If, then, the Soviet Union (or any other nation) was somehow making advances in "applied psi," then what the American mainstream thought of psi was incidental and of no interest.
After all, if the intelligence community was to bow before mainstream opinion (such opinion in this case largely psi illiterate), then our defenses via the intelligence community would soon consist only of mainstream consensus opinion somewhat dominated by that vagary known as political correctness.
The point I'm trying to make in this chapter, though, is that the intelligence community responded to a set of circumstances not of its own making. "Responded" is one way of saying "got sucked into." At one level, we can easily say that the Soviet Union aroused those circumstances. But at another level what was aroused was an interest in the existence of the superpowers of the human bio-mind.
At that level we encounter something which, in a legendary sense at the very least, is organic to our species. And we encounter as well the abiding and eternal question of whether our species DOES, in fact, possess such superpowers.
By way of definitions, SUPERPOWERS of bio-mind refers to those cognitive faculties inherent in our species which transcend the tangible time and space, and matter and energy as well -- such as in the case of intuition experienced world-wide, and other so-called "paranormal abilities."