The best exhibit at the National Cryptologic Museum is the WWII-era ENIGMA (3-rotor, but still!) machine that is on display.
In the open.
With instructions on how to encode/decode messages using it.
And little slips of paper and tiny golf pencils right there encouraging you to use it.
This and the National Electronics Museum (colocated with the System Source Computer Museum [which also houses most of the DigiBarn collection]) about an hour north have more hands-on exhibits of actual vintage technology than practically every other museum in the country combined.
That's incredibly cool
>Project Star Gate was used by the U.S. Government during the Cold War. Many of the psychic spies were at Ft. Meade, tasked with collecting intelligence, locating enemy agents and determining American vulnerabilities by using “remote viewing.” Remote viewing is mentally viewing a distant location they have never visited to gather insights on a person, site, or specific information. As outrageous as it sounds, the secret program was very successful and was in use until 1995
Checks calendar..... nowhere near April!
My understanding of "remote viewing" is it's actually about time travel, and recall of the future. In order for a "viewing" to work, it was found that there needed to be a report to the "viewer" at the end of a given "run", which included all the details were needed to make the mission successful.
This could have been a parallel construction mechanism, if they had sources too sensitive then they could feed data via this project and have it successful.
Bonus points for having enemies trying to replicate the technology and observing that progress and espionage around it.
so — what happened in 1995 that provided a better laundry?
(or was the critical date 25 Dec 1991, and the program just had inertia? 1995 is mid-Yeltsin and mid-Clinton, so those can both be ruled out?)
There are countless repeatable psi experiments that show unusual deviations from probability, but very few that have been conducted with a large number of viewers by institutions. My favorite is the Ganzfeld experiment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_experiment
Unfortunately the more it's replicated, the smaller the deviation seems to become. But if there is a deviation above random, say 1%, then we could use a large number of viewers and an error correction coding scheme to transmit a binary message by the Shannon-Hartley theorem:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon–Hartley_theorem#Power-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_correction_code
At 1 impression per person per second, it might be on the order of 1.44*(1/100) or roughly 1 bit of data per minute per viewer. I'm sure my math is wrong. But a few dozen people might be able to achieve primitive Morse code-style communication across the globe or even space.
It would be interesting to see if/how results differ when participants are shown the answers after the experiment, like with your comment about time travel.
Governments probably worked all of this out decades ago if there's anything to it. But it might mean that aliens have faster than light communication. We can imagine petri dish brains or neural nets trained for remote viewing. Sort of an FTL dialup modem.
As long as we're going off the deep end, I think this works through the magic of conscious awareness, that science may never be able to explain. Loosely it means that God the universe and everything fractured itself into infinite perspectives to have all subjective experiences and not have to be alone with itself anymore. So rather than being a brain in a box/singularity, source consciousness created all of this when something came from nothing. Consciousness is probably multidimensional above 4D and 5D, able within the bounds of physics to select where it exists along the multiverse, like hopping between the meshing of gears that form reality. Or Neo in The Matrix. So thought may make life energy ripples like gravity waves on the astral plane where time and distance don't matter. So feelings may be able to affect the probability of quantum wave collapse.
https://hackaday.com/2021/03/04/can-plants-bend-light-to-the...
This has all sorts of ramifications. Time seems to have an arrow even though quantum mechanics is mostly symmetric in time. If we assume that free will doesn't exist, then people would make the same choices if we got in a time machine and watched them choose repeatedly. But if we assume that free will exists, then people would seem to choose randomly with a probability distribution, which would make time travel impossible since no sequence of events could be replayed with 100% accuracy. Similarly to how the 3 body problem can't be predicted beyond a certain timeframe. So we could have time travel or free will, but not both. This latter case seems to more closely match how the universe works with observing stuff like the double slit experiment, and our subjective experience of having free will that so-called experts tell us is only an illusion.
It could also mean that synchronicity and manifestation are more apparent to someone having the experience than to the rest of us in the co-created reality. So the subject and conductor of an experiment might witness different outcomes from their vantage points in the multiverse, with echoes of themselves in the other realities, even though the total probability adds up to one. Like how you are still you now and one second before now or after now. It's unclear if subjective mental efforts can hold sway over the shared reality. That gets into metaphysics and concepts like as above, so below.
Happy holidays everyone!
Oh come on! You must expand on your theories of remote viewing. Did you mean that after a remote viewing session the subject is shown a true report of the target location?
For example, a subject is told to do a remote viewing of Trumps toilet. After the session or sometime later they are shown evidence of Trumps toilet. Or even get a vip tour. Is that the gist?
I love that museum; try to visit whenever I'm nearby.
During Covid, the new director of the museum changed policy substantially -- primarily focusing on original artifacts, rather than the "displays" which had been built before to illustrate concepts (when something wasn't available, or where the original artifacts weren't impressive or illustrative enough). As someone fairly familiar with the field, seeing the actual objects is much more worth a trip than seeing a museum display illustrating a concept which I could see better in a wikipedia article or a book.
Both approaches work for museums, but I'm glad his one changed. The most striking thing for me was seeing the actual computers used in SIOP and nuclear war initiation a couple decades earlier (fairly run of the mill high end DEC Alpha boxes).
This museum, just outside of DC, is worth the visit if you enjoy encryption and learning about code breaking. They even have a pair of enigma machines that let you encode a message on one and decode on the other. It is small but packed with some unique artifacts including some of the earliest super computers.
What seems to be a related project, Project Scan 8, is mentioned briefly in this 1980's Nova episode about scientific research into ESP. See it at about the 44 minute mark.
There is a movie that makes fun of project stargate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Men_Who_Stare_at_Goats_(fi...
It's ostensibly based on Jon Ronson book of the same name but it falls pretty far, and is much less funny, vs the book.
“Remote viewing” is a scam, debunked time and time again by psychic debunkers like James Randi and others.
The people doing the “remote viewing” use vaudeville tricks but pass it off as real.
Sadly the US government has spent millions on programs like this. The programs always fall apart when someone, usually a professional magician, steps in and shows the researchers how they’re being fooled.
In other news, the lady isn’t actually sawed in half.
This oversimplifies decades of research. While early remote viewing studies at SRI had methodological flaws, later experiments at SAIC addressed these issues and produced statistically significant results that haven't been adequately explained. Randi's million-dollar challenge isn't considered scientifically valid - it's more publicity stunt than proper experimental protocol. The circumstances and rules for awarding his prize were opaque, controlled by Randi, and has nothing to do with how science tests hypotheses.
The government programs (like STARGATE) actually produced some compelling results according to their declassified documents. The issue wasn't that they were "debunked" - the programs ended largely due to inconsistent results and questions about operational usefulness, not because of exposed fraud.
I'd encourage looking at the peer-reviewed research rather than relying on stage magicians' critiques. While healthy skepticism is good, dismissing the entire field based on cherry-picked cases misses the nuance in the data.
The book "Phenomena" by the investigative journalist Annie Jacobsen is a fantastic and fascinating starting point.
The secret programs with lots of money little oversight, and the normal bureaucratic inertia. Plus, people in that realm like to play political games where they imply that they have access and power to things other people aren't even allowed to know the names of the programs. Secret squirrel stuff goes to their heads.
"Major Dumbass is researching what?" "Well we didn't have any actual useful work for him so we figured this was harmless"
Just another comment that this small, niche museum is worth a visit. I’ve been twice, once when visiting Ft. Meade on business and once when passing through DC.
The thing that impressed me is the typewriter-size Enigma machines of legend, and the multiple-refrigerator-size Bombe nearby that decoded the Enigma output. Seeing the actual hardware makes an impression that reading stories can’t get to.
Worth the risk/read purely for the wtf factor. #nospoilers