Astronaut Edgar Mitchell
Picture Source: NASA

American Astronaut, Edgar Mitchell, held telepathic experiments between Earth and Apollo 14. He wrote, "My experience exceeded all expectations. It is not now a question of believing or disbelieving in biological bonds. Nowadays the important thing is to perform serious scientific work. For mankind, these experiments may be more significant than space research itself." He said, "We went to the moon as technicians; we returned as humanitarians." Mitchell earned a doctoral degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1973, he founded The Institute of Noetic Sciences to further research the nature of human consciousness. The telepathic experiment which was conducted during the Apollo 14 mission in 1971 proved distance is not a barrier to telepathy. The telepathy experiment was not authorized by the U.S. Government.

Sigmund Freud noticed telepathy so often that he soon had to address it. He termed it a regressive, primitive faculty that was lost in the course of evolution, but which still had the ability to manifest itself under certain conditions. Psychiatrist Carl G. Jung thought it more important. He considered it a function of synchronicity. Psychologist and philosopher William James was very enthusiastic toward telepathy and encouraged more research be put into it.
When the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) was founded in 1885, telepathy became the first psychic phenomenon to be studied scientifically. Simple testing was used. A sender in one room would try to transmit a two-digit number, a taste, or a visual image to a receiver in another room. The French physiologist Charles Richet introduced mathematical chance to the tests, and also discovered that telepathy occurred independent of hypnotism.

Scotland is conducting research which has shown, so far, that people can use thought transference to communicate with each other. At Edinburgh University, experts conducted controlled experiments to see if telepathy is possible. While the experiments are still ongoing, a report was issued suggesting that psychic phenomenon does indeed exist. The experiments are being conducted by Dr. Paul Stevens. Dr. Stevens says, "Our research is not yet complete, but we may have found a significant pattern which we hope will demonstrate psychic ability and the underlying mechanisms responsible for it."The subjects that Dr. Stevens is using are "emotionally close" couples. They are split into groups of "senders" and "receivers".Video clips are shown to the "sender" which are selected at random from a library of 100 and are told to try to telepathically transmit their information to the "receiver" who is in a sound proof room 25 meters down the hall. Next the "receiver" is asked to speak in a stream of consciousness, stating the first thing he thinks of Dr. Stevens states that indeed the first thing his "receivers" talk about are things that are associated to the images being sent by the "senders".It seems a signal is being detected by the "receivers". As proof of this, skin conductance tests show that "receivers" become aroused while receiving.

Quantum leap for telepathy
14.04.38: BRAIN SCIENTISTS have scoffed at the idea of telepathic powers, but new findings from an American study could change their minds. Investigators at Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, have found that parts of the brain obey quantum laws of behavior. 'Quantum theory is about what happens at the subatomic level,' says Stuart Hameroff, professor of quantum consciousness at Arizona University, 'and different laws apply. You get action at a distance. Change one particle of a pair that have been together and the other changes, even though there is no connection between the two. This process could be the basis for telepathy.' The research was aimed at proving the theory that human consciousness emerges from quantum activity in the tiny microtubules that make up the skeleton of individual brain cells. Scientists explored the effects of anesthetic gas on the brains of mice, and found that one of the parts of the microtubules, tubulin, behaved like the 'qubit' used in quantum computing. But skeptics were cautious. 'This doesn't prove anything about human consciousness,' said Professor David Chalmers of the University of California, San Diego. JB

The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) program was established at Princeton University in 1979 by Robert G. Jahn, then Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, to pursue rigorous scientific study of the interaction of human consciousness with sensitive physical devices, systems, and processes common to contemporary engineering practice. Since that time, an interdisciplinary staff of engineers, physicists, psychologists, and humanists has been conducting a comprehensive agenda of experiments and developing complementary theoretical models to enable better understanding of the role of consciousness in the establishment of physical reality.

Professor Douglas Dean of the Newark College of Engineering personally witnessed ESP experiments in Russia. The Russians have demonstrated that PLANTS know rain is coming hours before it happens. They have been able to take photographs of the force lines between two people in telepathic communication. Professor Dean believes that the Russians are years ahead of us in this field.
The "International Journal of Neuropsychology" reported an experiment conducted by Professor Dean where he demonstrated that telepathy can take place even though a person is not aware it is taking place. He proved this by measuring the blood vessels of a person in a room 250 yards away from the "sender".

The Toth incident:

In Moscow on June 11, 1977, Los Angels Times correspondent Robert C. Toth was arrested and detained on a charge of illegally obtaining papers that disclosed "state secrets". The papers had been given to Toth by a Soviet scientist, Valery G. Petukhov.
Toth had first met the Russian biophysicist earlier in the year. While Petukhov seemed eager to show his scientific findings to Toth, the correspondent felt that his work was "only theory and far too complicated" for a newspaper story. Toth reported that, as best as he could recall, Petukhov asserted that certain particles of living cells "are emitted" when such cells divide, that they can be "detected and measured and that these radiating particles can carry information." Their function could "explain the basis for telepathy" and related phenomena. To Toth, Valery Petukhov seemed "like a serious scientist." According to a card he handed the reporter, he was Chief of the Laboratory of Bio-Physics at the State Control Institute of Medical and Biological Research. He had been recommended to Toth by a dissent Soviet scientist who later emigrated. At their first meeting, the Los Angeles Times man told Petukhov that, once the scientists had proved this theory, he would be interested in writing about it.

Months passed. In mid-June 1977 Petukhov phoned Toth. The biophysicist told Toth that his experiments had succeeded. He planned to describe them in a formal scientific paper; but, as Soviet authorities would certainly refuse to publish his work, he wanted to translate the paper into English and give it to Toth for publication in the West. At the rendezvous, Petukhov took a manuscript from his briefcase. It contained over twenty typewritten sheets, complete with charts and photos of charts. It looked like a complex, comprehensive scientific paper, well-documented, appropriately technical.

Toth never managed to get a real look at the paper; for it was at that moment a melodrama began, when a Soviet-made Fiat braked sharply at the curb. The car was filled with five plainclothesmen who jumped out and quite unceremoniously pulled Toth inside. Robert Toth's account stated: "Our car drove through red lights and down one-way streets the wrong way to a militia (police) station. My captors were firm and polite, offering me cigarettes. I was ushered into a room with an inspector who declined my requests to phone the U.S. Embassy but said a Soviet Foreign Ministry official would be called."

In addition to the Foreign Ministry official and a KGB agent, a man named Sparkin, the police inspector summoned a senior researcher of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Professor I.M. Mikhailov. Mikhailov was asked to provide expert testimony on the paper Petukhov had given to Toth, which the police were now treating as "evidence." Specifically, Professor Mikhailov stated: "The article beginning Petukhov, Valery G., from the word of `microorganism self-radiation' to the words `by means of vacuum particles in space' states that within the content of living cells are particles . . . and these particles are grounds for discussing the fundamental problems of biology in the context of biology and parapsychology. There is also information about the uses of such particles. This material is secret and shows the kind of work done in some scientific institutes of our state."

It was this last sentence that raised the eyebrows among observers of Soviet parapsychological studies throughout the world. Earlier, Moscow authorities on various levels had several times denied that parapsychology was being researched in the Soviet Union. A year before, Leningrad writer Vladimir Lvov had published an article in the leading French daily, LE MONDE, in which he asserted categorically: "The truth is simple: parapsychology is not accepted as a legitimate and official branch within Soviet science. No institute or center or research in the Soviet Union is devoted to telepathy, psychokinesis, etc." Yet the Mikhailov testimony in the Toth incident directly contradicted the Lvov statement.

Professor Mikhailov's testimony on the Petukhov paper and Toth's police interrogation at the Pushkin Street Station lasted about two-and-a-half hours. At last, a representative of the US Embassy, Vice Consul Lawrence C. Napper, was permitted to come to the station. The reporter's account of his meeting with Petukhov was read aloud and translated into Russian. But Toth refused to sign a handwritten Russian version of it. The KGB man Sparkin then told him he was "free to go."

Toth's Moscow difficulties were not at an end. The following Tuesday, Toth had a telephone call from another US Embassy official, Theodore McNamara, who asked him to come to the embassy immediately. The matter, he added, was "serious." At McNamara's office, Napper and two other officials were waiting. They handed Toth a Soviet note that had been delivered a half hour earlier. It contained the following passages: "The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is authorized to state the following to the American Embassy: "On the 11th of June of this year Robert Charles Toth was apprehended at the moment of meeting a Soviet citizen, Petukhov Valery Georgiyevich, which took place under suspicious circumstances. When apprehended, the American journalist was found to have materials given to him by Petukhov, containing secret data. "The Ministry of Foreign Affairs informs the American Embassy that in conformity with established procedure, Toth will be summoned for interrogation by the investigatory organs, in connection with which his departure from Moscow until the end of the investigation is not desired."

Within the hour, a polite KGB agent, wearing a flowered shirt and gray suit, arrived, asked Toth to identify himself, and told him to come to the State Security's Lefortovo center for interrogation. He was advised of Articles 108 and 109 of the Criminal code, and that he did not have diplomatic immunity. After two days of confusing interrogation, Toth was told: "Parapsychology as a whole may not be secret information. But there could be fields of science within parapsychology that are secret. It is not for me, as it's a matter for experts, to say what is secret, and what the scientist has stated that the materials you received are a secret. And you received them under circumstances where your behavior and the information seems to be a breach of our law."

After the second interrogation Toth was told that he was no longer needed. The US Embassy received confirmation from the Soviet Foreign Ministry. Toth and his family quickly arranged for a flight to the United States. The Toth incident was reported worldwide, and the WASHINGTON POST and THE NEW YORK TIMES ran accounts of it. The incident then passed into oblivion, and most were none the wiser. But intelligence analysts understood that Toth had gotten into his hand, if only for a few moments, one of the tips of the enormous iceberg of top secret Soviet research into psychic powers of the human mind.

American Fear of Psychic Warfare:

Some years before the Toth incident, American intelligence analysts had begun noticing a Soviet secret police (KGB) trend, shortly after 1967, indicating serious interest in what is called "parapsychology" in the West. This trend began when the KGB's far-flung operations came under the direction of Yuri Andropov, named General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in late 1982. But even the KGB, for all of its experience, large staff, skills, and high-priority status, had not developed a clear-cut policy toward psychic experiments; conflicting attitudes within its leadership appeared to have caused erratic actions. This was well illustrated when agents arrested Toth and thereby revealed that secret research was, in fact, taking place at government institutes.

US government officials were jittery that research in parapsychology might cause them to be accused of spending public funds on science fiction projects. When columnist Jack Anderson reported early in 1981 that a laboratory in the basement of the Pentagon was devoted to parapsychological experiments, his comments were heavy with ridicule and sarcasm. Anderson's assistant, Ron McRae, alleged in an article on "Psychic Warfare" (in THE INVESTIGATOR, October 1981) that "the Pentagon is spending millions on parapsychology in a crash program to end Russia's psycho-superiority." McRae, who was doing research for a book on US government projects in psychic studies, said the US Secret Service had "commissioned studies on ways to protect the President from the Kremlin's mind control." He wrote that its agents, as well as CIA staffs, had been "required to take courses in mind control" at universities in the Washington area, to "prevent them," as he put it, "from falling under the spell of Soviet psychics."
Although such claims at the time bore earmarks of exaggeration, they were none the less indicative of intense American interest in psi warfare possibilities.

But American media accounts of psi warfare spread alarm and amusement, and an ideological battlefield erupted, not only in the United States, but in the Soviet Union also. On the ideological battlefield of international Marxism, the controversy about parapsychology, by whatever name, had gone on for two decades; it showed no signs of abating. Typical of those who regarded psychic studies as ideological heresy was Soviet mathematician-physicist Dr. Alexander Kitaygorodsky, who had categorized clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinesis as "supernatural" and thus outside "the domain of the natural sciences." Writing in the Moscow periodical NAUKA I RELIGIA (Science and Religion), an atheistic magazine, Dr. Kitaygorodsky stated as long ago as March 1966: "To me, there is no doubt whatever that those who relate such fairy tales are frauds, mystificators or, at best, grossly deceived. Men have believed in miracles for centuries, and for centuries there have existed charlatan and impostors, conscious or unconscious. And the struggle against such deception of the human mind has gone on for centuries, and in each century it has to begin anew."

But in the same magazine, science writer Leonid Fillipov took the opposite view and cited Marxist gospel to prove his point. He asked: "Does Professor Kitaygorodsky seriously believe that the frontiers of physics have been reached?" He cited scientific breakthroughs in radioactivity, quantum theory, and lasers, and wrote: "What if telepathic phenomena conform to some new, as yet undiscovered laws which do not contradict already known rules governing electrons?" Fillipov added: "Rejecting a priori the possibilities of telepathy and other processes still unfamiliar to science amounts of rejecting Lenin's idea that, on any given level of scientific development, our knowledge of the work remains incomplete."

But beyond viewing-with-exaggerated-alarm, ridicule-cum-hyperbole and credibility gap lie the realities of psychic functions, for good or ill. To obtain the correct perspective, let us keep in mind that parapsychology can play only a supporting role in the Soviet Union's or any other military-scientific complex. It must, therefore, be seen as one element within a large and diffuse defensive-offensive research apparatus. Psychic elements might well be integrated into, rather than operating separately from, other scientific or military projects.

A major attraction for planners is the promise of financial and organizational shortcuts: Why engage in high-cost armaments, for example, if one or several psychics might influence personnel in the enemy's missile silos, as a DIA report suggested? The costs of military hardware are a heavy burden in national economies in the East as well as in the West -- and ESP is cheap.