CRYPTOLOG ARTICLE: SOVIET PSI EXPERIMENTS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: STARGATE
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): NSA-RDP96X00790R000100030007-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 5
• Document Creation Date: November 4, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 1, 2011
• Sequence Number: 7
• Publication Date: December 1, 1983
• Content Type: REPORT

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ecent Soviet experiments in remote
viewing and animal telepathy have
produced some significant, well-con-
trolled results. This work was
described at the Seminar on Applied
Phenomena, in the Xerox center at
Leesburg, on 1 December 1983 by Doctor Russell
Targ, who had just returned from Russia where
he visited several Soviet Psi facilities.
(U) The Soviet scientific community is
rather hesitant about Psi research, (telepa-
thy, clairvoyance, poltergeists, etc.), but a
theory of low-frequency radio propagation has
been devised to justify some telepathy
phenomena, and the Soviet Academy of Sciences
(SAS) has established a separate department to
deal with this work. The "Department for
Research on Theoretical Problems" is headed by
Professor Andrianka, who is an Academician and
who is the only member of this unusual depart-
ment.
(U) Much of the unclassified Soviet work
takes place in hospitals around Moscow and is
concerned with measurement of subtle physio-
logical changes, particularly in GSR (galvanic
skin response), that would correlate with
response to some stimulus, including the onset
of hypnosis.
(U) There are apparently problems of image
and semantics, for the research center in the
hospital is called the "Center for the Non-
Drug Treatment of Mental Problems," while the
Academy of Sciences calls it the "Department
for Special Problems." There are also doctri-
nal problems, for a Soviet scientist named Ka-
gan published a definitive book on information
theory in which he explained Psi phenomena in
terms of low-frequency radio propagation. Psi
experiments in Russia, the US, and elsewhere
which appear to show precognition do not fit
this radio model and produce curious reactions
by the Soviet scientific community, as noted
below.
(U) The concentration of the Psi research
in hospitals is also based on this radio
model, for the Soviet medical researchers have
been doing a lot of work in treating cancer
patients and others with low-frequency radio
waves (in the 10-Hz to 100-Hz range) and have
discovered that during this treatment the pa-
tients have mystical experiences, relax, and
some appear to experience cures. The experi-
ments are conducted without any specific
theory. Targ found that this resulted in a
lot of hospital visits in the Moscow area, to
see the ELF (extremely low frequency) equip-
ment and hear about the experiments.
(U) Dr. Targ, the visiting scientist, had
worked in various areas of hard science, in-
cluding lasers and wave physics, for GTE be-
fore moving to SRI in the early 1960s to pur-
sue a NASA-funded project for an ESP teaching
machine. Since then he has worked on a number
of Psi projects at SRI and recently formed a
company to do applied Psi work.- His emphasis
has been on controlled experiments in remote
viewing and precognition.
(U) At the August 1983 meeting of the
International Society on Psychic Research, a
Soviet theoretical physicist, Guberev, sug-
gested he come to Moscow as a tourist to see
the Soviet work. Targ, who had worked on De-
fense contracts, refused to go to Russia as a
tourist, fearing that the Soviet authorities
might detain him, but said that he would be
happy to go as an officially invited guest of
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the Soviet Academy of Sciences (so that the
Soviet authorities could not misconstrue the
purpose of his visit). The official invita-
tion arrived two days after the KAL 007 shoot-
down. Targ decided to accept the invitation,
he said, because he felt the KAL incident was
a result of a refusal to communicate (viz.,
neither the Japanese nor Soviet air controll-
ers would notify each other of the divergence
from the. flight path), and he thought his
visit would help to counteract the deteriora-
tion of US-USSR scientific communications. He
took his daughter, who is fluent in Russian,
as a translator. At the end of September
Targ, his daughter, and a colleague arrived in
Russia via Interflug. (The other airlines had
suspended service to Russia.)
(U) Most of the experiments are done in or
near major hospitals in Moscow. One large ex-
periment in "rat telepathy" was disclosed to
Targ. Rats raised together were separated
into two groups. They were shock-conditioned
separately, in standard Pavlovian fashion, by
being shown a light, followed soon afterwards
by an electric shock. The rats learned that
the light was associated with the shock and
would manifest fear at the light. Then two
cages were connected by a modem, at various
distances. Some experiments used cages more
than a kilometer apart. A computer would call
up one of the cages and shock one of a pair of
rats. Apparatus measured the galvanic fear
reaction of the unshocked rat when the warning
light was turned on in the other one's cage.
(U) Targ was careful to preface his exposi-
tion with the caveat that he could report only
what the Russians had told him of their work.
He did not see any experiments conducted and,
although he had known Guberev for about ten
years, he could not prove that all the results
reported to him were not intentional disinfor-
mation.
(U) His impressions were that the Russians
had a number of smart people, such as Guberev,
doing good controlled experiments on remote
viewing. A 1976 IEEE paper by Targ on remote
viewing had been translated into Russian, as
had the 1982 paper on Psi phenomena by Dr.
Robert Jahn, Dean of Engineering at Princeton,
which was published in the prestigious IEEE
Proceedings and soon translated. In general,
Targ found, the Russians were up-to-date with
US work in this field.
(U) Psi work is regarded seriously at high
levels in the Soviet scientific (and defense
circles, Targ found, because the scientists
had to clear their work with the Soviet mili-
tary authorities before disclosing it or let-
ting him into their labs. Targ found that
there were closed facilities, unambigously
presented to Targ as not permitted for him to
visit.
(U) A large computer in the hospital was
used to process the galvanic response data.
Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs and autocorrela-
tion were used to detect changes in the GSR
(galvanic skin response) in response to some
stimulus. Targ said that the computer looked
like a PDP.
(U) The signal-to-noise ratio of the GSR
data in the rat experiment was clear and the
analysis was considered (by the Russians ap-
parently) as a trivial application of a
mathematical algorithm. The experimenter was
apparently Guberev, whom Targ has known for a
decade. Targ could not vouch for the experi-
mental data. The experimenter wanted to use
computer analysis of GSR data to find the ex-
act instant that a subject drops into a hyp-
notic trance. This is somewhat controversial,
because it is apparently widely believed in
the US that there are no known physiological
correlates to the hypnotized state, i.e. no
measurable difference. Guberev claims that
there are unambiguous GSR changes at the
crossover point.
(U) GSR changes are also monitored in medi-
cal experiments which use 10-Hz to 100-Hz ra-
diation to treat various illnesses. Because
of translation problems, the Russian descrip-
tions of the experiments were incoherent to
Targ (his daughter translated), however cancer
treatment was one of the ELF applications.
Targ said that different stochastic modula-
tions, including high-frequency noise, were
impressed on the ELF carriers.
(U) Their Soviet host, Barazin, took them
on a tour of "the Department for Research on
Special Problems." Targ thought this was the
Soviet analog of the US phrase "anomalous
problems" that masks Psi experiments with an
ambiguous, scientific-sounding name.
(U) Targ and his party presented the SRI
work in remote viewing to two kinds of audi-
ences:
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The standard format was for Targ to give his
talk in English, after which his daughter
would give the same material in Russian. The
medical people had good questions on experi-
mental technique; e.g., the signal-to-noise
ratio of the data, the mental processing, how
the remote viewers felt during the viewing ex-
periments, etc. Targ felt that they had all
read the relevant US papers. But the physi-
cists were another matter.
(U) When Targ's daughter began to present
the Russian-language version of the SRI work
to the audience of physicists, all went
smoothly until she reached the part about
precognition, at which point there was an
uproar. She could scarcely finish a sentence.
For two hours the physicists interrogated her
mercilessly, demanding an explanation of how
the Psi subjects did the precognition; i.e., a
physical theory that would account for the
phenomena. Because Kagan's book on informa-
tion theory explained Psi phenomena as ELF ra-
dio, the SRI precognition results conflicted
with this (approved) theory. The Soviet.phy-
sicists refused to hear any data until Targ
could provide them with a theory which they
could accept, one that provided a model for
precognition.
(U) The Targ party visited Yuri Guliyayev,
an Electrical Engineer who is the director of
"the Soviet version of the IEEE" (probably the
Popov Society). There was noticeable antagon-
ism between the Academy of Science people and
the electrical engineering society. His SAS
host drove him to the door of Guliyayev's in-
stitute but would not enter. Yuri Guliyayev
wanted to know who Andrianka was, looked him
up in a directory, and announced to Targ that
he was an Academician and that his Department
in the Academy had only one member.
(U) There was also an experiment with a
noted psychic, Nina Kalada. The Russians re-
port that she can read a page in a book in
another room, with results well above random.
For example, she might be asked to read the
first line of page N of a book with a certain
title in a library in the next room. Her
results were well above random, according to
the Russians, as long as she had feedback of
results, i.e., could see immediately how close
she came. When she was sent out of the room
during the verification and not allowed to
know how well or poorly she had done, her
results were no better than random. Dr. Targ
felt that this meant that documents in locked
in safes in the US Embassy in Moscow were safe
from Ms. Kalada, since she would not get the
feedback necessary to produce successful
results. He said he assumed that espionage
was the point of the research.
(U) One of the asides in the journey was a
trip to a "free market" in Leningrad, where
fresh fruit and vegetables can be purchased by
approved people at black market prices in
large armory-sized covered markets. Because
of the shortage of fresh fruit and vegetables
in Russia, only certain foreigners and Rus-
sians are allowed into these markets. Rus-
sians approached the Targ party before they
went, in an effort to get them to change some
money or make some purchases on their behalf.
Targ, fearing he was being set up for a police
trap, refused. His scientific friends then
confirmed that this was a standard ploy, to
implicate visiting foreigners in some illegal
activity. At the food market, the police re-
fused to allow Targ to take any photographs at
all and interfered with his efforts to do so.
Apparently fresh fruit is so hard to obtain
that they did not want any photographic evi-
dence that it was available at all.
(U) Guliyayev knew all about US Psi work,
including Psi experiments on US submarines.
Targ found that the Russians seemed to know
everything that was going on in the US, (ap-
parently even unpublished work) but wanted to
talk about what the Russians were doing. Yuri
Guliyayev is doing tests in bioradiation, re-
peating what Vasiliev did, to see all the RF,
IR, and other electromagnetic energy coming
out of people's bodies, and to correlate this
with different physical states. Yuri kept
saying that he was doing physics, not ESP.
But Targ noted that Guliyayev's work is almost
the same as what "aura readers" are doing in
spectraphotometry. The Targ party was given a
paper that rather sketchily described the So-
viet work in bioradiation.
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Pop, I don't believe that you have ESP.
0
(U) From Leningrad their Russian hosts took
them on an unscheduled side trip to Yerevan,
capital of Soviet Armenia. Targ, apprehensive
about what might happen, resisted, saying it
was not on his itinerary and he would not go
to Armenia. The Russians replied that there
had been a large-scale experiment in remote
viewing and the Armenian scientists wanted to
see Targ and his party-in Armenia. Professor
Rubiky Gasumsan, of the Department of Psychol-
ogy, had done experiments with graduate stu-
dents. Apparently they were given no choice,
and had to go to Armenia. In the remote view-
ing experiments, an architect picked a number
of sites in the city that had distinctive
features. These locations were sealed in en-
velopes and picked at random. Students, called
"guards," were used to escort the "agent" to
the site, which they only learned about by
opening the envelope while on the way. The
other member of the RV (remote viewing) pair
sat in a lab and waited until the "agent"
reached the site. Then he described what he
thought the agent was looking at. (This is
similar to the SRI experiments.) The Armenian
scientists described work which had strikingly
successful results.
\ brief holiday, still protesting, to a remote
place in the mountains of Armenia to see "the
church at the end of the world." It was only
when they were in the back of the Intourist
bus, far away from all witnesses, that the Ar-
menian scientists revealed what they really
wanted to talk about. They had encountered
precognition of targets before the "agent"
reached the site to be viewed. The student in
the lab, even when he was told that the agent
was not yet in place, would go ahead and
(U) The problem for the Armenians was what
to do with the data. They have trouble deal-
ing with the data at the labs in Yerevan and
in the Academy of Sciences. Targ and the Ar-
menians had a long discussion on protocol,
i.e., the form for such experiments, similar
to US protocol analyses.
(U) (Obviously, they were using Targ to
"publish" results that they could not publish
in Russia, because they conflicted with ac-
cepted theory, and staged his visit so they
could talk to him and still deny things after-
wards, if there were any repercussions. Add
in the potential for disinformation, and the
situation has various possibilities-a commen-
tary on being a scientist in Russia.)
(U) Summarizing, Targ said there were a lot
of hospital visits to show ELF signals and ap-
paratus which caused the subjects to have
mystical experiences, and so on.
(U) In reply to a question, Targ said he
had made informal agreements to do long-
distance remote viewing experiments between
the USSR and the US, providing the "communica-
tions" between the US and Soviet scientific
parties were good enough. He has not started
this work because of communication problems.
(U) What the secret Soviet work in Psi ap-
plications might be was neither known nor
hinted at in Targ's exposition.
(U) Apparently there were no live demons-
trations of anything for the Targ party and no
detailed papers that they could take out.
(U) Other papers at the SAAP meeting
covered a lot of US work in sensing objects
underground, or at some distance, and also
covered driminological applications to get
clues to serious crimes. The Chinese had also
reported experiments in seeing printed materi-
als through sealed envelopes, in which a suc-
cessful "read" set off a number of field sen-
sors and also Pave a "blurred photographic im-
pression" of the string of five Chinese char-
acters when a success occurred. There was au-
dience interest in using these remote sensing
and underground and undersea detection tech-
niques to find submarines and missile silos.
Possibly the Russians, who seem to be abreast
of US work, have similar interests.
(U) A recent Congressional Research Service
(CRS) study by Christopher Dodge (83-511 SP)
cited other Soviet Psi work, noting consider-
able Soviet interest in remote hypnotic mani-
pulation and dowsing for water, oil, and
minerals. This is referred to in Soviet
literature as the "biophysical or bioloca-
tional effect." Psychokinesis (PK or Polter-
ism, in which the mind affects physical ob-
jects) and psychic healing have also attracted
Soviet interest. The Soviets claim that
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scientific studies of dowsing have yielded
significant results. (US researchers make the
same claim.) Therefore, dowsing is taught to
professional mineralogists and geologists at
Tomsk Polytechnical Institute. The CRS report
says there are various speculations that the
USSR is spending tens of millions of dollars
on Psi experiments and applications directed
to military research, but this is unconfirmed.
A paper, "Psi in the USSR: Applied Aspects" by
L. Vilenskaya, Applied Psi Newsletter, Vol. I,
no 1, 1982, pp. 4-5. Bulgaria and Czechoslo-
vakia also conduct Psi research and applica-
tions, according to the CRS report.
_JXDYBj- The ability to read a page of a book
in another room (the Kalada experiment) would
have security implications for COMSEC if it
worked reliably. The Russians could, for ex-
ample, use such a technique to determine
whether a pinched keylist was in use in an em-
bassy coderoom.
.j.FiQWO The GSR research, using FFT and au-
tocorrelation to detect the instants at which
subjects are responding to stimuli or becoming
hypnotized, could be applied to electronic in-
terrogation and debriefing techniques. One of
the key factors in Psi experiments is deter-
mining when the Psi subject is reliably re-
porting Psi experiences, and US experimenters
have been using voice tremor analysis and pu-
pil dilation photographs to bracket valid ep-
isodes. The Russians are undoubtedly aware of
this work, and if they are able to develop
very good methods for determining when people
are responding correctly to an interrogation,
they would be able to apply it to non-Psi in-
terviews. The rat telepathy experiments, if
applied to humans, might give them ways of
determining when agents are under stress,
e.g., after they have been arrested. The
dowsing (i.e., biolocation of specific distant
objects such as ships, computers, nuclear
weapons, etc.) would have obvious intelligence
applications if it worked as well as conven-
tional intelligence techniques.
Generally, there
is a problem in getting the Psi subjects to
repeat their work because of emotional
factors--at least in the US.
o'r Summing up, Psi work is still very
nebulous and unpredictable. There is a lot of
doubt about it. In spite of this, the Rus-
sians are openly experimenting in certain
areas where they apparently feel there is an
acceptable theoretical base (e.g., ELF radio
and biolocation), while they reject other
unacceptable Psi effects. They are obviously
keeping up with the work in the US and other
countries. The establishment of a one-man
department in the Academy of Sciences implies
that the established disciplines don't want to
be closely associated with Psi work, but pos-
sibly the Russians feel the experimental
results are too strong to be ignored. The
difficulty Russian scientists are having with
precognition, for which there is no approved
theory, is somewhat comical, but probably no
different from the general attitude in Western
science.
yYj One of the subtle undercurrents of
Targ's visit was his concern about being
arrested, the arbitrary way in which the Rus-
sians made him go to Armenia (as if he had no
more rights than a Soviet citizen), and his
inability to get sufficiently detailed exposi-
tions of the Russian work--in a field in which
he has been a leading researcher for over 20
years-to determine whether anything he was
told was true or false. If he actually does
some joint experiments with the Russians, the
nature of the results and their interpretation
should be interesting.
JAI Another subtle point, noticeable be-
cause it was never mentioned, was the "human
element" of Soviet Psi work. In the US, much
of the current work is in trying to improve
the rapport between the experimenter and his
subjects, trying to find more people with Psi
abilities, and then getting them to cooperate
in Psi experiments. The key to success in US
experiments has apparently been the emotional
factors of getting the Psi subject to feel the
work is important, and also for the experi-
menter himself to be equally committed to the
importance of the work. This of course makes
it difficult to repeat experiments, because
the emotional charge cannot be sustained. On
the basis of Targ's exposition, this matter of
subject cooperation and the emotional com-
ponent of the work did not come up at any
point in the Soviet work.
(U) There is probably food for thought, on
several levels, in this unconventional Soviet
development. What are they up to? What does it
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