Yu 8nihua and the Air Force's "Seventh Sense"
By Eleanor Voss ·
Six children were subjected to military tests to see if they could read through lead and plastic, a project the CIA tracked as a news clipping for decades before its release in 2000.
Six children were plucked from their villages and schools to serve as biological sensors for a military that believed it had discovered a new law of physics. They were treated not as students or citizens, but as hardware, tested for their ability to penetrate lead and plastic with their minds.
This is a record of a pursuit that the CIA kept in a file until August 11, 2000, when it was finally approved for release. It is a news clipping, a piece of open-source intelligence that describes a program run by the Air Force, the military branch responsible for aerial warfare and strategic reconnaissance, which had pivoted its attention toward the human cranium.
The Tussle and the Cigarettes
Yu 8nihua, the first of the children to surface with the power, did not find his gift in a laboratory. The public record establishes that his discovery occurred during a walk from school with his friend Xiaiming, a peer who was present when Yu first realized he could perceive the hidden. During a tussle, Yu's ear brushed Xiaiming's coat pocket and two Chinese characters "sprang into my mind" (CIA-RDP96-00792R000300420005-4). When Xiaiming produced a pack of cigarettes, the brand name matched exactly what Yu had seen through the fabric.
Yu spent the following months in a mountain village, treating his ability as a parlor game, challenging others to write on paper, crumple it into a ball, and hide it. He claims he "guessed right every time" (CIA-RDP96-00792R000300420005-4). This was the spark that brought the Air Force into the room. The military didn't just want to verify the trick; they wanted to quantify a capability they termed the "seventh sense," a power they believed exceeded the "sixth sense" of ESP that others possess to a lesser degree.
The connection here is a classic trajectory of military recruitment: a chance discovery of a biological anomaly is immediately institutionalized. Yu 8nihua was the chronological precursor, the proof of concept that justified the Air Force's subsequent sweep for other children. Once the Air Force validated Yu, they stopped looking for accidents and started looking for subjects.
The Armpit and the Plastic Container
By the time the Air Force expanded its research, they had assembled a gallery of children who could do what the record claims "even Superman can't" (CIA-RDP96-00792R000300420005-4). Among them was Jiang Yan, a nine-year-old child who could see through lead. They found Luc W Leg Bin, an eleven-year-old girl who could see through a plastic container.
The tests were designed to be foolproof, or so the Air Force believed. For Luc W Leg Bin, the military took a piece of paper with the English words "typewriter" and "perception," rolled them into balls, and placed them in her right armpit (CIA-RDP96-00792R000300420005-4). Despite the fact that she did not read English, Luc wrote out the words "perception" and "typewriter" exactly.
Other children were brought into the fold to fill out the data set. Xion Jie, a twelve-year-old girl from Wuhan, was used to copy messages. Men Hong, a child from Changrhou, was tested on his ability to read words on paper slipped into various locations. The Air Force was no longer testing for a psychic phenomenon; they were testing the limits of a biological radar system, attempting to determine if these children could beam rays "10 million times stronger than radiation" (CIA-RDP96-00792R000300420005-4).
The line between these children is not one of kinship or geography, but of utility. Each child represented a different frequency of penetration—lead, plastic, fabric. The Air Force was mapping a spectrum, treating these children as a set of diverse sensors to be calibrated against one another.
The Only Adult in the Room
While the program focused on the young, there was one anomaly in the subject pool: Mou Feng Piety. The public record identifies her as a 25-year-old woman and the sole adult subject in the Air Force's research. Her history is a study in the social cost of the anomaly. She claims she discovered her power as a child, but her parents, fearing "some sort of witchcraft," forced her to keep the ability secret (CIA-RDP96-00792R000300420005-4).
Mou Feng Piety was used to see if the "seventh sense" could be maintained into adulthood. The military had her "read" five pieces of paper placed on different parts of her body. The fact that she is the only adult mentioned in the entire record is a glaring void.
If the record is shaped the way it looks, the desk's reading is that the Air Force believed this power was a developmental window. The focus on children—aged nine, eleven, and twelve—compared to a single twenty-five-year-old suggests a hypothesis that the "seventh sense" is a biological trait that closes upon maturity. Mou Feng Piety was not a primary subject; she was the control group, the evidence of what happens when the window shuts.
A Diagnostic of Gullibility
There is a profound irony in the way this story survived. We do not have a technical manual from the Air Force or a series of internal memos on the physics of the seventh sense. We have a news clipping. The CIA did not archive a signal intercept or a spy's report; they archived a sensationalist article that compares Chinese children to Superman.
The pattern suggests the CIA's primary interest was not the validity of the psychic powers, but the analysis of the Chinese military's institutional gullibility. By filing this clipping, the CIA was documenting the fact that the Chinese Air Force was wasting resources on pseudoscience. The "seventh sense" was not a threat to be countered, but a symptom of a military leadership that had lost its grip on empirical reality.
However, the desk's reading is that while the CIA was laughing at the absurdity, the children were paying the price. The record is entirely silent on what happened to Yu 8nihua, Jiang Yan, Luc W Leg Bin, Xion Jie, and Men Hong after the tests ended. There is no mention of them being returned to their families or returning to school. Given the involvement of the Air Force as the sole conducting entity, the pattern indicates these children were not released, but were transitioned into a closed military program for cognitive exploitation.
If a full release of these files exists, it would not show the physics of a seventh sense. It would show a list of subjects who disappeared from their villages into a black site, managed by a military that believed it could weaponize the mind. The redacted gaps in the broader CIA collection on this era are not protecting a secret science; they are protecting the record of a failed experiment in human exploitation. The children were the cost of a military's desire to believe in the impossible, and the CIA's archive is the cold ledger of that delusion.