How the military tried to create an army of super soldiers

Technology wasn't actually the method by which the military tried to create an army of super soldiers. It wasn't a special armor or a Captain America-like serum either. No, like most harebrained schemes of the Cold War, the military tried to create a kind of "warrior monk soldier" with paranormal abilities that would take on the defense of the United States when technology could not.

The Army and the CIA, it turns out, could spend money on anything.

The First Earth Battalion was more than just a bunch of men staring at goats. The idea was derived from the human potential movement, a counterculture phenomenon of the 1960s which believed humans were not using their full mental and physical capacity in their lives and could thus be and do more when properly trained or motivated. After the end of the Vietnam War, the Army was ready to review how it fought wars and try an approach less focused on filling body bags.

When the Army sent word that it was seeking new ways of fighting and training its soldiers, it was bombarded with suggestions that seemed bogus but had some merit, like sleep learning and mental rehearsal. It was also offered some of the less down-to-earth ideas in American culture. It attempted to create an Army focused on unleashing the human potential locked within the bodies of its soldiers, unused.

So the U.S. military was divided over how to proceed. One side wanted to invest in developing weapons, technology, armor, and ways to train its soldiers. You know, Army stuff. The other side wanted to train soldiers to master extra-sensory perception, leaving their body at will to fight on the astral plane, levitation, psychic healing techniques, and the ability to walk through walls – they were asking for a "super soldier."

Forget that there was no scientific evidence that this stuff actually worked. Or that the Army didn't really ask if there was concrete evidence. And forget that the Army had no real plans to integrate these super soldiers into its order of battle against the Soviet Union when and if they did work. All they cared about were reports that the Soviets were seeking the same technology and powers, and the Americans wanted it too.

To settle the matter, the Army researched a report on all things parapsychology, from remote viewing to psychokinesis. This comprehensive study took two years and was released at a whopping 425,000 pages by the National Research Council. Their findings? Spoiler Alert: the evidence in favor of nearly all of these techniques and powers were "scientifically unsupported."

What they did find to work were things like mental rehearsals before physically performing a task. Still, the money allocated toward the potential research in 1981 was never spent and was still unspent seven years later.