REUTERS ARTICLE, FROM DATA BASE SEARCH. 'KEYWORK: PSYCHIC'

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: STARGATE
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP96-00791R000200230019-2
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: U
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: November 4, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 7, 1998
• Sequence Number: 19
• Publication Date: November 10, 1985
• Content Type: NOTES

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Copyright 1985 Reuters Ltd
November 10, 1985, Sunday, BC cycle
SECTION: Washington Dateline
LENGTH: 931 words
BYLINE: By Christopher Hanson
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Nov 8
KEYWORD: PSYCHIC
BODY:
Military agents with "Extra-Sensory Perception" (ESP) are put to work
reading the minds of enemy generals 5,000 miles away and visualizing secret war
plans locked in safes.
Government agents with another bizarre mental power -- the ability to move
physical objects without touching them and to affect the pulse rates of human
beings -- use their skill to sabotage weapons and cause heart attacks in enemy
leaders.
Scientists use a machine to extract a mysterious form of energy from the
brain and use it as a death beam.
These cases from a hypothetical mind-war are the stuff of science fiction --
but a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report expresses fear that a major
Soviet "psychotronic" research effort may be developing just such mental powers.
"Soviet and Czech psychotronic research ... has powerful potential for use as
an effective weapon against groups of men and leaders," according to the report,
a copy of which was provided to Reuters by a private source.
Same skeptics have dismissed reports about Soviet psychic experiments as
"disinformation" aimed at confusing the West. Many mainstream scientists reject
psychic research.
Even so, Washington is backing its own research into psychic phenomena and
this year doubled annual funding to $1 million, scientists who have worked on
U.S. psychic projects say.
Sources close to the U.S. experiments say the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) once funded tests in which psychics, sitting in a laboratory and given map
coordinates of military bases and nuclear plants in the Soviet Union, described
those sites in detail that was consistent with CIA data.
A CIA spokesman would not comment on whether or not such tests had been
conducted.
The Pentagon denies funding psychic studies and a CIA spokesman told Reuters:
"We have no ongoing program for psychic research."
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But a 1983 congressional report confirms the U.S. government has funded
psychic research.
Scientists Russell Targ and Keith Harary say the center for U.S.-funded
psychic research is SRI International, a private institute in Menlo Park, Calif.
They describe what they say were their government experiments for SRI in a
recent book, "The Mind Race."
An SRI spokesman declined to comment on funding sources.
Targ and Harary state that for 13 years SRI has been carrying out a
multi-million dollar series of U.S. government experiments in so-called
"remote viewing", which they describe as "the perception of events, objects or
people which are hidden from the five senses."
In these experiments, they say, a psychologist would sit with a "psychic"
subject in a laboratory, while another scientist would stand at an unknown site,
sometimes thousands of miles away. The subject would attempt to describe the
site, of which he had no prior knowledge.
In many cases, the scientists said, these descriptions -- of objects as large
as clock towers and as small as pins -- were remarkably accurate, the evident
result of some telepathic mental process not yet understood.
Targ told Reuters Soviet scientists have shown great interest in their
research, have met with them in the United States and invited them to the
Soviet Union for talks. The Soviets were especially interested in whether a way
could be found to screen off secrets from psychic intrusion.
The DIA report, "Soviet and Czechoslovakian Parapsychology Research", is
based largely on Soviet scientific literature and describes a large-scale
Kremlin program including mind-over-matter experiments, a field known as
psychokinesis.
It said in one set of experiments a Soviet psychic named Nina Kulagina stood
in a laboratory beside the heart of a frog, which had been surgically removed
and placed in a glass but was kept beating artificially.
"As she concentrated on controlling its beat, ... the rate of contraction
increased or decreased at her command (and) five minutes after the experiment
began she stopped its beat entirely," the report said.
Kulagina's ability "might be used against human targets," the report said. It
said Soviet scientists had reported extensively on experiments in which psychics
moved or levitated objects through mind-power, a skill that could be used to
"deactivate power supplies or to steal military documents."
Larissa Vilenskaya, a scientist who says she particiapted in Soviet psychic
studies for 10 years before emigrating to the United States, wrote in a recent
book that Kulagina managed to affect human heartbeats in a number of
experiments.
The report said in other experiments reported by Soviet scientists, including
Vilenskaya, psychics hypnotized people hundreds of miles away telepathically. It
said some western experts are concerned that such hypnosis could be used
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against "U.S. or allied personel in (nuclear) missile silos."
Much of the Soviet research described in the report deals with a theory that
psychic abilities stem from a form of brain energy that can be identified and
studied.
Soviet scientists have developed a machine which they say can extract energy
from the brain, and report that when flies were exposed to a beam of such energy
they "died instantly."
"If (such) devices can kill insects at present, their potential ... after
refinement and enlargement may well be for killing men," the report said.
The 1983 congressional report summarized this way the objections of
mainstream scientists to psychic research:
"Poorly conceived methods, including inadequate controls, faulty equipment
. experimental bias, selective treatment of data, and general experimental and
theoretical incompetence."
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