Extrasensory Perception (ESP)

Extrasensory perception (ESP) is the purported ability to acquire information about external events or other people’s mental states through channels other than the recognised human senses, encompassing phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition. One of the most sustained programmes of formal investigation into ESP was conducted by J. B. Rhine, formerly of Duke University, who ran and compounded simple statistical probability card tests over roughly thirty years¹. According to Journeys Out of the Body, Rhine’s card tests proved to his own satisfaction that ESP is a fact², though his results were regarded dubiously and were largely unacceptable to the majority of psychologists and psychiatrists in the United States at the time³.

ESP also drew the attention of US intelligence and military agencies during the Cold War. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the United States Army and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) recruited people who claimed to have ESP to help uncover intelligence secrets⁴, against a backdrop in which the Soviet Union, including the KGB, was spending millions of dollars every year on extrasensory perception phenomena⁵. The CIA’s own ESP work concluded in the late 1970s, after which the programme moved to the United States Army’s base at Maryland Fort Meade⁶. Harold E. Puthoff, an engineer who conducted ESP research for the CIA, later worked as a contractor for the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP)⁷. The Stanford Research Institute psychic spy program at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) was created during the Project MKUltra period because Russia was experimenting with extrasensory perception⁸. Ed Dames said that he and the other members of a five-person prototype team became better remote viewers than some of the better natural psychics in the world⁹.

ESP has also been proposed as an alternative explanation for phenomena more commonly interpreted as evidence of survival after death. Alan Gauld said that, when pushed to its limits, a preferred counter-hypothesis to the survival hypothesis is that a medium’s information can be explained by ESP exercised by living persons, sometimes called the super-ESP hypothesis¹⁰. Gauld also said that he knew of no instance of undeniable telepathy between living persons, or any other variety of ESP, in which the flow of paranormally acquired information was as quick, copious and free from error as in the sittings of the medium Leonora E. Piper¹¹. According to Surviving Death, Erlendur Haraldsson and Ian Stevenson considered it not feasible to attribute all the information in the case of Runolfur Runolfsson (“Runki”) to any single person or written source, whether the medium acquired it normally or by extrasensory perception¹². The same source states that human beings are held to have extraordinary mental abilities, called psi (psychic functioning), interchangeable with ESP, that science cannot explain but that have been documented by legitimate scientists for many years¹³.

ESP is likewise weighed as an alternative to reincarnation in cases such as that of James Leininger. Leslie Kean said that she considers the evidence points toward Leininger actually remembering and reliving a previous existence rather than acquiring information through ESP¹⁴. Stephen Braude said that explaining the Leininger case in terms of psi alone would require positing either implausibly successful ESP links between Leininger and multiple sources, or even more incredible psi on the part of his parents involving both information gathering and telepathic influence over him¹⁵. Braude also said that he considers it reasonable to interpret out-of-body experiences as imagery-rich manifestations of ESP¹⁶. Laura Lynne Jackson grew up with natural psychic abilities, including an exceptional perception of people’s energies and an ESP she seemed to have been born with¹⁷.