Like the White Visitation

[David Morris]

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-darpa14aug14a,1,5017558.story?coll=la-home-leftrail

Army of Extreme Thinkers

Over the past half-century, an obscure Pentagon group, the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency, has been behind some of the world's most
revolutionary inventions - the Internet, the global positioning system, stealth
technology and the computer mouse, to name a few.

It's an impressive record of success offset only by the fact that DARPA has
also come up with some of the most boneheaded ideas ever to spring from the
government.

[...]

Johnson set up the agency to find experts in physics, information technology,
materials science and other fields, then showered them with funds and freedom.
ARPA initially focused on rocketry, space exploration, ballistic missile
defense and nuclear test detection, then broadened its range.

Eschewing sluggish peer- review of grant proposals, ARPA relied on enterprising
program officers, many drawn from academia and industry, who selected projects
based on hunches about the future.

"In the 1960s you could do really any damn thing you wanted, as long as it
wasn't against the law or immoral," said Herzfeld , who directed ARPA from 1965
to 1967.

One legendary manager was the late J.C.R. Licklider, an acoustical engineer and
early mainframe computer expert. In 1962, then-ARPA Director Jack Ruina
recruited "Lick," after reading his pioneering article, "Man Computer
Symbiosis," in an engineering journal - a prescient vision of real-time,
interactive computing.

Licklider disdained red tape, meetings and paperwork. He freed scientists to
move as rapidly as possible toward his dream, the "Intergalactic Network." His
wild idea became the Internet after years of DARPA-funded research.

[...]

DARPA's unlikely triumphs, however, have come at a high cost - 85% to 90% of
its projects fail to accomplish their planned goals, although they sometimes
spin off unanticipated technologies, according to Tether.

The list of failures is long and strange.

During the 1970s DARPA studied telepathy and psychokinesis, the psychic
manipulation of objects. "The Soviets ¼ had a woman who was fantastic," Tether
said. "She could feel colors."

DARPA probed such methods to see, for example, if anyone could psychically peek
around the globe for military advantage. "DARPA spent, for those days,
considerable amounts of money because the impact would be tremendous if you
could do it" - and disastrous if the Soviets won the telepathy race, Tether
said. Ultimately the agency concluded that parapsychology, if real, could not
be used on demand, and killed the project.




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