The FBI's ESP File: Could the Blind Read Without Eyes?
A small FBI Vault file shows the Bureau weighing a 1957 claim that blind people could be taught to see without their eyes.
The FBI's ESP file is a small Vault release covering 1957 to 1960. It centers on William Foos's claim of teaching people to see without their eyes, which the FBI found no scientific support for and did not pursue.
The FBI Vault includes a short release called "Extra-Sensory Perception." According to its summary, it "consists of cross references to ESP found in FBI files from 1957 to 1960." Several documents concern William Foos, "a proponent of ESP," and others concern "claims that ESP could be used in espionage investigations." It is a small file. The much larger US government psychic research effort, later known as Stargate, was run by the CIA, the Army and the Defense Intelligence Agency, not the FBI.
The documents describe Foos, of Richmond, Virginia, who claimed he had taught members of his family and about 25 other people, including people who were completely blind, to see perfectly without using their eyes. In one demonstration his daughter Margaret, then about 16 or 17, "was blindfolded by the observers with eye pads and an elastic band, thereafter reading, distinguishing color and moving about the room with complete ease." The file also records FBI contacts with the CIA about Foos in 1957.
One memo explains why the Bureau paid attention at all: "Should his claims be well-founded, there is no limit to the value which could accrue to the FBI - complete and undetectable access to mail, the diplomatic pouch; visual access to buildings." By September 1957, the file records, CIA contacts had told the FBI that Foos had produced nothing new and that his claims were not supported by evidence.
The file also notes a June 1960 New York Journal American column by Ruth Montgomery, "Spying by Mind-Reading," which said Army intelligence was running experiments in mental telepathy. The Vault summary sums up the outcome: "The FBI found no scientific support for this or other claims and did not pursue the matters raised in these references." The CIA, for its part, would start its own remote viewing research in 1972.
An FBI memo imagined a blindfolded reader giving the Bureau "complete and undetectable access to mail, the diplomatic pouch; visual access to buildings."
The FBI found no scientific support for the claims and dropped them. Claimed "eyeless sight" has generally been explained as cheating, most often by "peeking down the nose" past a blindfold.
