Tag Archives: cleve-backster

Psychic Spies – The CIA Quest for the Ultimate Intelligence Weapon

Posted on June 25, 2026 by | Leave a comment

Reference: The History of Mind Control In America

During the rise and development of CIA MK Ultra–related mind-control cults examined here—from the Manson Family in 1969 to Jim Jones’ People’s Temple in 1978—the Military Industrial Intelligence Complex (MIIC) also explored other areas of the mind. No subject seemed out of bounds in the quest for the answer to mass mind control. It funded and embedded itself in leading psychological movements of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including those associated with Carl Rogers and B.F. Skinner. It also investigated New Age and parapsychology movements, driven by what amounted to a mind-over-matter Red Scare.

By the mid-1960s, the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) were alarmed by reports that the Soviet Union was developing psychic powers as a way to bypass conventional defenses. They feared Soviet psychics might infiltrate the MIIC. Intelligence reports suggested the Soviets were using telepathy, psychokinesis, mental influence, and related phenomena for espionage. By 1970, the MIIC began efforts to close the perceived “mind gap” with the Russians.

The CIA had explored psychic phenomena for three decades through MK Ultra mind-control research but had dismissed the field as unscientific and irrelevant to its main aim: controlling individuals and groups. However, as intelligence increasingly indicated that the Soviets had spent decades researching psychic phenomena and were using psychics in intelligence operations, the CIA launched a program in 1970 to catch up.

In July 1972, the DIA published a then-classified, detailed assessment of Soviet mind-research achievements. Twenty pages focused on parapsychology, or psychic research. The report, Controlled Offensive Behavior USSR, stated: “The Soviet Union is well aware of the benefits and applications of parapsychology research. In 1963, a Kremlin edict apparently gave top priority to biological research, which in Russia includes parapsychology…Today it is reported that the USSR has twenty or more centers for the study of parapsychological phenomena…”

The MIIC’s motives for taking up research of its own in this field was both defensive and offensive including the potential creation of “mass hypnosis or mind control through long-distance telepathy” (Pg. 26)

 With predictable MIIC cold-war-level paranoia, the report warns:

“The individuals who have studied these effects…have suggested that since these bodies (astral) can travel unlimited distances and are able to pass through solid material (walls), they might well be used to produce instant death in military and civilian officials.” (Pg. 29)

The report is full of comical claims to those studied in the world of confirmed psychic or parapsychological phenomena. For instance, it suggests that hypnotism might be the route to creating predictable out of body abilities; when research would demonstrate quite the opposite: those who were proven to leave the body at will were so alert in the present as to be in the 180-degree opposite state to hypnosis.

Buried in the report was one assessment that turned out to be a more measured, accurate prophecy of what its own research would confirm: “…there is great danger that within the next ten years the Soviets will be able to steal our top secrets by using out-of-body-spies.” (pg. 30)

The report notes, “It is a known fact the Soviet Union takes the appearance of luminous bodies very seriously as evidenced by the Kirlian photography of the human body’s aura.” (Pg. 29) Four pages are devoted to this subject. It is a form of photography invented by Semyon and Valentina Kirlian. It purports to show the energy aura that surrounds the body. That to some new age philosophies represents the astral body – the spiritual entity and its energy that animates, but is not imprisoned by, the body. Others, such as Scientology would posit that the spiritual being (called Thetan) is thoroughly separate from the body and also able to produce the energy that animates and surrounds the body. (Why Scientology’s view is important will become evident as we continue). 

The DIA report concludes, “In view of what the human mind has demonstrated it can do with organic matter, and in view of the very real Soviet threat in this sector, the science of parapsychology should be investigated to its fullest potential, perhaps to the benefit of national defense.” (pg. 30)

By the time the comprehensive report was published the investigation had already begun in earnest by the CIA. The report’s emphasis on Kirlian photography may have belied that fact.  

The New York Psychic Scene

By 1971, the CIA had embedded agents into the thriving parapsychological psychic world of New York City. For decades the wealthy of New York supported and used psychics to entertain guests in their parlors. In July of that year, America’s most skilled psychic Ingo Swann was invited to the center of the NYC psychic scene, the apartment of mystic Zelda Suplee. It was there that Swann performed a mystical act never before accomplished. Visiting Kirlian photographer Bert McCann asked Swann to project energy in a particular place; inferring he choose an area of the body to so project spiritual energy toward. Instead, Swann said that he would post the energy a few feet above his head. Sure enough, when the film developed it showed a halo-like aura some distance above Swann’s head. Word rapidly spread across the psychic community that a new psychic wizard had arrived. 

Cleve Backster was a “former” CIA agent working overtime for acceptance into Psychic/New Age circles in New York in the nineteen-sixties. His lifetime expertise was operation of the polygraph, also known as the lie detector. He gained notoriety for publishing a paper claiming to demonstrate with his device that plants could experience emotion and react to human intentions. See, Life Force vs. Chemicals, for background on Backster having copied (without public attribution) previous research of Scientology Founder L. Ron Hubbard using his own Electro psychometer. 

Coincidentally, only a few short weeks after Swann had taken Kirlian photography to another level, Backster wound up at Zelda Suplee’s for a psychic get together that introduced Backster to the man of the hour, Ingo Swann. Backster invited Swann to his offices to participate in further plant/human interaction experiments. Given the MIIC fascination with Kirlian photography in the contemporaneous DIA report, perhaps the teaming of Swann and Backster was not so coincidental. Swann wound up spending many days over the next several months performing psychic acts for Backster to confirm on his polygraph, mainly by projecting intention toward plants. 

During this research Backster told Swann that ‘the CIA had been trying to replicate his plant work and that he had personally taught many of them improved polygraph techniques.’ (The Real Story of Remote Viewing  Ingo Swann, available in PDF form at Ingoswann.com/works). When Swann proved to Backster that his intentions and thoughts projected through space to plants registered on Backster’s polygraph, the latter exclaimed, “Boy, are the guys down at the CIA going to be interested in you.” (ibid.)

It was during early 1972 at Backster’s lab that Swann would later claim he first heard of the work of laser physicist Harold “Hal” Puthoff who was doing research on life force at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. While Puthoff was contemplating somehow measuring and better defining life energy, Backster told Swann that what Puthoff should really be doing is attempting to confirm the abilities of psychics like Swann.  He encouraged Swann to reach out to Puthoff. (Swann bio, ibid)

Puthoff and Backset shared intelligence backgrounds. The former worked for the National Security Agency (NSA) and in Naval Intelligence. While there apparently is no public record of what Puthoff’s intelligence work entailed (Puthoff did not respond to two written requests to clarify matters) we have discovered exactly what Backster’s Military Intel and OSS/CIA work consisted of.

Backster and CIA Mind Control

Backster skated through his 15-year flirtation with the parapsychology/psychic New Age community by claiming he had only a brief and dull, “polygraph expert” connection with the CIA ending in 1950. A review of his archives housed at the Special Collections library of the University of West Georgia  (UWG)* tells a far different story. 

In 1947 Backster was given a letter of recommendation from the Brigadier General in charge of the Army’s Counterintelligence Corps. It was a commendation for having devoted ”considerable effort toward development of classified techniques in interrogation.” (see UWG, Dec 17, 1947 letter) That Backster’s work overlapped with CIA Operations Bluebird, Artichoke and MK Ultra (see Deep State and Scientology, CIA vs. L. Ron Hubbard) was made clear in a Sept 15, 1947 recommendation by the “Chief of Interrogation Section”:

“I have personally witnessed various research problems conducted by Mr. Backster in sub-conscious isolation…The implanting or erasure of information from the mind: the recall, through the sub-conscious, of forgotten facts or information; and the ability of causing wanted information to be divulged are of inestimable value in espionage penetration or intelligence work…I do not hesitate in recommending Mr. Backster in such fields of endeavor…” (see UWG, Sept 15, 1947 letter)

Backster himself described the techniques he helped develop, called subconscious isolation (SI) in a report dated April 21, 1948:

“In this procedure instead of attempting to extract information from the conscious mind, the interrogator proceeds to break down conscious resistance, and thus gain control of the subconscious mind…One of the common techniques is the application of drugs that will paralyze the conscious will to resist…The state of “SI” can be established and terminated without any knowledge of the person involved…The writer of this report has accumulated his knowledge over a seven year research period. This research has involved the actual infliction of the state of “SI” on hundreds of subjects. Detailed interrogations have been conducted. Classified information has been extracted.” See UWG, April 21, 1948 document)

Backster’s UWG archives include personal holiday greetings from the CIA’s original director of Security Operations, Sheffield Edwards. (see UWG Edwards note 1, note 2) He was deeply involved in Mind Control Operations Bluebird, Artichoke, and MK Ultra. At the time that Backster was making headway into the psychic community, Edwards was busy attempting to covertly assassinate Fidel Castro, including by poisoning and then by contracting hits through the mafia. (see, Edwards at Grokipedia)  During Bluebird and Artichoke, Edwards personally commended Backster for his contributions. (see UWG May 13, 1949 commendation).

That covers the common backgrounds of Cleve Backster and Hal Puthoff.  It so happened that Puthoff also shared an important experience with Ingo Swann. And it was this relationship that almost killed the MIIC’s quest to win the Psychic Spy race with the USSR. 

———————————-

*Special recognition is due to University of West Georgia Ingram Library Special Collections. Those folks had the foresight to choose the papers of both Ingo Swann and Cleve Backster for preservation. We will be citing and sharing UWG collections papers multiple times in the next several articles.

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Life Force vs. Chemicals

Posted on January 29, 2026 by | Leave a comment

References:

The Deep State and Scientology

The CIA vs. L. Ron Hubbard

The Cult of Intelligence

This Deep State and Scientology series began by establishing the Cult of Intelligence’s early and visceral need to eliminate L. Ron Hubbard and his established subjects of Dianetics and Scientology. In his 1951 book Science of Survival, Hubbard had disclosed the CIA and Military Intelligence unlawful mind control experiments on unwitting Americans. Worse, Dianetics procedure uncovered the fact and cured the damage inflicted (see The CIA vs. L. Ron Hubbard).  From the outset Dianetics and Scientology processes were virtually the reverse of establishment Mental Health and its Cult of Intelligence bosses (see Military Industrial Mind Control, documenting the post World War II merger of the military and ‘mental health’).

As Hubbard evolved Dianetics and Scientology, and MK Ultra probed the depths of how to “abolish consciousness” (MK Ultra Subproject 2), the diametric opposition of the deep state vs. L. Ron Hubbard intensified.

By the mid 1950’s the conflicting purposes of Hubbard vs. Intelligence-controlled, established psychiatry came into sharp focus around a simple electronic device.

The artifact is generally known as the Galvanic Skin Response meter (GSR).  Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West, the CIA MK Ultra doctor later tasked with destroying Hubbard and his Scientology movement, and organized psychiatry referred to it as an integral component of the lie detector. Hubbard called his version of the device the Electro-Psychometer (the E-Meter).  He referred to it in opposite terms than the psychiatrist, also calling it a truth detector.

The psychiatrists took the reductionist view that the meter detected chemical processes within the body. This is consistent with reductionist ‘science’ which for several hundred years – and to this day – attempts to reduce all forces and energies to physical universe matter. You know, the theory that says all mis-emotion and psychological disturbance is a chemical imbalance, to be ‘remedied’ by ingestion of drugs. Materialists still maintain this crude explanation, despite its flying in the face of subsequent discoveries in quantum mechanics (See e.g., The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra).  Hubbard took the opposite, vitalism view, that the meter was affected by life force – that is the energy created by the spirit, elan vital, inhabiting the body. 

Significantly, a study of the meter’s namesake Luigi Galvani reveals the age-old struggle Hubbard found himself up against, life force (elan vital, the spirit) vs. chemicals, or vitalism vs. reductionist materialism. Galvani’s story was the 18th Century chapter of science burying evidence of the spirit or life force. Galvani had discovered that a being created electrical force to aid in body movement and healing processes. Consensus opted to discredit Galvani’s view. Alesandro Volta offered the alternative explanation that the forces Galvani observed were explained by the interaction of different chemicals. As “science” was funded by industry bankers – who accumulated money not by truth but instead by marketability of physical universe goods, naturally Volta won the ‘consensus’ that did and does often constitute accepted “science.”  Thus, even today “science” says the GSR measures chemical changes registered through perspiration. For a deeper history on Galvani vs. Volta and the centuries-long suppression of evidence of spirit in science, see CROSS CURRENTS: The Promise of Electromedicine, Dr. Robert O. Becker, Penguin 1990).

Hubbard described how the E-Meter projected an imperceptible electric current through the body – on the order of magnitude of Galvani’s life force – and could detect impedance in the created circuit caused by thoughts interjected by the participant. It could also be explained as disruption in an electric field created and measured by the meter. In either event, a competent E-Meter operator can prove to anyone in less than a minute that without variance the E-Meter reads on thought projected by the participant. I have done so to the silent astonishment (or perhaps chagrin) of Scientology antagonists from the founder of CBS 60 Minutes to the Editor of the New York Times.   

For more than thirty years, Hubbard worked with electronics engineers to calibrate his E-Meter to react as closely as possible to thought, distinguishing its signal from the noise of other bio-electric processes. Others carried on the process for another 40 years so that now the Scientology E-Meter bears little resemblance to the GSR component of the crude lie detector of ‘science.’  With the aid of the E-Meter, Dianetics and Scientology sought to clear the mind of pains associated with physical and emotional injuries of the past. The idea was to locate moments of pain, release them of the detectable electrical charge they imposed on the mind and body, and thus clear the mind and free the will of the individual. Hubbard described the process in hundreds of lectures and dozens of books as a reversal of hypnotic effect.

Conversely, West and his CIA MK Ultra brethren used the GSR to measure pain inflicted on the body in the quest to capture the mind and will of the individual. Thus, West requisitioned a GSR, in the form of “polygraph” as part of his “psychophysiogical (sic) laboratory” where he would measure “noxious stimulation” inflicted on drug and hypnosis subjects. See attached 1956 West report and proposal to CIA poisoner in chief Sidney Gottlieb (see page 9 of REPORT ON RESEARCH IN HYPNOSIS). 

Clearly the cult of intelligence understood the significance of Hubbard’s work and evolution. They already were acutely aware of the fact that even without the aid of the E-Meter he could and did uncover the harms the CIA was committing against human research subjects.  Imagine their alarm when reckoning what else Hubbard might find out with the aid of the E-Meter. Consequently, the CIA spearheaded a multi-agency effort (including Army, Air Force and Navy intelligence), across several international governments, to stop L. Ron Hubbard in his tracks. 

But, it wasn’t enough to simply destroy Hubbard. The agency simultaneously attempted to steal the man’s discoveries. This was evidenced by the activities of its one-time employee and longtime informant Cleve Backster. Mr. Backster was an acknowledged expert on the polygraph (lie detector). He hung around the spiritualist community evidenced by his claim that he met L. Ron Hubbard at a function surrounding parapsychologist J.B. Rhine in the late forties. In 1967 Backster became famous when he published a paper that detailed experiments that he performed with plants using the GSR meter (Evidence of a Primary Perception in Plant Life, International Journal of Parapsychology). According to Mr. Backster his work demonstrated that plants have measurable feelings. It became the genesis of a cultural phenomenon recognizing new dimensions about life force. A very popular book followed, The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Thompkins and Christopher Bird.  A subsequent documentary by the same title featured a soundtrack created by Stevie Wonder.

Backster’s use of the crude ‘lie detector’ GSR component became the parapsychology/spiritualist standard diagnostic and experimental tool and continues to be until now. Ironically, during the ensuing decades, while improving upon that ill-tuned device, Hubbard’s E-Meter was smeared by the state-controlled corporate media as a “crude lie detector.”

Neither Backster, the CIA, nor any of those involved in creating a movement around Backster’s alleged discovery ever mentioned an embarrassing detail: The experiments Backster presented as groundbreaking had already been done and publicized nearly a decade before by L. Ron Hubbard. Of course, in keeping with the agency’s decades-long campaign to discredit Hubbard, his experiments were written off as some sort of kooky hoax. See for example, CIA-influenced Time/Life publication’s branding the E-meter as one of the “dumbest inventions.” (note, it is dated a year after Backster’s celebrated “discovery”, and ten years after the date of the photo displayed and the experiments conducted by Hubbard).

The deep state went so far as to attempt to ban the E-Meter in America through litigation spanning nearly the entire sixties. It backfired on the lead agency, the Food and Drug Administration, as even Time magazine was forced to acknowledge (Appeals: Victory for the Scientologists | TIME).  However, it kept Hubbard distracted while his discoveries were hijacked.

When much of the dust had cleared, even Cleve Backster acknowledged privately that which nobody was apparently willing to admit publicly. Until recently the evidence lay quietly in the archives of the University of West Georgia. There sat a 1976 letter from Backster to a Scientology staff member. In it, he acknowledges Hubbard’s precedence: ‘His interest in plants also appears to have preceded my extensive involvement since February 1966.’ (Cleve Backster letter) This concession, buried in cordial correspondence, highlights the overlap—and the lack of crediting—in their work.

It is quite possible Backster himself had created sufficient distance from the CIA so that he truly wished to give credit where credit was due. However, this would not be the last time the CIA would rob from L. Ron Hubbard while beseeching the media and other government agencies to destroy him. Stay tuned.

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , ,