This Russian woman’s psychic powers ignited a paranormal arms race between the U.S. and the USSR
Nina Kulagina put the ESP in espionage
On March 10, 1970, Nina Kulagina, a housewife and former member of the Red Army tank regiment, stopped a frog’s beating heart using only her mind. Kulagina, who claimed to have psychic powers, was sitting in an observation room room at the Ukhtomskii Military Institute in Leningrad, Russia. The freshly removed frog’s heart was sitting in a solution that could keep it beating for up to an hour, and scientists were measuring beats per minute through electrodes they’d hooked up to the amphibian’s tiny ticker.
According to the Soviet doctors monitoring her, Kulagina’s own heart rate increased dramatically during the seven minutes it took her to mentally stop the frog’s heart. It had taken her 20 minutes to prepare for the exercise.
Next, she tried to elevate the heart rate of a human physician in the room who was skeptical of her powers. Both were hooked up to EKG machines. Within a couple minutes, analysts noted that the physician’s heart was beating at a “dangerous” rate, and the experiment was terminated. But video of it quickly made its way to the U.S. Defense Department. Did Kulagina truly have psychic powers? Or were the Soviets attempting to outwit their enemies by hinting at an extrasensory arsenal? American opinions were divided, but one thing was for sure: the Soviet psychic and the dead frog had certainly captured their attention.
From the canine cosmonauts of the space race to the notion that “duck and cover” would protect humans from nuclear fallout, we can now look back on some aspects of the Cold War with dark humor. Part of what’s funny is the earnestness of the day. As the arms race unfolded and the atmosphere of deep suspicion intensified, both the U.S. and the USSR focused enormous resources on innovating ever-stranger and more sophisticated modes of spycraft. One of them was psychic power.
As both sides were committed then — as today — to extracting information from one another, spy programs became experts in invisibility. Using double agents, wiretaps and other standard methods, they gleaned secrets without revealing themselves. But these methods were all risky. And anyway, it would be even better to know not simply what the enemy was planning but what he was thinking, and to be able to alter that thinking, or to destroy remotely without expensive weaponry. Even though enthusiasm about these capabilities remained tempered, the possibilities for psychic warfare seemed endless.
It was an odd turn for the Soviets, considering that they saw mysticism the same way they saw religion: as an “opiate of the masses,” in Marxist terms. As historian Annie Jacobsen writes in her book Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government’s Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis, the Soviets had outlawed anything in the realm of the paranormal — that is, until they realized they might be able to use mysticism to spy on their enemies, and did an ideological about-face. But first, they had to couch their activities in more scientific terms. In a 1963 edict, “Soviet nomenclature around ESP was rewritten to sound technical,” writes Jacobsen, “thereby severing all ties to ESP’s occult past.” She goes on to list some of the notable terminological changes this entailed: mental telepathy became “long-distance biological systems transmissions.” Psychokinesis (moving physical objects with the mind) became “non-ionizing, in particular electromagnetic, emissions from humans.”
Throughout the 1960s, the Soviets directed a great deal of energy toward energy itself, pursuing research designed to help them better understand energetic flows surrounding human beings. Their intention was to harness that energy to affect physical systems. The doctor in charge of the University of Leningrad’s Special Laboratory for Biocommunications Phenomena claimed the “discovery of the energy underlying ESP will be equivalent to the discovery of atomic energy.”
In 1962, during a routine security sweep of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, American military engineers had discovered strange electromagnetic signals emanating from a 10th-story apartment in a building across the street. They’d determined that the signal, which was aimed at the upper floors of the Embassy building, had been in use for over six years. It was then that the Pentagon began their own program. According to Jacobsen, they assigned the Advanced Research Projects Agency the task of initiating a classified program to “duplicate the effects of the Moscow signal.”
So, similar studies were underway stateside. Eight years later, in response to the Kulagina tapes (which were but one example of her psychic power; she had also been captured on film mentally moving matchsticks around on a table, among other things) the U.S. initiated a joint-intelligence assessment to study what they were calling the “Soviet psychoenergetic threat.” The resulting report, published after two years of research, determined that the Soviets were developing “methods of controlling or manipulating human behavior through subtle, non-identifiable means” and that their interest in “parapsychology,” the American name for the study of ESP, was enormous.
In 1978, the CIA began its StarGate program, a psychic program devoted in particular to the cultivation of “remote viewing” capabilities. This meant using psychic power to “see” places far away. Psychics were given the longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates of a Soviet military base, for example, and asked to describe what they “saw,” with sometimes shockingly accurate results. Like the Soviets, who created an entire technical lexicon around these investigations into extrasensory experience, the CIA coined the term “anomalous cognition” to describe the unusual information-gathering practices it was pursuing. (Some of StarGate’s bizarre activities are chronicled in Jon Ronson’s 2004 book The Men Who Stare At Goats, which was adapted to film in 2009.)
The psychic programs always had their detractors, but they persisted into the 1990s and possibly beyond. In 1984, The Washington Post reported that the CIA continued to take psychic research seriously, adding that “Former CIA director Stansfield Turner told critics their skepticism about the CIA’s psychic projects was healthy, but that research should keep pace with their skepticism.”
For her part, Kulagina was suspected by magicians and other skeptics of rigging her supposedly psychic feats. She was called out by the Russian newspaper Pravda as a fraud. She sued for defamation in 1987, and was granted a partial victory. But her exposing didn’t change the Soviet and even post-Soviet pursuit of a psychic advantage. Officials involved in the program report that groups of military psychics were employed by Russia as recently as the Chechen wars.
