Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception

by Annie Jacobsen

For more than forty years, the U.S. government, through various military and intelligence agencies, has invested millions in classified programs that study the role of mental telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and other forms of extrasensory perception (ESP) as a means of intelligence collection for military and defense purposes.

Now, for the first time, New York Times bestselling author Annie Jacobsen will tell the story of these programs, using interviews with the core group of individuals--including former Defense Department scientists, military officers, CIA analysts and researchers, an Apollo 14 astronaut, government psychics, and members of the Aviary--who ran these phenomena programs at the highest level of government.

PHENOMENA will be a quest narrative - a story about how far man will journey in search of improbable and mysterious things - with documentation showing which of these improbable things might actually exist.

• ISBN10: 0316349364
• ISBN13: 9780316349369
• Publish Date: 30 March 2017 (first published 28 March 2017)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 29 March 2021
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Little, Brown & Company
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 544
• Language: English

Reviews

[jamiereadthis]

Annie Jacobsen might just displace Mary Roach in my spooky nonfiction wheelhouse. And by that I mean, authors with whom I’d want to sit down and have long conversations over a pitcher of beer. Every one of her books is right up my alley. In this one, as she says herself in the afterword, the point is not to argue for the so-called paranormal nor against it, like most other books of its stripe. Instead, she reports on the people involved and the attempts at explanations that come to grief on the facts. Fascinating stuff here, and the last chapter with Ed Mitchell, he of the Apollo 14 walk on the moon, takes an unexpectedly poignant turn.

In ranking her books, I’d say Area 51, then this one, followed by Paperclip, with The Pentagon’s Brain to come. Whatever subject Jacobsen investigates next, I’m on board.