In 2014, the Office of Naval Research embarked on a four-year, $3.85 million research program to explore the phenomena it calls premonition and intuition. We have to understand what gives rise to this so-called sixth sense, says Peter Squire, a program officer in ONRs Expeditionary Maneuver Warfare and Combating Terrorism department. Todays Navy scientists place less emphasis on trying to understand the phenomena theoretically and more on using technology to examine the mysterious process, which Navy scientists assure the public is not based on superstition. If the researchers understand the process, there may be ways to accelerate it and possibly spread the powers of intuition throughout military units, says Dr. Squire. Because of the stigma of ESP and PK, the nomenclature has changed, allowing the Defense Department to distance itself from its remote-viewing past. Under the Perceptual Training Systems and Tools banner, extrasensory perception has a new name in the modern era: sensemaking. Since 1972, CIA and DoD research indicates that premonition, or precognition, appears to be weak in some, strong in others, and extraordinary in a rare few. Will the Navys contemporary work on sensemaking, the continuous effort to understand the connections among people, places, and events, finally unlock the mystery of ESP? Might technology available to todays defense scientists reveal hypotheses not available to scientists in an earlier age?
Latest
Latest News
Each news summary is created according to strict standards. Here's how we do it.
Each summary is created using a consistent editorial procedure. The target length is approximately 16 lines of 11-point Arial text in a 650-pixel-wide column. Up to 25% of a summary may be set in bold to emphasize the most important ideas. Summaries are composed of verbatim excerpts presented in the same sequence as they appear in the original news source, with very minor editorial additions. Where material has been omitted between excerpts, the omission is indicated with ellipses (...). Any words added by an editor for clarity or context appear in [brackets]. Our original news editor was Fred Burks. Tod Fletcher edited most summaries from 2007 through 2014, and Mark Bailey has served as news editor since 2014.