds around the massive journey we have taken today

57:57Because we started with a deeply skeptical, rigidly materialist nuclear physicist Who thought the paranormal was absolutely nonsense A parlor trick for gullible people And we followed the data We followed the rigorous, double-blind, statistical evidence It was so undeniable It forced the United States intelligence community To rely on psychic spies for 20 years We explored how the terrifying Soviet theories of telepathic mind control were debunked In favor of something arguably more profound, which is precognition The realization that our brains might literally be biological receivers Equipped with white matter antennas Designed to detect the Shannon entropy of future events Through the mind-bending physics of quantum retrocazation We learned that you probably cannot train yourself to be a psychic superhero If you don't have the hardware But if you can stop worrying Quiet your hyperanalytical mind and lower the noise floor You might just catch a faint, fleeting glimpse of the answer book before it's actually written

58:59It is a profound, paradigm-shattering shift in how we view the capabilities of the human brain And the fundamental nature of time itself And it leaves us with one incredibly provocative, almost unsettling philosophical thought Uh-oh Lay it on me Well, if precognition is truly real And the 20 years of Stargate data suggests it is If the information of tomorrow can genuinely reach us today through the physics of retrocazation Then it implies a block universe model of time Right, where time isn't flowing, it just exists Exactly It implies that the future has in some fundamental structural way already happened The answer book is already fully written, bound, and published And we are just biological machines equipped to occasionally peak at the pages ahead of us Wow So, if the future is already set in stone enough for a police chief in Burbank to read it on a map How much free will do we actually have when we make a choice? Are we writing the story of our lives or are we just reading along to a script that's already finished?

1:00:05That is the ultimate terrifying question this science forces us to confront If the future can be seen, it must already exist So what do you think? Are we just complex bio receivers tuning into a static-filled broadcast from a predetermined future? Have you ever had a moment of pure precognition? Got feeling, a vivid dream, or a sudden change of plans that you absolutely could not explain logically? I'd love to read those comments We really want to hear your stories Drop down into the comments and tell us your most unexplainable psychic moment And let us know where you stand on the Stargate program and the illusion of free will Thank you so much for joining us on this incredible journey today on thrilling threads Keep questioning, keep exploring, and we'll see you next time