Some "Primary Perceptions" of Cleve Backster

The CIA, the Shickshinny Knights of Malta, Plant Consciousness, Enhanced Interrogation, Mind Control, and a Tsar

Cleve Backster is a Fortean classic. His theory of “primary perception”—that most living matter had some form of consciousness or ESP capability—has been a tempting phenomenon to many researchers of the paranormal. Starting with plants hooked up to his favored instrument, the polygraph, he saw incredible results recorded plainly on the readouts. He would move to other items, “wiring up yoghurt bacteria, eggs and human sperm” and seeing the same fantastic results, findings that would rewrite fundamental notions of consciousness.¹ Backster’s articles on “primary perception” were published in popular magazines and he appeared on radio and television to promote the idea. However, his work was immortalized by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird’s The Secret Life of Plants, a book focused on unconventional plant experiments and the subsequently extraordinary findings. Obviously, Backster’s work fits right into that niche. Along with a barrage of other questionable sources I critiqued in my recent exploration of Jason Reza Jorjani’s Closer Encounters, Jorjani used the work of Backster in his earlier book, Prometheus and Atlas, as proof that psi phenomena exists in all life and thus should be present in the more evolved human race.² Many of Backster’s claims, while denied by the broader scientific establishment, are accepted without question by those in paranormal communities.

Less discussed in Backster’s biography, however, is the fact that he was a former CIA interrogator, this being the occupation that made him so proficient with the polygraph. Inspired to join the Navy after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Backster was “fascinated with hypnosis” early on and “wanted to enter Navy Intelligence and study the danger hypnosis posed as a brainwashing technique.”³ While initially shrugged off because of his youth and inexperience, his crusade was viewed more favorably when he joined the Army Counterintelligence Corp. From Jeannette DeWyze’s 1982 profile of Backster in the San Diego Reader:

Backster began teaching American military and government personnel both how to use hypnosis as an interrogation technique and how to guard against being an unwitting hypnosis subject. When the Central Intelligence Agency heard about Backster’s work, the agency was sufficiently intrigued to terminate Backster’s Army enlistment and hire him as a civilian. Once with the CIA, Backster’s attention turned to drug-assisted interrogation techniques, and then to polygraphs “as an afterthought.”⁴

This emphasis on hypnosis is alarming given the military’s other endeavors with the topic within the same timeframe—Backster even predates the most prominent explorations into the utility of hypnosis or brainwashing. In the context of polygraphy—a field that has drawn questions of reliability for decades—Backster’s combined interest in hypnosis and “drug-assisted interrogation techniques” prompts the question of whether Backster’s polygraph technique was its own form of subtle hypnosis or interrogation. Indeed, even a textbook from fellow polygrapher James Allan Matte notes Backster’s “pioneering work in hypno-interrogation (and) narco-interrogation” before migrating to polygraph techniques.⁵ Matte recalls a peculiar (though to my knowledge unverified) incident where Backster, “frustrated by the lack of concern for the potential usefulness of the technique to CIC and the danger of its use by inimical foreign intelligence agencies,” decided to try a bold gambit. He hypnotized “the secretary of CIC Chief of Counterintelligence Corps Brigadier General George V. Keyser” and influenced her to hand over a classified document to Backster. He then instilled “post-hypnotic amnesia” to make her forget the event ever occurred.⁶ Backster returned to Keyser with the document in hand, declaring that he would either accept a court-martial or receive support for his MKULTRA-esque program of interrogative techniques. Supposedly, General Keyser, who was indeed in the correct role for this purported incident at the time, chose to support Backster’s ventures. Whether this anecdote is true or false, (and a lie detector probably won’t tell us which,) Backster’s apparent proficiency in influencing individuals certainly makes one pause to consider the possible ethical issues that may be at work in his version of polygraphy. With the recurrence of false confessions or contradicted polygraph results throughout the ensuing decades, the prospect of Backster forcing the desired results through hypnosis, drugs, or badgering seems unavoidable.⁷

His relationship with the American military did not end after wandering into the world of plant consciousness, Backster also associated with personalities connected to Mankind Research Unlimited. This organization, A.J. Weberman of Covert Action alleged, received funding from “various branches of the U.S. government—certainly the U.S. Navy and probably the Central Intelligence Agency” and, recalling Backster’s earlier work, was often accused of being military research into mind control.⁸ While Backster’s studies were not taken very seriously by MRU, one of his greatest promoters, The Secret Life of Plants coauthor Christopher Bird, was the organization’s Biocommunications Editor/Russian Translator.⁹ Weberman gets the sense that Bird was a spy of a plant of sorts, with former roles that included being an assistant to banker Cyrus Eaton at “the Pugwash meeting on Atomic, Chemical and Biological Warfare.”¹⁰ He also served as a TIME magazine correspondent in Yugoslavia—a publication often embroiled in CIA-adjacent activities—and later “lectured on the evils of Communism to members of John Hopkins University’s School for Advanced International Studies.”¹¹ Weberman held suspicions about Bird’s promotion of Backster’s work, noting that Bird’s collaborator Peter Tompkins was also a former OSS agent, a surefire spy background in conjunction with his hunch regarding Bird. “In 1972, MRU did not show much of an interest in it and the possibility exists that the ‘Backster Effect’ and (The Secret Life of Plants) were part of a CIA-disinformation campaign,” Weberman posits. “Only the Soviets know how many rubles were spent investigating this ‘phenomenon.’”¹² MRU papers can also be found in Backster’s archives at the University of West Georgia and I am currently requesting scans.¹³

Later, in 1985, computer scientist and ufologist Jacques Vallee—a recurring character within the annals of this publication—recalls meeting Bill Church, a restaurateur who had expanded his father’s fried chicken franchise into a national brand after it was left to him and his brother to manage. Church was at a meeting of the Institute for Advanced Studies, a program started by controversial scientist and former Scientologist Hal Puthoff that later became known as Earthtech. This organization is not to be confused with the Institute for Advanced Study, the prestigious Princeton collective that featured luminaries such as Einstein and Oppenheimer in their ranks—but the naming similarity gives Puthoff’s institute a particular Larouchian flavor. This Forbidden Science entry comes up because Vallee notes how Bill Church, with a fresh “28 million dollar check” from Church’s Fried Chicken going public on the stock market, “went to the bank with it, and his next visit was to Cleve Backster, expert practitioner of the lie detector.” Church wanted to “offer(…) to support his paranormal research on plants.”¹⁴ Backster rejected this money, instead pointing Church in the direction of Hal Puthoff, the beginning of “a long association” between the two.¹⁵ Beyond MRU, it appears that Backster was willing to advocate for other woo military scientists and off-kilter ventures. Puthoff himself had a long association with CIA-funded studies into psychic abilities and remote viewing, not too far removed from Backster’s own research. In a bit of a happy coincidence—if you believe in those things—Puthoff’s association with Scientology greatly influenced the development of his remote viewing and psi protocols and Scientology’s famed auditing device, the E-meter, is essentially a form of polygraph device, Backster’s weapon of choice.¹⁶ It’s the paranormal spook circle of life.

But before any conversations with plants or other military-funded woo ventures came to the forefront of Backster’s resumé, he found himself embroiled in a strange scheme to convince the broader public (and the CIA) that there were living members of the Romanov family of Russian monarchs living in America. The late researcher Kevin Coogan’s The Spy Who Would Be Tsar: The Mystery of Michal Goleniewski and the Far-Right Underground provides an excellent picture of Backster’s involvement in these intrigues. Through his acquaintanceship with a publisher named Robert Speller, Backster served as the polygraph examiner for Eugenia Smith, claimant to the identity of the magically-not-deceased Anastasiya Nikolaevna Romanova. Rigorous media consumers might know that 21^st century DNA analysis confirmed the deaths of every member of the Romanov family.¹⁷ But back in 1963, after Backster examined and polygraphed Smith for “’30 hours’ over a period of several weeks,” it was concluded that she was in fact the missing Romanov duchess, the findings resulting in a puff-piece from Life magazine and later a book from Speller’s publishing company.¹⁸ Backster was also present at the first meeting between the Duchess Anastasiya and her long lost brother, Alexei, the would-be successor to Tsar Nikolai II. The dubious character alleging to be Alexei Romanov was Michal Goleniewski, a former Soviet Polish superspy who would later become a triple agent and defect to the United States in 1961.

“Primary Perception” theorist Cleve Backster administers a polygraph test on the Duchess Anastasiya Nikolaevna Romanova (a.k.a. Eugenia Smith) as pictured in the October 17, 1963 edition of Life magazine.

The milieus promoting these two individuals as the lost Romanov children—highly questionable claims in both instances—were primarily far-right, underground intelligence networks with murky motivations. One could perhaps see a faction of fervent anti-communists or White Russians attempting to prepare heirs to the Russian throne after the hoped for fall of the Soviet Union, but the story is almost too bizarre and improbable for anyone in military or national security positions to take seriously—at least those who aren’t also in weird far-right groups. To illustrate the main audience for claims of this nature, Backster’s dubious confirmation of living Romanov heirs also appeared in 1994 within the pages of Contact: The Phoenix Project, the newsletter for the far-right channeling cult of Commander Hatonn.¹⁹ This was long after the stories of Smith and Goleniewski fell into disrepute, Smith no longer discussing her purported heritage and Goleniewski being mostly disregarded by the CIA. The entire narrative of these two figures (Goleniewski especially) is too long to unpack fully here—and Backster’s involvement is only a small sample of the complex networks at play—but I heartily recommend Coogan’s work on the matter.

Coogan notes that Backster’s involvement in the Goleniewski affair was due to his membership with the Shickshinny Knights of Malta²⁰—he was their “Chief Interrogation Officer,” in fact.²¹ The Knights were a group that “provided a home to dissident retired military officers dissatisfied with the CIA’s internationalism,” claiming that the agency was infiltrated by Communists in hopes of stirring up “anti-CIA paranoia.”²² Along with their membership list full of military personalities, the group shared personnel and ideology with the far-right John Birch Society and other fascist American groups. While being ostensibly anti-CIA, the Knights shared goals and methods with the organization, likely even some personnel, resulting in several “spooky” claims and occurrences. Knights member and ex-CIA agent Herman Kimsey, for instance, claimed to know who the Al Bundy-like figure purported to be Lee Harvey Oswald visiting the Cuban embassy in Mexico City actually was. Kimsey also alleged that he was Golienewski’s handler at the CIA and provided the agency with countless “strange communiques” regarding parapolitical networks.²³

Also among the ranks of the Shickshinny Knights—as I previously wrote about in my review of a local MUFON conference—was another memorable figure in the paranormal sphere: Lt. Col. Philip J. Corso. The colonel was coauthor of The Day After Roswell with William J. Birnes, a book where he purported to dole out the remains of an alien spacecraft to various military projects as part of his role at the Army’s Foreign Technology Desk. Corso was also a right-wing freak, “a veteran of Army intelligence who had retired by 1963 to work for the segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond, and Cuban exile Salvador Diaz Version, a former chief of Cuban military intelligence.”²⁴ He was close enough with Senator Thurmond, a Goldwater Republican who voted against numerous no-brainer civil rights bills, that the senator wrote the foreword to early copies of The Day After Roswell, only to later deny being aware of the book’s contents and its allegations of a UFO cover-up.²⁵ This is all to say, the world of the woo and the paranormal is constantly brushing up against far-right military goals. Both Corso and Backster were clearly ardent cold warriors, the latter being a member of “a strange group called the Anti-Communist International” along with the aforementioned Robert Speller, who ran “an unconventional publishing house” and a media company that was an “intelligence cover organization for correspondent-agents in countries like Cuba.”²⁶ Corso, similarly, spread rumors “that (Lee Harvey) Oswald was tied to a Communist ring inside the CIA,” in hopes of heating up tensions between the two Cold War superpowers.²⁷ These groups are indicative of a vast right-wing military intelligence network that Cleve Backster was a willing participant in, one of many tendrils that will undoubtedly pop up in Getting Spooked again.

In a final odd tangent, I had noticed that Backster was mentioned in a suspicious anecdote by Jeffrey R. MacDonald, controversial convicted murderer and former Army Special Forces doctor. MacDonald had previously come up in my research into Chris Bledsoe, with the North Carolinian experiencer claiming that MacDonald had given him stitches as a child.²⁸ In Joe McGinniss’ treatment of the case, Fatal Vision, the author finds that despite denying “under oath during grand jury testimony” that he had taken a polygraph examination, MacDonald later claimed in a tape recording that Cleve Backster himself had administered one.²⁹ “This is the guy who does the polygraphs and is famous for polygraphing plants,” MacDonald recalls. “And he’s on Johnny Carson all the time, I believe.”³⁰ But the ex-Green Beret doctor was not pleased with Backster’s methods:

Well, he hooked me up to the machine, and once (my lawyer) was excused from the room, he began going over my sexual history. It was very bizarre. He started talking about had I ever had sex with women other than Colette. I answered that. And then he asked if I had ever sex with men. And then he wanted to know if (…) there was a wild orgy the night of the occurrence of the murders.

I stopped him, and I said (…) I don’t understand what we’re doing here. I thought this was a polygraph based on my current legal situation—and he says (…) he was just getting me used to the machine and getting a base line ready on truth and falsity.

So I said okay then, let’s get back to the point. (…) We started going back to some more questions, and he immediately reverted to premarital and extra-marital sexual activities, and unusual sexual activities, and I thought this guy was crazy to tell you the truth.³¹

The test stopped again at MacDonald’s request as he was growing more uneasy with Backster’s approach. The polygraph expert then told MacDonald that he had never been wrong on a major case and that the doctor should consider an insanity defense, a prospect that the vigilant innocence-expressing MacDonald saw as outlandish. Joe McGinnis was unable to confirm this encounter with Backster himself (who cited confidentiality) but the story is nevertheless an interesting insight into how Backster’s less public polygraph sessions might have gone—much more badgering and interrogation than sincere scientific examination. While I am not one to believe most things Jeffrey MacDonald says, if true, the incident may be evidence of Backster never truly leaving his “Chief Interrogation Officer” roots, letting preconceived notions take precedence in his tests. I hate to say it, because I would love if plants were psychic, but these biases might even affect the results of his “primary perception” experiments.

Regardless, even without the testimony of a convicted murderer, I sure as heck wouldn’t let him administer a polygraph on me. The strange mixture of far-right anti-communist fervor and a background in hypnosis and interrogation—not to mention narco-interrogation—paints Backster in a more sinister light than the “aw shucks” plant polygrapher he is often depicted as. What does it all mean? That answer will likely not come easily, but one must wonder: Was Backster’s “primary perception” theory in any way related to his work at the CIA? Was his experience in mind control, hypnosis, or brainwashing ever utilized in his polygraph tests? Inseparable from his apparent far-right politics, was his involvement in the Romanov debacle at the behest of some shadowy organization like the Shickshinny Knights or the CIA? Does this all blend together into something intentionally bizarre to confuse outside observers? Attach the printout of your polygraph results in the comments below.

Thank you for reading Getting Spooked. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read, consider becoming a regular subscriber to get posts sent to your inbox. Become a paid subscriber to read over a dozen archived posts, listen to members-only podcast episodes, or ask questions to be answered in Q&As. It is the best way to directly support the continuation of this publication. I also started a referral program that rewards archive access to those who share the newsletter with others, so be sure to tell any friends who might find this work interesting. The leaderboard tab is now public if you want the bragging rights of your referral numbers. Thanks to the Daily Grail for linking to my recent Forbidden Science dispatch and The Anomalist for linking to my two prior articles and the recent podcast episode. Email me at gettingspooked@protonmail.com with any questions, comments, recommendations, leads, or paranormal stories. You can find me on Twitter at @TannerFBoyle1, on Bluesky at @tannerfboyle.bsky.social, or on Instagram at @gettingspooked. Until next time, stay spooked.

1. Pilkington, Mark. “Far out Research: Primary perception.” The Guardian. 9 June 2004. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2004/jun/10/research.highereducation4.

2. Jorjani, Jason Reza. Prometheus and Atlas. London: Arktos, 2016. eBook. Page 225-231.

3. DeWyze, Jeannette. “Cleve Backster – the man who talks with plants.” San Diego Reader. 24 November 1982. https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/1982/nov/24/cover-the-backster-experiments/.

4. Ibid.

5. Matte, James Allan. Forensic Psychophysiology Using the Polygraph. Williamsville: J.A.M. Publications, 1996. Page 39. https://books.google.com/books?id=4yThE6vChBAC.

6. Ibid.

7. Stromberg, Joseph. “Lie detectors: Why they don’t work, and why police use them anyway.” Vox. 15 December 2014. https://www.vox.com/2014/8/14/5999119/polygraphs-lie-detectors-do-they-work.

8. Weberman, A.J. “Mind Control: The Story of Mankind Research Unlimited, Inc.” Covert Action Information Bulletin, no. 9. June 1980. Page 15. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP90-00845R000100190004-3.pdf.

9. Ibid., page 17.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. “Mankind Research Unlimited, Inc. (Carl Schleicher).” University of West Georgia Special Collections, Cleve Backster papers. https://aspace-uwg.galileo.usg.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/53908.

14. Vallee, Jacques. Forbidden Science 3: On the Trail of Hidden Truths  – The Journals of Jacques Vallee 1980-1989. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2008. Page 215.

15. Ibid.

16. Marsh, Allison. “Why L. Ron Hubbard Patented His E-Meter.” IEEE Spectrum. 31 March 2024. https://spectrum.ieee.org/e-meter-history.

17. Katz, Brigit. “DNA Analysis Confirms Authenticity of Romanovs’ Remains.”  Smithsonian Magazine. 17 July 2018. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dna-analysis-confirms-authenticity-remains-attributed-romanovs-180969674/.

18. Coogan, Kevin. The Spy Who Would Be Tsar: The Mystery of Michal Goleniewski and the Far-Right Underground. New York: Routledge, 2022. Page 175.

19. “Connections Among Important Persons and Things.” Contact: The Phoenix Project 4, no. 12. 15 March 1994. Page 17. http://phoenixarchives.com/contact/1994/0394/031594.pdf.

20. Coogan, Kevin. The Spy Who Would Be Tsar: The Mystery of Michal Goleniewski and the Far-Right Underground. New York: Routledge, 2022. Page 325.

21. Ibid., page 298.

22. Scott, Peter Dale. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Page 214-215.

23. Coogan, Kevin. The Spy Who Would Be Tsar: The Mystery of Michal Goleniewski and the Far-Right Underground. New York: Routledge, 2022. Page 302.

24. Scott, Peter Dale. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Page 214.

25. Broad, William J. “Senator Regrets Role in Book on Aliens.” The New York Times. 5 June 1997. https://www.nytimes.com/1997/06/05/us/senator-regrets-role-in-book-on-aliens.html.

26. Coogan, Kevin. The Spy Who Would Be Tsar: The Mystery of Michal Goleniewski and the Far-Right Underground. New York: Routledge, 2022. Page 187-188.

27. Scott, Peter Dale. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Page 215.

28. Bledsoe, Chris. UFO of God: The Extraordinary True Story of Chris Bledsoe. Self-published, 2023. Page 16.

29. McGinniss, Joe. Fatal Vision. New York: Signet, 1983. Page 850-851.

30. Ibid., page 851.

31. Ibid.