The Soviet Threat
U.S. government military efforts to explore psychic phenomena remained mostly out of the public eye until December 1959, when an article about a secret government ESP program appeared in a French magazine called Constellation. The article, entitled “Thought Transfer, Weapon of War,” was written by journalist and former French resistance spy Jacques Bergier. Bergier had strong ties to the intelligence community and an interest in the supernatural. He was working on a book about prophecy, conspiracy, and the Nazi obsession with the occult.
In his article Bergier reported that ESP tests had been conducted aboard the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus, the year before. The Nautilus was also the first vessel to reach the North Pole, a feat accomplished by sailing under the polar ice cap. The purpose of the experiment, wrote Bergier, was to see whether long-distance telepathic communication could be achieved through barriers that included thousands of miles of seawater, thick polar ice, and the metal walls of a submarine. According to Bergier the ESP experiment involved a simple sender-receiver trials using Zener cards. The sender was a sailor onboard the Nautilus, isolated inside a cabin during the experiments; the receiver was a technician on land, at the Westinghouse Friendship Laboratory on America’s East Coast. Bergier identified the man overseeing the joint-service ESP experiment as Air Force Colonel William H. Bowers, director of the Biological Department of the Air Force Research Institute. Bergier’s story stated that starting on July 25, 1958, the sender and the receiver communicated telepathically over a sixteen-day period.
Initially, “Thought Transfer, Weapon of War” garnered little attention outside France. Then, in February 1960, an expanded version of the story was published in France’s top science journal, Science et Vie, under the heading “The Secret of the Nautilus.” There were no authors identified, but editor Gérald Messadié said multiple sources had confirmed the story on condition of anonymity. J. B. Rhine of the Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory, with whom the Defense Department had conducted ESP and animal experiments in the early 1950s, was identified as the civilian scientist assigned to the project, and it was reported that “about 75% of the telepathic tries are said to have been successful.” The Navy’s response was that the story was a hoax.
Whether the story was true or fabricated remains a debate. But in 1960, real-world consequences were a result. The most significant turn of events was how the Soviets used the news story to their strategic advantage. “In Leningrad the Nautilus reports went off like a depth charge,” states a declassified Defense Department document. “Soviet parapsychology research was actually stimulated by the 1960 French story concerning the US atomic submarine Nautilus.” Years later, the Soviets falsely claimed they had begun their ESP research programs only after they learned of the Nautilus tests from the French science journal. U.S. intelligence analysts monitoring the situation knew this was Soviet propaganda, as indicated in statements made in April 1960 by Dr. Leonid L. Vasilev, Russia’s leading ESP researcher. “We carried out extensive and until now complete unreported investigations under the Stalin regime,” Vasilev told a group of top scientists gathered in Leningrad. “Today the American Navy is testing telepathy on their atomic submarines. Soviet scientists conducted a great many successful telepathy tests over a quarter of a century ago. It’s urgent that we throw off our prejudices. We must plunge into the exploration of this vital field.”
The prejudices to which Vasilev referred could be summed up in the story of one man: Grigori Rasputin. In Soviet Russia, all twentieth-century forays into the mystical, magical, or supernatural were framed by his cautionary tale. Rasputin was a Russian monk said to have swayed men, women, and nations with the power of his eyes. In 1910, Czar Nicholas II took the mysterious faith healer from Siberia into his court after Rasputin allegedly stopped the bleeding in the czar’s hemophiliac son. From there, Rasputin began advising the czar on affairs of state, including battle plans during World War I. Rasputin’s ability to survive assassination attempts added to his mythical status, but eventually he was done away with by a group of unidentified conspirators who poisoned him (twice), shot him, and then drowned him in the icy Neva River as if to make sure he was dead. After the Communist Revolution of 1917, healers and sorcerers were outlawed by the new ruling party, and research into extrasensory perception went underground.
Marxist doctrine considered mysticism, like religion, an opiate of the masses; science and technology were productive forces. Determined to outpace the Americans in the field of ESP research, in a 1963 Kremlin edict the Soviet minister of defense, R. J. Malinosky, declared telepathy to be science- and technology-based, and ordered the creation of the Special Laboratory for Biocommunications Phenomena at the University of Leningrad. The man in charge was Dr. Leonid L. Vasilev. The goals of the laboratory, wrote a Defense Department analyst, were to establish “scientific proof of telepathic communications” and “to identify the nature of brain energy that produces it.” For this, a partnership was established with the Bekhterev Brain Institute in Moscow, in order to study and “to harness the possibilities of telepathic communication.” That the Soviets were looking at the brain as a secret weapon made the Defense Department take note. “The discovery of the energy underlying telepathic communication will be equivalent to the discovery of atomic energy,” proclaimed Vasilev. The prevailing hypothesis put forth by Russian scientists in 1963 was that “telepathic impulses are radiated along the lines of bits of information in a cybernetic system,” according to declassified documents.
It all sounded very scientific, which was the point. As in the 1963 edict, the Soviet nomenclature around ESP was rewritten to sound technical, thereby severing all ties with ESP’s occult past. Mental telepathy was now “long-distance biological signal transmission.” Psychokinesis was “non-ionizing, in particular electromagnetic, emissions from humans.” When the phrase “psychotronic weapons” started appearing under the rubric of biocommunications phenomena, U.S. intelligence analysts were baffled. Psychotronic weapons were described in Soviet science journals as electromagnetic weapons involving “the generation of high-penetrating emission of non-biological origin.”
At first it seemed as if the research was bifurcated, divided into separate disciplines. One branch involved traditional ESP and PK research programs, and another involved a radical new kind of weaponry that truly was high-technology based. Not until 2011 would the reason these two programs were originally entwined be revealed as originating in the Nazi SS Ahnenerbe documents captured by the Soviets at the end of the war. “Both the first and second programs had open [unclassified] and closed [classified] parts,” explains Professor Serge Kernbach, director of Cybertronica Research, Advanced Robotics and Environmental Science at the University of Stuttgart. Both programs stemmed from Ahnenerbe research on the “psycho-physiological effects of microwave emissions [that] were actively investigated during the NS [National Socialist] regime.” In the Soviet laboratories, if ESP and long-distance telepathic communications were proven to be scientific fact, they would be classified as augmented perception and cognition in humans. Electromagnetic weapons, which are designed to degrade or destroy perception and cognition in humans, would be useful countermeasures. To this end, defense minister Malinosky ordered the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, P. N. Demichev, to establish a special commission for “paranormal human abilities and biological radiation studies.” In 1962, one of the lethal Soviet electromagnetic weapons programs appears to have been moved out of the research laboratory and into the battlefield. The target was the U.S. embassy in Moscow.
In 1962, American military engineers were conducting a security sweep of the U.S. embassy in Moscow, searching for listening devices, when they discovered a strange electromagnetic signal. The first analysis by American scientists was that this was some new means of eavesdropping. But further investigation revealed that the Soviets were using multiple frequencies to transmit a series of widely fluctuating and irregularly patterned microwave beams aimed primarily at the upper floors of the central wing of the embassy, where the ambassador and top intelligence officials had their offices. The CIA had reason to believe that the Soviets were developing an electromagnetic weapon designed to adversely affect the behavior of embassy personnel.
Military engineers determined that the microwave beam was coming from a source inside a tenth-floor apartment inside a building located roughly 100 meters to the west, across Tchaikovsky Street; it affected the west facade of the embassy building, with highest intensities between the third and eighth floors. The signal (determined to have a power density between 2.5 and 4.0 GHz) was given the code name MUTS, or Moscow Unidentified Technical Signal, and had apparently been in use since 1956. The Pentagon got to work on a counterstrategy and assigned the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) the job of initiating a classified program to duplicate the effects of the Moscow Signal.
Declassified documents reveal that scientists with the Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory were assigned to oversee the research. An elaborate facility was constructed inside the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Forest Glen Section. There, inside an anechoic chamber (an echo-free room designed to completely absorb reflections of either sound or electromagnetic waves), primates were irradiated with microwave beams with a power density similar to that of the Moscow Signal. ARPA’s Richard S. Cesaro was in charge of what was called Project Pandora. Within a few months of beaming the signal at the monkeys, Cesaro became convinced of its harmful nature, deciding that it adversely affected the internal organs of primates, including the brain. “In our experiments we did some remarkable things. And there was no question in my mind that you can get into the brain with microwaves,” Cesaro later said. It was later determined that the microwave beam produced Alzheimer’s disease.
In Moscow, U.S. embassy personnel were not told anything about the mysterious electromagnetic beams. Instead, the State Department set up a classified endeavor, or “cytogenic testing program,” code-named the Moscow Viral Study, to secretly conduct genetic testing on embassy personnel. The physician in charge was Dr. Cecil Jacobson. By collecting blood samples from individuals exposed to the Moscow Signal, the State Department would have a control group whose white blood cells could be analyzed for chromosomal damage. Employees were told they were being tested for a simple viral infection going around Moscow. Not for two years were senior civilian officials briefed on the Moscow Viral Study. When these individuals expressed serious concerns about the secret testing of employees, the program was terminated. The State Department was told that the best countermeasure it could take was to turn the ten-story embassy building into a giant Faraday cage. In a declassified memo dated April 3, 1965, a consultant suggested a “selection of suitable copper screening and mandatory coverage of all window openings.”
A vicious debate ensued among defense scientists, with accusations of hysteria and malfeasance being hurled back and forth. One of the Navy’s top scientists, Dr. Samuel Koslov, led the charge of those who insisted that the Moscow Signal was harmless. “The actual physical results were nonexistent, but the real psychological trauma (in this case in a group of well-educated and dedicated people) was sad and startling,” Koslov later wrote in the Applied Physics Laboratory alumni digest.
ARPA’s Richard Cesaro and others vehemently disagreed. Based on the evidence that the electromagnetic beam could penetrate the human nervous system, Cesaro argued that it was necessary to determine exactly what kind of weapon this was and “whether the Soviets have special insight into the effects and use of athermal radiation on man.” In 1969, the Defense Department quietly expanded ARPA’s Project Pandora to include “the human.” Highly classified studies code-named Big Boy and Project Bizarre now projected microwave beams at unwitting sailors stationed in the Philadelphia Naval Yard. The experiments would remain secret for seven years…
Excerpted from Phenomena by Annie Jacobsen.
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