1.- How it all started - in Russia


Scientists in pre-Revolutionary [Russia] were studying the area of parapsychology as did later such Soviet scientists as V.M. Bekhterev, A.G. Ivanov-Smolensky and B.B. Kazhinsky in the twenties and thirties. In 1922, a commission composed of psychologists, medical hypnotists, physiologists, and physicists worked on parapsychology problems at the Institute for Brain Research in Petrograd (Leningrad). Work flourished throughout the thirties with research being reported in the literature in 1934, 1936, and 1937. After 1937 further experiments in the field of parapsychology were forbidden. During Stalin’s time, any attempt to study paranormal phenomena might have been interpreted as a deliberate attempt to undermine the doctrines of materialism. So stated the 1972 DIA reportControlled Offensive Behavior - USSR’ (Appendix 1, page 22)

The Defense Intelligence Agency are the military intelligence agency of the US Department of Defense. Part of the military, mainly army, they carry out intelligence work for the Pentagon. According to an official CIA paper written by Gerald K. Haines, the historian of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO):

‘There is a DIA Psychic Center and the NSA (National Security Agency) studies parapsychology, that branch of psychology that deals with the investigation of such psychic phenomena as clairvoyance, extrasensory perception, and telepathy.

In 1960 the Stalinist taboo that prohibited research into the paranormal was lifted and the KGB and GRU (Soviet military intelligence) began a scientific exploration of the weapons potential of psychic energy.

Soviet interest in psi was reawakened in February 1960 by a story which appeared in French magazine Science et Vie (Science and Life).

 

The story was entitled ‘The Secrets of the Nautilus’ and it claimed that the US government had secretly used telepaths to communicate with the first nuclear submarine ever constructed, the Nautilus, while it was under the Arctic ice pack. This telepathy project involved, according to the article, President Eisenhower, the Navy, the Air Force, Westinghouse, General Electric, Bell Laboratories and the Rand Corporation. Communicating with submarines is difficult as radio waves do not penetrate to the depths of the ocean.

 

Extremely low frequency (ELF) waves are used to signal the submarine to come to the surface to receive a message - these super-long waves penetrate almost anything including water but carry little information - so if telepathy could work it would be a perfect method of communicating with submarines while still submerged. The story was almost certainly a hoax but the Soviets were spurred into action, according to the DIA:

Ship-to-shore telepathy, according to the French, blipped along nicely even when the Nautilus was far under water.

‘Is telepathy a new secret weapon? Will ESP be the deciding factor in future warfare? Has the American military learned the secrets of mind power?’

In Leningrad the Nautilus reports went off like a depth charge in the mind of L.L. Vasilev. In April of 1960, Doctor Vasilev, while addressing a group of top Soviet scientists stated:

“We carried out extensive and until now completely unreported investigations under the Stalin regime. Today the American Navy is testing telepathy on their atomic submarines. Soviet scientists conducted a great many successful telepathy tests over a quarter of a century ago. It’s urgent that we throw off our prejudices. We must again plunge into the exploration of this vital field.”

[Appendix 1, page 24.]

From 1922 to 1959, this [negative] attitude [to parapsychology] gradually changed. Official recognition of parapsychology as a legitimate science was prompted to a considerable extent by the Party’s recognition of other discipline... In 1959 Professor L.L. Vasilev published his “Mysterious Phenomena of the Human Psyche” followed in 1962 by his “Experiments in Mental Suggestion”... the possible military implications were apparently overlooked in the West. [Appendix 2, page 15.]

Groups of scientists at many Soviet research institutes began to investigate and later harness psychic energy. The aim of this research was to produce deadly new weapons that could tip the balance of power during the Cold War. The DIA again:

Soviet parapsychology research gained impetus and sophistication, growing from a single laboratory into a coordinated USSR-wide effort; laboratories were also established in Czechoslovakia. Funds for research (reported at 20 million roubles in 1973) are believed to be primarily from military sources.

 

This high level of support advanced Soviet research on human telepathy far beyond that of the West, and the USSR became the leader in sponsoring and participating in international parapsychology symposiums... [Appendix 2, page 15] ...by 1968 the Soviets already had:

(1) established several research centers specializing in telepathic experiments on an academic and scientific level

(2) organized teams of scientists - physiologists, physicists, psychologists, mathematicians, cyberneticians, neurologists, and electronic engineers - to investigate telepathy, find out how it works, and devise means of practical application

(3) conducted experiments involving long-range thought transference (Leningrad-Moscow (600km); Moscow-Tomsk (4000km)

 

[Appendix 2, page 18.]

...Professor Vasilev was given state funds to establish at the University appropriately equipped laboratories for the study of telepathy... Following the example of Leningrad, other cities, including Moscow, Kiev, Novosibirsk and Kharkov, established similar laboratories and research centers, at which not only the phenomena described in world literature were examined, but a study was made of parapsychic features displayed by Soviet citizens.

[Appendix 1, page 23.]

Although the US Navy subsequently denied the reports of telepathic testing on atomic submarines, the Soviet hierarchy apparently heeded Doctor Vasilev’s advice and gave support, both moral and financial, to his dynamic view that:

“The discovery of the energy underlying telepathic communication will be equivalent to the discovery of atomic energy.”

...In 1963, Doctor Vasilev claimed to have conducted successful long-distance telepathic experiments between Leningrad and Sevastopol, a distance of 1200 miles, with the aid of an ultra-short-wave (UHF) radio transmitter. As a result, Doctor Vasilev was convinced that his experiments, and those he conducted jointly with the Moscow-based Bekhterev Brain Institute, offered scientific proof of telepathic communications. His next goal was to identify the nature of brain energy that produces it...

The so-called Father of Soviet Rocketry, K.E. Tsiolkovsky, stated that:

“In the coming era of space flights, telepathic abilities are necessary. While the space rocket must bring men toward knowledge of the grand secrets in the universe, the study of psychic phenomena can lead us toward knowledge of the mysteries of the human mind. It is precisely the solution of this secret which promises the greatest achievements.”

There are reports that the Soviets are training their cosmonauts in telepathy to back up their electronic equipment while in outer space. One of these back-up schemes is known to involve coded telepathic messages. This method was previously demonstrated in March 1967, when a coded telepathic message was flashed from Moscow to Leningrad. The involvement of astronauts or cosmonauts in telepathy experiments is not necessarily unprecedented. In February 1971, during the Apollo 14 flight to the moon, astronaut Edgar Mitchell made 150 separate attempts to project his thoughts from inside the space capsule back to an individual on earth.

[Appendix 1, pages 25-26.]

 

In 1967, the Soviet Maritime News reported,

“Cosmonauts when in orbit, seem to be able to communicate telepathically more easily with each other than on Earth. A psi (short for psychic faculty) training system has been incorporated in the cosmonaut training program”

Some informal reports indicate that the Soviets are working on psi systems for space use, involving not just telepathy, but precognition.

[Appendix 1, page 33.]

There are numerous reports on Soviet applications of clairvoyance, hypnotism, dowsing etc. in military operations. In the case of dowsing, this is also not unprecedented, since US forces have employed dowsing in Vietnam for locating enemy tunnels and caches.

[Appendix 1, page 26.]

The Soviet Union is well aware of the benefits and applications of parapsychology research. In 1963, a Kremlin edict apparently gave top priority to biological research, which in Russia includes parapsychology. The major impetus behind the Soviet drive to harness the possible capabilities of telepathic communication, telekinetics, and bionics is said to come from the Soviet military and the KGB. Today [1972] it is reported that the USSR has twenty or more centers for the study of parapsychological phenomena, with an annual budget estimated in 1967 at over 12 million roubles (13 million dollars) and reported to be as high as 21 million dollars.

[Appendix 1, page 24.]

In the early 1960s, Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB from 1967 to 1982 and President of the USSR from 1983 to 1984, issued the command to implement a psychotronic-warfare programme in order to develop a new form of strategic weapons system to augment nuclear weapons. According to Soviet journalist, writing in Young Guard magazine, in 1990, Emil Bachurin, former KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin, head of foreign counterintelligence for the Soviet Union in the 1970s, told him that Yuri Andropov had been especially upset about several psi-weapons centres he maintained were located in Canada. ‘Canadian research must be surpassed,’ he ordered.

 

Bachurin’s sources also revealed that after the war the Soviets had scooped up masses of Nazi occult research, including some by the notorious Dr Mengele at the Dachau concentration camp. Building on these horrible experiments had sped Soviet success in developing psi weapons, they told him. V. Scheglov, a journalist for Yaroslavl, reported in 1993 that psi weapons had been developed and used on the civilian populations of not only the USSR but the West, again and again. The DIA thought they were capable of it:

Doctor Y.A. Kholodov has investigated the effects of a constant magnetic field on rabbits. Whole-body exposures to fields between 30 and 2000 oersteds resulted in nonspecific changes in the [animals’] electroencephalograms [EEGs]... natural and artificial fields in man’s environment may have an influence on health and behavior via the nervous system and hypothalamus.

[Appendix 2, page11.]

In a 1992 ABC Television documentary shown in America, and in an earlier 1990 interview, for Young Guard Magazine, Major General Kalugin made more startling revelations about the Soviet Union’s investigation into harnessing psychic energy in order to produce exotic weapons with which the West was unfamiliar, He said:

They started to explore the mysterious powers of certain people and to simulate generators of this same nature in order to produce a similar effect. Russian scientists succeeded in developing generators of psychic force. Yuri Andropov issued personal orders to push full speed ahead with psychic warfare. Andropov’s directive also urged scientists to forget being squeamish about injuring or killing research subjects in the race to achieve their goal. Funding from the Military-Industrial Commission and the KGB was estimated at 500 million roubles.

The amount may be an underestimate; in Martin Ebon’s 1983 book, Psychic Warfare: Threat or Illusion? he claims that congressional sources stated the USSR psychotronic warfare research programme was funded to the tune of 500 million dollars per year.

 

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