Four Experts and the CIA's 1978 Map of the Psychic Mind

By Eleanor Voss · September 12, 2026

Government agents approached American parapsychologists in a secret effort to gauge the military utility of psi, a pursuit tracked in a survey kept in CIA files for decades.

A handful of American academics spent the late 1970s under the quiet observation of government agents who wanted to know if the human mind could be weaponized. The cost of this curiosity was a breach of academic sanctuary, as the state sought to turn psychologists into assets for a shadow war.

In March 1978, Charles T. Tart, a psychologist and one of the founders of transpersonal psychology at the University of California at Davis, sent a series of questionnaires to a selective group of experts. This record, appearing in the CIA Reading Room as "A Survey of Expert Opinion on Potentially Negative Uses of Psi, U.S. Government Interest in Psi, and Level of Research Funding in Field," was not a government project. It was a university-led inquiry into why the United States was losing a race it had not officially admitted to running.

The Soviet and Czechoslovakian Threat

The urgency of Tart's survey was born from a specific fear: that the U.S.S.R., the transcontinental communist state governed by Marxism-Leninism, had already mastered the art of psychic warfare. The record shows that this concern was "partially based on assessments that the U.S.S.R. is not only conducting secret research on the development of military applications of psi, but that this military research is funded at high support levels."

This was not mere academic gossip. Tart based his alarm on a specific piece of intelligence: a declassified report from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the DoD agency specializing in military intelligence, titled "Soviet and Czechoslovakian Parapsychology Research" (DST-181OS-387-75). The public record establishes that the DIA had been monitoring these programs to determine if the Eastern Bloc had found a way to bypass traditional electronic surveillance or disrupt Western hardware via the mind.

The line here is clear. The DIA provided the spark—the evidence of Soviet progress—and Tart provided the fuel by attempting to quantify the American deficit. Tart's survey was a reaction to the intelligence community's own admissions that the U.S.S.R. might be operating with a strategic advantage in the realm of the paranormal.

The $17,000 Median

Tart sought his data from the Parapsychological Association, a professional society formed in 1957 to integrate psychic research into mainstream science. He targeted the "handful of individuals and research laboratories" that produced the bulk of the field's experimental data. Out of fourteen questionnaires sent, thirteen were returned.

The results reveal a community that viewed psychic abilities not as fantasy, but as potential weaponry. When asked if psi could be used in a "practically useful way for espionage," not a single respondent called it impossible or unlikely. Four experts considered it "certain." More disturbing was the consensus on lethality. Tart asked if psi could be used by the military to "physically harm, sicken, or kill individuals." Seven respondents called it possible; three called it likely; one called it certain.

Beyond the potential for murder, the experts believed the mind could be used to "physically interfere with the operation of physical equipment, such as computers, observation instruments, etc." The record establishes that these experts believed these outcomes were inevitable if "enormous resources" were devoted to them.

But the resources were not there. Tart's survey exposes a staggering funding gap. He found that the median yearly research budget for active laboratories in the U.S.A. was just $17,000. He noted that a single industrial scientist typically earns $75,000 a year, meaning the entire scientific parapsychological infrastructure of the United States was sufficient to support only "seven and three-tenths scientists."

The Knock on the Door

While the funding was anemic, the interest from the state was active. Tart's fourth question asked if the respondents or their staff had been "approached by agents or officials of the U.S. government, acting in an official capacity" to gather information.

The record shows that while eight respondents had never been approached, four had been visited "several times." This is the most critical fact in the file. These four experts were not being recruited for a public grant or a university partnership; they were being mined for intelligence by agencies that were, at the time, keeping their own psi interests strictly off the books.

There is a sharp irony in the sequence of events. Tart used the Parapsychological Association membership list to find the experts. The experts reported that agents had already found them. The CIA eventually acquired Tart's survey, which contained the very same membership list and a graded index of who believed most strongly in the possibility of psychic assassination. The state did not just want to know if psi worked; it wanted a directory of the people who were most convinced it did.

The Recruitment Map

The presence of this survey in the CIA's files, long after the 1978 data was collected, suggests a purpose far removed from scientific curiosity. The desk's reading is that the "Soviet threat" cited in the document functioned as a strategic narrative, designed to bypass scientific skepticism and secure black-budget funding for domestic programs by framing psychic research as a matter of national survival.

If this file is shaped the way it looks, the survey itself served as a convenient vetting tool and recruitment map. By asking experts to rate the "certainty" of psi's military applications, the government could identify which academics were most susceptible to recruitment and which were too skeptical to be useful. The four experts who reported being approached "several times" were the prime targets—the most convinced, and therefore the most exploitable.

The pattern suggests that the "official inquiries" reported by these respondents were not requests for information, but tests of discretion. The Agency was likely monitoring whether these experts would leak the contact to their peers or keep the secret of the government's interest. The fact that the CIA archived a survey tracking these contacts proves the interest was counter-intelligence: the Agency was mapping the beliefs and networks of the psi community to ensure they controlled the perimeter of the research.

The desk's reading is that the operational research—the actual testing of psychic weaponry—existed in a separate, non-overlapping classification track, far removed from the $17,000 budgets of the university labs. The academics were the camouflage; the survey was the ledger. The experts who thought they were helping the U.S. catch up to the Soviets were actually being indexed as potential assets in a program that viewed them as tools, not colleagues.

Four Experts and the CIA's 1978 Map of the Psychic Mind

The Soviet and Czechoslovakian Threat

The $17,000 Median

The Knock on the Door

The Recruitment Map

Sources