In a bizarre development in the war on terrorism, it has been claimed that the CIA has revived its paranormal research programme in a desperate attempt to locate Osama bin Laden. Sources in the intelligence community have told The Sleaze that Dan Fetch, one of America’s top psychics – who has been employed by several law enforcement agencies to locate murder victims and missing persons via his ‘remote viewing’ talents – recently spent several days at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, poring over pictures of bin Laden and detailed maps of Afghanistan and Pakistan. “On the third day he went into a trance, staring into the middle distance, and started saying that he sensed the presence of Bin Laden in a great hollow space – a cave perhaps,” an anonymous CIA insider confides. “He then said he sensed feelings of enormous expectations, apparently related to a great tower, before ranting about the five fingers of Allah smiting the tower and ecstatic joy accompanying a huge explosion before the tower collapsed. At first we thought he’d located Bin Laden plotting a missile attack on US cities, but then, still in his trance, he started apologising for wiping his dick off on a prayer mat. Consequently, we were forced to revise our analysis and surmise that he’d ‘tuned in’ to Bin Laden whacking off in his secret hideout!”

The following day Fetch made another attempt at locating Bin Laden, this time by utilising ‘automatic writing’. Once again, he quickly went into a trance and began scribbling furiously on a writing pad. After four hours the CIA found that they had three pads covered with highly detailed pornographic pictures, including women naked save for veils across their faces urinating in Bin Laden’s beard, and huge erect penises, apparently ejaculating over camels. In a final effort to track down the terrorist ringleader, Fetch concentrated his psychic powers by staring into the lens of a camera containing a roll of unused film, whilst trying to visualise Bin Laden’s whereabouts. When developed, the film revealed a series of poorly lit, grainy and slightly out of focus photographs of a bearded and turbaned man wearing frilly women’s underwear, being tied up and spanked by a burkah-clad dominatrix. Following this debacle, Fetch suffered a mental breakdown and the project was terminated.

US intelligence chiefs have defended the initiative, claiming that whilst the experiment had not pinpointed the Al-Qaeda leader’s exact location, it had yielded valuable data. “It has established that he is alive and well and proves beyond any doubt just how morally depraved and degenerate this man is. Indeed, the fact that he is still capable of masturbating so vigourously indicates that he has not, as some reports have claimed, been seriously injured, and still represents a grave threat to global security,” said CIA Deputy Director Scott Muttoner. However, critics of the programme have pointed out that Fetch’s track record was highly dubious and his mental state questionable – Chicago police had previously dropped him from a murder investigation when he had shocked grieving relatives by whipping out his knob at the crime scene and offering to use it as a ‘divining rod’ to locate the missing murder weapon.

“Many of these so-called psychics are, to put it politely, a little highly strung and less than reliable,” says Senator Gary Lumber, a long-term critic of the CIA programme. “This type of thing attracts a lot of fantasists and emotionally unstable types, who use their supposed powers to compensate for their social inadequacies. Their visions are usually little more than their own repressed sexual fantasies projected onto third parties.” Indeed, the CIA’s attempts to use ‘astral projection’ to spy on senior Communist Party officials during the Cold War revealed only that Nikita Khruschev liked nothing better than to strip naked, be smothered with axle grease and climb into the turret of a T-34 tank before rampaging around downtown Stalingrad, ejaculating each time he fired his 85mm gun and demolished a building. A later attempt at ‘remote viewing’ revealed and that Leonid Brezhnev had a penchant for dressing up as a clown and having his mistress throw buckets of water over him, whilst his wife was a necrophiliac who played sex games with Lenin’s mummified corpse and kept Stalin’s embalmed penis in a jar. Nonetheless, as one ex-CIA operative has noted, this probably still represented far more useful information than was yielded by thirty years worth of conventional analysis based on human intelligence sources, satellite imagery and signals intercepts. Moreover, supporters of the programme point out that an attempt to use psychokinesis to assassinate Fidel Castro did result in his toilet collapsing whilst he was taking a dump – although this did not prove fatal, the cigar the Cuban leader was smoking at the time was knocked from between his teeth and set fire to his beard, forcing him to resort to wearing false facial hair for six months.

Despite the US programme’s lack of success, top paranormal researcher Wilson Collins has recently claimed that the UK government – fearing that it would be left behind in the ‘paranormal arms race’ between the US and the USSR – set up its own top secret psychic research programme. “During the early 1950s the Ministry of Defence trawled seaside fun fairs and gypsy encampments for psychics and fortune tellers. They also recruited surreptitiously through small ads placed in magazines such as Fate, and Psychic Times,” says Collins. “The most promising candidates were then taken to a secret research facility at RAF Farnborough, where their powers were tested and developed.” From the outset, it appeared that the selection process had been flawed, with testing producing highly disappointing results. “One candidate, Toby Winnet, claimed to be able to bend metal using only the power of his mind,” reveals Collins. “During his first test, he strained for three hours trying to twist a steel bar, with the sole result being that he spectacularly shit in his pants.” A second attempt resulted in Winnet suffering a debilitating double rupture – he was forced to adopt a colostomy bag and was dropped from the programme.

Undeterred, the Ministry thought that it had discovered a real talent in Jim Gurk, who could apparently materialise ectoplasm from his anus. “It could ooze through air vents and under doors, take on solid form and break into safes – ideal for spying,” says Collins. “In an attempt to boost his ectoplasmic powers, they connected him up to the National Grid at Battersea Power Station in late 1952 – the results were catastrophic!” An endless cloud of yellowish foul-smelling fog erupted from his backside and quickly enveloped London – over 3,000 people died from respiratory failure during what became known as the ‘Great London Smog’. “After three days a team of soldiers in gas masks and protective clothing managed to cork his arse, and he was incarcerated at Porton Down – never to be seen again,” recalls Collins. “The whole incident was hushed up and the smog blamed on pollution! Not surprisingly, the project was abandoned shortly afterwards.” The UK government has refused to either confirm or deny Collins’ claims, describing him as a “crank” and “completely barmy”.