by Martin Ebon
NOTE OF INTRODUCTIONMartin Ebon is a well-known figure in parapsychology circles. From 1953 to 1965 he was administrative assistant of the Parapsychology Association in New York set up by the world-famous medium and clairvoyant, Eileen Garrett. While occupying this post, he had more than adequate opportunity to meet the outstanding personalities in psychical research and parapsychology. He traveled extensively on behalf of the Association's research endeavors. His lectures, reviews, research reports, articles in magazines, and his books (over sixty of them) all reflect serious treatment of the field. His expertise, historical and otherwise, of the official and unofficial aspects of the field is enormous.
There is another aspect of Martin, though, which in my opinion makes him one of a kind, for he is much more than just a parapsychologist. He speaks several languages, and is also a lifelong researcher/writer/analyst regarding political and scientific developments of Eastern European countries, the former Soviet Union, and post-Communist Russia. His expertise in this regard also extends to the People's Republic of China and Asia.
His credentials along these lines are impressive. Following service with the U.S. Office of War Information in World War II, he then worked on the staff of the Foreign Policy Association, and with the U.S. Information Agency during the Korean War. Traveling widely and in direct contact with many sources, he was ultimately called upon by many agencies to present briefings, and for many years acted as analyst/consultant in this regard. As a free-lance writer, his articles were broadly published inter alia the NEW YORK TIMES, PSYCHOLOGY TODAY, and the INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTELLIGENCE AND COUNTERINTELLIGENCE. He lectured at universities on world affairs in general, but also specialized in tracking and examining the nature and directions of Russian and Soviet security services.
His deep interests in parapsychology, plus esteem of him as an exacting political journalist, made him a "natural" when official suspicions arose that the Soviet Union was engaging in mind-control and parapsychology research. For example, he was in Washington giving a briefing on telepathy to a top intelligence agency on 17 April 1961 when the ill-fated "Bay of Pigs" invasion of Cuba was launched. Other sources and clues also establish the existence of official intelligence interest in "psi" matters at least a decade prior to 1971 when the American intelligence agencies were forced to acknowledge and attempt response to the possible threat potential of "psi" research in the Soviet Union - and which, among other effects, resulted in the Remote Viewing project at Stanford Research Institute in 1973.
In addition to Martin's many books on matters parapsychological, he published: WORLD COMMUNISM TODAY; MALENKOV: STALIN'S SUCCESSOR; a biography of ERNESTO ["Che"] GUEVARA; PSYCHIC WARFARE (1983); THE ANDROPOV FILE (a biography of the former head of the KGB); and THE SOVIET PROPAGANDA MACHINE (1987).
His most recent book is KGB: DEATH AND REBIRTH (1994), which examines and documents the evolution of the new Russian "KGB" after the old Soviet KGB was officially pronounced dead in October 1991. As the U.S. Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "We don't have illusions about the Russians. We understand that the intelligence service may have changed its name - but it has probably not changed its method of operation." [See Martin Ebon, RUSSIA'S NEW SPY NETWORK. THE AMERICAN LEGION, June 1995.]
In my long-term experience of him, Martin has never been pro or con political enthusiast of any kind. He has always been a non-emotional documentarian of the first water, aided by a dignified, penetrating mind and vast experience in world, European and East European affairs. He and I had often discussed the "gap" in American awareness regarding the nature of Soviet mind-research, a gap made enduring because of Western intelligence agency and media reluctance to fair open knowledge about that research or its evolutionary background.
Although it took some doing on my part, Martin finally agreed to provide this paper for this website after I impressed on him that no one else could, would or was qualified to do so for the sake of posterity. Of all the essays and papers in this biomind database, this one is of signal importance - for it provides the historical, causative link as to why the intelligence agencies, antipathetic to psi research, were eventually forced into responding.
This paper was to go beyond the Cold War years and into what has happened to the KGB-sponsored research since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reorganization in Russia. Unfortunately, Martin's wonderful wife tragically passed away after an illness, and he has since been unable to proceed. We have decided to put this much of the paper in the database, to be followed by a Part Two when Martin is again up to the exacting work needed to extend it beyond the Cold War years.
I must now take this opportunity to express my deepest and most enduring gratitude to Martin and his fabulous, equally knowledgeable wife, Chariklia Sophia Ebon (1921-1996), who put up with me for so many years since I first met them in 1971. Your friendship would have been more than enough. But your mentorship in all respects, and including so very many difficult situations and decisions I was forced to make, prevented me from making far more mistakes than I did. So, Martin and "Koutsie", you have deeply honored me with your countless kindnesses and often did so far beyond the call of duty. Ingo Swann
By Martin Ebon
TOPICAL AREA: Developmental psi/Cold
War psi warfare gap
KEY TERMS: Consciousness, psychic research, bio-physics, bio-
communications, telepathy, mind enhancement, KGB, CIA, mind-boosting,
amplified mind power
ABSTRACT: The background of the Soviet Cold War psi-research effort is
summarized under the headings of: The Toth Incident; The American Fear
of Psychic Warfare and the Credibility Gap; A Brief History of the
Soviet Research Machine; The Novosibirsk Connection; The KGB Takes
Control; Centers of USSR Psi Studies; Three Major Directions Within
the Soviet Research Machine (Code by Telepathy, Boosting the Human
Brain, Amplified Mind Power); Washington's Dilemma; Outline of 1952
CIA Project on ESP; Congressional Response, 1981.
*
In Moscow on June 11, 1977, Los Angels
Times correspondent Robert C. Toth was arrested and detained on a
charge of illegally obtaining papers that disclosed "state secrets".
The papers had been given to Toth by a Soviet scientist, Valery G.
Petukhov.
Toth had first met the Russian biophysicist earlier in the year. While
Petukhov seemed eager to show his scientific findings to Toth, the
correspondent felt that his work was "only theory and far too
complicated" for a newspaper story.
Toth reported that, as best as he could recall, Petukhov asserted that
certain particles of living cells "are emitted" when such cells
divide, that they can be "detected and measured and that these
radiating particles can carry information." Their function could
"explain the basis for telepathy" and related
phenomena.
*
To Toth, Valery Petukhov seemed "like a serious
scientist." According to a card he handed the reporter, he was Chief
of the Laboratory of Bio-Physics at the State Control Institute of
Medical and Biological Research.
He had been recommended to Toth
by a dissent Soviet scientist who later emigrated. At their first
meeting, the Los Angeles Times man told Petukhov that, once the
scientists had proved this theory, he would be interested in writing
about it.
*
Months passed. In mid-June 1977 Petukhov phoned
Toth. The biophysicist told Toth that his experiments had succeeded.
He planned to describe them in a formal scientific paper; but, as
Soviet authorities would certainly refuse to publish his work, he
wanted to translate the paper into English and give it to Toth for
publication in the West.
At the rendezvous, Petukhov took a manuscript from his briefcase. It
contained over twenty typewritten sheets, complete with charts and
photos of charts. It looked like a complex, comprehensive scientific
paper, well-documented, appropriately technical.
*
Toth never managed to get a real look at the paper; for
it was at that moment a melodrama began, when a Soviet-made Fiat
braked sharply at the curb.
The car was filled with five plainclothesmen who jumped out and quite
unceremoniously pulled Toth inside.
Robert Toth's account stated: "Our car drove through red lights and
down one-way streets the wrong way to a militia (police) station. My
captors were firm and polite, offering me cigarettes.
I was ushered into a room with an inspector who declined my requests
to phone the U.S. Embassy but said a Soviet Foreign Ministry official
would be called."
*
In addition to the Foreign Ministry official
and a KGB agent, a man named Sparkin, the police inspector summoned a
senior researcher of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Professor I.M.
Mikhailov. Mikhailov was asked to provide expert testimony on the
paper Petukhov had given to Toth, which the police were now treating
as "evidence."
Specifically, Professor Mikhailov stated: "The article beginning
Petukhov, Valery G., from the word of `micro-organism self-radiation'
to the words `by means of vacuum particles in space' states that
within the content of living cells are particles . . . and these
particles are grounds for discussing the fundamental problems of
biology in the context of biology and parapsychology. There is also
information about the uses of such particles. This material is secret
and shows the kind of work done in some scientific institutes of our
state."
*
It was this last sentence that raised the
eyebrows among observers of Soviet parapsychological studies
throughout the world.
Earlier, Moscow authorities on various levels had several times denied
that parapsychology was being researched in the Soviet Union. A year
before, Leningrad writer Vladimir Lvov had published an article in the
leading French daily, LE MONDE, in which he asserted categorically:
"The truth is simple: parapsychology is not accepted as a legitimate
and official branch within Soviet science. No institute or center or
research in the Soviet Union is devoted to telepathy, psychokinesis,
etc."
Yet the Mikhailov testimony in the Toth incident directly contradicted
the Lvov statement.
*
Professor Mikhailov's testimony on the Petukhov
paper and Toth's police interrogation at the Pushkin Street Station
lasted about two-and-a-half hours.
At last, a representative of
the U.S. Embassy, Vice Consul Lawrence C. Napper, was permitted to
come to the station. The reporter's account of his meeting with
Petukhov was read aloud and translated into Russian. But Toth refused
to sign a handwritten Russian version of it. The KGB man Sparkin then
told him he was "free to go."
*
Toth's Moscow difficulties were not at an end.
The following Tuesday, Toth had a telephone call from another U.S.
Embassy official, Theodore McNamara, who asked him to come to the
embassy immediately. The matter, he added, was "serious." At
McNamara's office, Napper and two other officials were waiting. They
handed Toth a Soviet note that had been delivered a half hour earlier.
It contained the following passages:
"The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is authorized to state the following
to the American Embassy:
"On the 11th of June of this year Robert Charles Toth was apprehended
at the moment of meeting a Soviet citizen, Petukhov Valery
Georgiyevich, which took place under suspicious circumstances. When
apprehended, the American journalist was found to have materials given
to him by Petukhov, containing secret data.
"The Ministry of Foreign Affairs informs the American Embassy that in
conformity with established procedure, Toth will be summoned for
interrogation by the investigatory organs, in connection with which
his departure from Moscow until the end of the investigation is not
desired."
*
Within the hour, a polite KGB agent, wearing a
flowered shirt and gray suit, arrived, asked Toth to identify himself,
and told him to come to the State Security's Lefortovo center for
interrogation. He was advised of Articles 108 and 109 of the Criminal
code, and that he did not have diplomatic immunity.
After two days of confusing interrogation, Toth was told:
"Parapsychology as a whole may not be secret information. But there
could be fields of science within parapsychology that are secret. It
is not for me, as it's a matter for experts, to say what is secret,
and what the scientist has stated that the materials you received are
a secret. And you received them under circumstances where your
behavior and the information seems to be a breach of our
law."
*
After the second interrogation Toth was
told that he was no longer needed. The U.S. Embassy received
confirmation from the Soviet Foreign Ministry. Toth and his family
quickly arranged for a flight to the United States.
The Toth incident was reported world-wide, and the WASHINGTON POST and
THE NEW YORK TIMES ran accounts of it.
The incident then passed into oblivion, and most were none the wiser.
But intelligence analysts understood that Toth had gotten into his
hand, if only for a few moments, one of the tips of the enormous
iceberg of top secret Soviet research into psychic powers of the human
mind.
Some years before the Toth incident,
American intelligence analysts had begun noticing a Soviet secret
police (KGB) trend, shortly after 1967, indicating serious interest in
what is called "parapsychology" in the West.
*
This trend began when the KGB's far-flung
operations came under the direction of Yuri Andropov, named General
Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in late 1982.
But even the KGB, for all of its experience, large staff, skills, and
high-priority status, had not developed a clear-cut policy toward
psychic experiments; conflicting attitudes within its leadership
appeared to have caused erratic actions.
This was well illustrated when agents arrested Toth and thereby
revealed that secret research was, in fact, taking place at government
institutes.
*
U.S. government officials were jittery that
research in parapsychology might cause them to be accused of spending
public funds on science fiction projects.
When columnist Jack Anderson reported early in 1981 that a laboratory
in the basement of the Pentagon was devoted to parapsychological
experiments, his comments were heavy with ridicule and
sarcasm.
*
Anderson's assistant, Ron McRae, alleged in an
article on "Psychic Warfare" (in THE INVESTIGATOR, October 1981) that
"the Pentagon is spending millions on parapsychology in a crash
program to end Russia's psycho-superiority."
McRae, who was doing research for a book on U.S. government projects
in psychic studies, said the U.S. Secret Service had "commissioned
studies on ways to protect the President from the Kremlin's mind
control."
He wrote that its agents, as well as CIA staffers, had been "required
to take courses in mind control" at universities in the Washington
area, to "prevent them," as he put it, "from falling under the spell
of Soviet psychics."
Although such claims at the time bore earmarks of exaggeration, they
were none the less indicative of intense American interest in psi
warfare possibilities.
*
But American media accounts of psi warfare
spread alarm and amusement, and an ideological battlefield erupted,
not only in the United States, but in the Soviet Union also.
On the ideological battlefield of international Marxism, the
controversy about parapsychology, by whatever name, had gone on for
two decades; it showed no signs of abating.
*
Typical of those who regarded psychic studies
as ideological heresy was Soviet mathematician-physicist Dr. Alexander
Kitaygorodsky, who had categorized clairvoyance, precognition, and
psychokinesis as "supernatural" and thus outside "the domain of the
natural sciences." Writing in the Moscow periodical NAUKA I RELIGIA
(Science and Religion), an atheistic magazine, Dr. Kitaygorodsky
stated as long ago as March 1966: "To me, there is no doubt whatever
that those who relate such fairy tales are frauds, mystificators or,
at best, grossly deceived. Men have believed in miracles for
centuries, and for centuries there have existed charlatan and
impostors, conscious or unconscious. And the struggle against such
deception of the human mind has gone on for centuries, and in each
century it has to begin anew."
*
But in the same magazine, science writer Leonid
Fillipov took the opposite view and cited Marxist gospel to prove his
point.
He asked: "Does Professor Kitaygorodsky seriously believe
that the frontiers of physics have been reached?" He cited scientific
breakthroughs in radioactivity, quantum theory, and lasers, and wrote:
"What if telepathic phenomena conform to some new, as yet undiscovered
laws which do not contradict already known rules governing electrons?"
Fillipov added: "Rejecting a priori the possibilities of telepathy and
other processes still unfamiliar to science amounts of rejecting
Lenin's idea that, on any given level of scientific development, our
knowledge of the work remains incomplete."
*
But beyond viewing-with-exaggerated-alarm,
ridicule-cum-hyperbole and credibility gap lie the realities of
psychic functions, for good or ill.
To obtain the correct perspective, let us keep in mind that
parapsychology can play only a supporting role in the Soviet Union's
or any other military-scientific complex.
It must, therefore, be seen as one element within a large and diffuse
defensive-offensive research apparatus. Psychic elements might well be
integrated into, rather than operating separately from, other
scientific or military projects.
*
A major attraction for planners is the promise
of financial and organizational shortcuts: Why engage in high-cost
armaments, for example, if one or several psychics might influence
personnel in the enemy's missile silos, as a DIA report suggested? The
costs of military hardware are a heavy burden in national economies in
the East as well as in the West -- and ESP is
cheap.
The origins of the Soviet research remain a
mystery at best, mostly due to gaps in accessible documentation.
In any case, it would be clear that the research and attempted
development of specific useful psi powers of mind proceeded at the
start under severe ideological difficulties.
Thus it is not easily understandable how, and especially why, the
Soviet research machine achieved the monumental extent it did by about
1977.
*
Soviet efforts to harness telepathy (mind-to-
mind communication), telekinesis (better known as psychokinesis, the
influence of the human mind on matter), or any other psychic ability,
needed to overcome strong ideological objections from Marxist
theoreticians.
Pragmatists, even those highly placed in scientific or government
circles, needed to justify their hopes for psychic experiments in
acceptable ideological terms.
Historically, Western parapsychology was rooted in nineteenth-century
efforts to find scientific proof for such traditional religious
beliefs such as life after death.
And as psychic phenomena retain the mysterious air of the unknown or
unexplored, many Marxists accused Western parapsychologists of
propagandizing religio-folkloric "superstition" -- and of advocating
soft-headed "idealistic" concepts, in contrast to the strictly
"materialistic" approach promulgated by Karl Marx and V. I.
Lenin.
*
Such criticisms had been voiced, on and off,
for some twenty years in the Soviet Union. During the life of Mao
Zedong, Chinese communist ideologues even accused the Soviet Union and
the United States of using parapsychology to foster "religion without
the cross" in order to distract their citizenry form economic
difficulties.
*
As we examine analyses of Soviet research, this
continuing ideological conflict must be kept in mind. But there can be
little doubt that the extent of the Soviet effort did become
enormous.
In 1978, an American intelligence report was declassified and
released, although it had originally been scheduled for
declassification in December 1990.
*
The report was entitled "Controlled Offensive
Intelligence Agency (DIA), Task Number T72-01-14.
In part it read: "The Soviet Union is well aware of the benefits and
applications of parapsychology research. The term parapsychology
denotes [in the Soviet Union] a multi-disciplinary field consisting of
the sciences of bionics, biophysics, psychophysics, psychology,
physiology and neuropsychology.
"Many scientist, U.S. and Soviet, feel that parapsychology can be
harnessed to create conditions where one can alter or manipulate the
minds of others. The major impetus behind the Soviet drive to harness
the possible capabilities of telepathic communication, telekinetic and
bionics are said to come from the Soviet military and the KGB
[Committee of State Security; Secret Police]."
*
In continuing, the report of the Defense
Intelligence Agency asserted that the Soviet Union enjoyed a "head
start" in the field and had provided substantial financial backing.
The report concluded that "Soviet knowledge in this field is superior
to that of the U.S."
It noted that Soviet researchers had explored "detrimental effects of
subliminal perception techniques" that might even be "targeted against
the U.S. or allied personnel in nuclear missile silos" by "telepathic
means."
*
The report stated: "The potential applications
of focusing mental influences on an enemy through hypnotic telepathy
have surely occurred to the Soviets . . . Control and manipulation of
the human consciousness must be considered a primary
goal."
*
At this point, the reader should again be
cautioned that the ideological controversy about the study and use of
psychic potentials in the USSR had created gaps in public knowledge
that inevitably led to rumors and unverifiable claims.
"Hypnotic telepathy," of which the DIA report spoke, may well have
been one of the target areas of Soviet research, but little current
information on its status was available.
*
However, Russia had a long history of hypnosis
studies in medicine, education, and psychiatry. Soviet literature
reflected on-going and contemporary scientific interest in the
stimulation of telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis, either by
drugs or electronic means.
In the past, Russian researchers had experimented with telepathy-at-a-
distance, a technique of intriguing potential.
It was quite likely that the early origins
of the Soviet research machine may have begun with the work of Bernard
Bernardovich Kazhinsky, a student in Tiflis (now Tbilisi), in the
state of Georgia boarding on the Black Sea. His interests apparently
were triggered by a telepathic experience of his own.
*
In February, 1922, Kazhinsky was invited to
address the All-Russian Congress of the Association of Naturalists, a
top scientific organization perhaps equivalent to the American
Institutes of Mental health today.
The topic of his lecture was HUMAN THOUGHT-ELECTRICITY, and he quickly
published a book under the same title. Having been invited to address
the All-Russian Congress, it would be clear that the Congress
supported and funded Kazhensky's work, while his research thereafter
apparently became classified.
By 1923, he had published his early findings in a book entitled
THOUGHT TRANSFERENCE. This book attracted favorable attention among
important brain researchers at the time.
*
More visible and easier to document was the
work of Professor Leonid L. Vasiliev, later to become Chief of the
Department of Physiology at the University of Leningrad.
Born in 1891, Vasiliev had been a student of Leningrad physiologist
Vladimir M. Bekhterev who had established the Leningrad Brain Research
Institute. His granddaughter, Natalia P. Bekhtereva, had joined the
Institute in 1921, and ultimately became its director.
*
Vasiliev became a member of the Committee for
the Study of Mental Suggestion the following year.
"Mental suggestion," or hypnosis, became central to his interest. In
1928, he visited Paris, as well as other Western European cities.
Vasiliev spoke and wrote French fluently, and the Paris Institut
Metapsychique International (IMI) remained his major contact with
Western psychical research throughout his life.
*
Vasiliev established an ideological basis for
the Soviet research in several books, lectures, and articles. His
basic thesis was the experimental facts of telepathy, for example,
should be examined from a physiological (or material) viewpoint, so
that they could not be exploited by advocates of "religious
superstition" (or an idealistic view-point). He was criticized as
providing a pseudo-scientific framework for a return to idealism under
the mantle of Marxist dialectical materialism.
*
His major and influential book BIOLOGICAL RADIO
COMMUNICATION was published in Kiev by the Ukrainian Academy of
Science in 1962.
Kazhinsky concluded that "experimental confirmation of the fact that
communication between two people, separated by long distances, can be
carried out through water, over air and across metal barrier by means
of cerebral radiation in the course of thinking, and without
conventional communication facilities."
He added: "One important feature of the above-mentioned experiment is
worthy of attention. The electromagnetic waves accompanying the
thought-formation process (visual perceptions) in the inductor's brain
reached the cells of the indicatee's cortex after having traveled a
long distance, not only in the air and through water but also through
the hull of a submarine.
"This would justify the following conclusions: 1) these
electromagnetic waves were propagated spheroidally, not in a narrow
directed beam; 2) these waves penetrated though the submarine hull,
which did not block them, that is, it did not act as a `Faraday
cage'."
*
Kazhinsky noted that a radio receiver in the
marine laboratory of the Soviet scientific research vessel VITYAZ had
been unsuccessful in intercepting electric waves emitted in the water
by the torpedo fish.
He added that: "the radio receivers in the submarine did not intercept
these waves. This prompts the conclusion that some electromagnetic
waves of a biological origin possess yet another, still unknown,
characteristic which distinguishes them from conventional radio waves.
It is possible that our ignorance of that particular characteristic
impedes further development of research work in that
field."
*
Vasiliev noted in another book EXPERIMENTS IN
DISTANT INFLUENCE (which first appeared in Moscow in 1962) that while
official denials of the shore-to-submarine experiment suggested "a
certain caution," nevertheless "This experiment showed - and herein
resides its principal value - that telepathic information can be
transmitted without loss through a thickness of water, and through the
sealed metal covering of a submarine - that is, through substances
which greatly interfere with radio communication.
"Such materials completely absorb short waves and partly absorb medium
waves, the latter being considerably attenuated, whereas the factor
(still unknown to us) which transmits suggestion penetrates them
without difficulties."
*
Many have claimed that the infamous NAUTILUS
story of 1959 in the United States served as the major prod for Soviet
bio-communications research.
However, by 1959, some four decades after the Soviet research had
already begun, presumably their machine would not have needed such a
prod.
The NAUTILUS was the world's first nuclear powered submarine, launched
in 1954 and christened by First Lady Mamie Eisenhower, wife of
President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The NAUTILUS made its first voyage under the North Pole in 1958. Soon
afterward, French accounts claimed that while the submarine was
cruising deep in Arctic waters it received telepathic messages from a
research center maintained by the Westinghouse Corporation at
Friendship, Maryland. The U.S. Navy denied that such a test had ever
taken place, or that it was otherwise engaged in telepathy
experiments.
*
However, several sources in France appeared
which claimed otherwise. My own efforts to obtain confirmation of the
French reports were unsuccessful.
The reports held that such major U.S. corporations as Westinghouse,
General Electric in Schenectady, N.Y., and Bell Telephone in Boston
had begun telepathy research in 1958.
The aim was to develop thought transmission by telepathy, to record
and produce telepathic signals, and to determine the amplitude and
frequencies on which telepathy operated.
*
According to the French sources, President
Eisenhower had received a study prepared by the Rand Corporation of
Los Angeles, a "think tank" under contract to the armed forces and
other U.S. government agencies.
The report was said to recommend studying the use of telepathy to
establish communication with submarines, particularly those cruising
in waters under the Polar Ice Cap where radio communication channels
were particularly difficult.
*
Westinghouse's Friendship Laboratory allegedly
undertook just such an experiment with the U.S.S. NAUTILUS, linking
one person on Land (the sender or inductor) with another person in the
submarine (the receiver or inductee), while the vessel was submerged.
Representatives of the U.S. Navy and Air Force were present during the
experiment, according to the reports.
The original French reports fixed the starting date as July 25, 1959.
The tests continued daily for a total of sixteen days. The person in
charge was identified as Colonel William H. Bowers, director of the
Biological Department of the Air Force research institute and the man
who directed the experiments at Friendship.
Later accounts identified the sender or inductors as "Smith" a student
at Duke University, who was confined in one of the Westinghouse
laboratory's buildings during the experimental period.
*
The procedure was designed to have Smith
transmit "visual impressions" twice daily at specified times.
Using methods developed by J. B. Rhine at the Parapsychology
Laboratory, Duke University, Durham, N.C., a controlled timing device
shuffled one thousand ESP cards in a revolving drum in such a manner
as to drop five cards on a table, one at a time, at one-minute
intervals. Smith pricked each card up as it came out of the drum,
looked at it, and sought to memorize the image. At the same time, he
drew a picture of the symbol (square, cross, star, wavy lines, or
circle) on a piece of paper before him.
Each test thus produced a sheet of paper covered with five symbols.
Smith sealed each paper into an envelope, which Col. Bowers locked
into a cage.
*
At the same time, a Navy lieutenant, identified
as "Jones," sat isolated in a stateroom on the NAUTILUS, functioning
as the recipient of the images Smith sought to convey by
telepathy.
Twice daily Jones drew five symbols on a sheet of paper, choosing from
among the same symbols used by Smith. He placed the sheet inside an
envelope, sealed it, and turned it over to his superior, Captain
William R. Andersen.
The captain wrote the time and date of the experiment on the envelope
and put it into a safe in his own cabin. During the sixteen-day
experiment period, Jones saw no one else except for one sailor who
brought him meals and performed other routine services.
*
The final segment of these events, as reported
in France, began with the arrival of the NAUTILUS at Groton, its
cruise completed.
The envelopes were removed from the commander's sage, sent by car
under escort to the nearest military airfield, flown to Friendship
Airport, near Baltimore, and then taken to Col. Bowers's laboratory.
There the two sets of sheets were taken from their envelopes, dates
and times matched with each other, and the results tabulated. In over
70 percent of the cases, the figures tallied: Jones had correctly
"guessed" three-fourths of the images seen by Smith.
*
I was put off by these reports, particularly by
the high score ascribed to these experimental subjects, and by their
all-too-typical American names.
On the other hand, the NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE had reported in
November 8, 1958, that the Westinghouse Electric Corporation had begun
to study ESP using specially designed apparatus.
Dr. Peter A. Castruccio, director of the company's newly organized
Astronautic Institute, had spoken of the ESP studies as "very
promising," with the caution that "a lot more work must be done before
we can come up with anything practical."
*
I questioned W. D. Crawford, Staff Section, Air
Arm Division of Westinghouse, on the project and he said that "while
these studies have scientific value, any conclusion at this time would
be premature and inconclusive."
These statements were published in the NEWSLETTER of the
Parapsychology Foundation (January-February 1959), as was a report
that Bell Telephone Laboratories had considered an ESP research
project but had abandoned it.
*
The NAUTILUS story is often referred to as
hoax, since the French and other sources remain unconfirmed. However,
the telepathic part of the story might have added interest to the
Soviet effort, already four decades long by 1958.
*
In any event, in Paris, a prominent member of
the Institut Metapsychique International, Raphel Kherumain, collected
articles on the NAUTILUS story and mailed them to his long-time
professional friend, Leonid Vasiliev.
Whether of fact of hoax, the implications that the Americans MIGHT be
conducting ESP experiments did enter into the ongoing monolithic
research machine which influenced the lives of countless men and
women, and caused expenditures which by 1983 were supposed to amount
to $500 million annually.
Across the Ob River from Novosibirsk, a
pioneer town in western Siberia, lies Academgorodok, or Science City.
For some four years, its Institute of Automation and Electrometry
maintained a research unit with the nondescript name of "Special
Department No. 8."
The building that housed the department could only be entered if one
knew the code, changed each week, that opened the main door's
lock.
The "No. 8" operation was devoted to experiments in information
transmission by bioenergetic means.
*
As part of its program, physicists sought to
discover the nature of "psi particles," the elusive elements that some
Soviet scientists regarded as essential to the function of such
psychic techniques as biocommunication and bioenergetics.
Novosibirsk was a logical place for such advanced studies. Its Science
City was developed, after World War II, with such single-mindedness
that even the names of the streets and city squares reflect it nature.
For example, one could take a bus down Thermophysics Street, get off
at the corner of Calculators Street, and walk across Institute of
Hydrodynamics Square. The city contained some forty research centers
and housed tens of thousands of scientists and their
families.
*
When the No. 8 project was established in 1966,
some sixty researchers were brought to Science City from other parts
of the USSR.
One of them, Dr. August Stern, provided an account of the department's
operation after he migrated to France in 1977.
He told the NEW YORK TIMES that the project's director, a Soviet
officer, Vitaly Perov, had shown special "deference to two visitors,"
presumably KGB officers, "who came in the early days" of the project
"to check on the installations."
*
Theory and application of psi principles were
part of the experiments. Stern dealt with aspects of theoretical
physics, designed to solve the enigma of psychic energies flowing
between living things.
*
The center's elaborate equipment, he said, had
"cost many millions." In line with other Soviet experiments, the
Novosibirsk center did such things as applying electric shocks to
kittens to see whether their mother, three floors above, would react
to their experience in a telepathic way.
This type of experiment was similar to a rumored test in which baby
rabbits were taken down below sea level in a Russian submarine, the
killed, while the mother rabbit remained ashore, her reactions
monitored by measuring brain and heart functions.
*
Project No. 8 included telepathy-type distance
experiments among people.
Inductors, or senders, were stimulated in one group of rooms, while
recipients were placed elsewhere, their responses monitored on closed-
circuit television.
The center also undertook the study of electromagnetic forces in
person-to-person and mind-over-matter experiments.
Among laboratory animals used in the project were monkeys.
*
Stern recalled further details: "There were
also experiments with photon waves, in which frogs' eyes were used as
a more sensitive measuring instrument than a machine.
Another experiment involved putting bacteria on two sides of a glass
plate to see whether a fatal disease could be transmitted through the
glass. It was reasoned that if this could be done, it would show that
photons - light particles - accounted for some inexplicable forms of
communication."
*
Stern did not succeed in the project he had
been assigned, and which he regarded as a legitimate scientific
challenge. In fact, the whole of No. 8 was dissolved in 1969, although
it was much too early to achieve definitive results.
Stern concluded that the shut-down reflected "a change in attitude of
power balance in the Kremlin." Presumably, Moscow authorities had
decided on different administrative or research tactics in dealing
with psychic studies.
*
Stern's recollections concerning photon waves
have since been confirmed. Three researchers at Novosibirsk's
Institute of Clinical and Experimental Medicine and at the Institute
of Automation and Electrometry (Siberian Section, USSR Academy of
Science) are credited with undertaking the key experiment on the
problem.
They were Vlail Kanachevy, Simon Shchurin, and Ludmilla Mikhailova.
Their experiment, designed to establish photon communication between
cells of living organisms, has been listed in the State Register of
Discoveries by the Committee for Invention and Discoveries, which
functioned under the USSR Council of Ministers.
An English translation of their paper appeared in the JOURNAL OF
PARAPHYSICS (Vol. 7, No. 2, 1973) as "Report from Novosibirsk:
Communication between Cells."
Their experiment indicated that cells could communicate illness, such
as a virus infection, despite the fact the cells were physically
separated.
The tests showed that when one group of cells was contaminated with a
virus, the adjacent group -although separated by quartz glass -
"caught the disease." When regular glass was used to separate the two
cell groups, the non-contaminated cells remained
healthy.
*
The experimenters linked their idea to the
concept prominent in Soviet bioenergetics research: the existence of
unknown communication channels in living cells for the transfer of
information - "a language of waves and radiation," as Shchurin called
it.
The medical researcher added these comments: "Why should information
on all the processes of life be necessarily transmitted by chemical
means, which are certainly not the most economical methods? After all,
any chemical change is primarily an interaction of electrons,
complicated formations that carry a reserve of energy. In colliding
with a substance, they would either transfer this energy to it or
radiate it in the form of photons, or light particles.
"Today there are no methods for studying the specific character of
photon radiations, the constant normal radiation or normal cells. We
decided to evade the ban imposed by physics by creating an artificial
situation. We subjected cells taken from an organism to extreme
effects to observe the character of radiations emitted by them, That
the cell radiated photons was known. But perhaps the cell was able to
perceive them, too? Our experiments provided the answers to this
question."
*
The barrier of quartz glass permitted neither
viruses nor chemical substances to travel between the two vessels
inhabited by the cells. Yet, as Shchurin picturesquely put it, "the
affected cells virtually cried out loud about the danger" when they
were attacked by the virus, and "their cry freely penetrated the
barrier of quartz glass which permitted ultra-violet waves to
pass.
Something highly improbable happened. These waves were not only
perceived by the neighboring cells, they also conveyed the sickness to
the neighboring cells."
*
Although the No. 8 project was shut down and
sections of it transferred to other cities, animal research in
information transmission continued in Science City.
A Novosibirsk toxicologist, Dr. S. V. Speransky, discovered a form of
telepathy between starving and normally nourished mice. He observed
that impulses from hungry mice were transmitted in such a manner that
the non-starving mice acted as if they, themselves, were famished.
The most complete account of the Speransky experiment appeared in
PARAPSYCHOLOGY IN THE USSR (Part III), translated by Larissa
Vilenskaya from the researcher's original manuscript.
*
As a toxicologist, Speransky's primary interest
was the impact of poisons on living organisms; the mind-to-mind
reaction among the mice was encountered accidentally. Speransky's
"upper mice" lived on in the fourth-floor laboratory, while the "lower
mice" were kept in the basement.
In some experiments, the upper mice were starved, in others, they were
nourished. Out of the thirty experiments, results in twenty-seven were
positive: Non-starving mice responded to the suffering of their
"friends," who were several stories removed; in only three cases were
the results negative.
*
Refining his methodology, Speransky engaged in
additional series of experiments, varying sex, weight and other
variables.
He found that the "biological significance of the rapid increase in
weight if mice which received signals about starvation from their
`friends' is clear: a danger of starvation has to give them an
additional stimulus to be sated."
In other words, telepathy-like signals warned the non-starving mice
that food was short, so they increased food consumption and storage
within their bodies.
*
Speransky drew this conclusion: "Undoubtedly,
mentioning that the transmission of information occurred beyond
ordinary channels of perception will remind the reader of such notions
as telepathy, extrasensory perception, and `biological radio-
communication.' It is possible to suppose that the transmission of
information about starvation pertains to this type of phenomenon? We
think so, but cannot strictly affirm it at present. It is only clear
that the transmission of information about starvation in conditions of
our experiments goes beyond ordinary forms of interaction of animals.
Therefore, we propose to call it extraordinary transmission of
information."
*
Actually, related phenomena had been recorded
by Western researchers. Sir Alister Hardy, Professor Emeritus of
Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at Oxford University, had considered
the possibility that telepathic communication among animals might even
affect evolution and adaptation.
In an essay on "Biology and ESP," Professor Hardy suggested that
animal habits might be spread by "telepathic-like means," and that a
"psychic pool of existence" might function among members of a species
by some method "akin" to telepathy.
*
Speransky linked his findings about
communication between mice to work done by Gulyaev with his auragram
on humans, by Sergeyev in human brain activity, and by Presman on the
influence of electromagnetic fields upon living organism. A. S.
Presman's work, notably his book ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELDS AND LIFE (New
York, 1970), is internationally known.
*
One rare positive reference to parapsychology-
related work to appear in (what was) an East German publication was
printed in NEUE DEUTSCHLAND, the East Berlin daily published by the
Socialist Unity Party, May 15, 1982.
In an article on "Man, Animals and Magnetism," Professor Hans Weiss
and Dr. Jurgen Hellebrand discussed the question of whether a
correlation between electromagnetic fields and life processes does, in
fact, exist. They found that the views of physicists, chemists, and
biologists vary greatly.
*
They cited Presman's work, notably his
references to the apparent ability of snails and birds to orient
themselves through the earth's magnetic field. The two authors
denounced popular claims for magnetic healing devices as "clearly
humbug," but stated that in such fields as food production further
basic research "may permit developments leading to practical
applications."
*
As a leading research center, Novosibirsk was a
natural contact point for long-distance experiments in telepathy. The
top Soviet scientist, Professor Ippolite Kogan, arranged a long-
distance test from his Bio-Communication Laboratory in Moscow to the
Novosibirsk laboratory.
Kogan reported on this experiment, in absentia, to a meeting at the
University of California at Los Angeles in 1969. The test concentrated
on the telepathic transmission of the identity of various objects,
with Yuri Kamensky in Moscow trying to communicate the images to Karl
Nikolayev in Novosibirsk. The methods used corresponded to other long-
distance tests.
*
However, Kogan noted that the recipient in the
Siberian city, "did not have an assortment of items before him," as
was arranged later during the Moscow-Kersh tests, so he "could not
give specific names for the object he saw telepathically.
Kogan said that the Novosibirsk recipient was limited to listing "the
characteristics" of each item, which restricted statistical analysis
of the experimental results to "an approximation."
*
In one such test, the transmitting telepath in
the Soviet capital was asked by supervising scientists "to suggest an
object they had chosen randomly." Six segments of test were used to
transmit images of six different objects. Half of these tests gave
positive results.
During the Cold War it became a commonplace
observation that the Committee for State Security (KOMITET
GOSUNDARSTVENNOI BEZPASTNOSTI, or KGB for short) permeated Soviet
society at all levels.
Its role in psi research was, clearly, a minor aspect of KGB
activity.
The KGB's uneasy role in psi research illustrated that it was not, and
could not have been, a monolithic agency. Its sometimes contradictory
aims, as well as its enormous domestic and international scope and
diversity, made total efficiency impossible.
*
Western analyst have concluded that the KGB
took control of Soviet studies in parapsychology no later than
1970.
More precisely, the agency appears to have taken a serious
interest in the field during this period, and its involvement after
that became more active and consistent.
*
The KGB's alternately benign and hostile
attitude toward psychic studies is well illustrated by the rise, fall,
and resurrection of the bioenergetics laboratory attached to Moscow's
A. S. Popov Scientific-Technical Society for Radio Engineering,
Electronics and Communication (known as NTORES, the acronym of its
Russian name).
The original initiative for the Popov lab came from members of its
Bionics Section in 1965, who suggested a series of telepathy
experiments under the label "biological communication."
*
The new section met on October 11, 1965, and
developed a three-point program:
(1) study and analysis of international literature on the subject;
(2) a synthesis of spontaneous telepathic phenomena previously
observed; and
(3) a plan for laboratory-controlled telepathic
experiments.
*
The resulting Laboratory for Bio-Information
functioned on two levels, private and official. The core of the
operation was a team of unpaid volunteers, who were permitted to work
on premises leased by the Popov institute, and whose activity was
"officially authorized."
The little band of parapsychology enthusiasts inside the Bio-
Communication Laboratory was well aware that they operated under
official scrutiny, that at least one KGB operative was a staff member
and other regularly reported to the agency.
Much of their work was clearly visible, such as the long-distance
telepathy experiments, but other studies were never
published.
*
Among the unpublished studies was the work of
Yuri Korabelnikov and Ludmilla Tishchenko-Korabelnikova, a husband-
and-wife team who organized more than eight thousand clairvoyance
tests.
They placed different geometric designs of numbers inside opaque
envelopes. According to the group's compilations, the two psychics
were able to name about 70 percent of the images correctly, compared
to 20 percent expected by probability.
*
In addition to the existence of rival
"idealistic" and "materialistic" cliques, there was a continuous
effort on the part of publicity-conscious Edward Naumov to push for
more research in psychokinesis, while the laboratory's director,
Professor Kogan, favored telepathy experiments.
Barbara Ivanova, then employed as a government translator, engaged in
a series of experiments that included remote-viewing and distant
healing. Larissa Vilenskaya, impressed by the performances of Rosa
Kuleshova, investigated dermo-optic vision and developed techniques
for teaching this ability.
*
One of Ivanova's early students, Boris Ivanov,
eventually denounced her as bringing an "idealist" taint to healing
research. Ivanov himself specialized in "charging" water with "bio-
energy," a technique that had long been examined by a Canadian
researcher, Dr. Bernard Grad of McGill University, Montreal.
After Ivanov left the Popov laboratory to continue his studies at the
Institute of Molecular Genetics of the USSR Academy of Sciences, a
curtain of secrecy dropped over his work.
*
The KGB reorganized the Popov laboratory in
1978 along lines that favored military-oriented research.
The new unit, under the direction of academician Yuri Kobzarev, was
established after three years of soul-searching.
Professor Kobzarev was considered by Moscow researchers as a sound
scientist but, to the degree that this was possible within Soviet
society, something of a "political innocent."
*
As such, he occupied the position of an
academic figurehead for the new Laboratory for Bio-Electronics, while
the day-to-day functions of the unit rested in the firm hands of his
deputy, a KGB functionary who had been active within the old
laboratory and was instrumental in its eventual
dissolution.
*
Debates regarding "inhumane" projects often
arose. Determined to avoid these, the authorities did not permit
within the unit's secretariat, its council, or the laboratory team,
the presence of anyone who might oppose "inhumane"
projects.
*
To enforce this policy, a strict screening
process was established, complete with "Rules for Admittance to
Membership in the Central Public Laboratory for Bio-Electronics"
(December 7, 1978).
The rules specified that all potential staff members had to be
interviewed by the lab's directors, commit themselves in writing to
adhere to the rules, file two passport-type portrait photographs, and
submit a statement of three to four pages showing "familiarity with
bio-electronic problems." The laboratory, in tern, established a file
on each individual and issued an identity card.
*
Once admitted to the staff, members were
forbidden to give lectures or publish papers "without the laboratory's
prior permission." They were not permitted to "engage in any research
concerning the structure, or the improved quality of biofields"
outside the laboratory, without the prior permission of the
Scientific-Technological Section.
*
In order to widen the geographic scope of bio-
electronic research, Popov institutes in Leningrad, Kiev, Alma Ata,
Kishinev, Taganrog, Minsk, and Tallin were urged to establish similar
laboratories and engage psychics for experiments.
In addition to KGB guidance of the Bio-Electronics Laboratory, the
military was well represented among its officers. The full extent and
purpose of the military interests remains vague due to lack of
documentation. The military presence, however, was known to be
large.
*
Among eighteen members selected on October 31,
1978, two were senior scientists at the Soviet Ministry of Defense:
Jan I. Koltunov and Nikolai A. Nosov; a third, Mikhail A. Sukhikh, was
a Candidate of Military Sciences at the Ministry of
Defense.
*
An appraisal of the KGB's role in Russian
parapsychology must be acknowledge that the agency was an ever-present
fact of Soviet life, rather than an omnisciently sinister force.
Thus, when we observe that the KGB slowly tightened its hold on psi
studies, it simply means that - with a lot of backing and filling - it
started to take the psychic potential seriously, examined it more
closely, and began to guide its use toward serious
application.
*
Evidence for this interest can be found in
diverse areas.
When émigré August Stern reported on the carefully guarded operations
of a laboratory in Novosibirsk, he made two significant references to
the KGB's role in the operation of this unit in particular and in psi
studies in general.
He expressed the belief that two visitors who had inspected the
Novosibirsk installations during its early days were KGB men, and
stated that experiments in Leningrad and Novosibirsk were later
reported to have been combined into one Moscow laboratory, operated
under KGB auspices.
*
Stern understood in 1974 that all psi tests had
been curtailed, except for the "secret KGB laboratory," but when he
was told that something "important" and "very dangerous" had been
discovered in the course of these laboratory experiments, Stern said,
"I never believed it. How can the KGB do effective research? They need
real scientists."
Speaking from the elitist viewpoint of a scientists, Stern may well
have underestimated the results that can be achieved under police
pressure, if not guidance.
*
One American researcher stated bluntly: "The
KGB simply discovered or decided that parapsychology phenomena are
real, that they work, that all theoretical wrangling be damned, and
that the only thing that counts are results - and they just went
ahead, full steam, to get more reliable results to suit their
"specific aims."
*
The pattern that emerged of the KGB's rule in
Soviet psi research was one of increasing secrecy about actual
research with the USSR, accompanied by fluctuating tolerance of
encouragement of the exposure of peripheral, irrelevant, or even
inaccurate information concerning Soviet studies.
Three stages in this process can be identified; they were influenced
by the role and policies of Yuri A. Andropov, who held the post of KGB
chairman from 1967 to 1982. On November 12, 1982, Andropov was named
General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the
country's top position, succeeding Brezhnev, who died a few days
before.
*
The "golden age" of Soviet psi research, the
first stage of its contemporary development, lasted through most of
the 1960s.
It began with Professor Vasiliev's spirited advocacy of the research
he had long proposed; it became obscured after Andropov took control
of the KGB, which intruded more firmly into scientific activities,
including the monitoring, supervision, and actual conducting of
experiments.
*
From mid-1968 on, and quite noticeable by 1970,
contact between Soviet psi researchers and their colleagues abroad
began to dry up. By 1975, the Laboratory for Bio-Communication was
disbanded.
Publication of findings by such authorities as Professor
Kogan ceased, while rumors concerning secret KGB-operated laboratories
circulated.
This was a period of transition, with new plans made, blueprints
prepared, staff tentatively selected, some projects at least publicly
abandoned, and other pursued in an exploratory, probing, and even
confused manner.
*
The KGB's influence on scientific research
generally had been uneven. While it had the task of assuring maximum
ideological and political loyalty among scientists, it had to also
encourage optimum productivity.
This called for a relatively open exchange of information, including a
monitoring of scientific developments abroad. But the sheer volume of
data in science and technology available openly - at meeting, in
journals and books - in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan
during any given day must have severely taxed the transmission and
translation facilities available to Soviet science.
*
Even so, the skilled manpower needed to
evaluate, analyze, and apply such data was limited. Soviet scholars
found KGB censorship of incoming mail uneven and heavy-handed;
publications were often simply stolen in transit and sold on a
specialized black market.
*
Soviet science, arts, and literature
experienced a "thaw" of several years during the regime of Nikita
Khrushchev. When direction of the KGB was taken over by Andropov,
controls over Soviet society were tightened; flexibility,
unpredictability, and changes in policies thereafter characterized the
agency's operations.
*
In 1975, foreign observers detected a distinct
tightening-up of KGB and Communist Party control over the academy.
The weekly magazine U.S. NEWS AND WORLD REPORTS (March 1, 1967)
described this development as "one of the most important Soviet
internal changes since World War II."
The magazine quoted one analyst as saying "It is right up there with Stalin's death and the reversal of Khrushchev's reforms, because it destroys the only important island of independence left in the country."
The limited information and massive
disinformation available regarding the KGB takeover of Soviet psi
research did not in itself contribute to an in-depth analysis of the
Soviet psi research machine, especially when its large size was
considered, along with the known extent of its multidiscliplinary
activities.
For example, through privileged sources available to me, I was able to
confirm by 1983, that the arms and functions of the machine were so
extensive as to include all of the following twenty-nine research
centers.
A. S. Popov All-Union Scientific and Technical Society of Radio
Technology and Electrical Engineering, Moscow; Laboratory of Bio-
Information, 1965-1975; Laboratory of Bio-Energetics, established
1978.
Scientific Research Institute of General and Educational Psychology,
USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, Moscow.
Baumann
Institute of Advanced Technology, Moscow; Laboratory of Dr.
Wagner.
Institute of Energetics, Moscow; Laboratory of Dr. Sokolov.
Moscow State University; Laboratory of Prof. Kholodov.
State Instrument of Engineering College, Department of Physics,
Moscow.
Moscow Institute of Aviation.
I. V. Pavlov Institute, Moscow.
Institute of Reflexology, Moscow.
Moscow University, Department of Theoretical Physics.
Department of Geology, Moscow State University.
Interdepartmental Commission for Coordination of Study on the
Biophysical Effect, Moscow (dowsing research).
Adjunct Laboratory of Medical and Biological Problems, Moscow.
University of Leningrad, Laboratory on the Physiology of Labor;
Department of Physiology, Laboratory of Biological
Cybernetics.
A. A. Uktomskii Physiological Institute, Leningrad.
Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, Department of Cybernetics.
University of Leningrad, Bekhterev Brain Institute.
Research Institute of Psychology, Ukrainian SSR Academy of
Sciences.
Institute of Problems of Information Transmission of the USSR Academy
of Science, Moscow.
Pulkovo Observatory, Leningrad.
Filatov Institute, Laboratory of the Physiology of Vision,
Odessa.
Scientific-Industrial Unit "Quantum," Krasnodar.
State University of Georgia, Tbiblisi (Tiflis).
Kazakhstan State University, Alma Ata, Kazakhstan.
Institute of Cybernetics of the Ukrainian SSR, Kiev.
Institute of Clinical Physiology, Kiev.
Scientific Research Institute of Biophysics, Department of
Cybernetics, Puschino.
Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology, Kharkov.
Institute of Automation and Electricity, Special Department No. 8,
Siberian Academy of Science (1965-1969), Novosibirsk.
Institute of Clinical and Experimental Medicine,
Novosibirsk.
Although the full extent of the discoveries
and details of the Soviet research have remained shrouded in deep
secrecy before and after the end of the Cold War, it has been possible
to identify three major directions - CODE BY TELEPATHY; BOOSTING THE
HUMAN BRAIN; and AMPLIFIED MIND POWER. These early alarmed American
analysts, and partially account for the American
responses.
The most spectacular experiments undertaken
by the Moscow Laboratory of Bio-Information used the Soviet Union's
star telepathists -Yuri Kamensky, a biophysicist, and Karl Nikolayev,
an actor.
The two men first discovered each other's capabilities in thought
transference when they met socially. Even before the Popov research
group arranged formal tests, their skills attracted a mixture of
curiosity, awe, and doubt in Moscow society.
*
The first long-distance experiment took place
in 1966, with Kamensky staying in Moscow, acting as sender of the
telepathic signals, while Nikolayev served as receiver in Novosibirsk,
the science research center in western Siberia. The Moscow daily
KOMSOMOLSKAYA PRAVDA (July 9, 1966) reported that the experiment
consisted of two types.
*
The first, modeled after tests pioneered in the
United States by Dr. J. B. Rhine at the Parapsychology Laboratory of
Duke University, employed a deck of cards made up of five different
geometric symbols: cross, circle, star, wavy lines, and square.
The newspaper account did not provide details on the experiment's
design, nor did it publish specific results.
It concluded, however, that "the number of correct identifications of
symbols was higher than correct random identifications, as computed
according to the theory of probability."
The report said, "The reception of other symbols was disturbed by
considerable associative interference," a condition that would be
"reduced in the future."
*
The second experiment aimed at the transfer of
images of concrete objects. The paper reported that Nikolayev, in
Novosibirsk, "received quite clearly" the images of dumbbells and of a
screwdriver sent from Moscow by Kamensky.
The Moscow paper commented: "It is quite possible that these results
will equally disappoint the most ardent adherents of telepathy and its
opponents.
The former, because no miracle occurred, because there were no perfect
identifications.
The latter, because the experiment demonstrated the reality of the
phenomenon and produced valuable data, both positive and
negative, which pointed up the need for continued research."
*
A follow-up experiment, this time between
Moscow and Leningrad, took place a year later. It was designed to
harness the emotional content of crisis telepathy into a code
transmission.
The Popov group set out to design an experiment that would (a) be
suited to the skills of its telepathists, (b) utilize emotional
elements, and (c) achieve specific information
transmission.
*
The problem faced by the Moscow experimenters
is a basic one in efforts to use psychic powers for practical
purposes. In designing the Moscow-Leningrad experiment, they had to
come up with an answer to the question: "How do you tame a telepathic
flash; how do you transform a split-second impression into a
meaningful message?"
*
The answer was provided by Dr. Genady Sergeyev,
then a staff member of the A. A. Uktomskii Physiological Institute in
Leningrad and senior experimenter with Nina Kulagina.
Sergeyev, who had been a World War II radio operator stationed in the
Baltic region, decided that a short outburst of emotion might have
sufficient impact to form the Morse Code equivalent of a letter of the
alphabet.
*
The experimental design called for a message of
aggressive emotion lasting fifteen or thirty seconds to act as the
equivalent of a dot in Morse Code, while a message of forty-five
seconds was to be the equivalent of a sash.
To generate sufficient violence, Kamensky was instructed to imagine
that he was giving Mikolayev a severe beating, lasting wither the
short of the long period.
*
The experiment did not assume that Nikolayev
would experience the "code beating" consciously or intellectually.
Rather, it was designed to be registered by his brain and/or
cardiovascular system.
To measure these effects of the telepathic transmission, Nikolayev sat
alone in a soundproof test chamber in Leningrad University's
physiology laboratory. His heart action was monitored by an
electrocardiograph, while his brain function was recorded by an
electroencephalograph.
The work of Professor Ippolite M. Kogan,
who directed the Bio-Communication Laboratory of the Popov Institute
in Moscow until 1975, has disappeared into a fog of silence.
But either Kogan or his successors may well have continued this
work,
The AiResearch Manufacturing Company, in its January 14, 1976 report
to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, suggested that "further
theoretic and experimental developments along the lines outlined by
Kogan are continuing in the Soviet Union."
The report added: "Kogan posed to many interesting and challenging
questions for himself and his colleagues not to have delved into them
further. Based on the well-known predilection of Soviet physicists to
solve difficult and challenging problems, and their excellent training
in modern physics, the possibility that a team of Soviet physicists is
at work to systematically uncover and learn the physical mechanisms of
parapsychological events is highly probable."
*
The California research group used the term
Novel Biophysical Information Transfer (NBIT) to label the telepathic
aspects of psi when it stated "Had Kogan not presented such a clear
and sound proposal six years ago, one might have wondered if Soviet
physicists have any interest at all in novel biophysical information
transfer (NBIT) mechanisms. Clearly, if one could find out where Kogan
is working and what he is doing, this question would be
answered."
*
But Kogan had not been heard from since his
Moscow Bio-Information Laboratory was closed down in 1975, and he was
not a member of the staff of the laboratory that replaced it three
years later.
Kogan's background in the theory and practice of radio-electronics,
together with his dramatic tests in long-distance telepathy, made his
research particularly significant to studies in the transmission in
Very Low Frequency (VLF) and Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) radio
waves.
These research areas were of specific interest to shore-to-submarine
communications. The AiResearch study made the following points:
"Assuming that the USSR started a special NBIT program sometime in
1970, by now they could have developed some sensitive instruments to
detect, monitor and analyze VLF and ELF radiations for possible
instrument content, as Kogan suggested should be done.
"Also, they must have been instrumental in developing sensors to
monitor fluctuations in the human body's electric and magnetic fields,
and they may have a team of scientists studying the properties of bio-
organic molecules and their response to electromagnetic ELF/VLF
radiation."
*
The report suggested that Soviet researchers
were using electronic means for boosting telepathic communications.
"The Russians may now be implementing the next logical step," it said,
"namely to reinforce, enhance or aid NBIT in certain trained or gifted
individuals after having discovered the basic communication
carriers."
How could such enhanced telepathic or clairvoyant ability be
utilized?
The most dramatic means possible, despite its science fiction
connotations, is tuning in on people's minds.
*
Less precisely focused monitoring was well
under way. The Soviet Union operated an elaborated an elaborate
eavesdropping network, with several monitoring stations on the eastern
seaboard of the United States, to record radio-telephone conversations
among U.S. government agencies, private corporations, and
individuals.
The monitoring of more intimate communications, even "thought
reading," can be seen as an extrapolation from these undertakings -
particularly if it can extend to the mind-reasoning of prominent
decision-making officials.
*
It may be taken for granted that Moscow was
interested, on a continuous basis, in monitoring extremely low
frequency communications between U.S. navel command posts and
submarines at sea, then in an experimental state. Tuning in on the
mind processes and decisions of individuals, on ELF/VLF wavelengths,
could have been hardly less tempting.
The AiResearch report noted: "If experiments which generate special
ELF/VLF waves are being conducted, it may will travel across the
world."
It added that these frequencies may be "undetectable by the usual
relatively broadband frequency detectors," and commented: "It is
rational to assume that the Soviets pursue the investigation of
various physical methods that might serve novel biophysical
information transmission mechanisms. Whether or not ELF/VLF mechanisms
explain parapsychological events may be a moot question, if these
mechanisms can be utilized for human information
transfer."
*
In other words: If it works, who cares what you
call it?
*
To discover the "carrier mechanism" of this
capacity, the AiResearch team undertook what it called "a short
speculative study" and decided that three methods were "compatible
with current modern physics." These included:
(1) Very Low Frequency (VLF) and Extremely Low Frequency (ELF)
electromagnetic waves;
(2) Neutrinos, based on the photon theory of neutrinos;
(3)
Quantum-mechanical *****(UI - I think the sign is alpha???) waves,
based on schizo-physical interpretation of basic QM [Quantum
Mechanics] theory.
The report said that experiments in the United States and the Soviet
Union in this field point to the ELF/VLF mechanisms, but "the other
two possibilities cannot be ruled out."
*
Whether one uses such terms as NBIT, bio-
communication, or the handy word telepathy, there is an awesome
fascination in the prospect that a single mind may be monitored, or
thought transference between two people intercepted, on an extremely
low frequency receiver.
Medical electronics have perfected apparatus that come close to the
frontier of such uses.
*
For years, Russian neurologists and
psychologist had treated the human mind as little more than a complex
electro-chemical apparatus. As such, they felt, it could function as
the "recipient" of information or as an "inducer" of energies.
With skill, these faculties might be manipulated: made more sensitive,
more powerful, more responsive to outside influence.
*
In his book entitled THOUGHT TRANSFERENCE,
Kazhinsky had concluded that the human nervous system incorporates the
elements of its own historic evolution.
He wrote: "Like all other parts of the living organism, nerve elements
and nerve circuits perform adaptive and protective functions; that is,
they adapt the organism to the influence of the environment, as well
as to the influences of environmental factors.
"They have undergone changes and improvements for many thousands of
years. Nature took care to equip all living matter with highly
delicate nerve structures that have resulted in great improvement of
all vital functions. Electromagnetic transmission of mental
information over a distance is a vital function of the nervous
system.
"This leads to a logically justified idea: the human central nervous
system (including the brain) is a repository of highly sophisticated
instruments of biological radio communication, in construction far
superior to the latest instruments of technical radio communication.
"There may exist `living' instruments of technical biological
communication still unknown to contemporary radio engineering. A
thorough and original laboratory study of such `living' instruments
may help us raise radio communication to an unprecedentedly high
level, placing entirely new and vastly improved radio facilities at
its disposal."
*
Kazhinsky disagreed with those who regarded the
telepathic ability as a remnant from man's earlier stages of
evolution.
Instead, he maintained that "the phenomenal capacity of a person to
exert a mental influence over others from a distance is still in an
embryonic stage."
He added: "Those who believe that this brain capacity is moribund,
degenerating, etc., are wrong. On the contrary, it is the beginning of
a new and higher stage of development of the human mind, on a new and
firmer foundation, based on biological radio communication. This
hypothesis is confirmed by a simple law of nature: the more a capacity
is exercised, the keener it will become and the greater man's power
over nature will be."
*
Kazhinsky's concepts were, in several ways, a
prototype of some Soviet thinking in this filed.
He notes the "insignificantly low energy emitted by the brain of the
`biological radio transmitter' in the transference of sensations and
experiences over distance."
He urged that efforts be made to develop instruments that can
duplicate the `remarkably delicate and perfect natural instrument"
that the brain represents in functioning as such a transmitter.
Kazhinsky bolstereds his arguments with a quotation from V. I. Lenin,
"Sensation is the resulting effect of matter on our sensory organs."
(MATERIALISM AND EMPIRIO-CRITICISM, Moscow, 1953).
*
By 1961, Vasiliev's psychiatric colleague,
Professor K.I. Platonov, was able to address a Kharkov meeting on
telepathy and recall experiments he had conducted in 1924 at the All-
Russian Congress of Psychoneurologists, Psychologists and Teachers in
Leningrad.
Vasiliev, who was present during the original Congress, published
Platonov's account in his book. During a meeting of the Congress's
hypnological Section, a female subject, M., sat at the presidential
table, facing the audience, while Platonov stood behind a blackboard
that hid him from M., although he could be seen by the
audience.
*
Platonov had told the audience earlier that,
when he silently covered his face with his hands, he would try to put
the subject to sleep hypnotically.
His report continued: "Having covered my face I formed a mental image
of the subject M. falling asleep while talking to Prof. G. [who sat
next to her on the dais]. I strenuously concentrated my attention on
this for about one minute. The result was perfect: M. fell asleep
within a few seconds. Awakening was effected in the same way. This was
repeated several times."
*
Platonov's observations included the finding
that, when he gave the subject the actual mental suggestion of saying
"Go to sleep" or just "Sleep!" he didn't get any results. But when he
wanted to conclude the experiment - he had positive results.
He noted that the subject woke up suddenly, "within a few seconds
after I had started mentally visualizing her awakening." Platonov
emphasized that the subject was "entirely unaware of the nature of the
experiment."
*
Platonov said that his tests should prompt
scientists to take these phenomena "extremely seriously."
He concluded that his findings give researchers "the right to search
for means of finding a scientific, materialistic grounding, not only
for the phenomena of telepathically inducing sleep, but for many other
telepathic phenomena as well.
*
The crucial question was whether
hypnosis/telepathy could influence men or women who were unaware of
being targets.
Many cases had been reported, similar to Platonov's mental influence
on the subject M., which seem to prove that the subject can be
hypnotized while unaware of the experiments.
It is likely that the pioneer work done by Soviet scientists in this
field has led to more intensive and wider studies.
*
Soviet long-distance telepathy experiments are
a matter of record; we may assume that the "reinforcement" or "mind
amplification" by hypnosis or drugs, of telepathic senders (inducers)
and receivers had been attempted in all types of telepathy
tests.
By 1969, the growing evidence that the
Soviets were undertaking research into amplified mind power techniques
led to the American dilemma of how to respond to the "psi
situation."
The American science community was not predisposed to undertaking a
significant step toward "psychic research," and many government and
intelligence leaders feared ridicule.
*
But at the very least it had to be determined
if there was any "potential threat" to American security if the
Soviets had developed an array of amplified mind power
techniques.
*
After what may have been a lot of soul
searching, the CIA responded in 1973 by funding a classified
exploratory project at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) placing it
under the guidance of a physicist, Dr. H. E. Putoff.
For years, the CIA involvement remained vague. But in 1996, Puthoff
published a report entitled CIA-INITIATED REMOTE VIEWING PROGRAM AT
STANFORD RESEARCH INSTITUTE (JOURNAL OF SCIENTIFIC EXPLORATION Vol.
10, No. 1. pp 63-76, 1996.) [NOTE: this document can be found in
Section IV of this site.]
*
Up until 1973, it was commonly understood that
the American intelligence community had taken no interest in psychic
research or ESP. But in 1981, the following document suggesting
otherwise was declassified and released.
The following text, released by the Central
Intelligence Agency under the Freedom of Information Act, deals with a
twofold project designed to examine the potential use of extrasensory
perception for "practical problems of intelligence."
The author of the memorandum outlined a project of at least three
years in length and estimated the cost for its first year. The project
was envisioned as aiming at reliability and repeatability among
"exceptionally gifted individuals" and at the utilization of
"scattered" ESP results through "statistical concentration."
Names, telephone numbers, and other items that might permit the
identification of individuals or departments were deleted by the CIA
at the time the document was released in 1981, and such deletions are
noted in the text.
There are no indications whether the project was actually undertaken,
nor is it clear whether the text is an interoffice memorandum between
two agency officials or was addressed to a CIA official by a
researcher working under a contract or grant outside the agency.
The memorandum is dated January 7, 1952, and its full text follows
without quotes:
If, as now appears to us established beyond
questions, there is in some persons a certain amount of capacity for
extrasensory perception (ESP), this fact, and consequent developments
leading from it, should have significance for professional
intelligence service. Research on the problems of extrasensory
perception (ESP), this fact, and consequent developments leading from
it, should have significance for professional intelligence service.
Research on the problems of extrasensory perception has been in the
hands of a few very workers and has not been directed to the purpose
here in mind, or to any practical application whatever. However,
having established certain basic facts, now, after long and patient
efforts and more resistance than assistance, it now appears that we
are ready to consider practical application as a research problem in
itself.
There are two main lines of research that hold specific promise and
need further development with a view to application to the
intelligence project. These two are by no means all that could be done
to contribute to that end; rather, everything that adds anything to
our understanding of what is taking place in ESP, is likely to give us
advantage in the problems of use and control. Therefore, the
Rockefeller-financed project of finding the personality correlates of
ESP and the excursions into the question of ESP in animals, recently
begun, as well as several major lines of inquiry, are all to the
good.
The two special projects on investigation that ought to be pushed in
the interest of the project under discussion are, first, the search
for and development of exceptionally gifted individuals who can
approximate perfect success in ESP test performance, and, second, in
the statistical concentration of scattered ESP performance, so as to
enable an ultimately perfect reliability and application.
We have something definite to go on in each case, and it is with this
in mind that we are inclined to make a serious effort to push the
research in the direction of reliable application to the practical
problem of intelligence.
First, a word about the "special subject": On a number of occasions,
through the years, several different scientific investigators have,
under conditions of excellent control, obtained strikingly long runs
of unbroken success from subjects in ESP tests. The conditions allowed
no alternative. At least one of them occurred with the target cards
and experimenter in one building and the subject several hundred yards
away in another.
Due to the elusive, unconscious nature of ESP ability, these same
subjects could not reliably repeat, and during the years of
investigation under the conditions of extreme limitations with which
the work has had to be done, it has not been possible to solve the
problem of overcoming this difficulty and bringing the capacity under
reliable control. We have recently learned of two persons definitely
reported to be able to keep up their rate of almost unbroken success
over much longer stretches of time. These investigations have been
going on in scientific laboratories, and from reports in our hands we
have no reason to question their reliability. We have not been able to
bring the subjects here or extend our investigation to the
laboratories concerned. It looks, however, as if in these two cases
the problem of getting and maintaining control over the ESP function
has been solved. If it has, the rest of the way to practical
application seems to us a matter of engineering with no insuperable
difficulties. Even if there is anything wrong with one or both of
these cases, this more extended control must come eventually, we
think, and we have had in mind many lines of research, designed to try
to bring it [about].
I shall not enlarge on the practical and technological developments
that would be followed in bringing a capacity, such as that
demonstrated in these card tests, of getting information in a
practical situation. It will be seen that if a subject under control
test conditions can identify the order of a deck of cards, several
hundred years away in another building, or can "identify" the thought
of another person several hundred miles away, the adaptation to the
practical requirements for obtaining secret information should not
give serious difficulty.
The other practice on which research should be concentrated, we
believe, is that of developing ways of using small percentages of
success in such a way that reliable judgment can be made. While we are
still exploring the advantages of this instrument of application, we
have gone far enough to see how it is entirely possible and practical
to use a small percentage of success, above that expected by chance
alone, so as to concentrate the slight significance attaching to a
given trial to the point where reliance can be placed upon the final
application to the problem in hand. I believe you went into this
matter thoroughly enough with [name of individual or unit deleted]
that I will not need to review her the actual devices and procedures
by which this concentration of reliability is brought about.
If we were to undertake to push this research as far and as fast as we
can reasonably well do in the direction of practical application to
the problems of intelligence, it would be necessary to be exceedingly
careful about thorough cloaking of the undertaking. I should not want
anyone here in the [word or words deleted], except [two names
apparently deleted] and myself to know about it. We are all three
cleared for security purposes tot he level of "Secret." I would
perhaps feel bound to have confidential discussion on the matter with
[name or names apparently deleted]. Funds necessary for the support of
the work would understandably carry no identification and raise no
questions.
If there is no reason why there could not be, at any time it was
justified, a renegotiation of additional needs that might arise that
cannot be anticipated at this stage, I should prefer to proceed with
some restraint in estimating what such a project would involve in the
matter of funds. I shall estimate a research team of five persons
working on this project primarily. There will be no careful line
drawn. Three will be a great deal of exchange and, of course, no
designation in the [several words deleted] a separate unit. For our
purposes at the moment, however, the [deleted] can consider that such
a test might consist of [names apparently deleted], a well-qualified
statistician and two research workers qualified not only to handle
groups of subjects but assist in the evaluative procedures as well.
The total salary estimate for these five people would be between
$22,500 and $25,000. In order to take advantage of mechanical aid in
the statistical work and such other matters as traveling expenses, it
would be advisable to add $5,000 as a conservative estimate. I think
$30,000 would be well spent on the first year. It is almost anyone's
guess as to what the next year would lead us into, but it would almost
certainly be more and probably a great deal more. I doubt if it would
be profitable to try to fix it at this time.
Frustrated as we have been by having to deal in short-term projects
and the wastefulness of effort that accompanies the attempt to do
long-term research projects on that basis, I am about ready to say
that without pretty definite assurance of at least a three-year
program I should not want to try to assemble the personnel, deign and
research program and put the overall effort into what is really a
major undertaking like this.
Much as I feel the urgency of having our country have as much a lead
as possible in this matter, I do not think it is advisable to
undertake it unless there is a certain amount of confidence on both
sides of the agreement, and these short-term grants-in-aid are, after
all, usually measures of limited confidence.
I might add that, while the Russians have both officially and through
their leading psychologists disapproved of our kind of work, as they
would have to do because of the philosophy of Marxian materialism, I
have seen at least one reference to the fact that they have done
experiments on our lines, giving a materialist interpretation. If you
can give me any information on this, I would appreciate it. Sometime
we might discuss what the Nazis undertook to do
...
Between 1969 and 1981, classified
documentation regarding the Soviet psi research efforts had become
abundant - but never released into the public, which remained ignorant
of the "threat situation."
Congressional leaders, however, were provided copies and extracts of
the most sensitive documents.
The result was that in June 1981, the Committee on Science and
Technology of the U.S. House of Representatives issued a staff report
that called for "a serious assessment" of parapsychology research in
the United States.
*
The report took note of "the potentially
powerful and far-reaching implications of knowledge in this field" and
observed that the Soviet Union "is widely acknowledged to be
supporting such research at a far higher and more official level" than
is the case in the United States.
*
The report submitted the following questions
"for congressional consideration": "Is funding for such research
adequate? What is the credibility of such research in the sciences,
humanities, and religions? How does the public perceive the
credibility of research in this field from both a subjective and
objective point of view? What should the Federal role in such research
be and what agencies are or should be involved in such
research?"
*
These suggestions and questions were part of a
comprehensive SURVEY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY ISSUES, PRESENT AND
FUTURE, commissioned by the committee.
*
In a section on "Research on the Physics of
Consciousness (Parapsychology)," it defined the issue this way:
"Recent experiments in remote-viewing and other studies of
parapsychology suggest that there exists an `interconnectiveness' of
the human mind with other minds and with matter. This
interconnectiveness would appear to be functional in nature and
amplified by intent and emotion."
*
The report noted the history of studies in
parapsychology generally, and in telepathy and psychokinesis
specifically, and said: "Attempts in history to obtain insights into
the ability of the human mind to function in as-yet misunderstood ways
goes back thousands of years. Only recently, serious and
scientifically based attempts have been made to understand and measure
the functional nature of mind-mind and mind-matter
interconnectiveness.
"Experiments on mind-mind interconnectiveness have yielded some
encouraging results. Experiments in mind-matter interconnectiveness
(psychokinesis) have yielded less compelling and more enigmatic
results. The implications of these experiments is that the human mind
may be able to obtain information independent of geography and
time."
*
The report acknowledged there could be "no
certainty as to what results will emerge from basic and exploratory
research" now underway, so that its potential importance and "its
implications for the United States and the world at large can only be
speculated upon." It then listed several categories on which
parapsychological studies might have an impact.
*
One of these categories had to do with national
defense.
"In the area of national defense, there are obvious implications of
one's ability to identify distant sites and affect sensitive
instruments of other humans. A general recognition of the degree of
interconnectiveness of mind could have far-reaching social and
political implications for this Nation and the world."
*
The congressional report noted that studies in
parapsychology had "received relatively low funding." It attributed
this to the fact that "credibility and potential yield of such
research is widely questioned, although less today than ever before."
It added: "Thus far, the quality of research that even the strongest
proponent of such research believe is necessary has been lacking due
in part to low funding."
*
Such cautious, obviously well informed
appraisal of parapsychology on the part of a congressional body was
unprecedented. Until then, Congress as a whole had not taken
cognizance of ESP potentials in peace or war.
*
Only one of its members, Representative Charles
Rose, Democrat of North Carolina and a member of the Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence, had shown long-range interest in psychic
studies generally and their warfare potentials in
particular.
*
Agencies of the Federal government sporadically
encouraged ESP research. But, given the ubiquitous nature of
government concerns, such efforts often seemed no more than an
expression of personal interests, the cautious involvement of "closet
parapsychologists" at various levels in one or another agency.
Individuals and groups that might want to follow the ideas expressed
by the staff report on science and technology were likely to be held
back by fear of ridicule, wither from within Congress of in the
Media.
*
As columnist Jack Anderson had phrased it, the
Central Intelligence Agency had its "mouth watering" when it looked
into Soviet research on remote-viewing.
Anderson wrote on March 20, 1981: "Who'd need a mole in the Kremlin is
a psychic sitting at a desk in Washington could zoom-in mentally on a
super-secret Soviet missile site or a Politburo
meeting?"
*
One of Anderson's researchers, Ron McRae, was
alerted to what he interpreted as serious armed forces interest in the
psychic when he read Lt. Col. Alexander's article in MILITARY REVIEW,
late in 1980.
McRae told another Washington writer, Randy Fitzgerald, the article
had convinced him "there were people in the Pentagon who were really
taking it seriously."
Anderson-McRae erroneously claimed that a psychic task force, budgeted
at $6 million per year, had been established in the Pentagon
"basement," and that the National Security Agency was examining the
use of extrasensory perception in its code-breaking
work.
*
Anderson's flippant terminology seemed designed
to ridicule his findings or allegations.
He wrote of "wacky projects" that covered "ESP weapons that can
brainwash or incapacitate enemy leaders by thought transfer, deliver
nuclear bombs instantaneously thousands of miles away by psychic
energy, or even create a protective `time warp' to make incoming
Soviet missiles explode harmlessly in the past."
He added: "The CIA, though historically less alarmist about the Red
Menace than the Pentagon spooks are, also has been monitoring Soviet
ESP research and pondering the possibility of less bizarre psychic
weapons."
*
While the 1952 ESP project mentioned earlier
may never have been undertaken, it seems certain that the Central
Intelligence Agency did engage in psychic experiments.
One source of information on this subject is ex-CIA employee Victor
Marchetti, who wrote several books based on his fourteen years with
the agency.
*
Marchetti, who tended to be critical of the
CIA's activities, has said that it once sought to establish
mediumistic communication with the spirits of agents who had died.
He recalled that the agency's "scientific spooks" were "progressing
into parapsychology, experimenting with mediums in efforts to contact
dead agents, with psychics in attempts to divine the intentions of the
Kremlin leadership and even with stranger phenomena."
*
Marchetti asserted that the CIA had tried to
make contact, through a medium, with Oleg Penkovsky, a colonel in the
Soviet Army who had been one of its most valuable contacts during his
lifetime.
On May 11, 1963, Penkovsky appeared before the Soviet Supreme Court in
Moscow, where he was declared guilty of treason and sentenced to be
shot to death. As a colonel in the military intelligence branch of the
Soviet Army, he had been assigned to artillery in a "civilian
capacity."
Penkovsky was a member of the Soviet State Committee for the
Coordination of Scientific Research Activities, with responsibilities
in domestic and international technological liaison and
development.
Penkovsky had been an agent for Western intelligence agencies,
presumably British services as well as the CIA.
*
There is a simple kind of logic in trying to
keep in touch with such a valuable agent, even after death.
It is speculative, of course, whether such contact can actually be
established, whether spirit communication can be specific and
reliable, could be checked against information from other sources, or
merely used to fill gaps in existing data.
*
It may be regarded as imaginative rather than
foolish to have tried to reach someone like Penkovsky through a medium
(or several mediums, cross-checking any resulting information for
correlations and deviations).
But the number of qualified mediums is limited; it would be difficult
to keep such an assignment secret, even if the mediums concerned did
not know whom they were expected to contact.
*
Marchetti said that, after Penkovsky had been
executed, someone in the CIA had suggested: "Why don't we contact
him?" and that this suggestion had led to the agency's becoming
"involved with mediums." He said, "They began to contact our own dead
agents, as well as dead agents from the other side."
*
If the project expanded beyond an attempt to
get in touch with the spirit of Penkovsky, it may be assumed that at
least some of the mediumistic messages had been satisfactory or at
least promising to CIA staff members. "There is no indication that
they have stopped," Marchetti said, "and no reason why they would."
At any rate, Marchetti's recollections suggest that the CIA had been
alert to psychic potentials, no matter how unproved, in the service of
intelligence-gathering.
The CIA was certainly justified in keeping
an eye on Soviet studies.
References have earlier been made to a report on Soviet parapsychology
commissioned by the Central Agency from the AiResearch Manufacturing
Company of Torrance, California.
The research group's experts suggested that, in view of Soviet
studies, the U.S. government should initiate developments in what it
called Novel Biophysical Information Transfer Mechanisms (NBIT) that
"are functional," although "they may have no relationship to common
parapsychological phenomena."
*
The report (January 14, 1976) advised that such
studies should be interdisciplinary, as this type of research "crosses
so many widely different scientific disciplines."
The report noted that on Soviet researcher Professor Gennady Sergeyev
of Leningrad, appeared to have perfected a mechanism capable of
measuring human brain function from a distance of five meters. The
report observed that Sergeyev's instrument was classified and that "no
credible description of it is available - only allusions to its
existence."
*
The AiResearch report traced reference to the
Sergeyev device in Russian scientific literature, while noting that
"there is reason to doubt the Russian claim."
It speculated that "it is possible that a sensitive electric or
magnetic sensor, or some combination of the two, would detect
electrical signals from a human body at a distance of five meters.
"Although it is unlikely that the output of such an instrument would
be a direct measure of the EEG, it would provide information of
interest to a police interrogator, such as the strength and rate of
the heartbeat, the tensing and relaxation of,muscles, the depth and
rate of breathing, and perhaps the electrical properties of the skin.
The uses to which the instrument would be put are reasons enough for
official secrecy about its operating principles."
*
The report noted Sergeyev's professional
competence, concluded its analysis with the assumption that Sergeyev's
remote sensor "does exist: in some form, and examined the possible
development of remote sensors by Soviet researchers, "following the
indicated lines of investigation."
Where, the report asked, could Sergeyev's findings lead? It made this
cautious forecast: "Perhaps the Russians have, in fact, developed such
instruments; perhaps they are going to do so. Perhaps they have tried
and have not been successful.
Possible sensor developments discussed in the following paragraphs are
not meant to be exhaustive; rather, they are speculative and offered
as examples of what may or might be:
"A tuneable antenna for detecting low-frequency, very-low-frequency,
or extremely-low-frequency electromagnetic radiation could be used.
The Russians believe both in mental telepathy and in a prosaic
physical mechanism for it. The most probable mechanism is
electromagnetic radiation.
"A tuneable antenna could be used in two types of experiments: trying
to detect the radiation from the telepathic agent and trying to
generate radiation of the right frequency to interfere with telepathic
receptions.
"A neutrino detector may be used. Both the Russian Je. Parnov (NAUKA I
RELIGIA, No. 3, pp. 44 to 49, 1966) and the American Martin Ruderfer
(NEUTRINO THEORY OF EXTRASENSORY PERCEPTION, in ABSTRACTS: 1st
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF PSYCHOTRONICS, Vol. 2, Prague, pp. 9 to
13, June 1973) have suggested neutrinos as the means of transmitting
thought from one mind to another.
*
One of the collaborators of the present study,
J. Eerkens, had a plausible hypothesis about the production and
detection of neutrinos that could be experimentally tested by
relatively modest expenditures for equipment and labor.
"A magnetic field or field gradient detector could be used. The
Russians and other Eastern Europeans are greatly interested in
dowsing, or finding ground water. A currently popular theory of
dowsing is that the human body is sensitive to small changes (temporal
and spatial) in the magnetic field of the earth, such as might be
produced by water near the surface of the ground. If the human body
can generate as well as sense magnetic fields, such a human magnetism
might be the basis of some form of thought transference or
psychokinesis."
*
In conclusion, the AiResearch study suggested five areas of research as "the most fruitful lines of investigation," as follows:
1. THE PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF AWARENESS OF NBIT
This area includes such questions as what are the modes of awareness that facilitate NBIT? How to select and train individuals for high resolution and reliable performance? Which of the possible transmission mechanisms can humans utilize for NBIT?
2. TRANSMISSION MECHANISMS
This area includes such questions as what are possible NBIT transmission mechanisms? How is information transmitted from the source to the recipient?
3. THE PHYSIOLOGY AND BIOCHEMISTRY OF HUMAN TRANSDUCER MECHANISMS
In this area, research would be conducted on physiology and biochemistry of reception and receptor mechanism.
4. STATISTICAL DEVELOPMENT
This area includes nonstationary analysis of random data, deviation from normally distributed data, and new developments in communication and information theory with respect to noisy channels.
5. DEVELOPMENT OF NON-CONTACT PHYSIOLOGY SENSORS
This area includes development of MEG, thermography, low- frequency electric field monitors, and other sensors.
Translated from its technical terminology,
the report suggested to the CIA, or other U.S. government agencies,
that the conditions under which telepathy and related capacities
operate should be more fully explored.
Such a study would, of course, be designed to harness, control, boost,
and direct telepathic and other psi abilities.
*
Among Washington's superstitious fears was
concern over scathing criticism dispensed by Senator William Proxmire,
Democrat from Wisconsin.
The monthly DISCOVER (February 1982), which was consistently skeptical
of parapsychological claims, spoke of him as "one of the capital's
most visible and colorful politicians, and certainly one of the
wittiest."
It wrote: "An energetic foe of government waste and boondoggles,
Proxmire is perhaps best known for his Golden Fleece of the Month
Award, intended to publicize what the senator considers to be examples
of foolish federal spending."
The magazine concluded that the senator at times displayed a "know-
nothing attitude about science," but credited him with "being bright
enough to know that scientific curiosity had been responsible for many
of the civilization's greatest advances."
*
Imaginative research was given strong support
by President Ronald Reagan on March 23, 1983, when he advocated
intensified studies in so-called "Star Wars" technology.
The President spoke of futuristic means, designed to "eliminate"
nuclear weapons. Space-based lasers, particle-beam weapons, and
similar devices were publicly discussed. Yet open-ended exploration of
antinuclear weaponry might well include "mind amplification" and other
psychic warfare elements.
Washington's dilemma over psi studies placed it firmly between the
recommendations to the Committee on Science and Technology and the
real or imagined wrath of Senator Proxmire. It was thus caught
squarely between the two Big Cs: Courage and Caution.