The Real Story Of Project Stargate

On March 10, 1970, housewife and ex-Red Army tank regiment member Nina Kulagina used her thoughts alone to halt the heartbeat of a frog. At the Ukhtomskii Military Institute in Leningrad, Russia, Kulagina sat in an observation room, claiming to possess psychic abilities. Scientists were monitoring the amphibian's heart rate using electrodes connected to its little ticker while they placed the recently extracted frog's heart in a solution that might sustain its beating for up to an hour.

The Soviet medics who were keeping tabs on Kulagina said that while the seven minutes it took her to mentally halt the frog's heart, her own heart rate rose considerably. She had spent twenty minutes getting ready for the workout.

The next thing she did was attempt to increase the heart rate of a human doctor who was there but doubtful of her abilities. Electronic heart-rhythm monitors were attached to both. Analysts detected the doctor's heart rate as "dangerous" after a few minutes, and the trial was immediately stopped. The United States Department of Defense, however, was the first to have footage of it. Were Kulagina's psychic abilities real? Alternately, were the Soviets trying to hide their extrasensory weaponry from their enemies? Even though Americans had mixed feelings about the Soviet psychic and the dead frog, they could all agree that it had piqued their interest.

We can now laugh at certain parts of the Cold War with a dark sense of humor, such the dog cosmonauts of the space race and the idea that "duck and cover" would protect people from nuclear fallout. The day's sincerity is part of the humor. The United States and the Soviet Union invested vast resources into developing more complex forms of espionage as the weapons race progressed and the climate of intense distrust became more pervasive. There was psychic ability among them.

Due to the utmost dedication of both sides to gathering information from each other, espionage programs developed a knack for remaining undetected. To remain undetected, they obtained secrets via the use of double agents, wiretaps, and other conventional tactics. But each of these approaches carried some degree of danger. Knowing the enemy's thoughts as well as his plans, and having the ability to influence his thoughts or destroy remotely without costly armament, would be much better. The potential for psychic warfare seemed limitless, despite the fact that excitement around these skills remained moderate.

For the Soviets, mysticism was just another kind of religion—an "opiate of the masses," to use Marxist terminology—so this was a surprising turn of events. According to Annie Jacobsen's book Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis, the Soviets had banned all paranormal activities. However, they reversed their stance when they realized they could secretly use mysticism as a spy tool. The first step, however, was to reframe their actions in terms more often used in science. A 1963 decree "severed all ties to ESP's occult past" by rewriting Soviet terminology surrounding ESP to sound technical, according to Jacobsen. She continues by mentioning a few of the significant modifications to terminology that this brought about: transcendental communication evolved into "long-distance transmissions of biological systems." As a result, "non-ionizing, in particular electromagnetic, emissions from humans" replaced psychokinesis, the mental manipulation of physical things.

The Soviet Union invested heavily in energy research in the 1960s, with the goal of better understanding the energetic fluxes around humans. They hoped to influence physical processes by using that energy. "Discovery of the energy underlying ESP will be equivalent to the discovery of atomic energy," said the doctor in head of the Special Laboratory for Biocommunications Phenomena at the University of Leningrad.

American military engineers found unusual electromagnetic signals coming from an apartment on the tenth floor of a building across the street from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in 1962 while conducting a regular security check of the building. Based on their findings, the signal had been in operation for more than six years and was directed at the higher levels of the Embassy building. The Pentagon's own program began at that point. Initiating a clandestine effort to "duplicate the effects of the Moscow signal" was supposedly given to the Advanced Research Projects Agency by them, according to Jacobsen.

Studies along these lines were thus also being place in the United States. Eight years down the road, the United States launched a joint-intelligence assessment to investigate the "Soviet psychoenergetic threat" in light of the Kulagina tapes—just one instance of her psychic abilities—along with other footage showing her mentally manipulating matchsticks on a table. The report that came out of the two-year investigation concluded that the Soviets were engaged in the development of "methods of controlling or manipulating human behavior through subtle, non-identifiable means" and had a tremendous interest in "parapsychology," the American word for the study of extrasensory perception.

The CIA's StarGate program, which trained participants to use "remote viewing" talents, was launched in 1978. Using one's psychic abilities to "see" distant locations was required. For instance, a Soviet military base's longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates were sent to psychics and asked to depict what they "saw," with surprisingly precise outcomes on occasion. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) also used the phrase "anomalous cognition" to characterize its peculiar methods of data collection, following in the footsteps of the Soviet Union, which built an entire technical vocabulary around its studies of extrasensory perception. The Men Who Stare At Goats, a book written by Jon Ronson in 2004 and made into a film in 2009, details some of the strange things that StarGate did.

Despite the fact that psychic shows' naysayers were always there, they continued airing far into the 1990s and maybe beyond. "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," the article read in 1984's Washington Post, which added that the CIA nonetheless maintained a focus on psychic research.

Skeptics and magicians alike thought Kulagina had rigged her purported clairvoyant performances. Pravda, a Russian publication, exposed her as a phony. In 1987, she prevailed partially in a slander lawsuit. However, the Soviet and even post-Soviet efforts to gain a psychological edge persisted long after her exposure. Russian forces reportedly used teams of military psychics throughout the Chechen conflicts, according to program officials.

References

https://medium.com/timeline/nina-kulagina-spy-psychic-5644ac54066d

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project_(U.S._Army_unit)