Mario Varvoglis and the 62 Montreal Fairgoers Screened for Psi

By June Hargrove · September 10, 2026

Hidden in agency files for decades, a 'psychic contest' at a Montreal fair used portable hardware to identify people with non-conscious abilities, charging them for the privilege.

Sixty-two people paid money to be measured by a machine they did not understand, unaware that their performance was being tracked in a dataset eventually swallowed by the CIA. They were not volunteers in a clinical trial; they were marks at a carnival, screened for a capacity they believed was a spiritual gift but which the record treats as a signal to be isolated.

At the Velodrome Olympique in Montreal, the largest city in Quebec, the air was filled with the scent of holistic health merchants and the chatter of tarot readers. This was the "Sommet Esoterique," a gathering of New Age personalities where Mario P. Varvoglis, a researcher who would later receive the Parapsychological Association Outstanding Career Award for his contributions to the discipline, set up a dark fabric tent. Inside, he ran a "psychic contest" that functioned as a filter. Participants first played a "Buddha Game" on an Amiga 1000—a digital display where a golden statue advanced or retreated based on random numbers—and were required to hit a minimum z-score of 1 to qualify for the main event. If they passed, they paid an additional four dollars to be tested by a system called PsiLab II.

The Transportable Laboratory

PsiLab II was not a piece of home electronics; it was a standardized computer-RNG psi-testing system developed by the Psychophysical Research Laboratories (PRL), an organization that built the hardware to ensure that results could be replicated across different sites. The system was co-released in 1984 by researchers Berger and Honorton, the latter of whom helped establish the hardware's technical baseline. According to the record, the primary appeal of PsiLab II was that its "portability and built-in safeguards" allowed it to be a "transportable testing environment which can be taken outside the laboratory to potentially promising environments."

Varvoglis used an Apple II equipped with a noise-based random number generator (RNG) provided by the PRL staff in 1985. He wasn't just testing people; he was testing the system's ability to operate in the "real world," far from the disciplined silence of a university lab. The record describes a "hectic atmosphere" and "market-place ambience" where subjects were "off the street."

The Silent Signal

The contest utilized a task called "Volition." The subject pressed a button to sample the RNG, and a graphic line on the screen moved up or down based on the result, providing immediate feedback. However, for every "feedback" sample the subject saw, the machine secretly took a "silent" sample—data that was stored but never displayed. The subject was blind to these results.

This design was not new. The public record shows that the PRL had conducted a 1984 study where feedback samples showed nothing, but "silent" data revealed a significant excess of subjects with anomalous results. Later, in 1987, researchers Palmer and Perlstrom reported a Volition study involving 30 subjects that mirrored these findings, showing high variance in silent samples. Berger had furthered this in 1988, producing results where run-score variability appeared only in the silent data, never in the feedback.

Varvoglis found the same pattern in Montreal. The record states that the analysis of end-game scores "yielded no significant feedback or silent results," but the "silent run-score was significant." The people who thought they were winning a contest by pushing a line on a screen were failing the visible task, while their subconscious—or something else—was shifting the hidden numbers.

The Logic of the Filter

Varvoglis was not acting in a vacuum. By using the Volition task, he was replicating the specific laboratory findings of Berger, effectively attempting to see if the "silent effect" survived the transition from a controlled room to a noisy tent in Quebec. The record emphasizes the "stiff price each person had to pay to have a shot at it," which served as a motivational device, ensuring that the participants were not just passive observers but were actively invested in the outcome.

Connecting these threads reveals a specific trajectory: the movement of psi research from the academic periphery into a standardized, portable format. The PRL provided the hardware; Berger and Honorton provided the methodology; Varvoglis provided the field test. The result was a system that could screen a population of "wild" subjects quickly and cheaply, using a "psychic contest" as a front for data collection.

The Desk's Reading

If this file is shaped the way it looks, the "psychic contest" was not a scientific inquiry into the nature of the mind, but a low-friction, high-volume screening tool. The pattern suggests the agency was interested in identifying "natural" candidates—people with latent abilities who had not been conditioned by laboratory environments or academic training. By placing the test at a New Age fair, Varvoglis cast a wide net over a population already predisposed to believe in their own abilities, then used the Buddha Game to discard the noise and the Volition task to find the signal.

The desk's reading is that the primary intelligence interest here was not whether psi existed, but whether the PsiLab II hardware was a viable, portable diagnostic tool for field operations. The record’s heavy emphasis on "standardization" and "portability" points to a requirement for a tool that could be deployed anywhere to identify assets without alerting them to the true nature of the screening. The focus on "silent" scores—the data the subject cannot see—indicates a search for non-conscious signals that are immune to subject bias or conscious manipulation. The agency wasn't looking for people who could consciously move a line on a screen; they were looking for people whose mere presence altered the mathematics of a random number generator.

This document appears to be a technical annex to a larger, still-withheld internal evaluative report. The missing pages likely contain the agency's assessment of the Montreal findings' operational utility—specifically, whether the 「wild」 subjects found in a Montreal tent outperformed the agency's internal, trained remote viewing cohorts. The fact that this specific academic paper was preserved in a CIA FOIA record, stripped of its internal directives, suggests that the hardware's validation was the only part of the experiment the agency deemed worth documenting for the long term. The 62 fairgoers were simply the calibration fluid used to prove that the machine worked.

Mario Varvoglis and the 62 Montreal Fairgoers Screened for Psi

The Transportable Laboratory

The Silent Signal

The Logic of the Filter

The Desk's Reading

Sources