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A séance room wrapped in copper
Rumors from Moscow
In 1948, rumors out of Moscow held that Soviet scientists were testing telepathy in labs, and American intelligence wanted a mind weapon of its own. No respectable scientist would touch the subject, and Congress was never going to fund séances in public. The job fell to Puharich, a 30-year-old doctor from Chicago.
While still a student, Puharich had published a theory his colleagues wouldn't go near: neurons didn't just fire, they transmitted, and anything that could transmit could also receive. If he was right, telepathy was biology, and he wanted to prove it.
The copper room
The copper room was a Faraday cage, a chamber that blocks radio waves and electricity. If the brain is a radio, a psychic placed inside a room no signal can penetrate would show what still gets through. Puharich called the project the Roundtable Foundation of Electrobiology. It had a name, a facility, and a testing protocol, and it still needed private funding.
The donors
The first check came from Alice Astor Bouverie, whose father was the richest man on the Titanic. The donor list that followed included business tycoons, heiresses, and politicians, among them Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt's former vice president. These people sat on corporate boards, advised the White House, and had some ties to the OSS, which became the CIA.
Why would a copper room test telepathy?
Conductive metal reflects and absorbs radio waves, so a room lined with copper screen keeps ordinary electromagnetic signals out. If a psychic inside still received information, the reasoning went, the information could not have traveled as an ordinary radio signal. A screen blocks a wave when its holes are smaller than the wavelength. A microwave oven's door uses the same principle, with a metal mesh whose holes block waves about 12 centimeters long.
How did the OSS become the CIA?
President Roosevelt created the Office of Strategic Services in June 1942 under William Donovan to gather intelligence and run sabotage behind enemy lines. President Truman disbanded it in October 1945, and its functions were split among other departments. The National Security Act of 1947 created the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA began operating that September.
How did the Astor fortune begin?
Alice Astor's father was John Jacob Astor IV, who died on the Titanic in 1912. The family fortune began with the first John Jacob Astor, who made money in the fur trade and then bought large amounts of Manhattan land. By his death in 1848, he was the richest person in the United States. His estate was estimated at about 20 million dollars.
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