These Light Pulse glasses from 1993 are flashing light through my eyelids
in perfect combination with synthesized sound frequencies to generate brainwave
patterns through a process known as entrainment.
And the company who promised to deliver this Mind
Power Breakthrough found itself at the center of not 1, not 2, but 20 lawsuits.
The Zygon SuperMind brainwave synchronizer and its Behavioral MindScripts cassette tapes
promised to fulfill virtually every human desire. You could learn a foreign language,
become a better public speaker, combat illness, lose weight, quit smoking,
experience the afterlife and even transform into a whale.
What began as a peek into a curious relic of 90’s tech snowballed into
uncovering a top secret government psychic project called Star Gate,
wearing glasses that made me feel like I was getting the Ludovico Technique
from A Clockwork Orange, and chronicling one man’s desire to power up everyone’s brains.
Because the most surprising thing about this oddity from the past is
that Zygon is back and ready to make you into a Mind Warrior right now.
If you flipped open the pages of Popular Science in the mid-90s you were bound to
stumble upon one of the most consistently advertised products at the time – Mind
Power Breakthrough! Learning Machine Breakthrough!
You’d have seen a picture of a woman wearing dark sunglasses with images of the beach or a
shuttle launching inside and an offer for $600 worth of free MindWare. What is MINDWARE? The
bottom of the ad highlights the $500 MindWare Bonus Pak and $100 of Mind Lifting Moodscapes
for free. The bolded subheadings include A Vacation In 20 Minutes, Boost Brainpower,
Speak French, Spanish, German & Italian Overnight, and 3 Fantastic Mind Journeys.
WHAT IS THIS THING?
No, seriously. What is this thing?
The first shock was discovering how expensive it is on eBay. I’ve done several retro tech videos
on forgotten gadgets that no one really wants anymore. You can pick up a brand new Interactor
or a DirectED Plus for about $25 bucks. A complete Zygon SuperMind is TEN TIMES that.
I had to pay $283.45 for my kit, and you can see a mint condition unit listed for $399 bucks.
It’s proof that there’s still a market for
30-year-old Brainwave Synchronizers. But what does the SuperMind even do?
The setup consists of the Brainwave Synchronizer computer and the Light Pulse glasses which you
use with your own headphones and cassette tape player. Everything gets plugged into
the Brain Synchronizer which allows you to choose from a list of Programs designed to
create specific brainwave states through a process called Brainwave Entrainment.
The entrainment process consists of using a rhythm of external stimuli like flickering lights,
music or tactile stimuli that synchronize brainwaves to induce a highly-specific
mental state. The SuperMind is capable of achieving four different levels:
Beta is measured in 14-16 cycles per second and is a waking conscious state.
Alpha is 8-13 cps and is a relaxed but alert state.
Theta is 4-8 cps and is related to creativity and dreaming.
And Delta, 0-4 cps, is the deepest stage of sleep.
So the Supermind is built to place your mind in the ideal state for your intended goal – whether
you’re hoping to learn a new language, become a better salesman or go on a meditative journey.
The programs range in duration from 7 minutes for
a Quick Charge of your mental acuity to 60 minutes for Super Delta Meditation.
I just wanted to expand my mind a little and experience some deep, restorative relaxation.
Instead, I got tortured.
Let me explain what’s going on here.
Cetacean Mind Link is part of the Fantastic Journeys Moodscapes series alongside Near
Death Experience and Aboriginal Dreamtime. These are 30 minute programs meant to trigger a Theta
brainwave state to inspire vivid mental imagery. These do appear to work well for
some people – and I’ll get to that later – people who feel like they’re floating with
dolphins or achieving enlightenment in the ancient Australian outback.
But to me? No. Definitely not. To me they sound almost scary. Listen to this sample of
Cetacean Mind Link and tell me it doesn’t sound like an oceanic horror soundtrack.
Now pair half an hour of that sound with relentless,
blisteringly-fast flashing red lights right on top of your eyeballs.
Obviously, you have to close your eyes while wearing the SuperMind Light Pulse Glasses and
there’s also a protective red plastic covering over the lights inside. But I actually bought a
second pair which interestingly have no branding on the front and… the inner shield is missing.
This allows us to see under the hood at the two pairs of red LEDs which do the pulsing.
Although the camera can pick up the LEDs flickering - this in no way replicates the
experience of having these flashing lights manically assaulting your eyelids. So I’m
going to simulate what it looks like and pair that visual with the bone-chilling audio from
the Near Death Experience MoodScape. I also need to provide a serious warning.
The following flashing lights may cause discomfort or seizures for those with
photosensitive epilepsy. Viewer discretion is advised. Please skip to this timecode to avoid
viewing the flashing lights. I’ll give you time to skip ahead if you need to. Okay, here we go.
How did you like THAT?
I found it impossible to handle – I could only sit through a few minutes before I turned it
off. It makes sense that when you’re trying to technologically synchronize
brainwaves to induce a particular mental state it’s going to require some extreme
measures. I put the glasses on my wife and she ripped them off after 5 seconds.
Zygon Founder and CEO Dane Spotts admitted some people have this reaction. In episode
4 of The Zygon Story in his Mind Warrior Project Podcast, Dane said that some people:
And they would take their cassette, their headphones off and throw them
at the wall… so there’s a small percentage of people that have difficulty with this,
and that’s because their conscious mind rejects it. And so what they’re
doing is… it’s almost like they’re fighting the transformation process.
I honestly felt like I was fighting for my own sanity.
While I love to cover retro tech there’s actually something new I’m happy to partner with on
this video. It’s an answer-engine, not a search engine called Perplexity. Unlike
traditional search engines it doesn’t spit back a list of links for you to dig through,
instead, it skips straight to the answers you need,
explained in everyday language with sources. This is a gamechanger for shopping. Let me show you.
I’m looking to upgrade the capture device for my VCRs and you can see the answer
includes a breakdown of key features, prices and compatibility with the sources listed at the top.
Then you can scroll down through the products including reviews scores and some pros and cons.
If you click all products it gives a more detailed view of the answers to compare and
contrast and then with Perplexity Pro you can buy what you want with one click and free shipping.
This massively streamlines the journey of finding what you’re looking for whether
it’s a Hello Kitty keyboard for your wife or the best noise-canceling earbuds for running.
So thanks to Perplexity for sponsoring this video and check it out for all of your holiday or
personal shopping – just use the QR code on screen or the link in my video description below. Thanks.
Interestingly, the testimonial quote on the back of the box is actually from Dane
Spotts himself declaring, “”This has to be the closest thing there is to what we
saw Arnold Schwarzenegger experience in the science fiction movie ‘Total Recall’.
And that’s just the MoodScapes, which are supposed to be enlightening brain adventures - I haven’t
even gotten into the Behavior MindScripts that are literally meant to change your
life. They’re designed to entrain your brain into becoming a sales superstar,
gaining a super memory, and making lots of money.
But before I demonstrate BehaviorScripts, I wanted to find out what happened to
SuperMind. How popular was it? What happened to the company? Why was it all over Popular
Science 30 years ago and seemingly disappeared for decades until now?
What I found was lawsuits. A lot of them.
Zygon International faced an onslaught of false advertising lawsuits over claims they
made about their devices. SuperMind is a pretty nebulous and frankly really cool
name for a piece of tech but their 1994 followup device, which used CDs instead of cassette tapes
was named something perfectly direct – The Learning Machine.
The Learning Discs promised to teach you everything from beginner
Spanish, to attracting wealth, better time management and organization, super memory,
quick energy, creativity and problem solving, health and healing powers,
eliminating fear and anxiety and even expanding psychic powers. More on that later.
But these claims were so serious that the FTC got involved, ordering Zygon to
“cease and desist from representing… that the use of such a product… can or will have any
effect on ”a person’s health, or that they can help the user quit smoking.”
They were also ordered to pay up to $195,000 in refunds to customers,
which never would’ve happened if “they had marketed the thing for relaxation” as Napa
County district attorney Darrell Roberts suggests in a 1996 edition of The San Francisco Examiner.
But that’s not all. Zygon was involved in twenty different suits on their home turf of King County,
Washington alone, ranging from commercial suits all the way down to tax warrants.
As a result, Zygon stopped selling The Learning Machine and the company ultimately shut down.
Dane Spotts pivoted to his work with his other company called PSI TECH and that was that.
But some people really LOVED Zygon’s brain synchronization machines. Swabby429 wrote a
retrospective on his experience with The Learning Machine in March of 2011 on “bluejayblog.”
He described the surprisingly elaborate and “classy” packaging of the device
that included a styrofoam statue head to display the unit on. Other than an annoying
“high-pitched whine” when he first booted up the system, he said “Sweet! So far so good.”
After trying out the French CD and sampling a few others, swabby “found [him]self using
‘The Learning Machine’ every day.” He “had no intention of sending the device back”
because he simply just “liked it a lot,” and for him, it really did seem to be a
success – he even admits that he noticed an “altered consciousness” after using it.
And he wasn’t alone, either. The comments on just this blog are
filled with people just like him with extremely fond memories of the device.
But it was impossible for Zygon to overcome the legal troubles. There were also a lot of skeptics
including a scathing SuperMind critique by Jon Margolis in the 1992 Chicago Tribune,
who referred to Dane Spotts as a “high-tech snake-oil salesman.”
And then the decision was made to shut the company down, right? Any company,
anybody that does innovative new stuff is always under attack.
Wait. So who is Dane Spotts? How did he even start Supermind? And what is PSI Tech?
This retrofuture device meant to give me the answers to all of
life’s greatest questions just ended up raising… a lot more questions.
Dane Spotts has “dedicated [his] life to nothing less than making
your life better…” and he “mean[s] it!”
When Dane was in his twenties, he moved to Southern California and began to
experiment with sensory-deprivation tanks, a process in which you’re sealed inside a
pitch dark chamber filled with salt water, completely cut off from all your senses.
I actually had what they call a Samadhi Experience… I was in for three hours,
but it felt like ten minutes… I felt like I was connected to God
and that I had the answers to every single question I had ever asked.
Dane’s eyes were opened to an entirely new way of thinking,
and it’s a high he’s been chasing the rest of his life. And then he had a breakthrough.
On his journey of personal development, he discovered that he could create a
similar effect to his “Samadhi Experience” when listening to certain forms of music
while meditating. So he hopped into a recording studio and made his own.
I went into a studio, and I experimented with sound phasing certain frequencies and working
with harmonics and to make along story short… came up with a matrix that replicated closely
a very deep meditation and the experience like I had in the sensory deprivation tanks.
Dane gave out his cassettes to a few of his friends and after most of them
reported back having achieved “amazingly deep relaxation and altered states phenomena,” he
decided that he would take it to the masses. And in 1986, Zygon International was born.
Not to be confused with the cone-shaped, sucker-covered aliens from “Doctor Who,”
the word “Zygon” is actually Greek, meaning to “yoke” or to join. It’s really about “the union of
two things to create a third” – it’s where we get the word “zygote” in terms of human reproduction.
In the case of Dane’s company, though, “Zygon” really means “the
union of ‘science and spirituality’ to create a new paradigm or belief system.”
He wanted everyone to power up their brains, and he specifically targeted
what he called “mind warriors,” or “a person who embraces the idea that mind is at the core
of everything.” He describes walking the path of the mind warrior “like being a Jedi Knight.”
In 1989, Dane filed a patent for the first Zygon machine – the Brain Supercharger. Like
the SuperMind, the Brain Supercharger used “pre-recorded audio cassette tapes
featuring self-improvement topics,” and he had a list of classifications ranging from
“scientific” to “nautical” all the way down to “life-saving.”
In 1993, Zygon released Supermind for $299.95 plus $15 shipping or the equivalent of about
$700 today. And in 1994 The Learning Machine debuted at the same price point. At its peak,
Zygon claimed to be raking in a whopping $50 million a year.
And then there was Dane’s psychic powers company based on top secret government research.
In the summer of 2000, Dane purchased a company called PSI TECH which ratcheted
up the idea of being like jedi knights by pretty much trying to use “the force”.
PSI TECH was founded in 1989 by Ed Dames,
who might’ve been a 4 star General and DIA intelligence officer… or he
might not have been. Who knows? But PSI TECH specializes in “Remote Viewing.”
WHAT IS REMOTE VIEWING?
The CIA defines it as “the ability to describe locations one has not visited.” So it’s being
able to see a place that you aren’t from where you are by using nothing but the power of your mind.
Remote Viewing was actually the basis for an episode of X-Files called “Mind’s Eye,”
in which a blind woman has visions of an active killer on the loose – and
if you’ve ever seen the movie “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” you get the idea.
The CIA had a program dedicated to studying the phenomenon during the
Cold War called “The Stargate Project” – which Ed Dames claims to have worked on.
Which is exactly where his claims to being a “psionic-spy” get a little
hazy. Since “the military doesn't publish organizational charts of
their classified projects,” there’s no way to know who actually worked on them.
The Stargate Project was ended in 1995 and a 178-page CIA report declassified in 2002 titled,
“An Evaluation of the Remote Viewing Program: Research and Operational Applications” basically
says nothing useful came out of it. It summarizes the program by stating, “...we conclude that
continued use of remote viewing in intelligence gathering operations is not warranted.”
The very concept of Remote Viewing had some very famous detractors including recreational
math legend Martin Gardner whose work I’ve featured on Vsauce2. Gardner noted the link
between founding Remote Viewing researcher Harold Puthoff and the Church of Scientology
in his 2000 book on pseudoscience “Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?” – the
implication being that Remote Viewing was rooted in religion instead of science.
The Remote Viewing tests were things like trying to mentally “see” what was on a series
of photographs while another person tried to tell them telepathically. Which seems very similar
to the ESP Testing scene in 1984’s Ghostbusters where Peter Venkman lies to an attractive woman
about her uncanny ability to guess the symbols on cards in order to secure a date with her.
Anyway, Ed Dames left the Army and went on to start PSI TECH to focus on Remote Viewing,
now calling it “Technical Remote Viewing” or “TRV” for short. The
goal was to “offer ‘remote viewing services’” to their clients, the first of which supposedly was
the Defense Department, with whom they apparently helped gather intelligence
for the Gulf War. And PSI TECH only got more ambitious after Dane Spotts got in the mix.
Because Dane wanted to bring TRV to everyone. It wasn’t long before PSI
TECH began to offer products like Remote Viewing training, self-help books, gear,
meditation tools, and mind technologies, all available for purchase on their website. Dane
even started his own online TRV University which featured a host of courses training its
students on remote viewing, and even had its very own virtual campus as far back as 2003.
But perhaps the most ambitious question Dane tried to answer with PSI TECH was
literally “what happens after you die?” In 2003, he assigned the PSI TECH Special
Operations Team (a team of “skilled Technical Remote Viewers”) to “Project Afterlife” – an
endeavor to answer the “ultimate question.” An endeavor that, according to PSI TECH,
was ultimately successful. Unfortunately for us, though, that answer was locked behind a
paywall on a page only accessible with the Wayback Machine and is thus lost to time.
So, Dane scoops up PSI TECH and does what he does best. And it seems like everything went
off without a hitch. But, there was a hitch.
The troubles began with PSI TECH before Spotts even arrived – really,
they were kind of the reason he arrived. Before Spotts entered the picture, Ed Dames partnered
with a man named Harry DeLigter who owned a video production studio called “Light Productions” that
specialized in the production and distribution of “many UFO and paranormal” related videos.
Dames hired DeLigter to make a series of instructional tapes on remote viewing to
distribute to the public. But after production was completed,
Dames took the tapes for himself and hired another person for distribution.
He believed that he could make more money on the videos than he initially thought,
so he decided to cut DeLigter out to keep more of the profit for himself.
DeLigter took Dames to court and Dames lost to the tune of $435,000. Because of this,
Dames stepped down from his role as president of PSI TECH,
and Spotts swooped in and bought up his shares, and took over as Chairman and CEO.
In the spirit of virtually every miracle device
sold in the 1990’s – I have to say this. But wait, there’s more!
Part of Spotts’ deal with Dames was a complete “transfer of all the company’s assets including
its intellectual property.” Which seems straightforward enough. That is, until a
former PSI TECH employee named F.M. Bonsall broke into Dames’ ex-wife’s house who he may have been
having an affair with, stole a bunch of PSI TECH files, and allegedly handed them over to Dames.
It is a pretty wild story, and Spotts thought so too. He sued Bonsall for the files in 2001,
and when the case was finally settled in 2002, Spotts walked away victorious,
leaving Bonsall to hand over the files and pay damages of at least $11,900.
So then what? Did Dane go broke and give up on his mental mission
to create a 21st century remote viewing hyper-intelligent Jedi Order? Is Zygon,
like this SuperMind Computer, a defunct relic of the not-so-distant past?
NO CHANCE.
PSI TECH still exists today, and Dane is still at the head of it. They’ve since shifted their
focus and are now operating as “a research and consulting firm specializing in intelligence
collection for individual, corporate, and government clients who are looking
to solve problems outside of what conventional information can provide.” They do still provide
some personal remote viewing services and are now offering to train and manage a TRV team for you.
… and they even got hired to help find JonBenet Ramsey’s killer by using remote viewing.
As for Zygon… IT IS BACK. Dane revived the project in 2020 at the start of the pandemic to
bring Zygon’s mind-expanding tech into YOUR home – but this time without all the extra attachments.
You can access the “Zygon mind tools” right from your phone through their
app. No need for bulky headphones, aquatic mammal cassettes, or blinding LED glasses.
Now we have the ability to reach any place on Earth in a matter of seconds… So you’ll
be able to take a course on your PC during the day… and then at night,
use your phone to engage in a sleep program.
But the Mind Warrior Hero’s Journey started with a box of 11 Behavioral Mindscript tapes
ranging from Permanent Weight Loss and Attracting Love Relationships to Reduce
Blood Pressure/Better Health and Mastering Fears & Anxiety.
Honestly, it’s all… so weird that it’s just so… intriguing.
Now I am ready to give Supermind another shot. And
in keeping with the true ethos of Zygon I will begin by Expanding my Psychic Powers.
See you in the future.
I am surrounded by the white light of love. My mind is connected to the pure consciousness
of the universe. I receive truth.
I remove all barriers and blocks. I let go.
I see. I heal.
I am the source and center of all life.
I am truth and love. My consciousness expands.