JFK's Assassination and the CIA's Psychic Cold War

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Have you seen any dinosaurs?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:01)
What kind of question is that?

**SPEAKER_3** (0:04)
On August 14th, I think that our neighborhood has moved.
We're in the past. Summer ends on Oak Street.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:15)
Run!

**SPEAKER_3** (0:16)
From producer GJ. Abrams and Hathaway, Ewan McGregor.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:21)
We're gonna survive.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:23)
The End of Oak Street, directed by David Robert Mitchell, rated PG-13, may be inappropriate for children under 13 August 14th.

**AJ Gentile** (0:30)
On March 29th, 1977, George deMorenchil told a journalist that his close friendship with Lee Harvey Oswald was an assignment from the CIA Dallas office.
Congress sent an investigator to take a statement. When he got to the house, George's family said he wasn't home. But he was. He was in his bedroom, dead from a shotgun wound. That nobody heard.
But the story doesn't start in 1977, and it doesn't start in Dallas. It starts in 1952 in a mansion in Maine, where America's wealthiest families held a seance, and nine people were chosen by ancient gods to change the world. And on November 22nd, 1963, they did.
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In 1948, the Cold War got weird. There was the space race, the arms race and the psychic race.
Rumors out of Moscow said Soviet scientists were testing telepathy in labs. If mine could be a weapon, American intelligence wanted one, but there was a problem. No respectable scientists would touch the subject, and Congress was never going to fund seances, at least not publicly. The psychic race needed a man willing to bet his career on it. That man was a 30-year-old doctor from Chicago named Andriy Puroch. The army put Puroch through medical school at Northwestern during the war. While he was still a student, Puroch published a theory that his colleagues wouldn't go near. He believed the human brain was a radio. Neurons didn't just fire, they transmitted, and anything that could transmit could also receive. If he was right, telepathy wasn't magic, it was biology, and Puroch wanted to prove it.
He rented a 45-room mansion in Glencote, Maine and started building. He converted one of the rooms into a Faraday cage, a chamber wrapped in copper screen that blocks radio waves and electricity. If the brain is a radio, you test it like a radio. Put a psychic inside a room that no signal can penetrate and see what still gets through.
He called the project the Roundtable Foundation of Electrobiology. So the program had a name, a facility, and a testing protocol. The only thing Puroch was missing was money. He needed private funding.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:03)
Private funding? That reminds me, I need to launch the Kickstarter for my vasectomy.

**AJ Gentile** (4:09)
Just why? You want me to have the cat eat you?

**SPEAKER_1** (4:11)
Reward tears.
Reward tears. For $10, you can hold the camera. For $50, you can hold the scissors. For $100, you can hold me.

**AJ Gentile** (4:20)
I'll give you $500 to never talk about this again.
Done. The first check came from Alice Astor-Bouvery. Her father was the richest man on the Titanic. He went down with the ship in 1912, and Alice inherited a fortune and an obsession with the afterlife. After that, the donor list read like a who's who of American wealth and power, business tycoons, heiresses, and, of course, politicians. Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt's former vice president, he cut a check. These people sat on corporate boards, advised the White House, and had some ties to the OSS, which became the CIA.