The US Navy and Marines investigate the “Spidey Sense”

Re-posted from Quora

The U.S. Military Believes People Have a Sixth Sense

In 2014, the Office of Naval Research embarked on a four-year, $3.85 million research program to explore the phenomena it calls premonition and intuition, or “Spidey sense,” for sailors and Marines.

“We have to understand what gives rise to this so-called ‘sixth sense,’ says Peter Squire, a program officer in ONR’s Expeditionary Maneuver Warfare and Combating Terrorism department. Today’s Navy scientists place less emphasis on trying to understand the phenomena theoretically and more on using technology to examine the mysterious process, which Navy scientists assure the public is not based on superstition.

Of course, they’re calling it “sensemaking” because of all the drama surrounding anything psychic. But this is exactly what they’re researching: psychic ability and practical uses for it.

Psychic ability and combat go hand in hand and there are accounts of it going back as far as written records will take us.

I have argued before that a characteristic of psychic ability is that it is often need based.

Need-Based Psychic Ability Appears to be Strongest Type

When people need to, they avoid disasters, accidents and death from a wide variety of causes.

In war, there are many other reasons that psychic ability would be more present than otherwise. There is a constant state of ambiguity regarding IED’s, snipers and ambushes. (Ambiguity is also a trigger for psychic ability.)

In addition to this there is the close connection that soldiers have with each other. It forms a kind of collective consciousness that allows the soldiers to be in tune with one another.

The article provides few clues as to the details of the program, and the devil is in the details.

Personally, I think that it would be a mistake to pull a few gifted individuals aside for special training and then re-insert them later. In order for psychic ability to work on a squad or platoon level, trust has to be achieved with fellow soldiers and this can only be accomplished through experience and training together. In other words the squad and platoon must train with psychic ability integrated into their operations so that everyone can get a feel for how it does (and does not) work. Soldiers should only work with people that they know and trust.

Bringing a psychic in as an outsider specialist is just asking for trouble.

If you’ve read the above article, you know everything that I know about this program.