Grill Flame Scientific Evaluation Committee

The Grill Flame Scientific Evaluation Committee, chaired by Manfred Gale of the Army staff and known in the program as the Gale Committee, reported in December 1979 on the Defense Department's parapsychology work: the SRI remote-viewing research, the psychokinesis contract of the Army Missile Command (MICOM) at Redstone Arsenal, the replication trials of the Army Materiel Systems Analysis Activity at Aberdeen Proving Ground, and the INSCOM unit at Fort Meade (Grill Flame). "In June 1979 it was suggested by Dr. LaBerge, then Under Secretary of the Army, that a Scientific Evaluation Committee be appointed to review the Army's parapsychological activities. In early July 1979, Dr. Ruth Davis recommended that because of the special interest of the Secretary of Defense, that the Committee review the total DOD posture and report directly to the GRILL FLAME Oversight Committee." Its mission was "to review the parapsychological research, investigations, and applications within DOD and the intelligence community," "to assess the validity of claims made for the alleged existence of the PSI phenomena," and "to recommend a course of action for DOD." Members "were carefully screened to avoid any persons with preconceived notions for or against the subject under investigation"; "since 1972, the combined funding for DOD and the intelligence community was less than a total of $1.5M." The report's security guide stated that "all connection between official U.S. Government interest or participation in the generic field of Parapsychology is classified a minimum of SECRET, caveat NO FOREIGN DISSEMINATION," and that "future security planning for GRILL FLAME includes making it totally a special access program."¹

Membership and Visits

The roster printed as annex 1: Douglas Tang, chief of biostatistics and mathematics at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research; Colonel Harry Holloway, professor and chairman of psychiatry at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences; W. Frank Cartwright of the Naval Weapons Center, China Lake; Richard Montgomery, consultant; Jesse Orlansky of the science and technology division of the Institute for Defense Analyses; Harry Snyder, professor of industrial engineering and operations research at Virginia Tech; Major General (retired) Laddie Stahl, consultant; Major William Stoner of the Army staff (DAMI-ISH), coordinator; and Gale (DAMA-ZD), chairman. The vote recorded in the report is of eight; Gale's distribution memorandum of January 1980 speaks of "the seven Committee members" apart from himself. The committee visited the Combat Developments Experimentation Command at Fort Ord on July 23, 1979, SRI on July 24 and 25 (Russell Targ, Hal Puthoff, Charles Tart), Redstone Arsenal on July 26, the National Security Council at the Executive Office Building on August 1, CIA headquarters on September 4, Princeton University and Bell Labs at Holmdel on September 8 (Robert Jahn and Robert Lucky), DIA on September 26 (Jack Vorona), INSCOM at Fort Meade on September 28 (Murray Watt), AMSAA on November 6, Lawrence Livermore (R. S. Hawke) and the Foreign Technology Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, with a final executive session at the Pentagon on December 10.¹²

The Chronology

The report's own history, which it said was "not attributable to the Committee's action," ran from the SRI work of 1971 through Ingo Swann's magnetometer trial of 1972 and Pat Price's readings of 1973 to 1975: the West Virginia site, where Price "spoke out classified codewords he 'read' from file folders"; the Urals crane, of which "CIA analysts concluded that either Remote Viewing had taken place, or Price had intimate knowledge of the URDF-3"; the embassy code rooms; an in-house CIA trial of the fall of 1974 that produced "what could only be a SA-5 missile training site" in Libya; and the guerrilla training site of July 1975, "the same month Price tragically died of a heart attack." "Since July 1975, CIA interest has remained minimal and unofficial. The Agency claims to have stopped all work," the "primary reason for abandoning the effort" being, in a phrase the scan garbles, "of winning a 'Golden Fleece Award.'" On the Army side, MICOM let "a one-year $80K contract" in August 1977 "under the innocuous title, 'Investigation of Unconventional Discrimination Techniques'"; in July 1978 DIA "sponsored a series of four unique experiments" in which Swann, given the coordinates of "a Soviet strategic missile field east of Moscow," "passed through a silo cover, 'traveling' down until reaching a connecting tunnel," entering "a command and control room" whose "floors are paved in 'white tiles'"; in August 1978 Vorona chaired the first meeting toward "a coordinated DOD program"; INSCOM's selection criteria of the autumn of 1978 were "above average intelligence, outgoing personality, adventuresome, open-minded, mature, artistic nature, and successful life career." The Grill Flame steering committee first met on February 13, 1979, with "all Service ACSI's, Dr. Ruth Davis, Dr. LaBerge, and Dr. Vorona (standing in for LTG Tighe)." Of the Navy: "Suspicion lingers among Army project personnel that Navy may have nevertheless kept a tightly compartmented effort going. Navy representatives attend all DOD meetings, but remain uncommitted and literally silent." Funding to date: "CIA, 1972-78: $240K. DIA, 1979: $100K. USAF, 1976-79: $300K. Army, 1977-79: $490K."¹

Findings

"RV research and investigations thus far have not proved the existence of the phenomena and have not conclusively established any parametric dependencies. Many of the anecdotal events reported to this Committee as potential evidence of the existence of RV do not adequately sustain their claim under careful scrutiny. A few of the examples are subjectively spectacular, but lack of scientific procedures precludes their consideration as scientific evidence of the phenomena. On balance, the Committee has indeed been persuaded that there is some probability that effects attributed to the RV phenomena exist under unexplained circumstances and in conjunction with particular individuals. However, to date, the experimental techniques have not been adequate to document such effects." Of the programs: "Inadequate documentation and failure to apply adequate controls are the most frequent causes which limit the credibility that can be given to reports of 'success' attributed to RV applications. In the judgment of the Committee, sole dependence on SRI-like protocols to resolve the RV issue will not be fruitful"; "lack of proper management involvement, direction, and review was evident at all activities surveyed"; "operational programs, that by their very existence assume the reality of RV as given, may inadvertently establish the assumption in other communities that RV is real." "The Committee found no evidence or any suggestion of fraudulent intent in any of the work examined." Credible research would need "management commitment to a program which is sustained for an indefinite period of time at a cost of several million dollars per year." The MICOM psychokinesis work "will not prove or disprove the existence of the PK phenomena," whereas members who visited Hawke's laboratory at Livermore "were very impressed by the scientific approach." Intelligence on the Warsaw Pact was "admittedly, highly speculative," resting on "a document prepared by the U.S. Army Medical Intelligence and Information Agency" (the reference list gives Maire and LaMothe's DIA report of September 1975), a Garrett AiResearch literature review, and a recent report of "at least three and possibly more officially-sponsored research groups" in Moscow, Leningrad and Alma-Ata; "the reasons for frequent iron-curtain representatives at Parapsychological Conferences" might be "establishing contacts with selected attendees for intelligence purposes." Of the four proposed mechanisms (extremely low frequency electromagnetism, quantum correlation, the "extra-dimensional hypothesis" of Targ, Puthoff, May, Feinberg and Rauscher, and Walker's thermal noise), "none of these theories is sufficiently persuasive."¹

The SRI Chapter

Chapter 9 credited Puthoff and Targ with "a much greater acceptance in some quarters than have the many researchers who have preceded them" because "these researchers are trained and recognized as 'hard' scientists," and found the SCANATE results for Kerguelen Island and West Virginia "impressive... until one carefully considers the timing and the notion that each subject could have obtained the impressive detailed information during the day that ensued between the first and second 'readings.'" In the local-target series "subjects who were originally considered learners somehow became gifted," a category of "unselected volunteers" was "added due to sponsor criticism and pressure," and a target that was "an airplane simulator" in one report was "a complete machine shop" in another. A drawing of the San Andres airport, in the Costa Rica series, had been made by "one of the experimenters who substituted his time for that of" a subject; annex 10 adds that "the lack of repeated use of Targ as a Subject is thus supported, even though he provided an excellent response to the San Andres airport. (One must wonder why he wasn't used again in view of this highly accurate response!)" Its summary: "The only way that their concepts will be accepted by the scientific community is for non-reproachable experimenters to conduct similar research, using improved methods, without any possible intrusion by persons (such as Puthoff and Targ) having a vested interest in the results." Annex 8 took Puthoff's own paper "Potential Criticisms and Responses," nine criticisms with his replies, and found most "at least partially valid"; of SRI's use of "double-blind": "The word clearly does not apply in either the traditional, or in a meaningful, sense to the SRI protocol." Annex 9 found that the Morris ranking method used to score transcripts "only uses a portion of the data," in the nine-target case "only 11% of rankings." Chapter 9 and annexes 8 to 10 reproduce, sentence for sentence, the "Summary and Critical Evaluation of Research in Remote Viewing" delivered by Harry Snyder and Arlene Snyder of Blacksburg, Virginia, on June 1, 1979, under a contract whose sponsor that report does not name; Snyder was invited to join the committee on July 17, 1979, "in place of Dr. Hyman."¹

The Annexes on the Army Programs

Of AMSAA: "Examination of SRI findings by this Committee has not resulted in a finding that SRI has proven anything of military operational value... The SRI effort should be terminated for the convenience of the government. The current AMSAA effort should also be terminated." Of MICOM's proposed random-number replication, drawn from "SRI document dated August 1979 prepared by E. C. May, Ph.D.": "the proposed experiment by SRI has not been performed and has yielded neither positive nor negative results, ergo, replication is impossible." Of INSCOM: 251 personnel considered, 117 interviewed, "more than 90% of all those interviewed considered psychic phenomenon to be real," twelve candidates, six chosen by SRI in February 1979 and in training from April; "as of 1 Oct 79, more than 150 RV tests have been conducted at Fort Meade"; the unit "gauges how good individual sessions are based on strict operational judgments (how much usable intelligence is produced), in stark contrast to projects in other places which rely on exotic, often flawed, statistical methodologies"; the committee asked that personnel "be immediately stabilized for at least two years" and that "a general officer review of all OERs and EERs" protect their careers, and commended INSCOM "for its logical, level-headed, and professional approach to a most curious problem." The pages between annexes 5 and 7, whose heading is absent from the released copy, record the visit to Bell Labs, where Lucky, "the man who probably started the whole (serious) PSI debate" by publishing Targ and Puthoff in the Proceedings of the IEEE, "believes that SRI does not have a bona fide scientific approach," had run six trials in 1975 that were "for the most part failures" but "ambiguous," and "once proposed to Targ and Puthoff that they allow a 'debugger' like Randy the Magician to watch an SRI RV session. They refused on the grounds that no one believes them anyhow." Annex 7 called Hawke's acoustic-emission experiments "the most objective and scientific of the investigations we have reviewed" and proposed a cover: "A small development project on 'AE applications to guided missile fuzing' would provide easily administered and controlled PK experiments by Hawke."¹

Recommendations

Work to demonstrate the existence of remote viewing and psychokinesis "should be supported if a credible approach were to emerge; however, it may be preferable to do this in some other agency other than DOD in order to more readily conduct the work in an open forum." Research to characterize the phenomena "should not be sponsored until existence is established." On operations "the Committee was divided," and "the majority (5 out of 8) believed that operationally-oriented RV activities aimed at determining the empirical value of RV to intelligence (like those at INSCOM) should continue," provided the work "be monitored by an oversight committee that can review the work for its adequacy and guard against self-fulfilling prophecy," that "dependence on SRI approach should be phased out," and that "the attaining of useful data should not necessarily be attributed to the reality of RV phenomena." The AMSAA and MICOM work "should be discontinued and terminated in the most cost-effective manner"; the intelligence community "should continue their collection efforts in this field in order to avoid any surprises"; and "a central DOD authority should be established to manage and fund the parapsychological program." The minority opinion of Orlansky, Holloway and Tang: "A minority of the Committee believes that a test program in an operation-like environment is not likely to provide useful or reliable data. We see little to be gained by recommending operational tests. Such tests can also be dangerous. By encouraging the conduct of operational tests, this Committee endorses actions which have dubious scientific validity at best and can have dangerous implications for those, who may rely on its products."¹

An undated roster headed "Grill Flame Review Panel Members" gives Stahl at General Electric's corporate research and development in Schenectady, Montgomery as director of corporate development at R&D Associates in Marina del Rey, and Snyder as "Systemetrics, Inc. (VA Polytechnical Institute)." On July 17, 1979, the Under Secretary's office told Gale that "Dr. Orlansky has accepted. Dr. Snyder of VPI has been asked in place of Dr. Hyman - at this time he has not accepted the invitation," and forwarded "the memorandum from Ruth Davis on the Grill Flame Technical Review Group." Snyder had delivered his own critical evaluation of remote-viewing research six weeks earlier. On November 19, 1979, he wrote to Gale that he held "a minority viewpoint on the need for further, better, more-controlled R&D on RV," that "the major argument AGAINST seems to be the combination of notoriety, disbelief, incredulity, and loss of scientific reputation of the proponents," and that "to hide behind the cost cloak is, I think, convenient but invalid"; an unsigned paper of findings in the same file recommended terminating "efforts at MICOM, AMSAA, and FTD," "a coordinated program" at "the national level (e.g., NSC)," and "$3 million" a year for research. Watt's message from Fort Meade that month recorded Gale's assurance "that INSCOM would be provided with a copy of the team's report when it was finalized."⁶

The Reply

The Defense Department's Grill Flame committee, under Vorona of DIA, had heard on November 27, 1979, that the report "had not been completed"; one member "questioned the substantive expertise of the Gale Committee," and the group moved that Vorona "inform him of the working group's desire and need to see and be briefed on the Gale Committee's report prior to it being given to any other party or group," since "to do otherwise would be extremely hazardous as this group represents the collective expertise, experience and background of the entire DoD and Intelligence Community." On January 10, 1980, "Mr. Gale briefed the Grill Flame Committee on his committee's findings," and "Mr. Gale's briefing was not received favorably by the Grill Flame group. There were many substantive reservations based upon errors in both facts and analysis. The report was, in the view of the group, misleading and inadequate, in part because of ambiguity in language"; it was "suggested that General Tighe contact Dr. Laberge to obtain copies of the report and to stop any further distribution," and a subcommittee was appointed "to review the Gale report in depth." At the same meeting "CIA volunteered that no Agency funds were budgeted for FY 80, 81 or 82 on parapsychological research." Vorona's written comments supported the finding that "unexplained observations of human capabilities to generate data of potential utility to intelligence have been documented" and "strongly" disagreed with the recommendation to end the MICOM and AMSAA work, "based on a misinterpretation of these programs"; the "condemnation" of the SRI approach "is not understood or acceptable without further explanation"; and "many of the difficulties in the report, especially those of fact and incompleteness, could have been avoided if the report had been collectively reviewed in draft, rather than allowing only individual inputs."²³

Stoner's memorandum of conversation on Gale's briefing of January 14, 1980, charged that Gale "has, in briefing the report here and elsewhere, done a great deal of verbalizing (shading) issues, personal opinion, 'faction,' and general guesswork not contained anywhere in the report. Some of it is just plain misleading." Against Gale's "I rejected two people who had pronounced tendencies to be nonobjective": "One person himself declined the offer to participate, claiming potential flak from his corporation. The other, Dr Ray Hyman, was rejected not because of any action by Gale, but because of a protest memo from MG Thompson to Dr LaBerge." Quizzed by Thompson "on what the word 'proof' in the report findings meant," Gale answered "with a flurry of scientific buzzwords and jargon." Gale's figure of "over 5000 experiments" was "an unadulterated W.A.G."; his remark that "the Surgeon General is critical of the MICOM proposal" rested on "a cribbed copy of the Surgeon General's comments. Question I have is who gave it to him"; and "because of prior intelligence problems (e.g., LSD case) two members of the Surgeon General's review panel are dead set against this kind of work." "In my opinion the Gale report is big, but weak... By pushing to have the report quickly accepted by Dr LaBerge he will have an effective shield from tough questions and criticism." Gale "has gone far beyond that charter," "selling the report around the Pentagon," and "should be thanked by the DoD Steering Committee and allowed or told to quietly go his way." According to Stoner, Vorona had written to Tighe on January 11 urging that the report "be put on hold." On January 25 Gale asked Stoner to distribute 27 copies, LaBerge's "official copy by Monday, 28 Jan," with Stoner's office "designated as Office of Record for all reports." On February 6, 1980, the under secretary of defense, William Perry, restricted the use of Program 6 funds, since it was "not appropriate for Army to fund technology programs aimed at scientific demonstration of parapsychology."⁴⁵

SRI and the Committee

On August 3, 1979, Puthoff wrote to Gale on the committee's visit of July 24 and 25 that "there were certain aspects of the meeting, however, which we felt were unsatisfactory": of the four planned parts, "with the extended ad hoc discussions that took place during the opening presentation on historical material (Part 1) and the need to press on to a discussion of planned efforts on present client programs (Part 3), we all but skipped Part 2 on scientific questions (for example, none of the slides were shown)." He answered three objections voiced during the visit: the target pool "should be chosen and maintained by someone further removed from the experimentation," which "is in fact the procedure already in force," the interviewers "had never seen the target list until your committee asked that it be brought to the conference room"; guessing and cueing, which "the statistical procedure we use takes into account at the outset"; and the suggestion "to dispense with the interviewer," which "indicates a complete failure to comprehend" the protocol's "division of labor between remote viewer and interviewer designed to mirror the two primary modes of cerebral functioning." "It is incumbent on the committee members to obtain a more thorough grounding in the technical details than was possible in the few hours available," and he asked for "further discussions... in smaller groups," naming "Drs. Synder and Tang," enclosing copies of a new "Standard Remote Viewing (RV) Procedures: Local Sites" by Puthoff, Targ and Edwin May for every member and "for Maj. Gen. E. R. Thompson, Dr. Ruth Davis, and the Hon. Walter Laberge." The enclosure set out a 6x6 rank-order judging matrix and a "direct-count-of-permutations method" credited to C. Scott (1972), "constructed sufficiently conservatively so as to apply even in the limiting case in which the target pool is completely known a priori to all involved." One member, Cartwright of China Lake, wrote on October 2, 1979, to "Chairman, Grill Flame Committee" that "the RV phenomenon, if it exists, represents a catastrophic military deficiency if left unexploited," that "the expectation of an existence proof of psychic-physical interaction is a forlorn one," that "I am an Occam," and that at INSCOM "the use of double blind procedures, and other devices to insure scientific rigor does not, any longer, seem necessary. (The integrity of the personnel has been well enough established.)... I propose, in short, that anecdotal events be emphasized"; the MICOM psychokinesis experiments were "not, in my view pseudo-science, but, rather irrelevant science."⁶

After the Report

John Kramar, AMSAA's Grill Flame project officer, wrote for the record on February 13, 1980, under the subject line "Scientific Evaluation Committee (SEC) GRILL FLAME Report, Dated November 1979," that the report, "transmitted to AMSAA January 1980, was found to be somewhat ambiguous and confusing," and took "exception" to "Terminate all AMSAA GRILL FLAME efforts": "This recommendation, as best as can be determined, is based only on a partial understanding of AMSAA's initial effort, which was terminated before the SEC came into being. There is an apparent mistake by the SEC in considering the AMSAA challenge/validation efforts to be an integral part of the SRI contract," copying Gale and DARCOM. Murray Watt's comments of the same month, "my personal assessment," written for "Dr Vorona's letter to LTG Tighe," whose "tone... will be rather general," found the report "very shallow in nature," its recommendations "vague," "unless doing away with the program can be considered as a constructive suggestion"; of annex 5, "after all, we provided the committee with most of the data contained in the Annex"; of the screening of members, "private conversations with individual committee members give quite the opposite view"; of the handwriting passage, "they do everything but call Targ a 'cheat.' Did they, in fact, question Targ on this handwriting issue?"; and of the minority, "it appears that the committee (minority) is more concerned about the possible loss of their credibility." Colonel Chad B. White of INSCOM told Brigadier General Thomas J. Flynn on March 10 that the report "has now been released," forwarding "the complete executive summary" and "that portion of the report dealing directly with INSCOM's program." On March 19, 1980, Puthoff, Targ and May wrote to LaBerge, by then principal deputy under secretary for research and engineering, that "we have just learned that, based on a recommendation of the Gale Committee, ODDR&E will not provide support for R&D efforts in the Grill Flame area," and "were further advised that a major factor leading to this recommendation was that the Committee concluded that the work being pursued under Grill Flame was of such a complex nature as to not provide basic proof-of-principle": "our contracts stipulated that we provide 'what if' threat analyses, utilizing experimental protocols applicable to specific operational tasks; we were not mandated to undertake formal proof-of-principle research," and "our efforts have yielded both general results and specific data that have been described to us by our various DoD and Intelligence Community clients as being of vital importance to the national interests." A three-page slide digest headed "Gale Committee Report, 1980" reduced the findings to "Individuals involved are sincere, dedicated," "No evidence of fraud, deception," "Management is ambivalent, lacks focus," and "SRI dependence phased-out." The report's date is given as November 1979 in the AMSAA memorandum and December 1979 on its cover and in Watt's.⁷