Declassified NSA File: The 1973 Psychic Probe of Jupiter

The document carries Its title page names two authors, Harold Sherman and Ingo Swann, and dates the work April 27, 1973. What the pages describe is not a sensor reading or a telemetry log but an attempt to perceive a distant planet through means the text itself calls psychic. The stated rationale, as the record sets it out, was timing.

The NASA probe Pioneer 10 was then on its way toward Jupiter, and the document notes the hope that it would relay back data as yet not known to science. That circumstance gave the exercise a built-in reference point: whatever the two men reported could, in principle, be checked later against what the spacecraft eventually returned. The document is explicit that neither Sherman nor Swann claimed validity for their results, adding that to do so would be beside any scientific point, and that what verification might come from Pioneer 10…