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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!
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.
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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.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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)
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.
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.