Soviet Union Spent $1 Billion On "Psychotronic" Arms Race With the US

KentuckyFC writes "During the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union battled on many fronts to demonstrate their superior technical and scientific achievements. While the race to put a human in space and then on the Moon is famous, a much less well-known battlefront was the unconventional science of parapsychology, or psychotronics as the Soviets called it. Now a new review of unconventional research in the Soviet Union reveals the scale of this work for the first time and the cost: as much as $1 billion. The Soviets had programs studying how "human energy" could influence other objects and how this energy could be generated independently of humans using a device called 'cerpan'. The Soviets also had a mind control program similar to the CIA's infamous MKULTRA project. Interestingly, the Soviets included non-local physics in this work, such as the Aharonov-Bohm effect in which an electromagnetic field can influence a particle confined to region where the field strength is zero. And they built a number of devices that exploited the effect, although research in this area appears to have ended in 2003."

Comments

In Soviet Russia

[MRe_nl]

When man stare at goat man have heart attack.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[Anonymous Coward]

But in Soviet Russia, goats stare at you.

this article doesn't have enough posts yet...

[buddyglass]

I guess this goes to show you don't need religion to believe in nutty pseudoscience.

Seems reasonable enough.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

We cannot permit an imaginary weapons gap!