In 1992, id Software released Wolfenstein 3D. Although it wasn’t the first to bear the Wolfenstein name, its cutting edge, 3D graphics propelled the game into international renown and instantly became a landmark in the development of the First Person Shooter genre.
 
But it wasn’t just the graphics that had changed. Wolfenstein 3D added a paranormal twist to its gameplay; along with Nazi storm troopers and SS guards, the game tapped into the popular mythology surrounding alleged connections between Nazism and the occult. Players were soon found doing battle with otherworldly entities and mutant by-products of Nazi experimentation. More recent additions to the series have continued the paranormal theme, which is set to continue in the upcoming Wolfenstein, being co-developed by id Software and its partner Raven Software.

This time, the Nazi’s experimentation has harnessed the power of a dark parallel dimension called The Veil, creating ever more bewildering arrays of otherworldly monstrosities and supernatural weapons. This dramatic fantasy has no grounding in fact, of course, but the truth is that the world’s militaries are no strangers to research into the paranormal. In recent years, laboratory studies, reports and confidential files have come to light showing that Britain, the USA, Russia and China have all conducted experiments in parapsychology to assess whether there might be any strategic value in harnessing Psi power.

So while the world’s military research facilities have yet to create their own Veil weapons and psychic spies, that doesn’t mean they haven’t been trying...
 

BRITAIN'S PSI EXPERIMENTS
As one of the pioneers of international Psi research, Britain is – to this day – one of the leaders of scientific investigation of the paranormal. So it comes, perhaps, as little surprise that the Ministry of Defence has conducted some of the most recent Psi experiments, hoping to discover whether supernatural powers might grant a tactical advantage to its intelligence officers.
 
Documents released recently under the Freedom of Information act prove that the MoD has been conducting Controlled Remote Viewing experiments. A study was undertaken in 2001 - 2002 to investigate “theories about capabilities to gather information remotely about what people may be seeing and to determine the potential value, if any, of such theories to Defence.”
 
Remote Viewing has always been a popular avenue for military-funded Psi research for good reason – it represents a unique intelligence gathering opportunity, where surveillance can be carried out where even satellites cannot reach and without anyone needing to set foot behind enemy lines.
 
The first phase of the secret MoD experiment involved 18 untrained Remote Viewing subjects. Although the experiment’s initial aim was to use experienced Remote Viewers to test the phenomena’s existence, only a very small number were willing to take part, so the MoD decided to conduct tests on untrained subjects instead, reasoning – for better or worse – that, if successful, future subjects would also need to be trained using the same methodology.
 
The results from this first stage were inconclusive at best, although a small number of subjects generated results which, according to the MoD, “suggested that there was a possibility that [they] had accessed some of the features of the target.”
 
What’s more intriguing is that the MoD did not disclose whether it had drawn any firm conclusions from the original test and what happened in the experiment’s second phase. As revealed in the de-classified documents, the next stage was intended to “involve the selection of one or more individuals who it is felt can be ‘trusted’ to be used for the more sensitive targets.”
 

THE STARGATE PROJECT
The methodology used in Britain’s experiments also has an important link to previous military Psi experiments. It was based heavily on The Controlled Remote Viewing (CRV) Manual, a process credited in part to renowned remote viewing proponent, Ingo Swann (although he strongly denies writing it), and developed following research conducted by the Stanford Research Institute, paid for with CIA funding, at the start of the now famous Stargate Project.
 
The manual (now publically available), was developed in 1986 during the peak of US Government ESP research. Its author is a retired US Army Major and intelligence officer, Paul H Smith, one of five people trained under Swann for Remote Viewing intelligence gathering.
 
Remote Viewing became one of the strongest areas of research within the Stargate Project, active from the height of the Cold War right up until 1995. The number of US Government agencies involved in the project throughout its 20-year lifespan, not to mention the length of time it was active and the amount of funding – some m – it received, are clear evidence that the US was intrigued by the possibilities of parapsychology and the potential power of unconventional science.
 
Evidence for how successful these Remote Viewing experiments were remains in doubt, and the current data – what little is available – does not meet the standards of rigorous scientific testing. However, records of events that “suggest the possibility of acute perceptions, either elicitation or parapsychological, in some individuals” strongly implies that further scrutiny is still needed [1].
 
Remote Viewing subjects trained using the techniques that eventually went on to form the basis of CRV Manual were often given nothing more than geographic coordinates and a vague description of the target to work with. One of the project’s most successful experiments involved key Stargate subject Pat Price, whose sketches of a cranes and gantries at a Soviet research facility in Semipalatinsk, proved remarkably accurate when checked against subsequent satellite photography.
 
In 1995, at the closure of the programme, the American Institutes for Research (AIR) began a review. Although its findings failed to convince the CIA to continue the project, the report could not completely rule out a Psi effect. In fact, one researcher and statistician, Jessica Utts, claimed that analysis of the accumulated data revealed a statistically significant effect. Although this view was challenged by Utts’s counterpart Ray Hyman, the review estimated that the Stargate psychics were hitting the target around 25 per cent of the time, albeit with a lot of irrelevant information crowding out the accurate viewings, echoing earlier analysis.
 
Both concluded that more research would be necessary.
 
 
THE KGB'S COLD WAR PK RESEARCH
In the 1970s, US research into the paranormal was motivated by reports from the USSR of similar experimentation. Despite the vague and often sensationalist nature of these reports, the fact that Russia had taken some of the earliest steps in Psi research, dating back to 1922, compelled the CIA to take them seriously.
 
Under the Stalinist regime, paranormal research was strictly forbidden, but in 1960 – inspired, ironically, by a questionable report that the US Navy was using telepathy to communicate with its first nuclear submarine – the ban was lifted. The potential value of using telepathy to communicate with submarines and cosmonauts ultimately led to the KGB taking a more active role in the research.
 
As the US developed its own Psi projects throughout the height of the Cold War, the KGB began to reorganise its parapsychology labs to favour more military-minded research. Its intention was not just to study and prove the existence of Psi phenomena, but to develop means of enhancing its effects and generate practical applications.
 
According to a 1976 CIA report, the USSR was engaged in the study of psychokinetic (PK) powers through electronic means, including the work of Ippolite M Kogan on Very Low Frequency (VLF) and Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) radio waves.
 
“Assuming that the USSR started a special NBIT program sometime in 1970, by now they could have developed some sensitive instruments to detect, monitor and analyze VLF and ELF radiations for possible instrument content, as Kogan suggested should be done,” the AiResearch Manufacturing Company report claimed. “The Russians may now be implementing the next logical step, namely to reinforce, enhance or aid [Novel Biophysical Information Transfer] in certain trained or gifted individuals after having discovered the basic communication carriers.”[2]

Other potential applications for the technology were believed to include ‘thought reading’ to enhance the USSR’s vast eavesdropping network and even mind control to manipulate the behaviour of unwitting sleeper agents.
 
Although much of the information surrounding these KGB experiments has failed to reach the public domain, that there was a great deal of research conducted into a wide range of Psi phenomena is in no doubt. The research outlived the Soviet Union – an overview of parapsychology research in the former USSR published in 1993 revealed the extent of Russia’s bio-PK and remote influencing experiments. The results seemed to demonstrate statistically significant effects on a wide range of inanimate and biological targets, but if the KGB ever successfully developed Psi technologies or used paranormal techniques in the field, records have not yet come to light.
 

CHINA AND THE RISE OF QIGONG
Maybe it was just Cold War paranoia that lured the two superpowers into such diverse – and, arguably, fantastical – research. But Russia and the USA haven’t been alone in their investigations into paranormal phenomena. In China, the study of Qigong and what is referred to as Exceptional Human Functions (EHF) are closely linked.
 
At its heart, Qigong is considered a meditative practice, its emphasis on controlled breathing to manage the body’s energy flow, or Qi. However, it has numerous, widely reported connections with the paranormal, encompassing a huge range of effects from psychokinesis and X-ray vision, to energy healing and levitation. [3]
 
Qigong itself is not considered to be the cause of EHF, but merely a facilitator which unlocks and stabilises those abilities. At times, potential military applications of Qigong powers were hoped to include anti-missile defences, along with telepathic communication and remote viewing.
 
The study of Qigong has close ties to China’s scientific community too. One of the most renowned advocates of the scientific study of Qigong is Tsien Hsue-Shen, a senior Chinese scientist, graduate of MIT and former head of China’s missile program. In 1982, Tsien Hsue-Shen’s lobbying successfully persuaded the Chinese Propaganda Department to drop its ban on the publication of Psi data for scientific purposes, and helped fuel an upsurge in Qigong practise.
 
Throughout the 1980s, Qigong grew into a full blown cultural movement, and in that time, the scientific study of Qigong grew significantly; the number of laboratories studying the effects swelled rapidly, accompanied by numerous societies and publications. This number soon grew to dwarf the combined total of Russia and US parapsychology labs.
 
Over the years, numerous Qigong masters have performed public demonstrations and have allegedly proved their abilities under laboratory conditions. One of the most famous masters was Zhang Baosheng, a former miner, who was believed to possess a wide array of extraordinary powers, including X-ray vision, psychokinesis and supernatural sensing. Zhang, it is claimed, was able to read the contents of sealed letters using his nose and once treated Marshall Ye Jianying with his Qi healing powers.
 
However, although China’s paranormal research and the rise of Qigong were not so obviously connected to Cold War tensions, Qigong began to decline steadily in the 1990s, around the time that the US and Russian governments were closing down the bulk of their own parapsychology research. As public fervour for Qigong waned, scientific criticism began to flood in from the West and reports of Qigong-related mental health issues became more common. Doubts were raised about whether Qigong research fulfilled the strict scientific criteria necessary to rule out chance and, more significantly, trickery.
 

PSI TODAY
Parapsychology remains a contentious area of scientific research, with both credulous claims and extreme scientific scepticism hindering proper research. Due to the clandestine nature of military Psi experiments, it is also impossible to know whether any practical applications have been developed, or whether they’ve ever been put to test on a real-life battlefield.
 
For the time being then, computer games remain the only place you’ll get to apply paranormal phenomena to the field of conflict.
 

Wolfenstein will be released on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on August 14th, 2009.
 

NOTES

1  Kenneth A Kress: 'Parapsychology In Intelligence: A Personal Review and Conclusions', Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 69–85, 1999
2  Martin Ebon: 'Amplified Mind Power Research In The Former Soviet Union'
3  David A Palmer: Qigong Fever, Columbia University Press, 2007
4  Palmer, op. cit., p73