Clairvoyance, telepathy and the contactless destruction of enemy personnel - if you believe the article by retired Colonel Nikolai Poroskov, "Super-soldiers for the wars of the future" - all this is studied by Russian fighters of the parapsychological front. While the scandalous article is being investigated by experts and fighters against pseudoscience, Lenta.ru decided to recall how in the twentieth century the military tried to use human paranormal abilities for their own purposes and what came of it.
As the history of mankind shows, war is a complex process, the scene of which is not limited to the battlefields and the headquarters of commanders. The term "psychological warfare" has long been established - it is understood as the impact on the public consciousness and the morale of the troops through propaganda. But the military did not always limit itself to indirectly influencing the psyche of the fighters - from time to time they turned to parapsychology to control thoughts. In the 20th century, scientists were not yet convinced of the anti-scientific nature of the supernatural, and occult research seemed to be an important and effective direction.
We will not abandon psychics
Perhaps the most famous of the states that took paranormal abilities and the occult seriously was the Third Reich. Adolf Hitler and his inner circle, as historians admit, used the services of parapsychologists and were enthusiasts of occult practices.
The Nazi worldview, which allowed the Holocaust to happen, was formed largely thanks to the mystical Thule Society that existed at the beginning of the 20th century. The members of this society were carried away by Eastern teachings and looked in the ancient scrolls for justification of the superiority of the highest "Aryan" race over the lowest. Contrary to some perceptions, only "Germans" and not "Aryans" appeared in the documents of the NSDAP and Nazi Germany, but it was the ideas of the sacred exclusivity of their origin, developed in "Tula", that inspired the Nazis for radical politics.
Nordic tales and legends about the heroic ancestors inspired the Germans of that time to create an institute called Ahnenerbe (Legacy of the Ancestors). Its employees were engaged not only in historical and cultural research - they studied parapsychology, spiritualism, witchcraft and other practices officially prohibited in Germany.
Employees of "Ahnenerbe" organized expeditions in search of ancient artifacts, which, as they believed, have not only symbolic meaning, but also paranormal power. In a somewhat ironic tone, such an expedition was portrayed by Hollywood filmmakers in the film "Indiana Jones: In Search of the Lost Ark," where Harrison Ford's character tries to prevent the biblical Ark of the Covenant from falling into the hands of the Nazis. A real example of such a search is the story of SS Obersturmführer Otto Rahn, who for years searched for the Holy Grail - an artifact from Celtic and Norman medieval legends. The leadership of the Reich seriously hoped that sacred objects and sacred knowledge would help the Germans develop supernatural abilities and become invincible.
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Frame: the film "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade."
The hopes for esotericism and mystical powers did not come true - they did not make superheroes out of the Nazis and did not help them win the war. Wolfram Sievers, head of the Ahnenerbe Institute, was sentenced to death at the Nuremberg Trials, and over time, a host of mystical and conspiracy theories arose around the Ahnenerbe. According to one of them, for example, in 1943, Mussolini was saved from captivity, allegedly thanks to the services of mediums released for this from concentration camps - their paranormal abilities helped to find the place where the fascist leader was hidden.
Cold psycho war
The ability of some people to find objects with the power of thought and from a distance to see what was happening in a certain location was believed long after the Second World War: simultaneously with the nuclear confrontation in the second half of the twentieth century, the superpowers tried to overtake each other on the supernatural field. Due to the policy of dealing with documents, we know little about the Soviet parapsychological troops, but we are quite aware of how this research has progressed among the Americans.
In 1978, the US military launched a secret parapsychological project, which appeared under various codenames, but eventually became known as Stargate ("Stargate"). His main task was to find out how to use for the purpose of espionage what the English-speaking parapsychologists call remote viewing ("remote observation"). The later world-famous Israeli charlatan magician Uri Geller took part in the project.
As documents released by the CIA in 2017 showed, the United States began the project when it received information about "psychotronic research", on which 60 million rubles were allegedly spent in the USSR. Soviet specialists allegedly developed a way to kill the enemy and damage equipment at a distance using the astral capabilities of mediums. Due to closed archives, there is no objective data, so it is quite possible that the West was supplied with exquisitely crafted disinformation.
Uri Geller worked for the American military for many years until they realized that he was a charlatan. Photo: Mandoga Media / ZumaPress / Globallookpress.com
It is unknown which side of the Cold War did better, but Stargate lasted nearly 20 years. 277 mediums have taken part in more than 26 thousand parapsychological missions. Some of them turned out to be effective, but in the end, in 1995, the CIA analyzed the project, declared it pointless and closed it. Interestingly, mediums were not told about the results of their work (the success or failure of "remote observation"), so that they did not get upset and did not lose their skills.
A year later, in 1996, illusionist James Randi founded a foundation that guarantees a million dollars to anyone who can prove their psychic skills under laboratory control. The amount has not yet been received by anyone.
Her Majesty's Medium
After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, the question arose of finding the perpetrators. They were preparing to look for terrorists in all possible ways, and the special services of many countries got involved in the process. Among them was the United Kingdom - the United Kingdom Department of Defense funded a number of studies on "remote surveillance".
In 2008, documents were released, which stated that the British held 18 sessions with the participation of non-professional mediums. The subjects tried to see what is shown in the photograph, lying in the next room, while the devices read the electromagnetic fields around their heads - the scientists hoped in this way to catch something unusual.
The conclusions, not surprisingly, came out the same as those of their American colleagues: psychic abilities did not work in the laboratory. Only 28 percent of mediums were able to describe something that remotely resembles the desired picture; none of them showed results “beyond rational understanding”. Since this was the purpose of research, British attempts to learn how to search for terrorists from a distance have ended.
British test results showed that "remote surveillance" does not seem to exist.
Intuition as a weapon
Despite the long history of failures in the study of the superpowers of the human brain, scientists do not despair. In 2014, the US Navy's Office of Naval Research allocated $ 3.85 million to research on "precognition," the hypothetical ability to predict future events.
Scientists believe that it is possible to understand the process leading to an accurate prediction of upcoming events, and if this works out, it may be able to strengthen it in order to develop paranormal intuition in the personnel of the American army.
Scientific work in this direction began after the researchers had accumulated a sufficient mass of reports on certain events on the battlefield. In them, the soldiers admitted that they acted on a whim, proceeding from a certain "sixth sense". One such incident allegedly took place in Iraq in 2006: Sergeant Martin Richburg prevented an improvised explosive device from detonating in an Internet cafe, saving the lives of its customers. According to the Marine, it was intuition that forced him to detain the seemingly first unremarkable Iraqi who came across, who turned out to be a terrorist.
This time, exploring the "sixth sense", the military are trying to distance themselves from words that refer to mysticism - they call their object of study the word sensemaking, which can be translated as "comprehension." State parapsychologists now have access to the most modern technologies - and who knows, maybe it is the modest goals and lack of bravado about "destroying technology by the power of thought" that will lead to the first results - albeit modest, but quite useful.
Stepan Kostetsky
