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

sounds like the money wasn't all wasted

[Trepidity]

The program sounds like it had a nutty origin (like the analogous U.S. programs), but from this part:

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.

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.

Re:Seems reasonable enough.

[Sarten-X]

The big risk of a diversion campaign like that is if the imaginary technology turns out to be real... then we've just inspired our enemies to perfect it, while we've wasted our time.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[Anonymous Coward]

But in Soviet Russia, goats stare at you.

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

[bunratty]

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.