https://youtu.be/gVfm3mUaQcg

When it comes to the dawn of the modern computer age, most of us think of rebel visionaries and college dropouts working out of their parents’ garage; whiz kids who became billionaires before turning thirty, by tinkering with clunky prototypes that held the promise of revolutionizing the world in ways previous generations could not even dream of.

All the multinational companies that were born out of those success stories are all too happy to uphold this romanticized version of history for their clients. But like ALL versions of history this one is also woefully incomplete, because it leaves out a key element in Silicon Valley’s past that those tech giants are either unaware of, or just too embarrassed to acknowledge — it leaves out PSI phenomena.

In his presentation for the 61st Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association on the campus of the Institute for Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, California, Dr. Jacques Vallee spoke about this ‘hidden history’ of Silicon Valley, and how the world wide web we’re so proud and dependent on owes a big debt to psychical research and the study of the untapped potentials of human consciousness, since it was at the famous Stanford Research Institute (SRI) that their scientists were involved in two major programs that ended up working in tandem: the ARPANET and the Stargate “psychic spy” program.

The ARPANET, as everybody knows by now, was the precursor of the modern Internet and developed at the behest of the Department of Defense’s ARPA (now called DARPA) in order to create a computer network capable of enduring a nuclear conflagration. In the early 1970s Vallee was stationed at SRI’s Augmentation Research Center – where many important technological breakthroughs were achieved for companies like Xerox and Hewlett Packard, such as the mouse interface – collaborating on the ARPANET project; but, as he explains in the presentation below, he soon became involved in the Stargate program as an ‘unpaid consultant’ and became a good friend of both the researchers and some of the individuals with alleged psychic abilities they were testing, including Ingo Swann and Uri Geller.