During my research trip to Moscow in 2021, I had the opportunity to visit the Russian Academy of Sciences.  It’s a unique building – certain elements are typical of the American university or government building – large, rectangular spaces formed of granite.  But atop the building are massive, intricate copper colored objects.  Sometimes called the golden crown, it evokes a sense of a radio antennae or some other technical mechanism designed for communication.  And as I researched the Academy of Sciences and the rumors about the purpose of this structure, I found a dark path into the Soviet pursuit of psychic powers that I’ll explore here.

This is the My Dark Path podcast.

INTRO

The year is 1978.  The place is Baguio City in the Philippines. The Cold War is at its height.  The Soviet Union has begun a crackdown on dissidents.  U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance assures skeptics that the Carter administration will hold the Soviet Union accountable for that suppression and violation of human rights. Within a year Brezhnev will launch the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which, in turn spawned the American boycott of the Moscow Olympics the following year.  International competition was one place where the Soviet Union and the United States continued their Cold War rivalry by showing which nation produced the best athletes, the best sportsmen, the best at games of strategy and intellect.  And in 1978 in the Philippines, the game was the world chess championships.  The Soviet Union’s hero, Anatoly Karpov was a chess grandmaster and the 12th World Chess Champion from 1975 to 1985.  In 1974 he had an upset victory over former champion Boris Spassky, earning the right to face American chess legend Bobby Fischer. The governing body of chess, the International Chess Federation, declared that Fischer’s conditions to play Karpov fell outside the bounds of allowable matches.  Fischer forfeited his title and Karpov was declared the new World Champion. 

In 1978, Karpov was defending his title again the next best chess player in the world, fellow Soviet chess grand master Viktor Korchnoi. The difference between the two is that Karpov had the support of the Soviet government, and Korchnoi was already the enemy.  You see, back in 1974, when Karpov was ascending to the heights of Soviet chess, the Soviet chess federation announced that the generation that included Korchnoi had all been defeated by Bobby Fischer and thus could not compete successfully against him. Korchnoi was banned from playing chess outside the Soviet Union.  So he defected in Amsterdam in 1976.  The match in 1978 was thus a fight between the current world chess champion, Soviet Grandmaster Karpov, against Soviet defector and now western champion Korchnoi. Korchnoi had embarrassed the Soviet Union by defecting, so it was vitally important, in the eyes of the Soviet government, that Karpov win the match. They decided to take no chances.

In 1978, as the match begins, there is a man in the front row right by Korchnoi.  He does not look at Karpov at all.  He’s not even watching the game.  He simply stares at Korchnoi.  What he is thinking is “YOU. MUST. LOSE.” And “YOU. SHOULD. STOP. PLAYING.”  And lastly, “YOU. ARE. A. TRAITOR. TO. THE. SOVIET. PEOPLE.”  Korchnoi later reports he can hear these thoughts in his own head.  At one moment, he stopped the game, turned to the officials, and shouts, “If you do not remove that man, I will remove him with my fists.” The man simply sat and smiled. The game continued.

The man’s name was Dr. Vladimir Zoukhar. He worked for the KGB as a psychic thought projector.  When the Soviet Union wanted damaging thoughts in people’s heads, especially athletes or other competitors, Dr. Zoukhar was the one they sent.  Zhoukhar also allegedly had the ability to stop hearts from a distance using only thoughts.  By all accounts he was able to stop frogs’ hearts from beating in a lab.  We do not know if he was successful against human beings, but the Soviets claimed he could stop a person’s heart as well.  But he was successful in disrupting play in Baguio City.  Korchnoi’s girlfriend took the seat next to Dr. Zoukhar and began kicking him to disrupt his thoughts, but he never took his eyes off Korchnoi.  Zoukhar used his psychic abilities to help demonstrate the superiority of the Soviet system.  It did not matter if Karpov won on his own or not, Zoukhar was the insurance to guarantee he won, period.  The dissident represented the failure of the west to defeat Soviet brainpower, both on the chessboard and in the global arena.

After losing the match, Korchnoi said, “I expected to play against one. Instead the whole Red Army led by Zoukhar was against me.”  The press reported that Karpov was aided by “parapsychological warfare in a sports setting.”

Sports settings were just one of several places where the Soviets engaged in psychic experiments to see if, through the power of thought, the Soviets could defeat competitors in sports and games, spy on the Americans, and even assassinate at a distance.  Today, our dark path runs right through the labs of the Soviet Supermen and psychic spies.

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Hi, I’m MF Thomas, and this is the My Dark Path podcast.  In every episode, we explore the fringes of history, science, and the paranormal.  So, if you geek out over these subjects, you're among friends here at My Dark Path.  See our videos on YouTube, visit mydarkpath.com or find us on Twitter, Instagram and Tiktok.

Finally, thank you for choosing to walk the Dark Paths of the world with me. Let’s get started with this special Secrets of the Soviets episode for our Patreon Members, Episode 5, Soviet Supermen and Psychic Spies.

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PART ONE:

Popular culture has had a field day imagining what strange psychic experiments might have happened in the labs of the Soviet Union. The recent Netflix hit Stranger Things is rooted in the idea that during the Cold War both the Soviet Union and the United States engaged in experiments in creating or enhancing special powers in individuals that would allow them to mentally enter the top secret locations of the other side, or affect the outcome of a context or game, or even kill with mind bullets.  The 1984 film Dreamscape imagines developing the psychic abilities of spies to enter into people’s dreams and kill them.  British horror writer Brian Lumley’s 1986 novel Necroscope and its sequels imagined a James Bond-like series of psychic espionage contests between British E-branch and the Soviet E-branch, E being short for “Extra Sensory Perception,” resulting in the British needing psychics to help fight Soviet psychic vampires.  More recently, the book and film The Men Who Stare at Goats detailed the experiments carried out by the CIA to do the same things: learn Saddam Hussein’s plans by telepathy, change the behavior of soldiers, and, as the title suggests, stare at goats until you can stop their hearts with a thought. Truth, however, as they say, is even stranger than fiction.  No vampires will be discussed today, but instead we will consider the Soviet experiments in psychic spying and the development of superhuman athletes.  It’s kind of strange when you think of it – the purpose of all the time, money and effort in these program in the United States and the Soviet Union were for psychic espionage, finding military advantages through the power of thought, and for making better athletes, and failing the latter, making individuals who could mentally destroy the opponents of those athletes.  Dr. Vladimir Zoukhar was not a chess master, but he was instrumental in Karpov’s victory in the Philippines in 1978.

From its origins during the first world war, the Soviet Union was looking for any advantage to aid the spread of soviet socialism and advance the cause of global communism.  In a sense, they were fighting a cold war against the capitalist west even before the Second World War. The Soviet leaders were interested in the scientific approach to unusual phenomena for the purposes of using those phenomena to advance the cause of global communism. The Soviets took unexplained occurrences and abilities such as ESP and precognition much more seriously than their counterparts in the west, at least at first.  One of the fastest ways to get funding for a project in the United States during the cold war was to assert that the Soviets were ahead of us in that area, no matter how ridiculous that area may seem.  The US did not want the USSR to have an advantage because of psychic powers, and thus did not care if said powers were real or not – only that we matched what the Soviets were doing.

Beginning in the early 1920s, a program was established at the Institute for Brain Research at Leningrad State University for the study of telepathy.  The Soviets wanted to use mind reading and thought transference.  They referred to telepathy as “biological communication” and sought to use it for ship-to-shore communication, contacting submarines, and giving direction at great distances.  Eventually, later on, the Institute considered training cosmonauts to develop their precognitive abilities (the ability to see the future, that is) to “foresee and avoid accidents in space.”  They also conducted experiments in contacting submarines via telepathy.  This experimentation was also used to locate American submarines.

The initial experiments were not just limited to investigations into telepathy, these early Soviets also researched psychokinesis, the ability to move objects with the mind. From affecting athletic contests to using psychokinesis, also called PK, to sabotage military equipment, the Soviets worked non-stop to use mind power to affect the physical world at a distance.  By the 1960s, that research was being used to explore the possibility of Soviet psychics disrupting the electrical systems of intercontinental ballistic missiles, allowing the Soviets to destroy or change the flight path of American nuclear weapons.

Soviet scientists believed that paranormal abilities are the result of “bioenergetics” — the energy given off by the metabolic processes of all living things. They theorized that people exude “bioplasma,” a charged energy field that was capable of emitting radiation beyond the body in the form of electrons and protons.  People who learn to direct their bioenergy and can control their bioplasma display phenomena such as ESP, telekinesis, psychokinesis, mind reading, and physical feats not possible by the ordinary human. Learning to control bioplasma and brainwaves would, according to Soviet scientists, lead to advantages in sport, espionage, military conflict, and international relations.

The Soviets did not constrain themselves to bioplasma, psychokinesis, and telepathy.  They embraced and explored every area of paranormal phenomena scientifically in order to gain advantage.  Soviet geologists used dowsing rods in the Baltics.  In the Ural mountains scientists practiced eyeless sight.  A lab on the Black Sea was tasked with studying psychic healing. The Soviets studied clairvoyance and past life regression.

PART TWO

Writer Ed Hawkins noted that during the cold war, America and the Soviet Union held a common belief: they believed in superhumans, a race of beings that could slow time, see across continents into locked rooms, levitate, predict the future, kill with mind bullets, and change body shape. They could put thoughts in people’s heads, or even stop the heart of another human being by staring at them.  Both nations put this belief system to work in the service of two tasks: espionage and creating better athletes.  You heard me correctly.  Part of the program of both the United States and the Soviet Union investigating psychic ability and what we might consider real-world superpowers was the desire to create superhuman sports stars who could dominate at the Olympics and other world-class level events, thus showcasing the superiority of their nation and ideology.  The CIA and the KGB were both in the business of creating assassins and weightlifters.

            The Russian term for developing these abilities is “hidden human reserves.”  By the 1950s the Soviets were pioneering at least three types of psychic phenomena to assist Soviet athletes win.  The first, as I already discussed, were people like Dr. Zoukar who helped get in the minds of opponents to make them lose.  The second were those who would work to improve Soviet athlete’s performances through mind power.  And the third were the athletes themselves.  The Soviets referred to it as “psychic self-regulation”: athletes controlling their bodies, their breathing and the performances through mind power.  Much of what they discovered is actually still applied internationally to sports today – everything from meditation before a competition to golfers visualizing the ball going in the hole before taking the shot, but this was innovative stuff back in the fifties.  By the 1970s, the Soviets had coined the term “The Theory of Top Competition in Sports,” reflecting research done at the All-Union Research Institute of Physical Culture in Moscow.  In addition to training techniques and steroid use, the Soviets wanted to use mind power to win competitions and continued to have a large number of scientists working on it.     

Using Yoga, long before it had become as popular as it is now, as well as meditation and other Eastern mystic techniques, Soviet scientists studied what they termed “Psychic Self Regulation.”  They developed techniques still in use today of visualization, breathing and focus.  Athletes were taught extensive visualization techniques – picturing themselves doing something before they do it, imagining lifting a weight or hitting a golf ball perfectly.  These techniques are still employed in sports around the world.  Tiger Woods has discussed at length his use of visualization as part of his golf game. What he calls “putting to the picture”: “Every look I take from the ball is a picture. So I take the picture of that right there, one. At my second look, I take another picture, I get up over the ball. I take the last picture and all I do is think about putting to the picture. All I am doing is putting to the picture. I'm telling you down the stretch in tournaments, when I'm really nervous, I will go back to that and say 'Come on Tiger just putt to the picture, like Papa used to say'."  This technique was pioneered by golf great Jack Nicklaus, and was developed out of work done by Soviet and American scientists making athletic supermen.

Soviet scientists would have athletes practice focusing and breathing while playing loud crowd noises to teach them to ignore the noisy distractions and focus on the task at hand.  Through psychic self-regulation, athletes could eradicate pain or tension, control their heart rate, blood flow, and even body temperature, and focus exclusive on the athletic activity regardless of what else was happening around them.  Scientists recorded that the use of these techniques considerably enhanced the performances of the athletes who were taught and practiced them.  The same scientists also consulted with so-called “Siberian witches” to learn psychic healing techniques.  Dr. Alexander Krivorotov would place patients in a chair, place his hands over the diseased or wounded area and heal the patient much faster than normal.  His patients reported feeling tremendous heat coming from his hands.  The Soviets especially wanted to apply these techniques to the rapid healing of athletes from sports injuries.  So not only did the Soviets have psychics in the stands to help them win, they had psychic healers on the sidelines, and athletes who employed esoteric psychic practice, visualization and psychic self-regulation to win over the athletes from the decadent west, who, tangentially, were doing the same things.

Oddly, by the 1970s, Soviet and American scientists working on developing psychic powers began to communicate with each other, more interested in data sharing than ideology.  In his fascinating book The Men on Magic Carpets, Ed Hawkins extensively interviews Jim Hickman and Mike Murphy, who were part of a group of athletic trainers who were New Age thinkers: men who thought that by exploiting the eastern mysticism and psychic phenomena making their way through the counterculture they could improve athletes’ performances. In the seventies and eighties they worked with a variety of athletes, but also met with their Soviet counterparts.  Mike and Jim wanted athletes to develop their “occult subtle energy” so basketball players could use levitation to help with their shots and golfers could use their minds to direct the ball to the cup.  The Soviets saw in occult subtle energy their own “bioplasma” and at a conference of sports science in 1980, coinciding with the 1980 Olympics, Soviet and American scientists using New Age theory to create better athletes began to exchange ideas and meet regularly.  Behind all this, of course, was funding from the American and Soviet governments, who wanted superior athletes gaining victories for their side, but were also interested in the military and espionage applications of the quest for the superman through the supernatural. 

PART THREE

The Soviets also became interested in distant mind control.  Special Department 8 was founded to carry out all kinds of psychic experiments. One of forty divisions housed at Science City, Novosibirsk in Southwest Siberia, the psychic scientists and their families were part of a huge community of individuals carrying out experiments to advance science and technology in the Soviet Union. It is said the average age in Science city was 30 and the average IQ well over 130, Whereas the other departments were engaging in chemistry, physics, biology, and technological research, Special Department 8 was doing the weird stuff, exploring how the brain interacted with events from a great distance away.  For example, one experiment involved implanting electrodes in a mother rabbit’s brain, taking her litter to a submarine that then went to the depths of the Pacific, and killing the baby rabbits one at a time.  Scientists back in Novosibirsk then recorded the reactions in the mother rabbit’s brain, synchronized to the second of each of her baby’s deaths.  They reported that at each moment of death, her brain somehow knew and reacted.  Successes such as this encouraged the Soviet government to invest fully in psychic experiments.

By 1967 it is estimated there were an additional twenty centers across the Soviet Union performing experiments with a total budget of twenty million rubles (about $21 million at the time).  The Kremlin committed to the experiments because they wanted to develop super humans.

Not only did they commit money, they committed to finding citizens who had powers that could be developed. They conducted a nationwide search for anyone who displayed any potential for ESP or mind powers.  One such person was Nina Kulagina who allegedly could move objects with her mind. Scientists would place objects inside glass fish tanks so they could not be manipulated by air currents or other means and Nina would stare at them until they began to move.  She could stop a frog’s heart, although doing so would raise her own heart rate to 240 beats per minute.

Nelya Mikhailova, born a decade after the revolution that overthrew the czar and fourteen when the Nazis invaded Russia grew up in Leningrad.  Like many Russian teens, she joined the army and fought the Nazis, finally withdrawing from combat after being seriously injured by artillery fire.  Years after the war she came to the attention of Soviet scientists because it became apparent Nelya had powers. Her pulse could also race as high as 250 beats per minute when she focused.  In this state she could make the needle of a compass spin, open and scatter a box of matches, and move pens, cigarettes and other small objects around a tabletop from a distance, all by using her mind.  It came out that she had had this ability since a child. As a baby she could draw toys to herself from across the floor, or make desired food move across a table.  She was thoroughly investigated, tested under the most rigorous conditions, and examined by scientists who wanted to understand how she did it, and furthermore, if other people could be trained to do it, albeit in the service of the Soviet Union.

In another experiment, on April 19, 1966, famous journalist and actor Karl Nikolaiev flew from Moscow to Science City, Novosibirsk to take part in the Grand Moscow-Siberia Telepathy test.  Back in Moscow, at the designated time, biophysicist Yuri Kamensky was presented with a sealed package and ushered into an isolated, insulated chamber. The plan was for Kamensky to examine six objects for ten minutes each and attempt to project an image of each to Nikolaiev, who would attempt to receive these thoughts and describe what he was receiving. The first object was a metal spring consisting of seven tight coils.  “Round, metallic, gleaming, looks like a coil” Nikolaiev noted.  Kamensky focused on a screwdriver with a black plastic handle; Nikolaiev saw “long and thin…metal..plastic…black plastic.”  Over the next two weeks, Nikolaiev attempted to receive thoughts from four different senders.  Nikolaiev identified a barbell visualized by one. Some people were more effective at sending thoughts than others, thus confirming the Soviet theory that a trained sender is almost as important as a gifted receiver: if the sender is unfocused, or sends unclear images, the receiver gets equally indistinct images.

What made all this ironic is that even though the Soviet science community was open to the possibility of telepathy, psychokinesis, and precognition, and the Soviet intelligence community was happy to experiment with it to gain an advantage in the cold war on both the athletic field and in politics, the official position of the Soviet Union was that parapsychology was a decadent western fraud that went against Soviet principals.  The 1956 edition of the official Soviet Encyclopedia observed, “Telepathy is an antisocial, idealistic fiction about humanity’s supernatural power to perceive phenomena which, considering the time and place, cannot be perceived.”  Paranormal phenomena directly contradicted the theories of Marxist-Leninist philosophy.  Psychic phenomenon cannot exist, argued Soviet physical scientists, and socialist scientific principals treated it as a superstition, referring to it as a “bourgeois fiction.”  Yet the experiments in this “anti-social, idealistic fiction” had been continuing for decades, arguably somewhat successfully.  They would simply mask it under other names.

In 1965 the “Popov Group,” which was the short name for the Bioinformation Section of the A.S. Popov All-Union Scientific and Technical Society of Radio Technology and Electrical Communications decided to focus on Bioinformation communication, the Soviet euphemism for ESP and telepathy.  They made Nikolaiev their resident lab rat after the Siberia experiment and studied how he could transmit and receive information, which led to the next great experiment.  In March of 1967, the Popov Group flashed a coded message via telepathy from Moscow to Leningrad. Once again, Yuri Kaminsky sat in Moscow while Nikolaiev sat in a physiology lab at the University of Leningrad. The scientists attached him to an electroencephalograph, better known as an EEG machine, to measure his brain waves. This time, Nikolaiev had no idea what time, how many, or of what kind the telepathic messages would take.  According to the scientists, three seconds after Kaminsky began “transmitting,” Nikoliaev’s brain lit up, they said his brain waves “changed dramatically,” causing the scientists to believe they had caught the moment of telepathy.  As Kaminsky focused on an empty cigarette box in Moscow, the visual centers of Nikoliaev’s brain lit up and he described, “something that looks like cigarettes. It is the lid. Inside is empty. The surface is cold…it is cardboard.”  When Kaminsky spoke out loud in Moscow, the areas of the temporal section of Nikoliaev’s brain associated with sound and hearing registered longer brain waves.  The Soviets believed they had proven the reality of telepathy, and that it could be possibly controlled and directed, which meant that it could be used to strategic advantage.  On the other side of the globe, the CIA was funding and carrying out very similar experiments.  The Cold War had also become a mind war and a psychic war.

Fearing the Americans might be more successful in developing psychic powers, the Soviets doubled down.  Yuri Andropov, who was the leader of the Soviet Union from 1982 to 1984, served as head of the KGB from 1967 to 1982. One of his mandates was that the Soviet Union must lead the world in psychic research and its practical applications.  He wanted psychic spies and people who could use mental powers to change the world.  Human life was irrelevant.  Test subjects to experiment on could be very easily had. Rat would have their skulls opened, electrodes attached, and the psychics would attempt to communicate with the brains and make them feel specific emotions and sensations.  It was only a matter of time when the subjects moved from rats to human beings.

The morally questionable experiments resulted in at least one lab being shut down by scientists refusing to continue the experiments.  Instead, Andropov replaced them with a secret mega lab built in a sub-basement under the Filatov Eye Institute in Odessa. Death row inmates were brought to the new lab and placed in cells.  The scientists bombarded them with pulsing magnetic fields to see if they would become clairvoyant.  Their brains simply melted.

In 1972 the US Defense Intelligence Agency published a classified 174 page report entitled Controlled Offensive Behavior – USSR. It warned the same experiments the Soviets were doing with their athletes they were doing with their agents.  The report warned the KGB was training its spies to have “psychoenergetic abilities,” whatever that means. In response, the CIA began experimenting to develop American psychic spies.  At CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, CIA scientists would show a picture of a place and then ask the psychic being tested to describe what was occurring in the area. The Soviets had been doing this for years. The CIA’s program was called Project Stargate and moved to the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California where they were discovering and training psychic warriors to go toe-to-toe with Soviet psychic spies.  The most famous of these is Uri Geller, better known now as an entertaining and spoon bender, who claims clairvoyance and psychokinesis among his abilities. The CIA would have Geller and the others sit in the office in Menlo Park, focus on locations in the Soviet Union and then draw the location of Soviet missiles. Sometimes, they were right.

The CIA psychic spies held themselves as superior to the Soviets as the Americans refused to attempt to kill using psychic powers.  That may or may not be true, but the Soviets had no such compunction about attempting psychic assassination.  The KGB created an exact replica of the Oval Office, placing psychics in it around the clock, twenty four hours a day in short shifts, focusing on the American president, attempting first to confuse and bewilder him. Later on, the psychics would see if they could stop the president’s heart from the Soviet Union, using only the power of thought.

In 2021, the CIA declassified a number of memos related to Project Stargate and the Soviet Hidden Human Reserves, one of which details how CIA agents were tracking two Soviet scientists in 1991 who had been conducting experiments on ESP for the purpose of gaining information and influencing people from a great distance.  The declassified memo reports that Soviet scientist Konstantin Buteyko, was described as having “perfected his method” of ESP by conducting experiments in which he would put a volunteer patient in the middle of a room that had two concave mirrors on opposite sides. The document noted that researchers believed “the mirrors focused psychic energy”. A medical psychic would then concentrate on transmitting psychic energy to the patient while simultaneously empathetically experience the patient’s discomfort and pain.  The psychic would then transmit bioplasma to the patient, attempting to control or cure whatever disease affected the patient. They experimented on everything from asthma to heart disease to cancer. In 1987 and 1988 alone, about 3000 patients underwent what the soviets called “nontraditional medical treatment,” including “the use of psychic methods.”

The other scientist the CIA had been tracking was Vlail Kaznacheev, described in the CIA memo as a “well-known authority on ESP.”  He conducted experiments in which volunteers “attempted to relay to one another images of geometric shapes such as squares or circles”.  Yet another scientist that had been studied by the CIA, according to the declassified memos, was Dr. Igor Smirnov of the “Institute for Psycho-Correction.” He was hired by the Soviet government in the early eighties to blast “silent sounds” into the minds of people, in other words, influencing people from a distance without them ever knowing what he was doing.  His first major task was to blast silent messages at Red Army troops being sent to combat in Afghanistan in the early eighties. The message he blasted into the minds of soldiers was: “Don’t get drunk before battle.” 

PART FOUR

Soviet experiments in understanding the world through other than standard scientific approaches reached into all areas of human endeavor.

In Krasnodar in 1939, anyone who wanted their scientific equipment repaired was sent to Seymon Davidovich Kirlian, regarded by all as the best electrician in the Kubar region, near the Black Sea. While repairing an instrument used for medical electrotherapy, Kirlian saw a tiny flash between electrode and skin and began wondering what would happen if he put a photographer’s plate between electrode and skin.  What kind of photo might emerge?  So he attached a metal electrode to his own skin, and, placing the photographic plate, switched on the current. Although he gave himself a severe burn, he chalked it up to a sacrifice for science and developed the plate. The photo showed the silhouette of his hand with luminescence surrounding the fingers – like thousands of tiny flares were leaping off his hand into the surrounding air. He began to work on taking such photos without the pain or burning, and discovered this luminescence surrounds all living things in such photos.  He called it “a window on the unknown,” and this type of picture now bears his name: Kirlian photography.  There are examples of it on our website.  The pictures are fascinating, dynamic energy patterns surrounding leaves, hands, a piece of fruit – any organic thing photographed in this manner displays an aura.  Soon the elite of Soviet science were making their way to Kirlian’s lab to see his photos. One brought two leaves torn from the same species of tree at the same moment.  They were identical in every way.  Kirlian and his wife photographed them and their auras were different, which was not the expected result.  Kirlian had theorized each species of plant had its own frequency of aura and two leaves from the same type of tree should be very similar.  Dr. and Mrs. Kirlian stayed up all night trying to make the leaves photograph the same, but could not.  When the scientist returned the next morning he was delighted, explaining they were from the same type of tree, one of which had a fatal plant disease.  With no external indication of illness, the leaves clearly showed the presence of a debilitating aspect to the tree in Kirlian photographs. This result was repeated when Kirlian attempted to demonstrate photos of his own hand, which did not show the expected aura, but rather something blurry and dim. That evening he fell very ill.  Kirlian photography could indicate illness before it was actually experienced in animals and plants. For centuries, mediums had claimed to be able to see an “aura” surrounding people.  Kirlian photographed it.

The Kirlians worked for a quarter century on their technique, and the Soviet ministries of health and agriculture also supported their research, thinking it may help in disease diagnosis and stronger crops.  Photographing dead bodies showed no aura.  Photographing leaves torn in half show a luminescence where the missing part was.  Ultimately the State University of Kazakhstan determined that the Kirlians had photographed “bioplasma,” the substance the scientists of the twenties had theorized was exuded by all living bodies. In the west such photographs were considered a novelty, in the Soviet Union they justified the Hidden Human Reserve program by confirming the existence of bioplasma and its absence when the body dies.  Kirlian photography could also be used to mark and track individuals who strengthened their bioplasma.

As I mentioned earlier, fascinatingly, unlike most espionage, the Soviets and the Americans often spoke with each other about their attempts to use psychic powers to improve sports.  The Americans and the Soviets working on human potential communicated quite regularly, sharing some information about their experiments and learning from one another. Jim Hickman, a key figure in American psychic research during the cold war actually spent much of the 1970s and 1980s travelling in the USSR to research Soviet Hidden Human potential experiments. Hickman now tells that during those visits he learned about strange, disturbing things. Even stranger and more disturbing than a whole bunch of Dr Zoukhars trying to influence the thought patterns of a head of state from great distances? “There was much deeper work going on,” he said. “We knew that we were only talking to the people they let us talk to.”  Similarly, the CIA would speak with and keep careful tabs on any American scientist visiting or exchanging information with their Soviet counterparts. 

            Perhaps the most disturbing use of psychic experiments in the Soviet Union was a project by physiologist Dr. Leonid L. Vasiliev.  As much as the Americans feared what Soviet psychics might be able to do in the Cold War, the fact is that many of the experiments were to the detriment of Soviet citizens.  In the sixties, Vasiliev experimented with telepathy and mind control as a form of population control and brain washing.  In order to indoctrinate and “re-educate” what the Soviets called “antisocial elements,” a term that covered everyone from criminals to those who spoke ill of Stalin or were not patriotic enough, psychics would attempt to enter their minds and induce them to adopt the “correct” political and social attitudes.  These experiments were highly secret, as they would constitute evidence that there were those who lived under socialism but did not care for it. It is a useful reminder that the scientists carrying out all the experiments discussed today may have been men and women of science, genuinely seeking to explore and unlock human potential, but they were also pawns of the politicians, the KGB and the Soviet military. The government saw to it that the Soviet scientists were provided with everything published in the west on psychic phenomena, and even many things not published, and then worked to ensure only that which the government approved of being released to the west ever found its way out of the Soviet Union.

Ultimately, the Soviet experiments in Hidden Human Reserves in athletics and espionage were all to the same purpose: creating a race of Soviet superhumans to win the cold war, whether on the chessboard, the Olympic stadium, or in the espionage game.  And in fairness, the Central Intelligence Agency in the United States was doing the same exact thing. 

If you enjoyed today’s stories, we recommend Ed Hawkins’ book The Men on Magic Carpets: Searching for the Superhuman Sports Star – it tells the tale of the American attempts to use psychic powers, meditation, and other new age techniques to create superhuman sports stars as well as develop a team of American psychic spies the equivalent of the Soviets ones I’ve discussed today.  Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder’s 1970 book Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain is also a fascinating study of Soviet engagement with parapsychology, and equally fascinating in hindsight, based on what we know now that the Soviet Union is no more. 

Thank you for listening to My Dark Path’s special episode for Patreon members. I’m MF Thomas, creator and host, and I produce the show with our creative director Dom Purdie. This story was prepared for us by Kevin Wetmore.  Big thank yous to them and the entire My Dark Path team, as well as to you, our Pateron supporters and listeners.

Please take a moment and give My Dark Path a 5-star rating wherever you’re listening. It really helps the show, and we love to hear from you.

Again, thanks for walking the dark paths of history, science and the paranormal with me. Until next time, good night.