The Other Side

The belief in people having Mystic powers .....

Nina Kulagina - Alleged Russian Psychic.

.... to predict the future, contact the dead, or identify where bodies are etc etc, are almost embedded in to some parts of humanities psyche. The UK TV channel Blaze for example (along with others), shows a lot of shows on ancient aliens, future aliens, house hauntings, strange and unknown events etc.

So its perhaps not too surprising, that the mainstream can be caught up in the nonsense. Famously the US military (and perhaps the Soviet Military, but that's not confirmed), had a program called 'Project Stargate', which ran from 1975 to 1995 to use 'Psychic Viewers' to remote view Soviet Military sites etc .... with at best decidedly mixed results (it was claimed by some to have identified spies, located weapons, and assisted in other intelligence operations, and yet it was ultimately cancelled, suggesting considerable doubt by those running the program). 

There's some that actually believe the Russians just ran a sting operation, pretending to have an interest in the same subject, to get the USA to spend large amounts of money on a wormhole going nowhere, while they performed real research in to hard military science. But even so, given the fact that much of early Israeli science came with émigrés from Soviet Russia post 1945, its perhaps no surprise that the Israeli military have also have considered dabbling with mystics.   

There is apparently three types of mysticism in the history of Judaism: the ecstatic, the contemplative, and the esoteric. Although they are distinct, they frequently overlap in practice, and at least one of these mystic forms of Judaism (which isn't studying the Kabbalah), allows for the practice of clairvoyance.

So perhaps its not necessarily a surprise that for a period of time between 2013 and 2016, the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) apparently allowed a Jewish rabbi, who claimed to be a clairvoyant to accompany army patrols. The 50 year old rabbi, who used the name Yehuda (I'm not sure if that was a stage name), was used to search for and identify Hamas smuggling tunnels crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel (sadly we know how that later turned out).

 

So as you might expect, his success rate was at best spotty, and at worst totally unconvincing. Certainly the IDF command apparently thought so, because they ordered a halt to these joint patrols, and the searches continued without the clairvoyant rabbis assistance.