Interest in the Ark of the Covenant is surging after CIA documents resurfaced claiming that the agency had located the legendary relic using a psychic.
The files from December 1988, which were declassified in 2000, detail an experiment during which an individual who claimed to have extra sensory perception (ESP) seemed to encounter the ark—purely through the power of their mind.
The Ark of the Covenant is a religious storage container that was sacred to the Israelites. As described in the Bible, it is said to hold the Ten Commandments. The ark’s location has remained a mystery since Babylon sacked Jerusalem—where it was once held—in the sixth century B.C.
The ark vanished, and in the thousands of years since, its whereabouts—or existence—have never been confirmed. Today, several religious groups in the Middle East and Africa claim to either possess the ark or know its approximate location, although they have offered no evidence.
The unnamed person, envisioning the sacred chest in their mind’s eye, said it seemed to be “somewhere in the Middle East as the language spoken by individuals present seemed to be Arabic.” It was “underground, dark and wet,” they added.
Eerily enough, they said that the ark was not alone—the person sensed that it was being guarded by “entities” capable of destroying those who try to open it “through the use of a power unknown to us.”
According to the CIA documents, the psychic did not know exactly what object they were describing and had just been working off of coordinates supplied by the agency.
The mystery of the ark has long held the public fascination. The search for the ark was even the subject of Steven Spielberg’s classic 1981 Indiana Jones adventure flick, Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The CIA report is full of spine-tingling details, but just how seriously should it be taken? Does it actually contain crucial details that could help solve the mystery once and for all?
The perhaps disappointing truth is that a healthy dose of skepticism is in order.
The ark files are part of a broader CIA initiative from the 1970s and 1980s that tried to harness the power of “remote viewing.” The idea was that people gifted with ESP could deliver valuable information “blocked from ordinary perception by distance, shielding, or time.” The endeavor was called Project Sun Streak.
It began as a U.S. military project during the Cold War—after the U.S. received reports that the Soviet Union had achieved positive results from its own research into psychic information collection—and was later transferred to the CIA.
The American unit performing the psychic investigations was called Project Stargate.
However, it was shut down in 1995 after a retrospective analysis performed by the CIA concluded that ESP had never produced a useful result.
Ray Hyman, one of the psychologists responsible for evaluating the program, later wrote a journal article that gave a scathing account of its merit.
“Psychologists, such as myself, who study subjective validation find nothing striking or surprising in the reported matching of reports against targets in the Stargate data,” he wrote in the Skeptical Inquirer in 1996. “The overwhelming amount of data generated by the viewers is vague, general, and way off target. The few apparent hits are just what we would expect if nothing other than reasonable guessing and subjective validation are operating.”
In addition to remote viewing, Stargate examined whether psychic energy could be used to physically harm adversary. This aspect of the project was explored in Jon Ronson’s 2004 non-fiction book The Men Who Stare at Goats, whose title is a reference to attempts by Army operatives to try to stop a goat’s heart just by looking at it (with no success). The book was later adapted into a satirical 2009 film starring George Clooney and Ewan McGregor.
Despite the immense intrigue of paranormal abilities, scientific studies have found no evidence that ESP exists.
