part0018

T he Cold War between the US and the USSR began almost immediately after the end of WWII. The legacy of the Nazi occult/psychic programs had not extended past the collapse of the Reich, and attempts at military use of ESP rested primarily with the two superpowers. However, the two sides had very different approaches to using ESP for military purposes. Much of what was conceived of, pursued, and achieved was seemingly stoked as much by a lack of information coupled with misinformation as a lack of understanding of the potential extent of ESP as a tool for espionage.

B y the end of the 1940s, the US was the leader in ESP research, especially due to the dedicated work of J. B. Rhine and his colleagues. Rhine’s experiments at Duke University were controversial, though the statistics were impressive to many mathematicians. The apparent successful findings caused serious criticism, perhaps more because of the supporting evidence that ESP actually existed—an idea to this day still hard for many in the sciences to even consider possible. His research was reviewed in the prestigious journal Science by George R. Price, a well-known chemist and geneticist. Price acknowledged that if Rhine’s results were true, they were revolutionary. But since he could not identify any technical or procedural flaws in the work or think of any other viable explanation for the results, he concluded that the results must be fraudulent. His assertion sparked a lively debate in Science in 1956, though two decades later, Price apologized in the same journal for his original assertion.1

Rhine was instrumental in promoting parapsychological research and professionalizing it, as well as creating popular interest in the subject. In fact, one of the things Duke University was most known for in the public eye was Rhine’s research on ESP and PK and the parapsychology lab there. This fact was so well known that until relatively recently, people continued to associate Duke and psi research and believed there was still a parapsychology lab there, even though the lab moved off campus in 1965 with Rhine’s retirement from the university and leaving no formal with Duke. Not finished with his research in parapsychology, Rhine founded the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man (FRNM), also in Duke’s home town of Durham, North Carolina. The Foundation, a non-profit corporation, was seen as the umbrella organization under which other programs could function, one of those being the Institute for Parapsychology. J. B. and researcher-wife Louisa Rhine oversaw much in the way of research as well as the training and development of a number of parapsychologists until their deaths in the 1980s. Besides the research at the Institute, educational and publishing activities have also been a focus since the 1960s. It may be that the public’s association between a parapsychology research center and Duke University was furthered by both existing in Durham.

In 1995, in honor of its founders J. B. and Louisa Rhine, the Foundation was re-christened as the Rhine Research Center and continues its programs of research, education, and publication of The Journal of Parapsychology. 1995, by the way, marked the centenary of the birth of J. B. Rhine.

In 1957, the Parapsychological Association was founded. Still, the world’s only organization looking at scientific research of psi phenomena, abilities and experiences, it’s composed of professional parapsychologists and people with a professional interest specifically in the subject. In 1969, after an impassioned plea by anthropologist Margaret Mead, the organization was admitted as an affiliate of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the most prestigious science organization in the US. Attempts by some members of the scientific community to oppose its membership were unsuccessful. Although this was seen by some as evidence that parapsychology was becoming a legitimate science, the sad fact is that this struggle continues even today.

Since Rhine’s day, parapsychology research blossomed as best it could in the United States even with funding on the low end for such scientific endeavors. A number of universities including Princeton, University of California at Davis and Santa Barbara, and Syracuse University embarked on small programs. Of these, the Princeton Engineering Anomalous Research (PEAR) laboratory was the longest lived of these, having shut down relatively recently with the retirement of Dr. Robert Jahn. Today, the state of publicly funded ESP research is not good at all, due to dwindling funding sources over the last 30 years.

In the UK, the University of Edinburgh began education and research in parapsychology thanks to a bequest from the late writer and philosopher Arthur Koestler. The University established the Koestler Chair of Parapsychology in the Psychology Department, held for a majority of time by the late Dr. Robert Morris. Many of today’s psi researchers have studied under Dr. Morris in Edinburgh, and the UK has over 20 universities with graduates of the Koestler Unit teaching and researching.

In the US, perhaps the best funded research was under US government sponsorship first at SRI International and later Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), where psi research and applications thrived for over 20 years, as you’ll see shortly.

As you saw in the last chapter, the history of ESP Wars has some ties to many a controversial figure of the first half of the 20th century connected to Europe, the USSR, and the US.

Another leading figure investigating paranormal phenomena during the early 20th century whose reach extended past WWII into the Cold War era was Wilhelm Reich, a psychiatrist and student of Sigmund Freud. Reich fled Europe in 1939 and settled in the US where he maintained a thriving psychoanalytic practice, conducted research on what he called “orgone energy,” and designed “orgone energy accumulators” that he claimed improved people’s health. In 1954, the US Food and Drug Administration brought legal action against his use of an unverified medical device. Reich refused to appear in court and defiantly declared that the court did not possess the competence to pass judgments concerning scientific discoveries. He was found in contempt of court and sentenced to two years in prison for violating an interstate injunction against shipping orgone equipment and literature. All of Reich’s equipment was destroyed at his estate in Maine, and over six tons of his books and publications, many of which were unrelated to the subject of orgone, were burned in a public incinerator in New York City.

Reich died of a heart attack on November 3, 1957 during his eighth month of imprisonment in a federal prison. However, his ideas about accumulating biological and mental energy did not die with him. Instead, they soon resurfaced in attempts to create psychotronic generators in Europe and the USSR.2

As all conspiracy junkies will tell you, military and intelligence organizations in the US had an interest in and attempted to develop methods of mind control, and as a natural next step, became increasingly interested in parapsychology and ESP. Beginning in 1945 with “Operation Paperclip,” which imported and employed Nazi experts in brainwashing and torture, operations with names like “Chatter” (1947), “Bluebird” (1950), and “Artichoke” (1951) soon followed and served as bases for the new large-scale MK-ULTRA Project. MK-ULTRA was launched by CIA Director Allen Dulles on April 13, 1953, and directed by Sydney Gottlieb.

In this covert program, the CIA pursued a variety of goals: acquiring the ability to manipulate foreign leaders, finding new methods to obtain and send information without a subject’s knowledge, enhancing or diluting the effect of alcohol and other drugs, causing panic and disorientation, strengthening mental abilities and perceptual acuity, and a range of other objectives. Their research techniques included experiments using hypnosis and psychotropic substances, noise loops, drugs to induce coma, and many other harsh methods. Many experiments were conducted without the knowledge of the patients involved—drugs were simply mixed into their food, or some other substance or influence that wasn’t immediately perceptible was used.

In 1964, MK-ULTRA was renamed MK-SEARCH. The Cold War was on, and the program allocated many resources in the search for a perfect “truth drug” for use in interrogating suspected Soviet spies. Any and all sorts of other possible methods of mind control were investigated—a huge number of experiments with LSD and other psychedelics and drugs were conducted.

In the mid-1970s, it was disclosed that the CIA had conducted illegal experiments on American citizens in the 1950s and 1960s. Numerous references can be found in the press of the time, especially in the New York Times. The disclosure led to a Congressional investigation headed by the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission. President Gerald Ford followed their recommendations and issued the First Executive Order on Intelligence Service Activities in 1976 that prohibited, among other things, using drugs on human subjects without their consent. Presidents Carter and Reagan subsequently expanded this directive to apply to any type of experimentation on human subjects.3

Many MK-ULTRA Project experiments involved various aspects of parapsychology. The major reason for the CIA’s great interest in researching ESP was its potential both as a means of mental manipulation and as a method of covertly sending and receiving information. During experiments in which subjects were under the influence of LSD or hypnosis, some people entered altered states of consciousness in which they manifested ESP phenomena. Project MK-ULTRA was right in the middle of the ESP Cold War.

Unfortunately, we may never learn about the details of the project experiments as a Congressional investigation in 1975 revealed that Richard Helms, then director of the CIA, ordered all the MK-ULTRA files destroyed in 1973 to cover up the real nature and magnitude of the project’s research work. Nevertheless, some of the research was revealed through the testimony of project participants and eyewitnesses. While not all of this testimony may have been true, one case deserves special attention in view of its enormous role in the escalation of the use of ESP in the cold war between the USA and the USSR, as well as in the development of parapsychology in both countries: telepathic experiments aboard a nuclear sub.

This particular story began in 1957 when the Rand Corporation think tank, which was engaged in secret research for the government, sent a report to President Eisenhower in which it recommended conducting telepathic experiments involving a submarine under the ice in the Arctic. Direct radio communication with a submerged submarine is not possible because radio waves do not travel through water. As this was before submarines had retractable antennae, a sub had to surface to receive or send radio messages, making their location discoverable. However, they still could not penetrate the polar ice, leaving no means of communication while in that area. The Rand Corporation concluded that it was logical to try telepathic communication.

Experiments were conducted on July 25, 1958, while the USS Nautilus—our first nuclear submarine—was under the Arctic ice for the better part of 16 days. Colonel William Bauers headed the project. The “psychic transmitter” was a student from Duke University named “Smith,” located at the Westinghouse Laboratory in Friendship, Maryland. Meanwhile, the “psychic receiver”, a lieutenant in the US Navy named “Jones,” was on the submarine. Twice a day, an automatic machine shuffled 1,000 Zener cards at an appointed time and dispensed five cards per minute to Smith. He concentrated on each symbol, tried to send it mentally, and then sketched it on a sheet of paper. Each sheet with the five drawn symbols was placed in a sealed envelope. Colonel Bauers recorded the time of the experiment and locked each envelope in a safe.

On the submarine, Jones simultaneously drew the card symbols, which he received telepathically, and then he sealed his drawings in an envelope that he gave to the captain of the Nautilus. The submarine returned to port, the envelopes were opened and the results were compared: they showed a remarkable level of correspondence—70% (112 out of 160), instead of the 20% expected by chance guessing. The odds of this occurring by chance are less than 1 in 8,000,000,000!

A remarkable statistic like this, leads detractors and proponents of parapsychology alike to be skeptical about the Nautilus reports, if only because results like this simply are not seen under controlled laboratory conditions.

Dr. Richard S. Broughton, the former director of the Rhine Research Center, and someone quite familiar with the Rhine legacy thought that there was some grain of truth to the card-guessing experiment on the Nautilus. But in general, he was unable to confirm that notorious experiment. In an e-mail dated 2 June 2008 from Broughton to Ed May, and used with permission, Dr. Broughton recalled:

Well, on the basis of what I can remember from the odd document or two that I encountered in Rhine’s safe (as distinct from the documents that he transferred to Duke), parts of that account are true. But, as you yourself have encountered, the little grains of truth do not amount to a conspiracy or any widespread use of psi by the CIA or other government bodies.

I do recall seeing copies, stamped secret (or some such thing) relating to at least one funding agreement dated in the early 1950s with the Navy. My recollection was that it didn’t specify what research was involved, as if that was in other documents, but I believe I was told by people who would have known (Dorothy Pope or Fay David) that it was funding for Pratt’s experiments with homing pigeons (which always were a bit of an anomaly in the Duke program) .

I also think there is some grain of truth to the card-guessing experiment on the Nautilus, but it was more of one of those one-shot demonstrations rather than any substantial program [editor’s emphasis]. I never ran across any documents that would have suggested any systematic work. The fact that it may have used the Duke card shuffler is one of those details that story tellers add to increase apparent veracity, but that would simply have been one of the routine procedures in place at the lab in those days. They are widely pictured in all Rhine’s books.

Certainly, Rhine had his own share of contacts in the military and he had applied for funding on at least a few occasions, and sometimes got it. Also, in the 50s and perhaps later he was strongly anti-communist (as evidenced in some of his unpublished talks), seeing parapsychology as scientific evidence to counter Soviet Materialism. It would not be surprising that any applications for funding might use that perspective to help sell.

It’s worth adding that it is rumored that Rhine himself did not believe a word of the Nautilus experiment. True or not, the story has implications for later Soviet involvement in the ESP Wars.

The US Navy denied that it was involved in these experiments, but many details of this case point to the fact that US intelligence services deliberately used disinformation against the Soviets: the information first appeared in the foreign press, the French magazine Constellation, and the source of the information was never disclosed. Regardless of the Navy denial, indirect data suggest that the US was installing new sound detectors in the oceans to detect Soviet submarines at this time, and so they needed to distract attention away from this project.

R egardless of its veracity, the information about the Nautilus experiments was taken rather seriously in the Soviet Union, although with an understanding of the possibility it was disinformation.

The USSR had been in the deepest “ESP depression” from the post-war period onward from Stalin’s final years through Khrushchev’s early years as leader. During this time, the discipline of psychology was not even considered a legitimate science, much less parapsychology. There were no scholarly degrees granted in psychology; they were replaced by degrees in pedagogy. It wasn’t until 1956 that the first specialized journal Questions of Psychology started as a publication. This was all due to ideology: psychology and parapsychology were considered too “idealistic,” and their development was in constant conflict with Marxist-Leninist doctrine.

There were other disciplines that shared the fate of being disregarded; the champions of the purity of communist views also regarded cybernetics and genetics as pseudo-sciences. This perception, as it turns out, was quite misleading. As our former adversaries have revealed in this book, the Soviet era was far from entirely embracing the doctrine of unadulterated materialism given their continued belief in spiritualism and shamanistic beliefs.

From the late 1930s to the late 1950s there was no research conducted on telepathy in the USSR, except for a small series of research work done in 1952 by Professor S. Turlygin and physician-psychotherapist Dmitry Mirza at the Institute of Biophysics of the USSR Academy of Sciences. When Khrushchev came to power, the situation began to improve. In March, 1958, a discussion about renewing research into telepathy began at the Biophysics Institute but no decision was made. However, at the end of 1958 a small telepathy research laboratory headed by Dmitry Mirza was opened at the scientific research institute Electrom of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

Lt. Colonel Igor Poletaev, a cadre officer and expert in cybernetics, who had been involved in research there, tried to acquire financing for telepathy research from the Ministry of Defense. He submitted an official report to military organizations, but got a lukewarm response. Things changed after information about the experiments on the Nautilus was disclosed.

On March 26, 1960, Poletaev submitted the following official report again, but this time directly to Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, the Minister of Defense of the USSR4 :

In March 1960 Professor Leonid Vasiliev (the head of the Physiology Department of Leningrad State University) reported that the American Armed Forces have adopted telepathy (the transfer of thoughts at a distance without the use of technical means) as a means of communicating with submarines at sea. Professor Vasiliev received this information from one of his colleagues in Paris. Articles with a brief mention of this fact appeared in two French magazines (I am attaching the translations of these articles). Scientific research into telepathy has been conducted for a long time, but major US research organizations—RAND Corporation, Westinghouse, Bell Telephone Company and others—joined in this work in late 1957. Research has been conducted intensively and successfully. On the basis of this research, an experiment was undertaken involving information transfer by means of telepathic communication from a naval base to the submarine Nautilus which was submerged under Arctic ice at a distance of 2000 km from the base. The experiment was successful.

The transfer was conducted in the five-symbol alphabet of Zener cards, and it resulted in a score of 70% correct symbols. Considering that self-corrective codes could be designed today based on information theory which would allow for error correction in a communication channel, (if this information is reliable) these results make us confident that telepathy could be used to establish effective communication, especially military communication.

It should also be noted that no other means of communication could have been used during the Nautilus experiment: specifically, radio communication was impossible because the boat was submerged. Without getting into a discussion about the reliability of the aforementioned information, we must acknowledge that the danger of disregarding these reports is too great in the event that a new psychological weapon with which we are unfamiliar is used against the USSR. I consider it my duty to report the above mentioned facts directly to you with urgency.

As far as I know, successful research into telepathy was conducted in the Soviet Union on behalf of the People’s Commissariat of Defense in the 1930s at the I. P. Pavlov Institute of Physiology (Leningrad) under the direction of Professor Leonid Vasiliev. Although the results were positive, further research was stopped. Reports about the findings of this research are still stored in the archives of the Pavlov Institute.

In September 1958, at your orders, the Director of the Main Military Medical Administration had several meetings with Professors Vasiliev and Gulyaev about the possibility of renewing research into telepathy for military and military-medical applications. However, for some reason, the research work was postponed, and it has not yet resumed.

At present Gulyaev and Vasiliev, the main Soviet experts in telepathy (who demonstrated the possibility of telepathic communication with shielded radio-waves 25 years ago) have stated that they are ready and able to continue research into telepathy.

As is evident from the official report, the possibility of disinformation or simply a false report in the media was considered from the very beginning, but that wasn’t the essential point. Most likely, the well-known Soviet scientists Vasiliev and Poletaev simply decided to take advantage of a favorable situation to break through the ideological barrier and obtain military funding for research that they considered promising. As for the Soviet military command, when it came to any new potential weapon, they always felt it was important not to lag behind America. The fact that parapsychological research in America was being expanded was known in the Soviet Union and, even if there had been no specific report about the Nautilus, some other information would have resulted in a similar outcome.

In any case, Marshal Malinovsky’s response was not long in coming. Later in 1960, a special laboratory for the study of telepathic phenomena was established under Professor Vasiliev’s direction at Leningrad University’s Institute of Physiology of Biology with powerful assistance and financing from the Ministry of Defense. Some of Vasiliev’s books, including Mysterious Phenomena of the Human Psyche, Experimental Research into Mental Suggestion, and others were published at this time. These books were extremely popular with students and young scientists, as were discussions about telepathy during those years. The laboratory engaged in academic research as well as fulfilling orders for the Ministry of Defense, under Vasiliev’s direction until his death in February, 1966.

At the time, and even extending to today, the question of how ESP works remains one of parapsychology’s main scientific challenges. However, the use of ESP in warfare does not require an explanation as to “how” it works. That it works, that there were successful applications was sufficient for both the US and Russian military to justify continuing in this area.

In 1961, the Institute of Information Transfer (IPPI) was created within the system of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Located in Moscow, it was a semi-secret scientific institution where the overwhelming majority of subjects studied were classified. Almost from the IPPI’s inception, the study of information processes in living systems and bio-information was established in addition to the study of cybernetics, computer science and the design of electronic communication technology. This was where ESP research flourished, and did so because research there was conducted in the most rigorous scientific way and incorporated the newest state of the art equipment. One specific example as to how ESP fit in here was IPPI’s research attempts to design equipment to record telepathic signals.

In March 1962, the Academy of Sciences made the decision to transfer Dmitry Mirza’s telepathy laboratory from there to the IPPI. The Institute’s initial budget, estimated at the huge sum of 10 million rubles (over $15 million at the exchange rate of that time), was increased annually—more than any research money put into parapsychology in the west.

Vasiliev’s laboratory and the IPPI were only the harbingers of what was to come. From the mid-1960s, the number of scientific institutions in the USSR involved in some way with parapsychological research increased rapidly. In addition to secret research establishments, the major universities in the USSR—Moscow, Leningrad, Novosibirsk, and others—were also engaged in ESP research. Most of the secret scientific institutes touched upon parapsychological subjects to some degree, but the stigma of “idealistic materialism” remained. Researchers tried to circumvent the intrigue and separate what they were doing from the baggage of psychic terminology by giving parapsychological research projects entirely respectable scientific names. They tried to reproduce ESP phenomena in every possible way with “material” devices, much as one sees amateur ghost hunters on TV trying to detect the “paranormal” with electronic devices today. To many people, ESP is connected to the spiritual and the possibility of survival after death. Thus, there was substantial effort to make ESP fall exclusively into the domain of the “material”—physics and physiology. The USSR was not alone for inventing euphemisms to obscure the interest in parapsychology. Under Star Gate, the Americans used them as well—Enhanced Human Performance, Novel Information Transfer, and Psychoenergetics to name but a few.

The Soviet work resulted in the creation of a large variety of psychotronic generators—“psychically charged” hardware devices that ostensibly could store and later direct the psychic energy for whatever purpose—and accumulators of every kind imaginable. The overwhelming majority of them did not work, but a few did, and we will talk about those in another chapter. Later, it became fashionable to call all these devices “psychotronic weapons.”

Another example of secret Soviet research was the extensive program of telepathic research on humans and animals conducted from 1965 to 1968. This was conducted at the semi-secret Novosibirsk Institute of Automation and Electrometry of the Siberian branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences, under the direction of Captain First Class (Colonel) V. P. Perov, who held a Ph.D. in Technical Sciences. The results of the research were not declassified and published until 10 years later, in the mid-1970s.

A possible breakthrough in understanding the nature of ESP phenomena was made in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, which was a part of the Communist Block at that time. It grew out of the clinical research done at the Prague Psychiatric Center by Stanislav Grof, who resided in the US for quite some time, into non-ordinary states of consciousness. By its very nature, this research dealt with many types of paranormal phenomena. Grof’s work showed that5 :

…from a broader perspective, there is no reason to separate so-called paranormal phenomena into a special category. Since many types of transpersonal experiences rather typically involve access to new information about the universe through extrasensory channels, the clear boundary between psychology and parapsychology disappears….

Pressure to conform to the communist ideology was weaker in Czechoslovakia than in the USSR. This led to the situation where a large association of parapsychologists were working in Prague. There was probably more parapsychological research in the small nation of Czechoslovakia in the 1960s and 1970s than in the whole of the vast Soviet Union. Czechoslovak parapsychologists were also engaged in the creation of psychotronic generators. Unfortunately, these breakthroughs were largely stymied by the invasion of Soviet troops and violent change of the Czechoslovak government during events of the Prague Spring of 1967. The political regime had become tougher, and many interesting research efforts were curtailed or stopped.

By no means did all ESP researchers in the USSR want to work for the state, nor could they. Some of them chose not to collaborate for moral reasons: it was a matter of critical importance to them that the KGB and the Ministry of Defense were trying to use the experimental findings of parapsychological research for political and military purposes. Others simply would not be accepted by secret research establishments because of their biographies or due to a lack of formal education, but they remained very interested in parapsychology and wanted to be involved with it. The number of these enthusiasts grew steadily, and in 1965 they succeeded in convincing the A. S. Popov Scientific and Technical Society of Radio Engineering, Electronics and Communication (NTORES) to establish a new section specifically committed to research into extrasensory phenomena (NTORES is analogous to the American IEEE).

Professor Ippolit M. Kogan, who held a Ph.D. in Physical and Mathematical Sciences, was the head of the new section which was primarily devoted to studying telepathy though avoided using this term in favor of the official sounding “biological communication.” The group had many other interests, including research on psychokinesis, clairvoyance, psychic diagnostics, and psychic healings.

Three years later, the group succeeded in setting up equipment in their Bio-Information Laboratory in a basement on Maly Vuzovsky Lane in Moscow. The members who worked there in the evenings conducted very serious research work without any expensive or ultra-precise equipment at their disposal. Most of the work was done by these psi enthusiasts on a volunteer basis, and they received no compensation for their work. The experiments they conducted in long-distance telepathic communication—sessions with Yuri Kamensky and Karl Nikolaiev from Moscow to Leningrad and back—are widely known today.

Less well known are the experiments on clairvoyant recognition of hidden images done by Yuri Korabelnikov and Ludmila Tishchenko. Moscow University Professor Vladimir Raikov, a well-known physician and hypnotist, also worked with the laboratory and conducted ESP experiments during hypnosis sessions. Barbara Ivanova ran a successful group of healers at the laboratory, Karl Nikolaev’s group trained in telepathic abilities, and Larissa Vilenskaya’s group did research on “skin vision” there. Vilenskaya came to the US in 1975 and later joined the Star Gate program when it was at Science Applications International Corporation.

Interestingly enough, the level of the Bio-Information group’s research was so serious that reports that reached the West were perceived as information leaks about supposed secret research. To this day, it is still possible to find descriptions in the Western press of experiments, such as those done by Nikolaiev, as examples of “KGB experiments.” This is a bitter irony given that the majority of researchers engaged in the work at the Bio-Information Laboratory regarded the KGB extremely negatively, and often had to overcome opposition from the authorities.

The Western press wrote a great deal about the persecution of amateur parapsychologists in the USSR. Most of what they wrote was true, but statements made by some western authors about the full support of parapsychology in the USSR by the state were pure promotion. In general, the state suppressed parapsychology on purely ideological grounds rather than encouraging it. The study of paranormal phenomena advanced primarily due to the enthusiasm of these amateur researchers and the work that they did.

One Russian psychic from this time period, Sergey Vronsky, deserves our special attention. Vronsky lived in Yurmala, Latvia, where he earned money on the side using his ESP abilities to help a former schoolmate who was an investigator. As with psychic detectives in the West, he psychically searched for missing people and objects. From time to time, he traveled to Moscow and gave underground lectures on astrology and ESP. Many psychics who later became well-known in Russia studied with him, such as the remarkable psychic Vladimir Safonov, who is a player in later aspects of the Soviet ESP Wars.

Shortly thereafter, the KGB also began working with Vronsky’s psychic abilities in their operations in similar fashion: he solved crimes and prevented accidents with the help of ESP. Some KGB officers who we’ll “meet” later in this book also studied ESP with Vronsky.

From 1968 on, Sergei Vronsky gave lectures and conducted practical training at the aforementioned Bio-Information Laboratory. Vronsky even received official permission to engage in astrology, but only under the name of cosmos-biology. At that time, he cast horoscopes for a number of top officials and leaders of the USSR. Through it all, he remained above popular ideology: he accepted very small fees or none at all, and always refused “dirty” money.

Jumping a little ahead to after the end of the cold war, Vronsky enjoyed a revival in popularity. The press and TV began featuring pieces about him. He wrote several bestsellers, including the twelve-volume series Classical Astrology that became his magnum opus. He taught astrology in a number of educational institutions and gave many public lectures. A generation of astrologers and psychics of the 1990s developed under his tutelage.

Sergei Vronsky played an enormous role in the revival of astrology and parapsychology in Russia during the post-war period. The entire constellation of well-known psychics and astrologers is obliged to him for their knowledge and abilities; among them we can mention Intelligence Services Major General George Rogozin, Vladimir Safonov, Larissa Vilenskaya, and others. Sergei Vronsky was a man not only of profound knowledge and extraordinary abilities, but also a man with a great soul. In spite of a difficult, occasionally brutal life, he always maintained his love for people. Vronsky died on January 10, 1998. In one of his last conversations with journalists Vronsky said, “I am not at liberty to tell the whole truth… There is a principle that an individual initiated into a great secret must carry it away with him.”

Vronsky’s biography contains many contradictory elements and pieces of information which are hard to believe. Nonetheless, we can say without doubt that Vronsky made a substantial and singular contribution to parapsychology and to the history of the ESP Wars. Indeed, his life provides the perfect bridge for our story as we move forward to explore the use of ESP on both sides of the Cold War.

At about the time of Vronsky’s Cold War activities, the luminescence of objects displayed with high-frequency photography was re-discovered for the second time in the USSR. This phenomenon, called electrography, was originally discovered in 1895 by Yakov Narkevich-Yodko of Belarus. It was subsequently forgotten and newly discovered in the 1940s by Simeon and Valentina Kirlian, who named it the “Kirlian Effect” and obtained a patent on the method in 1949. It was revealed that any living object placed in a high frequency field when photographed appears to emanate luminescence—to glow with an aura of sorts—and whose nature depends on the object’s state. This was of immediate interest to parapsychologists, and in due course “Kirlianography,” or Kirlian photography as we came to know it in the West became a standard method used in both civilian and military parapsychological research.

Many researchers are still convinced that what we see in Kirlian photographs are biological fields and the mysterious aura. However, carefully controlled experiments in the West have demonstrated that the effects are due to the more mundane corona discharges common in strong electric fields. The Soviet scientists V. I. Inyushin and V. G. Adamenko discovered “phantom effects” in the damaged leaves of plants that they had photographed using the Kirlian method, the effect made popular by American researchers such as Thelma Moss of UCLA. The effect was called “phantom” as the “aura” in the photographs of severed leaves of plants still looked whole, as if the entire leaf was still present. According to Inyushin and Adamenko, this research suggested the existence of an underlying energetic structure upon which biological objects build their physical form, a phenomenon that Alexander Gurvich had theoretically predicted and named morphogenetic fields back in the 1920s.

The publication of the booklet In the World of Wonderful Categories by the Kirlians in 1957 caused a real sensation in the scientific world. It appeared that the Kirlian effect could be applied in diagnosing illness, determining the activity of drugs, testing psychological states, discovering defects in materials and in dozens of other areas, including potential applications for the military, intelligence services and for crime detection .

For example, Konstantin Korotkov, a scientist at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, used the Kirlian methodology to study the changes in the luminosity of the finger pads of the deceased. He concluded that this method could be used to quite accurately determine the nature of a person’s death: whether the cause of death was natural or violent, whether it was a suicide or due to a wrongly prescribed drug. Professor Korotkov continued studying the energetic activity of human organs several days after death, and concluded that individuals go through several stages after death, a process which he described in the book Light after the Life: A Scientific Journey into the Spiritual World.

The Kirlian method gained wide recognition in the West. Several international conferences on the Kirlian effect were held in New York in the 1960s and 1970s, and an institute was founded to research the phenomenon in the US. Eventually, a special international association was established. At that point, the Academy of Sciences in the USSR suddenly began to recommend its use. By the early 1990s about 50 copyrights and patents for various inventions based on the Kirlian effect were granted in the USSR, an appreciable number of them involved ESP aspects, while others involved use by the military.

Here the West and East differ again. Many scientists in the West were skeptical of Kirlian photography and many of the stated conclusions and applications. Research was conducted that demonstrates a different—a Western scientific—perspective: controlling for environmental variables, such as humidity, finger pressure, and other factors, the “aura” around the fingertip is a well-understood corona discharge, which may be modulated by the emotional state of the participant.

All of this interest in psi in the USSR spawned a number of legends among Soviet parapsychologists. One such legend claims that Nikita Khrushchev gave permission for ESP research in the USSR after his trip to India. While there, he had seen yogis who appeared able to stop the activity of their hearts at any time and some who did not seem to experience bodily pain while lying on nail-studded boards. Khrushchev decided that the KGB and the Soviet army would become even more efficient and invulnerable if they mastered the “miracles” that these yogis performed. Of course, it may be difficult to believe Khrushchev believed such activities simply based on the claims, given that methods of the fakirs to do those things had been known by magicians and many others for quite some time.

As appealing as these legends might be, we must nevertheless acknowledge that the main stimulus to the renewal of ESP research in the USSR in the early 1960s was information that similar research was being conducted for military use by the MK-ULTRA Project and the US Navy, at Professor Rhine’s laboratory and at a number of firms, institutes and universities in the US and Western Europe.

As it turns out, the Soviets were justifying their ESP programs by saying the West was doing it also. Ironically, government and military programs in the West were doing the exact same thing, justifying their programs on the basis that the Soviets were doing it!

The Soviet Union responded to the reports from the US with a steadily increasing amount of parapsychological research and with efforts to develop a psychotronic weapon. Although the KGB did not operate an integrated program of parapsychological research, the magnitude of this research in the USSR during 60s and early 70s compelled the US to begin the research, which evolved into the Star Gate program—the next round of the ESP Wars.

1. Charles Honorton and Diane C. Ferrari conducted a modern analysis of over 50 years of Zener card experiments involving over 2,000,000 individual card guesses. They addressed all kinds of possible problems such as only publishing the experiments that “worked,” or those that contained sloppy protocols or analyses accounted for the results. The bottom line is that there is a small, but statistically robust, definitive effect. The reference, Honorton & Ferrari (1989). “Future Telling:” A Meta-Analysis of Forced-Choice Precognition Experiments, 1935-1987, Journal of Parapsychology, 53 , 281-308, can be found on the web at www.lfr.org/LFR/csl/library/HonortonFerrari.pdf.

3. These rulings had long-term implications for the US Star Gate Program. The rules governing the use of humans in experiments that were funded by the Department of Defense, were more stringent in protecting the rights of individuals than were similar rules in the private sector under the Health and Human Services Agency.