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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 $1 billion. The Soviets had programs studying how "human energy" could influence other objects and how this energy could be generated independently of humans using a device called 'cerpan'. The Soviets also had a mind control program similar to the CIA's infamous MKULTRA project. Interestingly, the Soviets included non-local physics in this work, such as the Aharonov-Bohm effect in which an electromagnetic field can influence a particle confined to region where the field strength is zero. And they built a number of devices that exploited the effect, although research in this area appears to have ended in 2003."
When man stare at goat man have heart attack.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
We cannot permit an imaginary weapons gap!
These same people also keep talking about all these "benefits" that space technology brings to a society, but when I point out that Russia beat America most of the time no one seems eager to move there. That is also very funny to me.
WWII was the biggest impetus for technology in the 20th century, THEN we went into space.
The program sounds like it had a nutty origin (like the analogous U.S. programs), but from this part:
That sounds like legitimate physics research. Research into the principle of locality is unlikely to produce a mind-controlled teleportation beam, but it has yielded a better understanding of quantum mechanics.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
That commercial you watched last night where the screen changed so often your eyes couldn't focus on it, the deep voice talking with music playing at the same beats per minute as the desired heart rate the advertiser wants, displayed on a screen at 30hz, usually starting off with either a motherly women or a crowd of people looking at you.
MKUltra started that research. Want to learn mind control, go get a masters in motion video or advertising; what they teach is textbook psychological warfare with a domestic application.
Funny thing; once you know it's going on, it doesn't work anymore.
It wasn't really a race at all. The USSR didn't make a massive effort to get there first; they were more interested in space stations. It was hard for their head of space exploration to get funding for moon missions, so they couldn't just brute force the problem like America did.
It's like the missile gap race - pretty much all in America's mind.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
There were "stories" of similar programs run by the CIA back then (and perhaps they are still doing it right now, as we speak), and I saw a documentary back in the 1980's of a soviet man who could sort of "imprint" what he thinks onto a film/negative.
Someone showed the guy a picture (a building) and then he hold a camera and then focus his "energy" into it, and then they took out the negative to develop and the picture that came out was blurry but still you could make out a "shape" of that building.
I am a science nerd, but still things like that really fascinate me to no end.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
One to indicate whether the dollar amount is inflation adjusted or not. I Imagine a $ with an arrow hat on the | So it's an up arrow and an S. That will work for talking about historical figures in current day.
There is another problem though that is wanting to work backward, either by date or rate. So I would suggest the arrowed $, number and a divisor $14.7m/3.5 this would indicate to divide 14.7 by 3.5 to get the original dollar amount.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
How do you know it's nutty pseudoscience before you perform the experiments? It seems to me that performing the experiments and testing hypotheses is science, but dismissing an idea as nutty without performing an experiment is pseudoscience. It's belief without evidence that makes something pseudoscience, even if it's believing an idea is nutty.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
It was a race. It is quite well known that the USSR build several rockets designed for moon launches (hence why they put a rover on the moon), but support dwindled after the U.S. landed humans, and the USSR refocused its efforts on space stations and abandoned their landing craft after the fact.
The difference between the USSR and the US was that NASA acted in public, while the USSR performed all development and launches in secret, so that they could publicize the successes and hide the failures. This strategy allowed them to save face whenever their program was inferior to their competitor.
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Well said. Many people seem to think that everything has been discovered.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
If you run 20 bullshit double blind experiments, 10 of them are going to show positive correlation to the hypothesis, and 1 will show improbably high correlation. Far more still if your testers have any unconscious control over the data.
"Surely spending that kind of money on such a project had some merit, or it wouldn't have cost so much"
You've never studied history or held a job at a corporation, have you? Spending millions, billions, trillions on meritless projects is what any entity large enough to have that kind of money *does*. Constantly. Continuously. All the time.
The division I work(ed) for was just bought by another company, because they wanted to integrate our software and acquired expertise. The buyer, having spent this money, announced all employees would need to re-apply for their existing jobs, which is only a little silly, and also all relocate, which is a LOT silly, since all of us worked remotely, and many of us couldn't relocate even if we wanted to. So, pretty much, they just lost all the accumulated knowledge they just paid for, and what they've got is tens of thousands of lines of mostly undocumented code that's virtually impossible to maintain or understand without spending months stepping through it. (It was developed over a decade by dozens of transient programmers, and in-line documentation varies from "sparse" to "actually false".)
Multiply that little bit of stupidity by tens of thousands of corporations and hundreds of world governments, and you have the world we live in.
Because it's been rebuked by research. Conducting that research, however, is what science is all about: test claims to see if they're correct.
Heck, you could do parapsychology research today and, as long as it's properly conducted, it would be science. It's unlike such experiment would do more than confirm what's already known, but that doesn't make it "mumbo jumbo".
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
You're right. NASA should totally fund an expedition to disprove the existence of the magical pink unicorn that many people have theorized lives on the dark side of the moon. Point being: yes, experiment, but sometimes even the decision to pursue a particular avenue of investigation is questionable.
Ingo Swann has a nice little website about his involvement with the US Remote Viewing program. I saw the man speak in Las Vegas twice - 2004 and 2006 (I think I personally drove him into retirement - he is now deceased). The first time was just a Q&A, the second he had prepared some remarks. The program was started as a threat analysis - "the soviets are spending all this money on psychic spying, tee hee har har what a bunch of fucking idiots. BUT WHAT IF IT WORKS?" So they had to create a program to evaluate the possibility that information can be obtained bioinformatically - through the aether, so to speak.
Mr. Swann said that he did not do public remote viewing "demonstrations", and only ever worked with scientists.
It seems to me that performing the experiments and testing hypotheses is science, but dismissing an idea as nutty without performing an experiment is pseudoscience. It's belief without evidence that makes something pseudoscience, even if it's believing an idea is nutty.
Mr. Swann said that because the spooks hated the remote viewing program, they had to get positive results right from the start. It lasted for over 20 years, and was killed as soon as possible when the Soviet Union broke up.
But if NASA weren't already going there, would it be worth spending a couple billion to investigate the pink unicorn? Probably not. That's what the soviets did.
Parapsychology has a lot of problems from a reproducible experiment POV, but many of them are due to a complete lack of theory as to how a possible mechanism for a given extra-sensory phenomenon might work. Without a working theory, how do you develop an experiment to test it?
Couple of examples to illustrate the difficulties:
I am an ancient experimenter. I have lots of black rocks. One or two of the black rocks attract one another, but the vast majority do not. (the ones that do are lodestones, natural magnets) I publish a paper saying that some black rocks attract one another. Other experimenters get black rocks and cannot reproduce my experiment. Jamius Randius says I'm a fake, and even when I demonstrate black rocks that attract one another, says I am a huckster. An investigating committee bangs my black rocks together, making them lose their magnetism, so even I cannot make them attract anymore. I lose my patron, and rocks that attract one another is branded pseudo-science.
Other experimenters try this out with other black rocks, but so few have successful results that future researchers need to depend on meta-analysis of thousands of experiments to get possibly statistically meaningful results. Statistics is hard, so the research descends into sniping about statistical techniques. (See http://therandomtexan.wordpress.com/2013/11/14/the-beginning-of-the-end-for-5/ for recent discussions about how p values are too loose across many disciplines.)
Second example closer to home in parapsychology. There are thought experiments proposing that all ESP related phenomena like remote viewing or telepathy may just be specific cases of precognition, since validating experimental results involves knowing the outcome at some point in the future.
Last idea: Since parapsychological phenomena (whether 'real' or not) involve people and effects at a distance, how to ensure the experimenter is not having an effect on the experiment. This is one idea behind the 'sheep/goat' effect in parapsychology (other explanation is that all sheep are cheating and all goats are honest experimenters)
it's a really interesting field that rewards study, just in terms of figuring out how to create good experiments in such a vacuum. Govt. research and specifically application to gathering intelligence has always been saddled with extremely low reproducibility but occasional spectacular successes.
Yes, it really would. At one point just about every major piece of technology and science we have today would have been considered supernatural/metaphysical. Given the abundance of anecdotal evidence of "parapsychological" effects, it is completely reasonable to perform controlled experiments in order to evaluate whether those effects can be reproduced. That is the very nature of science.
It is also completely reasonable and scientific to periodically continue to perform those experiments as our tools and understanding grow, and to continue to ensure that the earlier falsification was justified and correct.
. If you're willing to entertain anything more than that then you're dealing with quasi-claims for which no amount of evidence can be used to substantiate or disprove them.
String theory?
Drinking habits can be dangerous. You can choke on the cloth and the nuns will wonder where their clothes are.
Good points. But I would counter that we don't understand what consciousness really is. And we know that simply observing an experiment can change the outcome. We don't know why that is either, AFAIK. Further, we know that one's mental state can affect one's health and/or physiology. So it seems that consciousness and attention can have effects in the physical world, the mechanism of which we cannot explain.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
we know that simply observing an experiment can change the outcome. We don't know why that is either, AFAIK ... So it seems that consciousness and attention can have effects in the physical world, the mechanism of which we cannot explain.
We most certainly *do* know why observation affects an experiment. It's the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in action - if you make a measurement of the state of a system, that variable is known to some degree of precision. Its conjugate variable is thus made uncertain to a degree prescribed by the uncertainty principle. This has nothing to do with consciousness or a living observer.
A simple double-slit experiment works because of the uncertainty in the position of the particle. The wavefunction interferes with itself as it comes out of both slits and affects the possible positions it can be observed at on the detector. If you measure whether the particle passes through one of the slits, it's position is no longer uncertain, the wavefunction changes, and the experiment reflects that. This is well-understood quantum mechanics, although the popular press likes to pretend we don't know anything about it. And yes, IAAP (I am a physicist).
I would rather be killed by a terrorist than enslaved by my government.