Exploring the X Files
The Truth is *Out There*
Crew of the USS Tom Clancy,
Happy Autumn; the leaves are orange, red, green and yellow here in Charlottesville and it has been a minute since I’ve done a Dispatch but that of course does not mean I have not been working; there’s a piece on Dinosaur Parks in the works for County Highway I filed mid-month and fact-checking in progress on a GI JOE piece for Harpers that should be out early next year, so make sure you subscribe to both publications — and, of course, if you haven’t subscribed to The Hunt for Tom Clancy yet
Since this has all been going on while I’m also in my graduate school classes and doing various things around the University, I have not yet had a chance to get to Tom Clancy’s Op Center 3: Games of State, the follow-up to this dispatch from:
Tom Clancy's Op Center With Steve Pieczenik
In the early 1990s when the United States was still running victory laps around the world after the fall of the Soviet Union and the first Gulf War, Tom Clancy co-created a TV miniseries —Op-Center— with one of the most bonkers physicians ever to to get a PhD in international relations from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; of course I’m talkin…
Also, though, you know I can’t stay away from the weirdness—so last night as I was poking through the FBI’s Unexplained Phenomenon section in their Freedom of Information Act Vault I came across a fascinating case that was so Fox Mulder I felt I had to share: the truth is out there.
Here is the strange case of Mr. William Foos, a Richmond, Virginia C & O Railway employee who got into ESP, attracting the attention of the highest levels of the FBI, CIA, and Military Intelligence.
Foos also claimed to cure the blind, or at least teach a person to see with no eyes; this attracted the attention of the Veterans Administration; he used his teenage daughter, Margaret, to demonstrate this ability—members of the audience ( the FBI report was based on a demonstration held at American Legion Headquarters in Washington DC) blindfolded her with “pads and an elastic band” which did not seem to interfere with her ability to read, see colors, or move about the room
