The definitive history of the military's decades-long investigation into mental powers and phenomena, from the author of Pulitzer Prize finalist The Pentagon's Brain and international bestseller Area 51.
This is a book about a team of scientists and psychics with top secret clearances.
For more than forty years, the U.S. government has researched extrasensory perception, using it in attempts to locate hostages, fugitives, secret...

"Berlin, Germany, 1930--When the Nazis rise to power, Jürgen Rhodes is offered a high-level position in their burgeoning rocket program. Jürgen and his wife Sofie fiercely oppose Hitler's radical views, and joining his ranks is unthinkable. Yet it soon becomes clear that if Jürgen does not accept the job, their income would be put on the line, and so would their lives. Huntsville, Alabama, 1950--Jürgen is one of many German scientists pardoned...

'Grunt' tackles the science behind some of a soldier's most challenging adversaries -- panic, exhaustion, heat, noise -- and introduces us to the scientists who seek to conquer them. Mary Roach dodges hostile fire with the U.S. Marine Corps Paintball Team as part of a study on hearing loss and survivability in combat. She visits the fashion design studio of U.S. Army Natick Labs and learns why a zipper is a problem for a sniper. She visits a repurposed...

In the chaos following World War II, some of the greatest spoils of Germany's resources were the Third Reich's scientific minds. The U.S. government secretly decided that the value of these former Nazis' knowledge outweighed their crimes and began a covert operation, code-named Paperclip, to allow them to work in the United States without the public's full knowledge. Drawing on exclusive interviews with dozens of Paperclip family members, colleagues,...

In 1943, Hitler hatches a diabolical weapon: a bank of "superguns" housed in a massive underground complex in Nazi-occupied northern France. Together, the guns would be able to pump 600 high explosive shells 100 miles to London each hour, spelling doom for the Allies. Engineers, archaeologists, and WWII historians investigate this fearsome weapon and two audacious missions designed to destroy it.

"This is a previously classified story of one group of scientific researchers--men and women--who exposed themselves to extraordinary risks to make D-Day a success"--