Released files reveal CIA interest in Scottish paranormal research

Declassified documents released online reveal US Central Intelligence Agency interest in Scottish research into the paranormal.

Nearly 930,000 files containing about 13 million pages are available after a long-running freedom of information campaign.

Files include spoon-bending experiments at the University of Edinburgh, an attack at the US consulate and communist sympathiser rallies all dating back to the 1980s.

Several pieces of research from the university’s para-psychic department was kept by the CIA under its Stargate programme into the paranormal.

They include a paper by leading parapsychologist Deborah Delanoy in which she exposes a teenage metal-bending fraudster in 1983-84.

Her subject, Tim, was a “bright and very affable” 17-year-old who the research team deemed to be an ideal subject.

“Tim claimed to have started bending metal, mostly cutlery, at the age of four and to have been doing so ever since,” reads Ms Delanoy’s report kept by the CIA.

After seven-and-a-half months of laboratory tests, researchers began to suspect Tim was a fraud and used a hidden camera to expose him.

The report says: “Tim confessed to deceptive behaviour. Her said that he was a practicing magician who had wished to see if it were possible for a magician to pose successfully as a psychic in a laboratory.”

The primary lesson of the research, Ms Delanoy documents, was that “we must never let ourselves forget that our subjects may be deceiving us”.

Other University of Edinburgh papers kept by the CIA relate to extrasensory perception - or experiences not explained by known physical or biological understanding. A university spokesman said: “We conduct research into a wide range of areas and it’s understandable major global institutions take an interest in it.”

The Stargate programme has long fascinated conspiracy theorists and is widely credited for influencing the 2004 book by Jon Ronson, The Men Who Stare at Goats.

In the book, made into a movie in 2009 starring George Clooney and Ewan Mcgregor, US special forces attempt to harness paranormal powers as a weapon.

Edinburgh psychologist Drew Mcadam said the CIA’S interest in the paranormal is well-documented.

He said: “They [the CIA] were interested in anything because they got information that the Russians were into it. It was a case of if they’re doing it, we should be doing it.”