Wanda and the Encrypted Coordinates of a Psychic Hunt
By Eleanor Voss ·
A woman's location served as a calibration point for experimental psychic spies, a detail held in secret for decades in a set of handwritten notes.
A woman was turned into a binary switch for an experiment in mental surveillance, her presence at a secret site used to validate the visions of government psychics. This reduction of a human being to a calibration point is the quiet center of a Cold War desperation that preferred pseudoscience to failure.
These stakes appear in a series of handwritten notes, a technical fragment from a larger, unseen operation. The record shows a process of tasking where the government attempted to see through walls and across borders using the mind. It outlines a rigid, weekly schedule of "remote viewing"—the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen subject, which the public record establishes is generally regarded as a pseudoscience.
Wednesday at the Target
The notes describe a clinical approach to the occult. The record establishes that the tasking followed a strict tempo: "SRI will tc-a ;6:: th1,--:- viewer(s) on We:.-dnc?::~s(Jay o+ each week at hours, our time." This was not a haphazard exploration of the paranormal but a scheduled intelligence collection cycle.
The agency utilized the Stanford Research Institute, a research contractor that provided the mental tools for remote viewing to the intelligence community. Within that framework, the project was driven by two specific "ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF INFORMATION," or EEIs. The first was to "Describe the target site." The second was to "Describe the k:ey activity at the tar?ge1-."
This language is the standard vernacular of intelligence requirements, yet the tool being used was not a satellite or a spy. It was the remote viewer, a role developed by Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, the SRI physicists who coined the term "remote viewing" to separate the practice from the broader, looser concept of clairvoyance. By framing the process as a technical exercise with specific deliverables, the agency attempted to strip the mysticism from the method, treating the human mind as a sensor no different from a radar array.
The Polish Marker
At the heart of this operation was a person named Wanda, a woman of Polish origin. In the record, she is not a target of interest in her own right, nor is she a suspect to be interrogated. Instead, she is a variable. The notes state: "There may or may not be: a (Wanda) at the target, according to SRI."
The placement of Wanda in parentheses suggests she was never the primary objective. The desk's reading is that Wanda served as a "control" or calibration marker. In any scientific experiment, a control is used to verify that the instrument is working. If the remote viewer claimed to see a woman of Polish descent at the site, and the agency knew Wanda was actually there, the viewer was "validated." If the viewer saw nothing, or saw a man, the viewer was dismissed.
This is the cruelty of the record: Wanda was not a person to the project; she was a litmus test for the accuracy of a psychic's vision. The public record shows that the name Wanda peaked in popularity in the United States in 1934, a common name that provides a thin veneer of identity to a woman who, in these notes, is reduced to a biological flag planted at a set of coordinates to see if a psychic in a room at SRI could find her.
The Geometry of Denied Areas
The notes make a point of mentioning "ENCRYPTED COORDINATES" and specify that "the Project NUmber will also serve as th? Encrypted BACKGROUND." The use of encryption for the location, coupled with the reliance on remote viewers, reveals the nature of the site.
The pattern suggests the target was a "denied area"—a location where conventional signals intelligence (SIGINT) was blocked and human intelligence (HUMINT) was impossible. When the government cannot get a plane over a site or a spy through the door, it begins to look for exits in the laws of physics. The fact that the agency turned to SRI suggests a need for plausible deniability; using a private contractor to conduct psychic experiments creates a layer of insulation between the official policy of the state and the absurdity of the method.
However, the record contains a glaring gap. It outlines the input—the coordinates, the schedule, the EEIs—but it contains no output. There are no results, no reports of what the viewers saw, and no confirmation of whether Wanda was actually at the target. This missing "ground truth" verification loop indicates that the results were either negative or so wildly inaccurate that they were not worth recording in this specific annex.
The Reading
If the shape of this file is what it appears to be, these handwritten notes are a technical annex to a larger operational file. The strategic "Why"—the reason the government was so desperate to know the "key activity" at these specific coordinates—was held in a separate, higher-classification compartment. This document is merely the plumbing, the record of how the psychic sensor was tasked, while the actual target remained hidden behind a more formidable wall of secrecy.
The desk's reading is that this project was a failure of imagination born of a failure of access. The government spent resources and utilized a human being as a calibration tool to chase a ghost, hoping that a contractor's pseudoscience could bypass the physical realities of a denied area. The redacted and handwritten nature of the notes suggests a project that existed in the shadows of the agency, a side-bet on the paranormal that lacked the rigor of true intelligence work.
A full release of the associated files would likely show that the remote viewers saw everything and nothing, providing a Rorschach test of imagery that the agency tried to force into the shape of actionable intelligence. The still-withheld pages are protecting not a secret weapon or a successful spy, but the embarrassment of a government that tried to replace radar with intuition and found that the only thing it could truly see was its own desperation. Wanda, and whoever else was used as a marker in these games, paid for that desperation with their privacy, becoming nameless ghosts in a machine that never actually worked.