CIA Reading Room cia-rdp96-00791r000200230037-2: ASSOCIATED PRESS ARTICLE, FROM DATA BASE SEARCH. 'COMMITTEE RECOMMENDS ASSESSMENT OF PARAPSYCHOLOGY'

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Approved For Wefease 21708[0if1 dT?t f -RDP96-00791 R000200230037-2 The Associated Press The materials in the AP file were compiled by The Associated Press. These materials may not be republished without the express written consent of The Associated Press. June 25, 1981, Thursday, PM cycle SECTION: Washington Dateline LENGTH: 676 words HEADLINE: Committee Recommends Assessment of Parapsychology BYLINE: By BARTON REPPERT, Associated Press Writer DATELINE: WASHINGTON BODY: The esoteric world of parapsychology may now merit a "serious assessment" by Congress to help decide whether further research is warranted, according to a study prepared for the House Science and Technology Committee. Parapsychology, which involves heavily disputed phenomena such as "remote viewing" and influencing people at a distance through mental powers, is among more than 150 science and technology issues included in the survey, which was released Wednesday. other research horizons sketched out by the study range from global air pollution and weather modification to nationwide nutrition monitoring, the technology of robots, predicting earthquakes and advanced measures to help counter terrorism. Rep. Don Fuqua, D-Fla., chairman of the panel, said committee staff members and outside specialists took more than two years to compile the 530-page survey. The report's section on "the physics of consciousness" said recent experiments in remote viewing and other aspects of parapsychology "suggest that there exists an 'interconnectiveness' of the human mind with other minds and with matter." Experiments on person-to-person phenomena have offered "encouraging results," it said, while studies on affecting physical objects at a distance "have yielded less compelling and more enigmatic results. The implication of these experiments is that the human mind may be able to obtain information independent of geography and time." The congressional study cautioned that there is no certainty what may emerge from exploratory research now underway, and thus its potential importance can only be speculated upon." It added, however, that "a general recognition of the degree of interconnectiveness of minds could have far-reaching social and political implications for this nation and the world." For example, the report said, "in the area of national defense, there are obvious implications of one's ability to identify distant sites and affect Approved For Release 2000/08/10 : CIA-RDP96-00791 R000200230037-2 PAGE 69 The Associated Press, June 25 1981 Approved For Release 2000/08/10 CIA-RDP96-00791 R000200230037-2 sensitive instruments or other humans." Deeper understanding of such phenomena also could bear upon other areas such as investigative work, education and "mind-initiated cures" in medicine. The study observed that U.S. research in parapsychology has received relatively low financial backing "largely because the credibility and potential yield of such research is widely questioned, althoug