The 2004 AFRL Teleportation Physics Study and the Chinese "Gifted Children" Experiments

Briefing

In August 2004 the US Air Force Research Laboratory published an unclassified, publicly releasable special report titled Teleportation Physics Study, report number AFRL-PR-ED-TR-2003-0034 [1][2]. It was written under contract by the physicist Eric W. Davis of Warp Drive Metrics. Its fifth chapter, on what the author terms “p-Teleportation”, summarised Chinese research from 1981 and 1990 in which “gifted children” and young adults were said to move sealed objects — insects, pills, watches, radio micro-transmitters — through the intact walls of their containers, and recommended that the Air Force fund a five-year US programme at roughly $1.5 million a year [2]. The Air Force did not fund it. The report drew public criticism in late 2004 and remains the most-cited English-language route by which the Chinese “Exceptional Functions of the Human Body” (EFHB) claims entered a US military document.

This file is admitted on the strength of the American paper trail. What is documented here is that a US Air Force laboratory published such a report and what that report says. What the Chinese experiments actually demonstrated is a separate question, and one this archive cannot settle.

Sequence of events

The Chinese background, 1978–1990

• Late 1978. A declassified CIA holding names Tang Yu, a twelve-year-old boy in Sichuan, as the trigger for the EFHB wave in the People’s Republic [3][4].
• September 1979. Ziran Zazhi carries an EFHB report [4].
• Late 1981. The 507 Institute — the Institute of Space Medico-Engineering — is set up in suburban Beijing; Zhang Zhenhuan, Chen Hsin and Mei Lei are named in connection with it [3][4].
• Twenty-fourth of February 1982. An Academia Sinica meeting attended by 4,000 scholars is held; the Party rules that year to curtail the field [3].
• 1983. Prof. Lin Shuhuang of the Physics Department, Beijing Teacher’s College, leads nineteen researchers testing the subject Zhang Baosheng (born 1955, Bengxi, Liaoning) [3][4].
• 1984. Zhang Baosheng becomes a full-time military subject [4].
• 1987. An ISME film of a marked pill “passing through glass” is awarded a second-class Scientific Research Achievement Prize by the Spaceflight Department [4].

The American report, 2001–2004

• Thirtieth of January 2001 – twenty-eighth of July 2003. The period of performance covered by the contracted work [2].
• Twenty-fifth of November 2003. The date recorded on the report’s documentation page [2].
• August 2004. Cover date of the published report; the discrepancy with the documentation date is unexplained in the document itself [2].
• Twenty-eighth of October 2004. The Federation of American Scientists posts the report and flags it in Secrecy News [5].
• Fifth of November 2004. USA Today reports that the Air Force paid $25,000 for the report [6].

Documentary record

The primary artefact is the eighty-eight-page report itself. It was produced by Warp Drive Metrics, Las Vegas, Nevada, under contract F04611-99-C-0025 for AFRL’s Space and Missile Propulsion Division, Propellant Branch (PRSP), at Edwards Air Force Base, California, and is marked “APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE; DISTRIBUTION UNLIMITED” [1][2]. Dr Franklin B. Mead, Jr. is named as AFRL/PRSP project manager and responsible person on the documentation page; Dr David Campbell of ERC, Inc. is acknowledged as programme manager [2].

Chapter 5 states that “In September 1981, an extraordinary paper was published in the PRC in the journal Ziran Zazhi (transl: Nature Journal)… entitled, ‘Some Experiments on the Transfer of Objects Performed by Unusual Abilities of the Human Body’,” and that it “reported that gifted children were able to cause the apparent teleportation of small objects (radio micro-transmitters, photosensitive paper, mechanical watches, horseflies, other insects, etc.) from one location to another (that was meters away) without them ever touching the objects beforehand” [2]. The report notes that participants “included not only observers from various PRC colleges and medical research institutes, but also representatives from the PRC National Defense Science Commission”, and that on that account an unclassified Defense Intelligence Agency Intelligence Information Report carrying a full English translation was prepared [2]. Citation 204 of the report identifies the Chinese source as “Nature Journal (Peoples Republic of China), 4, no. 9, 652 [Defense Intelligence Agency Requirements and Validation Branch, DIA Translation LN731-83, Intelligence Information Report No. 6010511683 (1983)]” [1][2].

The same chapter describes later work by the Aerospace Medicine Engineering Institute in Beijing, published in the July 1990 Chinese Journal of Somatic Science: videotaping and high-speed photography of “the transfer of test specimens (nuts, bundles of matches, pills, nails, thread, photosensitive paper… sponges dipped in FeCl3, etc.) through the walls of sealed paper envelopes, double layered KCNS type paper bags, sealed glass bottles and tubes with sealed caps, and sealed plastic film canisters without the walls of any of these containers being breached” [2]. Davis writes that transfers took “anywhere from a fraction of a second to several minutes”; that footage showed specimens either “meld” with container walls or vanish and reappear elsewhere; that a radio micro-transmitter’s monitored signal weakened or disappeared during transfer; that subjects were blindfolded under blind and double-blind protocols; and that “the conditions for fraud and sleight of hand were totally eliminated” [2]. That last is the author’s assessment of papers he read in translation, not an independent finding, and it should be read as such.

Section 5.2 sets out the recommendation: a US experimental programme “similar in fashion to the Remote Viewing program… funded at $900,000 – 1,000,000 per year in parallel with a theoretical program funded at $500,000 per year for an initial five-year duration”, plus an $80,000 one-year experiment-definition study [2]. Readers approaching this file by way of Project Stargate will recognise that comparison as the report’s own.

The Chinese-side history comes from two declassified CIA holdings. “Parapsychology in the People’s Republic of China: 1979–1989” by Zha and McConnell, a draft dated the thirteenth of February 1990, covers the children’s EFHB wave of 1979–1982, the Academia Sinica meeting, the Party’s 1982 ruling, and the military 507 Institute’s absorption of the leading subjects [3]. A separate chronology appendix supplies the dated sequence above [4]. Qian Xuesen, described as the father of Chinese rocketry, is named as the movement’s most senior defender; Yu Guangyuan as its most prominent opponent, arguing that the claims were contrary to dialectical materialism and known science and that, given the many exposed hoaxes, “all such claims must be hoaxes” — an argument the authors of the CIA-held paper call “extremely weak” [3].

On the American reception: AFRL spokesman Ranney Adams is quoted as saying, “If we don’t turn over stones, we don’t know if we have missed something”, and the same piece records the Air Force position that “The views expressed in the report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of the Air Force, the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government” [6]. Lawrence Krauss, then of Case Western Reserve University, described the report as “some things adapted from reasonable theoretical studies, and other things from nonsensical ones”; Steven Aftergood of FAS said it “raises questions of scientific quality control at the Air Force” [6]. Davis later appears in the DIA’s AATIP-funded reference list released under FOIA in January 2019, credited with “Traversable Wormholes, Stargates, and Negative Energy” — a separate document from the 2004 study [7].

Open questions

1. The DIA translation itself — LN731-83 / IIR 6010511683 — is cited in the AFRL report, but no released copy has been located in any repository this archive treats as citable. Its full text, classification history and release status are unverified [2].
2. The original 1981 Ziran Zazhi article and the July 1990 Chinese Journal of Somatic Science papers were not accessible. Every quoted experimental detail above is Davis’s characterisation of them, not a reading of the source [2].
3. No primary document found identifies the individual children by name, their number, or their ages in the 1981 experiments.
4. No document found shows an independent, non-Chinese replication of the sealed-container results. The nearest is H. E. Puthoff of SRI International, who reported in August 1985 a partially successful attempt to repeat Chinese results, “although smaller in magnitude” [4].
5. Investigators at the 507 Institute are recorded as wondering whether Zhang Baosheng ever cheated in his public demonstrations, suspecting he did so to “save face” when unable to succeed under pressure — while maintaining that the formal experiments were adequately controlled [3].
6. The gap between the report’s documentation date of the twenty-fifth of November 2003 and its August 2004 cover date is unexplained in the document [2].

Status

This file is CONFIDENTIAL. The American half of the record is solid: an unclassified, publicly releasable US Air Force technical report exists, its contract, dates and recommendations are on its face, and its reception is documented in contemporaneous press [1][2][5][6]. The Chinese half is not. What the archive holds is a US officer’s contractor summarising, in translation, experiments this archive has not been able to read, conducted on subjects it cannot name. That distinction is the whole of the case.

Three claims that circulate with this story do not survive checking, and are recorded here so they are not repeated:

• The “$7.5 million request”. The report recommends approximately $1.48 million a year over five years plus an $80,000 definition study. The $7.5 million total appears in press coverage as an aggregation, not in the document [2][6].
• Children teleporting objects through walls between rooms. The report specifies transfers “meters away” and through container walls only. No source found supports room-to-room wall penetration by the 1981 child subjects [2].
• Suppression. The document is marked unclassified, distribution unlimited. No record of it being buried or classified was found [1][2][5].

Like the archive’s file on MK-Ultra, this case rests on a released government paper trail rather than on witness testimony — but here the paper trail documents a proposal that was declined, not a programme that ran. Updates pending any release of the DIA translation.

References

1. Teleportation Physics Study, Air Force Research Laboratory, August 2004, by Dr. Eric W. Davis — The Black Vault / DTIC (AD-A425545). Public domain (work of the U.S. federal government).
2. Teleportation Physics Study (AFRL-PR-ED-TR-2003-0034) — full text — Internet Archive / Air Force Research Laboratory. Eighty-eight pages; contains the p-Teleportation chapter, the funding recommendation and citation 204.
3. Parapsychology in the People’s Republic of China: 1979–1989 — Zha and McConnell, draft dated 13th February 1990. CIA-RDP96-00789R002600290003-0, CIA FOIA Reading Room (mirrored on the Internet Archive).
4. Chronology of Recent Interest in Exceptional Functions of the Human Body in the People’s Republic of China — CIA-RDP96-00792R000400300011-9, CIA FOIA Reading Room (mirrored on the Internet Archive).
5. Secrecy News, 28th October 2004 — Federation of American Scientists.
6. Air Force report calls for $7.5M to study psychic teleportation — Dan Vergano, USA Today, 5th November 2004 (mirrored by FAS).
7. More Light on Black Program to Track UFOs, 17th January 2019 — Federation of American Scientists; DIA AATIP reference list released under FOIA.