(Alleged) Psychokinetic Research at BYU (ERI pt. 5)
This is the fifth part of my ongoing series covering the Eyring Research Institute (ERI), Brigham Young University’s defense and computer science research arm from the 70s and 80s. You don’t need to read the other four parts before this one, but I’d recommend them.
On April 1, 1982, United States Navy Captain Jake W. Stewart sent a research proposal to the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, Dr. Richard Delauer. The proposal details a hypothetical research program exploring Exceptional Human Functioning — the directed use of psychic abilities including, but not limited to, remote viewing, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, telepathy, and healing. Stewart confidentially states that “it seems virtually certain that some sort of psychic phenomenon do [sic] exist,” but “it is less certain that [psychic] phenomenon can be controlled into a cost-effective, operational system.”
To harness psychic abilities, Stewart proposed that the Department of Defense partner with universities and research facilities throughout the country to conduct compartmentalized, classified studies. The goal was to develop weapon systems the DoD could use against its Cold War enemies while also providing a baseline for evaluating foreign programs investigating similar phenomena. Stewart’s research program would focus on three fields of Exceptional Human Functioning: remote viewing, psychokinesis, and telepathy. Each field would have separate universities or military research branches working on them. Under psychokinesis research, he proposed — alongside heavy hitters like the Lawrence Livermore Labs and Boeing Scientific Research Laboratories — the Eyring Research Institute at Brigham Young University. If included in the project, the ERI would investigate:
“[Examining] the vulnerability of electronic/electromechanical systems of known reliability”
“[Disrupting] foreign electronic information processing systems, and [protecting] US systems from unauthorized penetration”
“[Providing] data for evaluating foreign reports that a person’s physiology or behavior can be altered remotely via psychic means”
Did Captain Stewart’s project proceed, and did the ERI conduct Exceptional Human Functioning research? Unsurprisingly, I haven’t been able to track down any direct confirmation, so I can’t say for sure. That said, I’ve found evidence for two ERI projects that look like Captain Stewart’s proposal, or at least a related research tract. These are the ERI’s research projects diving into the powers of the mind.
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Flashback to the mid-60s. With everybody interested in the fashionable, mind-expanding drug LSD, the King of B-movies, Roger Corman, realized that there was money to be made by bringing the experience of an acid trip to the big screen. He dropped acid himself, had a great time, and started working on a script with Jack Nicholson. The resulting film, The Trip, would have to be heavily dependent on special effects to accurately portray the psychedelic experience. These effects needed to be top-of-the-line. If the acid trip scenes looked bad, the whole movie would be a bust. Corman scoured the film industry and found a highly recommended lighting specialist named Bob Beck. He had put on dazzling light shows for other productions, but most importantly, had worked with Timothy Leary on the epochal Turn On, Turn In, Drop Out. Touting the approval of the LSD guru himself, Beck joined the Corman production, completing three special effects scenes.
Beck’s effects were not entirely innocent. During one of the acid sequences, the frame rapidly flickers with bursts of light. The bursts of light were actually mystical symbols from occult traditions. According to Beck, he used research into subliminal stimulation to determine the flicker-rate of the images, hoping to influence the audience’s minds without them realizing it. Allegedly, during one of the screenings the audience became visibly agitated during the sequence. It’s up to you to decide whether that was due to a standard reaction to having a light rapidly flashing in your face or due to subliminal messaging. The pertinent point is that Beck was interested in ways to change people’s thoughts without their consent.
For a special effects guy Beck had an unusual start to his career. In 1955, he earned a PhD from the Atomic and Nuclear Sciences Institute. Well, let’s put an asterisk behind that because the Institute seems to have not existed outside of Beck’s biography page, or at least doesn’t have an internet footprint. He also claims to have worked for a variety of defense companies and research labs, notably Lockheed during the development of the F-94 Starfire interceptor jet. Due to the weirdness of the institute he graduated from, and the fact that his future research was definitely outside the scientific mainstream, it’d be easy to dismiss Beck’s resume as a charlatan trying to establish credentials. However, the projects he claims to have worked on are relatively obscure and don’t include anything too flashy. Even the F-94 is a lesser-known airplane — the aviation nerds among my readers would probably agree that the similar F-89 Scorpion is a better-known aircraft, and that’s still an obscure bird. With this in mind, I’m willing to give Beck the benefit of the doubt and accept his biography as relatively accurate.
Plus, secondary sources confirm other parts of his career. We’ve already seen his work with Roger Corman, and that’s verified by credits for the movie. Around the same time, Beck founded the Color Control Company, another organization that hasn’t left much of a footprint outside of “The UFO Evidence,” published by the National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena. Beck was called in as a technical expert.
If Bob Beck was ever in the straight world of verifiable science, he had by this point left it behind. Still, kooks like to believe that they are actually conducting research, and Beck hadn’t given up on his old interests from the Corman days. However, he had moved on from flickering lights and was investigating the mind control effects of electromagnetic waves. You might recall that the Exceptional Human Functioning study was interested in a similar research tract under their psychokinesis group. EM waves might not seem as paranormal as psychokinesis, but we’re in spook science territory now — the paranormal and verified all start blending together. The Eyring Research Institute was one place where the mixing was happening.
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Beck claims he worked for the Eyring Research Institute in the 70s and 80s. I can’t find how he got hired or when he left. During this time, he was also consulting for the Sandia National Laboratories out of New Mexico and California. Curiously, I have yet to find a reference to Bob Beck being Mormon. He must have been though, since Brigham Young University is exclusively Mormon, requiring professors and researchers to have unwavering faith in the church. Maybe they made an exception for Beck? Maybe Beck didn’t want to be associated with the Mormons after his time at their research institute? Who knows?
Here’s how Beck summarizes his time at the ERI:
In later years Bob was a consultant to such entities as the Eyring Research Institute, a top secret, mind research organization with a cooperative connection with the science departments of Brigham Young University. Eyring also investigated underwater communications and secret projects for the United States Navy. For several years he was a military consultant for his expertise on ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) technology. He also consulted for Sandia Corporation, an engineering and science laboratory as well as periodically presenting briefings for the CIA, DIA, NSA, and the Pentagon in ELF technology, psychological warfare, crowd-control systems via non-linear electromagnetic radiation, including expert analysis of possible Soviet advances in related technology… [He] designed and built the first successful ELF magnetic telemetry communications link capable of total penetration of shielded environments such as missile silos and control centers, as well as consulting on highly-classified Scalar and underwater communication modalities.
Immediately the connection between what Captain Stewart wanted the Eyring Research Institute to study and what Bob Beck claims he studied stand out, notably the psychological warfare research and the reference to secret projects for the US Navy. It’s also interesting that Beck refers to the ERI as a “mind research organization.” This is new to me. I have only seen ERI research revolve around defense and computers.
ELF waves are critical to naval operations and also play a role in pseudoscience. ELF radio waves are radio waves with extremely low frequencies. Here’s the intuition for what that means: imagine a wave in the ocean with a peak and a trough behind it. Radio waves are similar, with peaks and troughs tracing out a sinusoidal wave pattern. The frequency of a wave is how often the peaks occur, measured in a unit called hertz. Your car radio picks up radio waves with a frequency of around 100 megahertz, or 100,000,000 hertz. ELF waves range from 3 to 30 hertz. Extremely low, indeed.
ELF radio waves are generated by naturally occurring phenomena like lightning but are also critical for military communications. ELF waves can penetrate seawater, allowing the Navy to communicate with submerged submarines and order nuclear strikes or naval maneuvers without having the submarines surface. Building an ELF transmitter is difficult though, due to another property of waves. The lower the frequency of a wave, the longer the wavelength: the distance between the peaks of the waves. ELF wavelengths are gigantic, getting up to 100,000 km, a quarter of the distance from the Earth to the moon. You need a pretty massive antenna to transmit waves that big, and that’s what the ERI was researching. Out of all the spooky stuff the ERI did, this is the research field that I’ve found the most evidence for, including references in a Jane's military guide and published patents.
Specifically, the ERI was working on the Navy’s Take Charge And Move Out (TACAMO) program. Once the Navy realized their massive ground-based ELF transmitters were vulnerable to a nuclear strike, they began investigating ways to wrap up ELF antennas and place them on airplanes. That way, the Navy could have an airborne, un-bombable command and control network to order a submarine-launched nuclear counterstrike. More on this in future installments.
That’s the science side of ELF waves, but they have been the target of parascientific inquiry as well. Beck and others within the US military were convinced that ELF waves could be used to change people’s thinking at a distance. There was concern back in the day that the Soviets were developing this capability, beaming communist thoughts into the heads of innocent Americans at a distance. Beck, for example, claims to have proven that the so-called “Russian Woodpecker” — a mysterious 10-hertz signal originating from the Soviet Union — was a way for the Soviets to control American minds. In reality, it was the Duga early warning array, an over-the-horizon radar built to detect incoming nuclear missiles.
So Beck claims he was investigating ELF waves and psychological warfare while working at the ERI. Captain Stewart proposed that the ERI study the ability to change behavior at a distance using psychic means and figure out how to use psychic phenomena to penetrate secured facilities. Note, that Beck says he “designed and built the first successful ELF magnetic telemetry communications link capable of total penetration of shielded environments.” While ELF and psychokinesis might not seem connected, when you get to the fringes of rationality, science and the paranormal often mix. The pseudoscientists like Beck think they are doing research, and they think their enemies are the ones hiding the true application of science from the world. This sort of thinking is incidentally common in Mormonism; God lives on a planet, Book of Mormon archeological evidence is just around the corner, Moroni’s Promise in the Book of Mormon uses the scientific method, etc. It’s not difficult to see how ELF waves and psychic beliefs can merge — maybe the ERI thought that you could control the ELF waves using your mind or use the waves to control other people’s thoughts. Beck did refer to the ERI as a mind research organization, and while consulting for them, published a paper entitled “Mood Modification with ELF Magnetic Fields.”
Beck’s other research tract is even more fringe: scalar weapons. This was a sort of Cold War era proto-Havana Syndrome conspiracy theory. For years, pilots near the Soviet Union had seen mysterious domes of light over Soviet territory — like an atom bomb explosion, but not quite. The Drive interviewed an RC-135 crew member who saw such an event.
As we looked for traffic, we noticed what appeared to be a translucent, milky white wall moving from the left, over the USSR, to the right, toward the Northern Pacific Ocean. It covered the entire sky from ground level to as far up as we could see looking out the front windows of the airplane. It moved very quickly—far faster than crossing airplane traffic—and rapidly approached us. The wall of light passed across our flight path and then continued eastward, leaving the empty and dark night sky in its wake. Our programmed turn time arrived and we began our bank to the left to collect on the RVs. Once we rolled out southbound the wall of light was no longer visible to the east.
In 1984, the CIA published a report evocatively named “Star Wars Now!” on similar dome of light incidents, classifying whatever system caused these events as “scalar weapons.” The report is basically nonsense, but has some really wild illustrations so please take a look at it. The pertinent point was that the CIA believed that the Soviets had some sort of super weapon that could project energy at a distance. Not a laser, but something much worse. The author, Thomas E. Bearden, also had concerns about the Duga array and seems to have been in the same conspiratorial milieu as Beck and Captain Stewart. Although he never connects scalar weapons to psychic phenomena, the whole unhinged pseudoscientific ranting gives the report a distinctly paranormal tone, a sort of technological occultism.
In reality, the Dome of Light (if it existed) was probably some sort of anti-ICBM defense system or a way to blind American satellites flying over the Soviet Union. I’d assume that the ERI and Beck thought it was something much more sinister and almost paranormal. Like the Havana Syndrome, scalar weapons were phantoms — they could be whatever you wanted them to be, and have whatever properties you wanted. That the ERI was possibly researching them is fascinating, and I hope to dig up more about them for future installments.
Whatever Beck was doing, it seems that the ERI, their possible government backers, and BYU were interested in finding ways to change people’s behaviors and moods with a flick of a switch.
After his time at the ERI, Beck dove headfirst into the alternative medicine world, inventing the first ionic colloidal silver generator for home use. He founded an institute and began publishing the Beck Protocol, a pseudoscientific way to cure all your ailments, from drug addiction (he had been inspired by an alternative medicine practitioner who had cured Pete Townshend of addiction) to cancer. He died in 2002, but his institute lives on.
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The ERI’s second, and more directly paranormal, research tract is even more obscure than Bob Beck’s already fringe career. In 2011, Salt Lake City resident David Yurth published a “paper” for Natural Philosophy entitled “Y-Bias and Angularity: The Dynamics of Self-Organizing Criticality.” Don’t worry if that doesn’t make any sense to you, the paper is a pseudoscientific screed formatted to look like something that has passed peer review and was published for an organization that seems to be mostly an internet chat group. Not exactly the best source, but it’s one of the few traces left over from the ERI’s psychic experiments. At least he’s got the “Coast to Coast AM” stamp of approval.
Putting aside the wonky science, Yurth’s paper includes some tantalizing details. For one, he proposes some… interesting… theories about electromagnetism that are not too far from what Beck was talking about. Yurth also talks about the Bohn-Aharanov Effect, which features prominently in “Star Wars Now!” Most importantly, Yurth mentions the Eyring Research Institute.
According to Yurth, the Eyring Research Institute was able to experimentally prove “the coupling of consciousness with hadronic interactions, photonic effects, local and non-local field effects, and related phenomena.” That’s pretty similar to what Captain Stewart wanted the ERI to investigate. In the references, Yurth is even more explicit, describing spoon-bending studies:
...Thus, the selection which we are presenting is the result of a lengthy and rigorous screening process. In only 20 of 150 test samples which [were] deformed or transformed in front of us or our collaborators, could we positively confirm the "abnormal" nature of the effects observed. In this report, we will describe eight of the most important cases…”
This is the forward to the definitive report, published and prepared by the Eyring Research Institute, accompanied by extensive film footage taken under rigorously controlled conditions, which describes the use of human consciousness alone to deform, transform and exert other measurable effects on both metallic and nonmetallic substances, at a distance. While portions of the study remain classified, the report referred to here has never been classified by the United States Government. Our thanks to David Faust for providing this publicly available information.
While Yurth claims that the report has never been classified, I can’t find a reference to it outside of this paper. Despite his reporting that the Eyring Research Institute filmed footage of the spoon-bending phenomenon, I’m skeptical of that claim. Sorry, but I don’t think psychokinesis is a real thing. The more pertinent point is that, regardless of the outcome of the experiments, Yurth’s reference implies that Captain Stewart’s proposal to have BYU study psychokinesis was followed through. What’s really great about this source is that we get two names that we can track down: Eugene Kovalenko and David Faust.
Of the two, I could find less about David Faust. Yurth wrote about their friendship, especially in their quest to develop a technique to generate infinite energy. To sequel bait you again, I plan on talking more about the ERI’s connection to infinite energy research in the future. I also found some of his work in the “2nd Annual Review of Progress in Applied Computational Electrodynamics at the Naval Postgraduate School” from 1986. He worked on communication antennas for the Navy — just like what Bob Beck said he worked on alongside the ERI’s more paranormal research. So we have another antenna man diving through the murky waters of parapsychology. His LinkedIn lists him as the Director of Technical Analytics at the mysteriously named “Motion Sciences” out of Salt Lake City.
Eugene Kovalenko — who died in 2022 — has left a much bigger footprint. According to his obituary Kovalenko joined the Army as a Russian interpreter and worked on the Berlin Tunnel, a CIA project to build a network of tunnels under East Berlin for espionage. He then worked at Sandia and other military-connected labs and organizations.
Curiously though, Kovalenko doesn’t mention the Eyring Research Institute on his LinkedIn, which is much more comprehensive than Faust’s. There’s probably a good reason though. Kovalenko was a member of the Mormon church, but a heretical one. He was a consistent speaker at the Sunstone Symposium, a conference held in Utah where anybody from any of the various branches of Mormonism (including us apostates) can give presentations on Mormon topics.
In 1990, Kovalenko gave a presentation explaining his laudable but confusing belief that one can remain a card-carrying church member while not supporting (sustaining) the Mormon leaders. The church leaders disagreed with that assessment and, in 1992, excommunicated him. That didn’t get Kovalenko to go away, as he continued to present at Sunstone and write in the related Dialogue Journal, insisting that the ultimate religious authority will always be the “still small voice from within.” He seems to have been friends, or at least was in similar circles as the progressive BYU professor Eugene England — England’s archives include some of Kovalenko’s writing.
While not a smoking gun proving that the ERI did the Navy’s psychokinetic research, it is a slightly steaming one. David Faust was provably connected the Eyring Research Institute and conducted pseudoscientific research with Yurth. Eugene Kovalenko worked with the military and CIA. He doesn’t list his BYU experience, but has good reason to distance himself from Mormonism. In my experience, active members who get involved in things like Sunstone are generally connected to a Utah university in some way, mostly BYU. We don’t know if Kovalenko worked for BYU, but it’s not a bad bet. He also published a book about dream interpretation, so he seems to have not been a stranger to mysticism. He wasn’t the only ERI alum interested in harnessing the power of dreams.
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Did the Eyring Research Institute and, by extension Brigham Young University conduct paranormal research in the 80s? In my opinion, they probably did, and I believe that Captain Stewart’s plan was how they got funding to do it, but we’ll never know. We know that the CIA and Department of Defense were eager to exploit any advantage over the Soviets, including those outside the normal realms of science. Stewart’s proposal remains obscure, but other paranormal research tracts, such as the CIA’s Project Stargate, are better documented. Despite alleged video evidence, the projects probably never went anywhere. You can’t bend metal with your mind.
My blood runs a little cold though imagining BYU professors signing off on a project partially founded to investigate the ability to change people’s moods and ideas with electromagnetic radiation. Even if you and I know that’s impossible, BYU seems to have not thought so. The will to dive into a research program to violate people’s minds is an unsettling thing to contemplate.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could just zap a ray at someone and have them believe in Mormon teachings? That application occurred to me almost instantly once I started digging through all the detritus. After all, that’s what the CIA thought the Soviets were doing to Americans with scalar weapons or the Duga array. I would be surprised if it didn’t occur to, say, contemporary BYU president and potential future prophet of the church Jeffrey R. Holland.