Now that the CIA has placed a trove of its dirty laundry online for all to see, all sorts of strange chapters of the intelligence agency’s past are beginning to be revealed. Since 2017, journalists and amateurs alike have been poring over the CIA’s CREST database in search of the truth about the many dark, twisted research projects and activities the Central Intelligence Agency has gotten into over the years.

Already, some interesting and somewhat unexplained things have been found. Earlier this month, files were discovered showing the CIA hunted the elusive Yeti and a mysterious “metallic disc” in the Nepalese Himalayas, while another set of files appeared to depict unexplained shadow people with curious numbers stamped on them. Who knows what else may be waiting to be discovered in the CREST databases?

This week, American government watchdog site Muckrock found an interesting set of documents outlining the CIA’s interest in and fears of psychic abilities. Many of the files describe experiments into telekinetic abilities conducted throughout the U.S., Europe, and the USSR, including experiments involving famous psychic Uri Geller. In many of these experiments, the files note, individuals were able to “evidence a new form of energy that moves and perhaps alters matter.” The documents claim that British scientists witnessed objects appearing or disappearing during some of these tests, leading to CIA fears that enemy psychics might create “poltergeist phenomena” in order to terrify and confuse their adversaries’ leadership with psychic attacks.

This aspect of the CIA’s research into possible uses of psychic phenomena is well-documented by our own Nick Redfern and others, but these documents show that the CIA’s fears went even deeper, involving worries that its greatest adversary at the time was developing psychic abilities that could be used as weapons which could cause “a massive change which will alter the direction, time, space and energy-matter relationship of our world.” Yikes.

According to these files, the CIA began tracking Soviet research into parapsychology in the 1970s. While some CIA analysts believe the KGB’s research may have been a counterintelligence ruse designed to confuse American spies, many elements of America’s intelligence agencies took the threat of Soviet psychic weapons seriously. Some analysts even feared that if enough Soviet psychics were combine their powers, they could potentially cause mass destruction with their minds:

With the above scientific speculation and laboratory experiments in mind, a weapon or weapons could be theorized. […] If we see awareness in a psychic framework and you concentrate ten individuals in one area – all of whom are evidencing disruptive telekinetic phenomena – do you cause a chain reaction, causing much matter to reverse direction and sink back into a sea of energy or be displaced in time and space? Could such a ‘critical mass’ affect a whole city?

Could such a psychic weapon exist? Have any actually been deployed? Would we know it if they were? Perhaps the “disruptive telekinetic phenomena” and mind manipulation mentioned in these files could explain our recent shift into a bizarre dystopian timeline.

While these files are a tantalizing glimpse behind the veil of government secrecy, I firmly believe that the really secret, spooky stuff will never see the light of day or was never documented on paper at all. Still, these CREST files are beginning to show that the many conspiracy theories and allegations made about the CIA’s paranormal research over the years are perhaps more true than we realize.