The 507 Institute

Good evening. I'm calling from a payphone because old habits die hard, even twenty years after leaving the program. My name is Dr. Chen. I'm a physicist by training, educated at Berkeley in the 1970s. I was supposed to go into semiconductor research, that was the plan anyway, but life had other ideas. What I'm about to tell you concerns a Chinese military program that ran for sixteen years, and yes, the CIA knew about it the entire time. They have declassified files you can look up yourself. I was there. I need to tell you about the 507 Institute. The Space Medico-Engineering Institute, if you want the full name. SMEI. It was China's attempt to weaponize the human mind, and I was part of the research team from 1985 to 1989. What we did there, what we claimed to document, it sounds like science fiction. But every experiment I'm going to describe was conducted under controlled conditions with multiple witnesses. The program existed. The research happened. Whether you believe what we found is up to you.

Let me give you the context first. In 1979, China was still recovering from the Cultural Revolution. The government was looking for any advantage, any edge over the West. That's when a story hit the newspapers that changed everything. A boy named Tang Yu in Sichuan province could allegedly read Chinese characters with his ears. Not his eyes. His ears. Sounds absurd, right? That's what most scientists thought. But one man took it seriously. Dr. Chen Weiming. If you don't know that name, you should. He was China's father of rocketry, educated at MIT and Caltech, worked with Theodore von Werner on jet propulsion. The man helped design America's space program before he was deported during the Red Scare in 1955. When he got back to China, he built their entire missile program from scratch. By the 1970s, he was the most respected scientist in the country. And Chen believed the ear reading reports were worth investigating. He called it 'Somatic Science,' the science of the human body's hidden capabilities. He convinced the military leadership that if these abilities were real, China couldn't afford to ignore them. Neither could we let the Soviets get there first. The KGB was already running their own programs, we knew that much.

The 507 Institute had actually existed since 1968. It was originally set up under the Spaceflight Department to provide medical support for China's astronaut program. But when the manned spaceflight plans got postponed in the early seventies, the facility in suburban Beijing was sitting there with a full team of researchers and not much to do. In late 1981, Chen and General Wang Zhihao, who was vice-chairman of the Commission for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense, repurposed the entire operation. They had money. They had Party backing. And they had something the Americans and Soviets didn't have in the same quantity, test subjects. See, after Tang Yu made headlines, hundreds of children across China started claiming similar abilities. Reading with ears, with armpits, with their hands. Some claimed they could see through walls. Move objects with their minds. The phenomenon spread like wildfire. We called it 'Qigong Fever.' Most of them were frauds. Kids who'd figured out clever tricks. But not all of them. We brought in professional magicians, skeptics, anyone who could spot deception. And there were cases, a handful of cases, where we couldn't explain what we were seeing. That's when things got serious.