Kenneth Kress

Kenneth A. Kress was a CIA officer with a background in physics who managed the agency's investigations of parapsychology in the 1970s. In 1977 he wrote an internal account, 'Parapsychology in Intelligence: A Personal Review and Conclusions', for the classified CIA journal Studies in Intelligence. It was declassified in 1996, and the CIA still points readers to it.

Kress describes how the laser physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff at Stanford Research Institute interested the CIA in psychic research in the early 1970s, and how the agency funded remote viewing tests with subjects including Pat Price. He discusses Price's 1974 description of a Soviet research site, noting a striking sketch of a large crane but adding that most of Price's data were wrong or could not be evaluated. He weighed whether Price really saw the site or had been told what to draw.

His overall judgement was that the results were tantalising but incomplete. After Price died in 1975, CIA-sponsored intelligence tests stopped, and the work moved to the Army and Defense Intelligence Agency.