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-Short Attention Span Theater-

Psychics 'hired to find Bin Laden'

2007-02-24

Psychics were recruited by the Ministry of Defence to locate Osama Bin Laden's secret lair, it was claimed yesterday.

I knew that. It all came to me in a dream one night.

Newly declassified documents revealed that the MoD conducted an experiment to see if volunteers could 'see' objects hidden inside an envelope. It is claimed the ministry hoped positive results would allow it to use psychics to 'remotely view' Bin Laden's base and also to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. However, after running up a bill of £18,000 of taxpayers' money, defence chiefs concluded there was 'little value' in using psychic powers in the defence of the nation and the research was taken no further.

£18,000 is pretty cheap. Maybe they shoulda spent some real money and hired some good psychics.

The study, conducted in 2002, involved blindfolding test subjects and asking them to 'see' the contents of sealed brown envelopes containing pictures of objects and public figures. The MoD tried to recruit 12 'known' psychics who advertised their abilities on the Internet, but when they all refused

The old "after-the-fact clairvoyance" dodge was it?

they were forced to use 'novice' volunteers. The report, released under the Freedom of Information Act, shows 28 per cent of those tested managed to guess the contents of the envelopes, which included pictures of a knife, Mother Teresa and an 'Asian individual'.

Fu Manchu? Chairman Mao? Tojo?

But most subjects, who were holed up in a secret location for the study, were hopelessly off the mark. One even fell asleep while he tried to focus on the envelope's content.

A former MoD employee who received a copy of the report said the timing of the study must have been related to military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nick Pope, who ran the MoD UFO research programme and worked at the ministry for 21 years, said: "It can only be speculation, but you don't employ that kind of time and effort to find money down the back of the sofa. You go to this trouble for high-value assets. We must be talking about Bin Laden and weapons of mass destruction."

The MoD last night defended its decision to fund the secret tests despite the questionable use of taxpayers' money. And Mr Pope said: "I don't think this was a waste of public money. Many people will say so, but I think it is marvellous that the Government is prepared to think outside the box. "And this is as outside the box as it gets."

Posted by:Fred

#11 Mine 6th sense only works on bad things (my father's death, girlfriend's brother's death, the flight that went down in NYC in October '01) I'd prefer winning lotto numbers, myself...

Posted by: IG-88 2007-02-24 22:52

#10 If there was someone out there who could find where Bin Laden was hiding using psychic abilities, I'm sure they would have collected that $25million by now.

"He's dead, Jim".

Posted by: twobyfour 2007-02-24 20:55

#9 I have a sporadic "sixth-sense", but it only works with MY future, and with people very close to me. It's saved my life (and my family's) a couple of times, but it wouldn't be of much use to the government. It's also totally unpredictable - it works when it works, period. If there was someone out there who could find where Bin Laden was hiding using psychic abilities, I'm sure they would have collected that $25million by now.

Posted by: Old Patriot 2007-02-24 18:31

#8 A good summary, Anonymoose.

Posted by: twobyfour 2007-02-24 18:25

#7 I found #1 rather interesting.

Posted by: Free Radical 2007-02-24 18:06

Carrie White was unavailable for comment.

Posted by: doc 2007-02-24 18:04

#5
#1 bandwidth

Posted by: Clomoger Elmains2941 2007-02-24 15:27

#4 Cheater. You used Google Earth.

Posted by: Anonymoose 2007-02-24 13:18

#3 I know exactly where he is and for $1,000,000.00 I will tell them he's on Planet Earth.

Posted by: CrazyFool 2007-02-24 11:19

#2 He's to the east , up a bit from there , left now ,turn 180 degrees , walk 100 yards , turn left up that path and he's now on your right in that mud hut with 3 goats ..

£18,000 please , cash . cos i predict a cheque would bounce

Posted by: MacNails 2007-02-24 11:13

#1 In past it has been pointed out that the way "psychic research" has been conducted is almost as if they are trying to not find psychics.

To start with, there are two types of ability, the "adepts" and the "trained". If psychic ability was reciting the alphabet, adepts would be masters of the letter 'k', but they would have no idea about the rest of the alphabet, how the letter 'k' relates to anything else, or even how to regularly invoke the letter 'k'. Unpredictably, out of the blue, they shout the letter 'k!'. That is all.

So adepts are pretty useless. The "trained", however, know the letters 'a' through 'g', in their approximate order, but their ability is so pragmatic and obvious that it is overlooked, even by themselves.

The next problem is that from infancy, people are trained to not muck around with "extraneous" information, for survival reasons. It is a dangerous world, and if you are not paying attention, distracted by something else, you might get eaten by a tiger.

Well, not so much anymore, but we still train for it, and teach our children some highly effective techniques to block out non-standard information.

Then, an important distinction is whether the information that psychics get is "narrow" or "wide" bandwidth. Narrow bandwidth is like telepathy, exact data transfer, but with terrible error checking. Wide bandwidth is like empathy, seeing the forest, but not the trees.

If you want to find people who lean towards telepathy, find a dozen who impatiently complete your sentences when you're talking with them. They can be pretty close to what you were going to say, but they will usually be just a tad off on your exact wording.

People who are more empathic have no clue what you are thinking, but pick up on what your overall mood is. But people give off all sorts of conflicting signals, so empaths are prone to misinterpretation. They can be pretty good with 'intuition', however.

If I was going to get a bunch of good candidates for psychic training, I would visit martial arts schools and find people who have developed some skill, but obviously aren't fighters--just not designed for it.

Posted by: Anonymoose 2007-02-24 11:01

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