A new science is perhaps to be born: Bioelectronics
(TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL FRENCH ARTICLE IN "SCIENCE ET VIE" NO. 509, FEBRUARY 1960. TRANSLATION COPYRIGHT 2025 MUSEUMOFTAROT, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)
BIOELECTRONICS AND THE NAUTILUS
The atomic submarines, the "Nautilus", "Skate", and "Skipjack", are masterpieces of atomic and naval engineering. An almost unlimited range of action would allow them to sail for a year without returning to their base and, in any case, several weeks underwater. But then, under the waves of the oceans or the ice of the Poles, it becomes impossible to communicate with them by radio: radio waves do not pass through water. Mission execution orders no longer reach them. These sophisticated weapons become useless.
To overcome this fundamental shortcoming, American military and civilian technicians are currently secretly carrying out the strangest experiments.
"Since the American Navy and Air Force are interested in it, it must be serious." This is why a number of large American firms, Rand Corporation, General Electric, Westinghouse and Bell Telephone, better known for their electrical and electronic products than for their interest in metaphysics, each founded, a few months ago, a laboratory for the study of extrasensory perception, in other words: telepathy. Out of a kind of modesty understandable among technicians, the subject of study is renamed bioelectronics and classified in the field of human engineering.
Among the main points of the research that Navy specialists are doing in this field, we note the following:
• The human transmission system.
• The amplitude and frequency of bioelectronic signals.
• Bioelectric components: electrodes and relays.
To make it clear, no doubt, that it was not joking, the Army itself set up this strange laboratory at the large Redstone missile research center in Alabama, right next to von Braun's office. What is extrasensory perception? It is a set of phenomena for which no explanation has yet been found: telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis or the ability to act on objects at a distance; until now, it was left to charlatans or the naive. However, in recent years, hundreds of testimonies that are difficult to refute have been collected on this subject; they have aroused real interest among many perfectly honorable minds, among whom we count Henri Bergson and Pascual Jordan, and this has made skeptics a little more cautious. Is it all just a cleverly conducted conspiracy? It would be necessary to assume that for several years it has included, in perfect secrecy, about thirty universities in Europe and America. It is better to face the facts: there is something there. But what?
A SECRET WEAPON ON BOARD
On July 13, 1958, Ansel E. Talbert, a well-known observer of military affairs in the United States, wrote in the New York Herald Tribune: "It is essential for the armed forces of our country to know whether the energy emitted by a human brain can influence another human brain thousands of kilometers away... Amplifying this phenomenon could provide a new means of communication between submarines and land..."
What inspired Talbert to think so unorthodoxly? A report from the Rand Corporation, an organization specifically charged with finding ideas, on the inadequacy of current means of telecommunications. "Our submarines," declared this report, which was submitted to Eisenhower, "are useless: it is impossible to communicate with them when they are submerged, since radio waves do not pass through water, and especially when they are under the polar crust. We must, by all means, seek a new system." And they simply proposed that telepathy be investigated!
A HIGH DEGREE OF ACCURACY
On July 25th, a strange passenger embarked on board the atomic submarine "Nautilus": no member of the crew was allowed to see him, from the moment he went down the ladder until he was locked in a special cabin, except a sailor charged with bringing him his meals, and Captain Anderson.
This man was thus cloistered for 16 days between four steel walls. For 16 days, he received no news from the outside. Every morning, the captain came to visit him and sign a certain document.
Crazy rumors were circulating on board: a mysterious machine had been put on board the submarine, operated by a great scientist, or else the atomic radiation of the engine was being secretly controlled... In reality, the mysterious passenger did nothing but make small drawings, always the same: a square, a circle, three wavy lines, a cross and a star, which he sent to Captain Anderson. The latter dated them, signed them and put them in an envelope which he sealed.
This may seem absurd: they were experimenting with a secret weapon.
The warning of Ansel E. Talbert, the advice of several famous scientists had been heard: the American government was unofficially conducting an experiment in thought transmission. What was the mysterious passenger of the "Nautilus" doing? He was trying to guess which cards were drawn by a "correspondent on dry land thousands of miles away. Twice a day, in fact, at designated times, during the 16 days that the experiment lasted, a "correspondent, also cloistered in a room at a Westinghouse research center in the town of Friendship, Maryland, drew certain cards.
Or rather, it was a certain machine that drew them for him. Activated by a clockwork movement, it ejected certain cards at one-minute intervals according to a chance as perfect as that of roulette. These were not ordinary playing cards, but so-called Zener cards, commonly used in telepathy experiments, and bearing the five designs described above. This correspondent from dry land then concentrated on the cards drawn and tried to think only of them. He then noted down on a piece of paper the cards drawn and had the result stamped by Colonel William Bower, Director of Biological Sciences at the United States Air Force Research Office.
When the "Nautilus" docked at Groton at the end of its voyage, the mysterious passenger, whose name remains unknown, was immediately escorted to the nearest military airfield. From there, a plane took off and carried him to Friendship. The passenger was immediately sent to Colonel Bower.
He compared the contents of the two envelopes: the experiment had succeeded with an accuracy of over 90%. The passenger of the "Nautilus" had guessed the cards drawn by a correspondent across the Atlantic, under several meters of water. The American Air Force and Navy had just verified that a brain can communicate without the aid of any material support with another brain, across space.
PATENTED DEVICES
Here is also strong: a few weeks ago, in its industrial program, the British national broadcaster B.B.C. announced that a businessman from Leeds, Mr. Little, was going to make a six-week trip to the United States and South America to demonstrate the effectiveness of a patented device, called "The Revealer"; this device can, it is said, detect metallic and non-metallic objects and ground structures to a depth of 60 m.
The device, invented by a Mr. L. J. Veale, consists of two cylindrical handles made of
chrome-plated copper, each bearing, at right angles, indicator rods mounted on a pivot and 0.53 m long. The indicator rods remain parallel when held horizontally; but when the operator points them towards the ground and moves, they pivot towards each other.
"It is even possible," declared the B.B.C., "to determine the nature of the mineral or of the buried object. To do this, it is sufficient to collect a certain number of mineral indicators (tin, zinc, iron, etc.) at one of the places where something has been located and to fix them successively, above the object"; if the mineral or combination of minerals which is suitable has been chosen, the indicator rods remain parallel... ".
The instrument could also detect pottery and pipes, fittings, fire hydrants and voids caused by ground subsidence; in archaeology, for example, it was used to find a 224-year-old coffin in Uxbridge.
An English contractor claimed that various members of his staff had used the instrument successfully; no special skills were required to operate it, its maker claimed. "It works," concluded the BBC, "by the reaction of copper rods to the frequency of vibrations or waves emitted by a given mineral; these waves act on arms which are delicately balanced on needles in the handles of the vibrator..."
The firm manufacturing the apparatus is Grace Bors, Ltd., Fenchurch Street, London, E.C. 4. It is represented in the United States by Porter International, Washington.
Mr. Little, who is still traveling, must have had a bit of a surprise when he was in the United States. In fact, a device quite similar to the "Revealer" was registered by the American Patent Office four years ago under number 2,482,773. It had been invented by a Mr. T. G. Hieronymus.
BIOELECTRONICS AND RELATIVITY
What is the bottom of this business of detectors? Extrasensory perception again. Do we have a theory? Several. Facts? A crowd; it would be tedious to list the great series of experiments undertaken on this subject over the last twenty years; the extraordinary cases of subjects correctly guessing fifteen times in a row the cards drawn in a neighboring room or at Tens of kilometers of distance fill the works on the subject.
What gives the results their value is their interpretation. The method used is obviously the statistical method: the average of the "right hits" that can be attributed to chance being 20%, the proportions higher than this are explained by an unknown factor. Speaking of extrasensory perception, the Americans use the convention Psi (from the name of a letter of the Greek alphabet) to designate this factor.
THE SECRET OF A TORPEDO FISH
But all phenomena, apparently, are not of the same order in the field of bioelectronics. We must first distinguish between cases of thought transmission or telepathy, those which currently interest the large firms mentioned above and the American government, and cases of psychokinesis. What is it? These are cases where the mind appears to act on objects at a distance; it is supposed, for example, that a gambler can influence the fall of the dice he throws. Telepathy and psychokinesis are not absolutely separate; the psychiatrist who obscurely influences his patient, for example and this is in the process of being demonstrated, exercises a sort of psychokinesis. Given the more particularly fantastic character of psychokinesis, specialists who deal with Psi phenomena have prudently preferred to turn their attention to telepathy. This is already a lot of work for the moment...
What seems to characterize telepathic phenomena is that they occur without limitation, across time and space. For space, this may still work, that is to say, one can appeal to admissible data to explain bioelectronics. How is it, for example, that the passenger of the "Nautilus" and his correspondent were able to correspond across meters of water, while ordinary radio waves do not pass through water? It may be that the "waves" of the brain are of a nature to pass through this element, as are waves of biological electricity. A significant fact: the receivers of the Soviet laboratory ship "Vityaz" were able to pick up the waves of torpedo fish, while messages from submarines could not reach them.
It is for the propagation in time of Psi phenomena that the explanations become difficult; mathematical theories are even used to explain them. Some telepaths, for example, predict future events. Let us not cite the cases of great soothsayers, let us limit ourselves to the limited and reproducible experience of the subject who guesses the card that is going to be drawn; this would mean that the subject emits waves, electronic or otherwise, which would propagate at the speed of light; he would then "join" in the future the event that he reflects; according to Einstein, a man who ran fast enough around a pole would end up... catching up with himself, we could thus compare the bioelectronic wave to a ray of light reflected by a mirror towards its focus of emission.
A German physicist of international reputation, Nobel Prize winner Pascual Jordan, and Dr. Banesh Hoffman, Einstein's collaborator at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, noticed that the phenomena of Psi and... gravitation presented great similarities... It is enough to mention the stories of levitation by certain Asian ascetics, where gravitation and parapsychology meet, to find oneself projected into absolutely fantastic hypotheses...
Some American researchers also believe that phenomena as dissimilar as the perception of colours and hypnosis (1) can be partly explained by extrasensory perception.
THE IDEAL: GOAT-SHEEP
While waiting for a new Einstein to have the audacity to formulate a theory embracing all this, international experimenters are pursuing more practical research. An American psychologist, Dr. Gertrude Schmeidler, has found that subjects who believe in thought transmission obtain better results than those who do not; she calls the former "sheep" and the latter "goats." It is said that a good receiving apparatus is composed of a "goat-sheep" pair. She also found that subjects well adapted to their social group obtain the best results.
This last finding seems to confirm the conclusions of another researcher, Dr. Humphrey Osmond, communicated in 1957 to the Academy of Sciences of New York: certain hallucinogens, including an alkaloid called Mescaline, which is obtained from a Mexican plant, promotes receptivity to thought transmission. Now, the Mexican Indians and the many toxicologists who have experimented with this drug, had already noted that it puts one in a state of extraordinary sympathy with the assembly in which one finds oneself; in the study of Psi phenomena, this state is called empathy; an empathic subject obtains better results than a lucid subject. <<As far as I can judge, writes Osmond, the phenomena provoked by this drug occur because the brain, although deregulated in its functioning, reacts in a more subtle and complex way than when it is normal... ». We already know, moreover, that coffee promotes transmission and that aspirin inhibits it. It therefore seems that thought transmission is a material phenomenon, since chemical substances modify it.
OUR BRAIN 1/10 OF A VOLT
If thought transmission is ever to be used as a weapon of war, or more precisely of espionage, it is likely that special drugs will be used. For the moment, however, working "cold," the researchers at Rand and other firms are not using any drugs; they are trying first to define the behavior of a normal brain in a thought transmission phenomenon.
To do this, they follow the trail opened by the famous specialist in brain activity, Grey-Walter. By studying a large number of encephalograms, Grey-Walter was able to determine three major types of brain waves, which are never the same in two different people. It is thus possible, by determining the exact amplitude of each of these waves in a subject, to take a real "cerebral imprint", commonly used by specialists in mental illness and in criminal procedure. It is also possible, just as one recognizes the mental age and character of a person by their encephalogram, to recognize a subject gifted for telepathy by a certain type of waves, by a certain cerebral imprint.
Because it seems accepted that there are gifted subjects and others who are not.
The ten billion cells in our brain together produce a voltage of barely 1/10 of a volt; how could this current flow through thousands of
kilometers and still have enough strength to influence another brain? No one knows yet: the subject is new, and it is only in recent months that organizations capable of conducting large-scale experiments have become interested in this subject. Several experiments are to be attempted soon. And among these, the study of the influences of certain screens (copper, iron, zinc, etc.) on bioelectronic waves. A large part of American research tends towards the discovery of amplifying substances.
Fantastic, all this? We must not forget that if our brain contains only for I NF barely any chemicals, water, carbohydrates, sulfur, etc., it also contains tens of millions of "electronic devices"...
At a recent conference in Chicago celebrating the 100th anniversary of Darwin's "The Origin of Species," a London neurologist, Dr. Macdonald Critchley, had the courage to declare: "At present, language enables man to express intelligibly only 60% of what he thinks. As for the listener, he understands only 60% of what he has heard. Moreover, a growing gap is opening up between spoken and written language. The latter will disappear first. And one day, man's need for communication will be so much stronger than his possibilities of expression through speech that the latter will have to give way to a more effective means, something like telepathy.