C. Janith is a Jadetimes news reporter covering science and geopolitics.
Are secret psychic spy agents somewhere out there?
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Declassified documents show that throughout the latter half of the 20th century, the CIA had some... interesting... ideas on how to obtain intelligence.
One of the most dizzying reports comes from a 1983 document detailing the “Gateway Experience” - various means of altering the mind to create a kind of psychic spycraft.
Although the document details some well-known techniques, such as hypnosis and transcendental meditation, the document veers into some unconventional territory and makes lofty claims about consciousness and the universe.
If you spend any amount of time pursuing declassified Central Intelligence Agency materials, you come across some pretty wacky stuff. There are dragonfly robots, cyborg cats, and an absolutely bonkers Soviet submarine heist. Recently, another chapter of the CIA’s strange investigations surfaced on TikTok.
Through some creative extrapolation by TikTok user Sara Holocomb, the document purported to confirmed existence of reincarnation, which was further touted by sites like the Daily Mail. While this is not in fact true, the document does offer a bizarre look into the agency’s efforts to develop some sort of a psychic spycraft.
The declassified document itself isn’t new - originally drafted in 1983, the CIA declassified the 29-page report back in 2003. The agency is also well-known for its investigations into the inner workings of the human mind and how it could be manipulated for extracting information. The most famous of these investigations was the 20-year-long MKUltra top-secret project, which started back in the 1950s.
The document, written by U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Wayne M. McDonnell, explores a number of varying means of mind alteration, which McDonnell refers to collectively as “the Gateway experience.”
“The ‘Gateway Experience’ is a training system designed to bring enhanced strength, focus, and coherence to the amplitude of brainwave output between the left and right hemispheres so as to alter consciousness, moving it outside the physical sphere so as to ultimately escape even the restrictions of space and time,” the report states. “The participant then gains to the various levels of intuitive knowledge which the universe offers.”
So… yeah. I’ll have what he’s having.
Some of these mind-altering techniques are relatively mainstream, such as hypnosis or transcendental meditation - a practice actively advocated for by film director David Lynch. Other ideas are a bit further afield, such as biofeedback (the ability for one hemisphere of the brain to gain control of parts of the other hemisphere) and an idea known as “The Consciousness Matrix,” which claims that “the human is also a hologram which attunes itself to the universal hologram by the medium of energy exchange thereby deducing meaning and achieving the state we call consciousness.”
In her series of TikTok videos, Holocomb zeroes in on page 19, which states how consciousness is timeless - as it exists outside of a space and time, it seemingly has “neither beginning or end.” Which… woah, if true.
This line led Holcomb - and, by extension, the Daily Mail - to assert that the CIA believed in the existence of a reincarnation. However, the document describes this consciousness as a “pool of limitless, timeless perception,” which does not exactly match up with the tenets of reincarnation as described in some religions.
Regardless of these takeaways, the CIA memo is quite the trip, and is written with an impressive amount of unflagging certainty. Which is strange, considering that those working in the scientific field of consciousness still have no concrete idea as to how it’s generated in the animal mind - let alone that it’s a “differentiated aspect of the universal consciousness.”
Needless to say, the CIA never developed a corps of psychic spy agents.
C. Janith is a Jadetimes news reporter covering science and geopolitics.
Many of the technologies that will define the future of space warfare are already in development. The problem facing the U.S. is that China is spearheading most of it.
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If another great power conflict erupts, it will be fought in the strategic domain of space. That’s because the U.S. disproportionately relies upon access to space for its most basic military and civilian operations. Destroy or disrupt those satellite linkages, and America’s adversaries - most notably China and Russia - will have a significant window of opportunity to exploit American weaknesses.
In fact, the U.S. Space Force was created because the national command authority believed that America’s position in space, notably the strategic orbits around Earth, was eroding. At the time of its creation in 2019, the Space Force was given a simple strategic doctrine: “Space Dominance.”
But that’s not where the story of space war ends. China and Russia want more than just to deny the U.S. access to space in a time of war, so fighting outside the confines of Earth will come in stages. China already has crafted plans to displace the United States as the dominant satellite power in orbit. And soon, wars will be fought over control of vital territories in space, such as the Lagrange points between Earth and the moon that help telescopes sit steady in space or the resource-rich asteroid belt.
If either China or Russia ever managed to become the dominant space power, that country would surely become the dominant power on Earth as well, since space and Earth are so intertwined in the digital age. In anticipation of the coming space war era, America needs to take actionable steps to rule the domain outside our own planet - and keep its enemies at bay. But the transition to space warfare won’t happen overnight; it’ll come in phases.
Phase I
Right now, any potential space war will be closely tied to geopolitical developments on Earth. Thus, a space war would begin as a fight over satellites with the end goal of denying one’s enemies access to space to blind its forces and sow confusion in its populations back home on Earth.
For instance, if the geopolitical situation on Earth between the U.S. and Russia or China broke down sufficiently, either of these two rivals could fire anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons at those vital-yet-vulnerable U.S. satellites in orbit. The debris generated from such an attack might be so profound that it would ricochet and annihilate nearby satellite constellations, causing a massive chain reaction, known as the Kessler Syndrome, that would result in the total loss of all satellites across the orbital plane. Or, Russia could simply detonate a nuke in orbit. The electromagnetic pulse it would create would saturate the space above Earth and effectively disable all satellites there.
Chinese co-orbital satellites floating nearby sensitive American nuclear command, communication, and control satellites or near the U.S. Navy’s Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) satellite constellation, which allows for the global coordination of U.S. Navy forces, would be used to physically sabotage these important American systems in orbit. Chinese counterspace forces could target the critical Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) satellite constellation for disruption, too. From the Xichang Satellite Center in China, powerful lasers could be fired up at U.S. spy satellites in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) passing by, rendering American (and allied) forces in the Indo-Pacific blind.
Over the years, senior Space Force officers from Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado have insisted that the U.S. military, too, can threaten Chinese and Russian satellites in orbit; it’s just that neither Russia nor China yet rely upon satellites the way the U.S. does. Further, in space warfare, the advantage goes to the attacker rather than the defender. Once a nation starts losing its satellite constellations, it becomes nearly impossible to save those satellite capabilities. It’s a knock-on effect.
Phase II
Eventually, though, there will be conflict among actors in space that goes beyond targeting unmanned satellites. That distant war might occur entirely in space, relatively unaffected by developments on Earth.
Let’s go back to those Chinese and Russian co-orbital satellites that stalk American satellites in orbit, such as the MUOS or WGS constellations in geosynchronous orbit around Earth. One suggestion by experts for countering the threat these co-orbital satellites pose is the creation and usage of so-called “bodyguard” satellites. As the name suggests, these bodyguard satellites would be co-orbital satellites deployed alongside the U.S. satellites in orbit to defend against incoming counterspace attacks by Chinese or Russian space forces.
Like a Secret Service agent diving in front of an incoming bullet, these bodyguard satellites would physically intercept and deflect incoming co-orbital satellite attacks. While not fool-proof, these co-orbital, bodyguard-type satellites would buy America’s critical satellites time to continue operating in a degraded environment, thereby giving American military units fighting on Earth below tactical advantages over their enemies.
Phase III
Contrary to how many space policy experts may think about the strategic domain of space, it will not be an area relegated only to unmanned military systems and manned research facilities, such as the International Space Station. Eventually, military operations will take place through - and from - the strategic high ground of space. In fact, in 2002, this almost became a reality when a daring U.S. Marine officer championed his branch purchasing one of Richard Branson’s spaceplanes and converting it for military use.
In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, U.S. ground forces were presented with a tough set of options: they had to rapidly advance into landlocked Afghanistan to hunt down and destroy the terrorist enclaves that had given succor to Al-Qaeda. There were concerns about being given access to the airspace surrounding Afghanistan. One solution was to create a force of sub-orbital space planes that would launch into orbit from American territory, pass over the airspace of other countries (without crossing through it), and then land in the target country. Think of it as being akin to the dropships featured in the popular Halo video game series.
This idea never took off, but variations of it exist today. In a new, multipolar world environment where the strategy of denial is most commonly used against the U.S. military’s power projection capabilities, having a rapid response fleet of spaceplanes to quickly send ground troops into combat in distant lands, without ever violating the airspace of surrounding nations, might be one way to ensure that the U.S. military can continue projecting power when needed.
The U.S. Air Force has called for a similar project. Instead of creating spaceplanes to drop ground troops into battle, though, the Air Force wants to build the equivalent of warehouses in low-Earth orbit in order to more quickly supply forces engaged in combat in what will undoubtedly be contested and degraded airspaces (making it harder for traditional forms of resupply to get to those American forces). Keeping those supplies in orbit, according to the Air Force, would be more cost-effective in the long run because you could conceivably cut down on the distance between the point of origin and the destination for those supplies.
Phase IV
With the rise of hypersonic missiles as well as a return of the threat of nuclear world war, the old Reagan-era concept of space-based missile defense has become a hot topic among America’s national security space policymakers. Back in the 1980s, when President Reagan first proposed building a constellation of satellites to knock out incoming Soviet nuclear ballistic missiles, the 40th president was derided as being delusional; the technology needed to shoot down incoming missiles was still in its infancy. Today, however, the technology has more than matured, and the U.S. is now vulnerable to a surprise nuclear missile strike each day that the Pentagon refuses to build and deploy these systems.
As for the growing threat of hypersonic weapons, multiple defense sources insist that the only real defense against them will be from space-based assets. Specifically, swarms of satellites operating in Low-Earth Orbit could be used to intercept hypersonic glide vehicles, preventing those weapons from ever reentering the Earth’s atmosphere and destroying their vulnerable targets below.
The threat of hypersonic weapons have less to do with their speed (although they are quite fast), and more to do with the way that they radically maneuver on their way to their target, stymying conventional air defense batteries. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a source at the Air Force’s Western Air Defense Sector (WADS) at Joint Base McChord confirmed that the kind of hypersonic weapon the Russians fired at Dnipro in retaliation for Ukraine’s use of American-made Army Tactical Missile System (ATACM) and British-built Storm Shadow cruise missiles cannot be reliably defended against by most conventional air defense systems.
So, in both conventional nuclear missiles as well as newer hypersonic weapons threats, the only defense is space-based. Such systems would have a birds-eye view of incoming attacks and could tether those real-time observations of incoming attacks to a multi-layered defense screen that operated continuously around the Earth, working alongside existing anti-missile defense systems. But space will be key. Indeed, as Reagan conjectured, such space-based defenses could render the entire threat of nuclear weapons attack obsolete. At the very least, it could degrade the threat of nuclear warfare.
Nevertheless, wars will still occur.
Indeed, they will increasingly migrate to the Solar System itself, as humans move deeper into the galaxy and settle permanently on celestial objects, such as the moon, Mars, and the asteroid belt beyond. The fight in the strategic high ground of space will be less about controlling the domains on Earth below and more about controlling key territories of the Solar System.
Phase V
Over time, there will eventually be combat waged between actual spaceships, although these spaceships are unlikely to look like what most fans of science fiction are used to seeing on their television screens. The spaceships will probably be large, clunky vessels.
Modular design itself will be helpful. In battle, if sections of the spaceship are damaged beyond repair, they could conceivably be detached so that the rest of the spaceship could continue fighting on. Further, these spaceships could be outfitted with modules and payloads specific to whatever type of mission they were undertaking in the depths of space. In fact, these large, modular spacecraft could possibly detach into smaller spacecraft, making themselves into an armada of smaller craft rather than one large, lumbering spaceship.
Rather than sleek and stylish, these cumbersome spaceships will be modular vessels likely powered by an Electromagnetic (EM) Drive or possibly even a nuclear-pulse-detonation engine - both of which are highly experimental today. An EM Drive is a wild experimental technology that was first posited by a British satellite engineer, Roger Shawyer. The U.S. became interested in the technology (as did the Chinese) for use as a possible engine on future satellites. This is a microwave technology that converts electrical energy directly into thrust. Propellant is not used. The system has been dubbed the “Impossible Drive” by many scientists who remain skeptical that it will work as intended.
Nuclear-pulse detonation is another idea that’s been floating around for decades. Such an engine would essentially “use nuclear explosions, detonated behind a reaction surface on a spacecraft, to push the spacecraft forward.”
Warp drives, unfortunately, are unlikely to be in use even at this later date. Just as in Star Trek, warp drives compress space in front of a starship, expanding it behind the spacecraft. The ship can, therefore, travel at faster-than-light speeds. Although, there are real theories for how humanity could be using warp drives, such as those of Miguel Alcubierre, these are infeasible and likely will be for some time.
AI will become a mission-critical part of any space operation going forward. By the time that humanity begins warring for control of our Solar System, humanity’s survival in space will be impossible without it. There might be many instances in which AI is completely controlling spaceships either because the crew will have been incapacitated or the militaries deploying these modular space warships would prefer to put machines - rather than their own men and women in uniform, at risk.
In terms of a future space battle between the United States Space Force and China’s People’s Liberation Army Aerospace Force, for instance, the modular starships of the two sides will likely deploy swarms of AI-controlled space drones against one another. They will fire directed-energy weapons, in other words, lasers.
Long-range ballistic missiles and possibly even railguns will complement the lasers of these modular starships. Railguns are an interesting piece of technology that are currently under development by both the U.S. and Chinese militaries. Basically, these guns use electricity to launch projectiles at very high speeds across large distances. Although, since most combat in a future space war will likely occur across vast distances, the missiles would be the last resort for a military engagement due to fuel constraints. Still, they will be available.
In a zero-gravity environment, spaceships will be able to maneuver and conduct attacks in ways that platforms on Earth simply cannot. The vast distances in space will likely mean that spacecraft combating each other might not see each other. They would have to rely on drones and possibly even new forms of sensors, such as quantum radar, or other technologies that are highly theoretical today.
Quantum radar is a major source of controversy right now. That’s because the Chinese military has spearheaded its design and claims that it can basically render American stealth planes obsolete. As Dave Makichuk of the Asia Times wrote in 2021, the quantum radar basically creates an “artificial electromagnetic storm” in which radar operators can detect even stealth warplanes.
In the future, space powers will equip their ships to handle the delayed communications. One technology that may evolve into a primary system for space travel in general - and space combat specifically - could be quantum communications, another technology that is being spearheaded by China. Luckily, today, the Americans have SpaceX.
According to Matt Swayne at Quantum Insider, the innovative startup is testing the Space Entanglement and Annealing Quantum Experiment (SEAQUE) which “could lay the foundation for quantum cloud computing across vast distances” which could be “a technology that is critical for future space exploration and communication between far-flung spacecraft.” This could be the beginnings of a technology that becomes the basis of advanced spaceflight-enabling communications technologies, all of which would play a significant role in future space combat situations.
The technologies that will define the future of space warfare are already being developed now. In some cases, rudimentary forms of these systems are already being fielded. The problem facing the U.S., if it is to continue being competitive, is that China is spearheading the development of many of those technologies. If that continues to be the case, then America’s quest to be the dominant space power will evaporate. This competition will go beyond the current moment and define the rest of the century as humanity takes its permanent place in the cosmos.
C. Janith is a Jadetimes news reporter covering science and geopolitics.
The method involves detecting alien messages while they’re whizzing between planets.
A photograph of radio telescopes directed at the night sky at sunset. Image Source: (sdecoret/Shutterstock)
Since the first modern SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) studies tried to detect alien transmissions in the early 1960s, scientists on Earth have been on the alert for strange cosmic signals with no reasonable explanation. So far, they haven’t positively identified any signals as evidence of intelligent alien life among the stars, but the search continues.
Most SETI telescope searches aim to observe a vast expanse of sky or zero in on a specific star system or group of stars. They usually try to intercept signals that potential aliens could have aimed at Earth or those that pass close by. But what if aliens are transmitting messages from one exoplanet to another instead? If they exist, we may now have a way to eavesdrop on alien conversations, leveling up humanity’s search for intelligent life far from Earth.
Working with his team at Penn State University, astronomer Nick Tusay, a graduate student working on his Ph.D., came up with a new technique that tests indicate would detect alien radio chatter. From our Earthly point of view, we can observe when one exoplanet - a planet that is not part of our solar system - passes in front of and blocks another. This is called occultation. However, the occulting planet does not always completely cover the planet behind it. So, any message a hypothetical alien transmits from the occulted planet can spill over into space, and our radio telescopes could detect it.
“I want to be able to find or at least look for the kind of signals that we put out all the time, from an alien civilization going about its business doing its thing, not intending to signal anyone,” says Tusay, who led a study published in July 2024 in The Astronomical Journal
Tusay’s method of listening in on alien conversations during planet-planet occultations (PPOs) is designed to seek out narrowband radio signals. While there are many different types of radio waves that are emitted by objects such as quasars or pulsars, narrowband signals are glaringly artificial and are the type used by transmitters. We only know of one species that has been able to produce these signals, and that’s us. Humans send these signals into space when communicating with spacecraft via NASA’s Deep Space Network. The fact that these signals cannot occur naturally is an advantage for SETI, because if radio telescopes on Earth were to detect one coming from space, it would mean that it is definitely artificial.
Seth Shostak, Ph.D., Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute and renowned SETI expert, agrees that narrowband signals would be a sure sign that someone out there is communicating, though not necessarily with us. There is always the possibility that extraterrestrials might be using a type of signal we cannot even fathom yet. However, Shostak, who is also an astrophysicist, believes it is likely aliens would use the same methods of communications that humans do.
“Maybe ether aliens have a different signaling system to what we can imagine, but the physics on their world are the same as the physics here,” he says. “Sending radio signals is something that they would probably do too, because it’s congruent with the physics the universe has.”
The more practical reason for relying on narrowband signals transmitted between planets is that we understand them, according to SETI historian Rebecca Charbonneau, Ph.D., author of Mixed Signals: Alien Communication Across the Iron Curtain. During the advent of SETI in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the Space Race was taking off, humans were sending artificial signals into space. And they were already starting to wonder if there were intelligent beings out there who were doing the same.
“We’re highly influenced by our environment when it comes to thinking of what we might expect to see in other words, because radio is the primary mechanism with which humans have historically communicated,” says Charbonneau.
As our technology has evolved, we have shifted from radio to other modes of communication, such as fiber optics, internet, and cables buried deep beneath the ocean. This shift also means that radio signals from our telescopes may take a backseat to these newer types of signals. If intelligent aliens are looking for other life in the universe, then they may or may not be able to detect our variety of signals.
However, it’s possible that none of these signals may resonate with an advanced civilization, which could be millions - or possibly billions of years - older than ours; its members could be communicating in ways only science fiction could fathom. As a recent study published in The Open Journal of Astrophysics explores, it is possible that alien communications technologies are so advanced, they may be talking to each other using gravitational waves. These are ripples in spacetime, and physicists don’t yet fully understand them.
The problem is that - unlike narrowband radio waves - our science cannot distinguish between gravitational waves that are natural and those that may be artificial. That lack of knowledge still does not discourage Tusay. While he will not be developing the eavesdropping technique further, he plans to leave it in the literature as a proof of concept, so that future scientific progress may make the adjustments needed to pick up unnatural signals. Whether we could actually decode any type of signal from another civilization is an entirely different question, though.
“We probably won’t be able to decode it,” Shostak says. “But the modulation of the signal might [convey] something simple, such as what their planet looks like or what they look like. There might be something to learn by pointing antennas at the sky.”
Charbonneau thinks that, in addition to the possibility of alien messages remaining a mystery to us, identifying an errant PPO signal as alien will need rigorous scientific testing. It will also require us to question our own biases. We imagine and tend to look for signals and civilizations that are familiar to us on Earth, because after all, it’s all we know.
“We do need to continually do these searches until we find something,” Tusay says. “Not finding anything doesn’t necessarily mean that nothing is there.” Does that mean E.T. might phone another planet while we’re on the line?
