Naval Research Laboratory parapsychology claim

Naval Research Laboratory parapsychology claim

Claimant	Norio Hayakawa
Venue	Lecture at the 11th Los Angeles Whole Life Expo, 16–17 November 1991 (revised text June 1992)
Republished in	"Branton", The Dulce Book, ch. 5
Claim	The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory had a "Parapsychology Research Unit" working with DARPA and Naval Intelligence on mind-control weapons
Status	Unverified; no supporting record found
Date	21 February 1990
Topics	Beings & bodies (topic), Government programs (topic), Bases & Area 51 (topic)
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 107
Year	1990 in UFO history
Timeline	1990 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	6

The Naval Research Laboratory parapsychology claim is an allegation by the UFO researcher Norio Hayakawa that the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) "seems to have" a "Parapsychology Research Unit". According to Hayakawa, the unit coordinated with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), some of its work under the Office of Naval Intelligence took place at sites such as Area 51, and the Navy was developing "mind-control weaponry".^[1] The claim reached the UFO literature through a chapter of The Dulce Book, a compilation by a writer using the name "Branton" about the Dulce base legend. An anonymous UAP timeline later repeated it in the journalist Michael Shellenberger's 2024 written testimony to Congress.^[1][2] No record of such a unit at the NRL has been found. Declassified files do show, however, that the Navy ran a parapsychology effort aimed at submarines until about 1975.^[3]

The claimant

• Norio Hayakawa was born in Yokohama, Japan, in 1944, became a U.S. citizen in 1976, and lives in New Mexico. He is known for UFO investigations around New Mexico and the American Southwest, has been a frequent guest on Coast to Coast AM, and directs a group called Civilian Intelligence Central.^[4] In the early 1990s, The Dulce Book described him as head of the "Civilian Intelligence Network" in California.^[1]
• In February and March 1990 he guided a Nippon Television Network crew. On 21 February 1990, on a field trip just outside Area 51, the group of 25 to 28 people saw and videotaped an orange-yellow light making abrupt, zig-zag movements. The crew then went to Dulce, New Mexico, to look for an alleged underground biogenetics laboratory. The resulting two-hour documentary aired in Japan on 24 March 1990.^[1][4]
• In 1999, Hayakawa and the filmmaker Anthony J. Hilder started the Area 51 "People's Rally", a protest against secrecy at the base.^[4]

The claim

• The NRL passage comes from a speech Hayakawa gave at the 11th Los Angeles Whole Life Expo, held at the Los Angeles Airport Hilton on 16–17 November 1991. The Dulce Book quotes a revised and expanded version written in June 1992 under the title "UFOs, the Grand Deception and the Coming New World Order".^[1] Hayakawa also published a booklet of that name in 1993.^[4]
• In the speech he said the NRL "seems to have" a Parapsychology Research Unit that coordinated with DARPA. He said some of its activities under the Office of Naval Intelligence took place at locations such as Area 51.^[1]
• He listed extremely low frequency (ELF) wave emitters, "scalar machines", electromagnetic beam weapons and detailed hologram projections as new mind-control weapons, along with hallucinatory and memory-tampering drugs from a Naval Intelligence "Parapsychology – Mind Control Unit". Citing an informant in a Navy special-operations group, he claimed two techniques were already being used: implanted radio receivers to trigger hypnotic cues ("R.H.I.C.") and remote "electronic dissolution of memory" ("E.D.O.M.").^[1]
• He linked the NRL to a May 1992 Los Angeles Times report that Caltech scientists had found tiny magnetite particles in human brains. He also suggested that new cellular-telephone towers around Los Angeles used frequencies close to those in NRL and DARPA ELF and microwave experiments.^[1]
• The same lecture described Area 51's security, an April 1992 NBC News video of an object over Groom Lake, and Dulce residents' reports of lights and military vehicles in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It framed all of this within Hayakawa's belief that deceptive "ultradimensional entities" posing as aliens were working with a secret world government to stage a contact event and bring in a "New World Order".^[1]

Dating and transmission

• The UAP timeline in Shellenberger's November 2024 testimony lists the claim under 21 February 1990 and calls Hayakawa a "Japanese journalist". It also adds that he described a "deep black" aircraft project at Groom Lake that was not Aurora.^[2]
• In The Dulce Book, 21 February 1990 is the date of the Area 51 field trip. The NRL statement appears in the 1991 lecture text, as revised in 1992.^[1] The earlier version of this article followed the timeline in saying the claim was made in 1990, and its infobox date reflects that. The source shows the statement dates from November 1991 at the earliest.
• The timeline cited the book chapter with a broken address that contained a space. The page is still online at the same site under a slightly different address.^[1] The Dulce Book mixes quoted material with the compiler's own long commentary on reptilian aliens, Bavarian secret societies and Bible prophecy. It is a collection of largely unverified material.^[1]

The Navy's real parapsychology interest

• A U.S. Army intelligence memorandum of conversation dated 10 July 1978, released in the CIA's declassified STARGATE files, records a meeting on 7 July 1978 with W. O. Mehuron, the Deputy Director for Naval Intelligence R&D. The writer, Stoner, of the Army intelligence staff (office DAMI-ISH), was working on the GRILL FLAME psychic-research programme and asked about the Navy's past and present involvement with parapsychology.^[3]
• Mehuron said that until about 1975 the Navy had an active programme exploring parapsychology as it might apply to "submarines". It was dropped because of the risk of bad publicity showing the Navy "wasting scarce resources on ethereal ventures". The Navy had nothing going in 1978 but might be interested in experiments designed for its own needs, such as detecting equipment movement, rather than basic research.^[3]
• According to the memo, Rear Admiral Harvey, the Director of Naval Intelligence, would probably want to attend future planning meetings and see a demonstration. Mehuron suggested that the Intelligence Research and Development Council was the natural body to coordinate any parapsychology programme. A companion note of 5 July 1978 says the Navy was "still interested".^[3]
• The memo does not name the NRL, mention mind-control weapons, or connect the work to Area 51 or UFOs. The earlier version of this article described it as "a declassified CIA memo". It is in fact an Army memo preserved in the CIA's released collection.^[3] The Army's later remote-viewing work is covered in the Stargate Project article.

The Navy's position on UFOs

• A Navy "UFO Fact Sheet" dated 29 March 1999, reproduced in a Defense Department FOIA compilation, states that there is no central office or activity in the Department of the Navy assigned to collect and maintain information on UFOs, paranormal activity or similar incidents.^[5]
• The fact sheet refers inquirers to the Air Force's Project Blue Book, which ran from 1947 until 17 December 1969, and to the Air Force's Roswell reports.^[5]

The Naval Research Laboratory

• The NRL is the corporate research laboratory of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. It was founded in Washington, D.C., in 1923 at Thomas Edison's urging and now comes under the Office of Naval Research. It specialises in plasma physics, space physics, materials science and electronic warfare, and spends about $1 billion a year on research funded by sponsors.^[6]
• Its researchers publish more than 1,200 open papers a year. Its research areas include sensors, autonomous systems, cognitive science and artificial intelligence, directed energy, oceanography and space systems. Some of its contributions to military technology were declassified only decades after they came into wide use.^[6] No published account of the laboratory lists a parapsychology unit.

Assessment

• Hayakawa hedged his own claim ("seems to have"), named no source for the NRL unit beyond unnamed informants, and set it inside a much larger conspiracy narrative.^[1]
• The documented Navy parapsychology effort was a small submarine-oriented programme, ended around 1975, which an intelligence official described in 1978. Nothing found ties it to the NRL or to the activities Hayakawa described. In 1999 the Navy stated it had no office collecting information on UFOs or paranormal activity.^[3][5] The claim about a parapsychology unit at the NRL should be treated as unverified.

People and topics

• Dulce — A New Mexico town linked to legends of an underground alien base.
• Central Intelligence Agency — The U.S. foreign intelligence agency, which has followed UFO reports since the 1940s.
• U.S. Navy — The U.S. naval service, whose pilots reported the UAP encounters revealed in 2017.
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.

On the Timeline

• Project Blue Heaven claim (1990) — A physicist claims he worked on Project Blue Heaven at Edwards AFB.
• AGARDograph 313 and gyroscopic drives (March 1990) — A NATO aerospace study discusses a gyroscopic device said to counteract gravity.

See every 1990 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Norio Hayakawa”, “United States Naval Research Laboratory”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.