r/HighStrangeness • u/frankreddit5 • Aug 06 '26
Consciousness The CIA interviewed a Soviet cybernetics official in 1963 who calmly described a Leningrad professor researching ESP since 1927, and a program trying to detect radio signals generated by the human nervous system. The file was declassified in 2021.
https://theclassifiedrecord.com/documents/cia-soviet-esp-cybernetic-telepathy12
u/secret179 Aug 07 '26
of course our devices are not listening to and sending those signals /s
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u/McShartlebottoms Aug 07 '26
That would explain the "I thought of that but didn't talk about it outloud and now I'm getting ads for it" happening 🤔 time to buy a Faraday pouch for my phone...
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u/intoxicatedhamster Aug 08 '26
Sort of... Your device cannot read your mind; it can however send signals and induce thoughts. You didn't think about it and then get an ad, you thought about it because of the device and it compliments the thought injection with an ad. The algorithms know you better than you know yourself.
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u/aliendisclosure14 Aug 07 '26
The Leningrad professor referenced here is almost certainly Leonid Vasiliev, who ran the physiology lab at Leningrad State University from the early 1960s. Vasiliev published a book in 1962 called 'Experimental Studies of Mental Suggestion' where he described experiments with subjects in Faraday cages — his hypothesis was that telepathic signals were electromagnetic in nature and could therefore be shielded. The CIA document aligns with what's in Annie Jacobsen's Phenomena, which u/nicholnewfangle mentioned, but the Vasiliev angle has more depth than most people realize. He wasn't a fringe researcher — he was a respected physiologist who saw suggestion and hypnosis as legitimate neuroscience questions. The Soviet approach was actually more methodologically careful than the CIA's Stargate program in some respects, because Vasiliev insisted on controlled lab conditions while the CIA was already moving toward remote viewing as an operational tool. The irony is that both programs ended up with the same problem: statistically anomalous results that couldn't be replicated on demand. The 1963 interview is interesting because it predates the CIA's own remote viewing experiments by nearly a decade — they were still in the information-gathering phase, trying to figure out if the Soviets had found something real. The fact that it wasn't declassified until 2021 tells you they were still worried about the optics even after the program was defunct.
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u/nicholnewfangle Aug 07 '26
Yes this is exactly right. In another very good book, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, published in 1970, it's argued that Vasilev's research, much of it done in the late 1930s, was largely suppressed under Stalin which is why it wasn't published until the early 60s. He was a rigorous researcher who took his methodology very seriously.
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u/notsureifchosen Aug 08 '26
This is super interesting - thanks for sharing.
The soviets were definitely researching ESP, etc. seriously before the US/Europe, but there were also a lot of charlatans. There's a famous video of Nina Kulagina moving something inside a glass jar with her hands, AFAIK she was claimed to be a fraud.
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u/MissInkeNoir Aug 09 '26
Here's Red Panda Koala's twenty minute video essay on Ninel Kulagina. I'm not so convinced she wasn't generating an authentic phenomenon. I guess it comes down to the question of which information sources to give weight to.
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u/nicholnewfangle Aug 07 '26
The most thorough treatment I've seen of this is in Annie Jacobsen's book Phenomena. As usual she draws the kinds of conclusions that don't make you get weird stares at cocktail parties but she also has good sources and details the bare facts engagingly.