Nina Kulagina
A Leningrad woman filmed apparently moving small objects without touching them, the most famous Soviet psychokinesis subject.
1968 CE · 59.94, 30.31 · status: disputed
The account
Soviet scientists studied her through the 1960s and 70s, and black-and-white films of her sliding matches and compass needles circulated in the West. US intelligence took the films as evidence that the USSR was serious about psi. DIA's 1975 survey repeats G. A. Sergeyev's report that in 1970 Kulagina sped up, slowed and then stopped an isolated frog heart in a jar 2.5 feet away, and that she marked film sealed in black envelopes; it presents these as Soviet claims and lists data on her as an intelligence need (p.47-48, p.64). The report used her to argue that 'beneficial' energy transfer could be turned to harm (p.60).
The sceptical view
The films were never made under conditions that excluded threads, magnets or other stage tricks, and Soviet critics accused her of fraud.
Connections in the atlas
- Robert Pavlita's 'psychotronic generators'
- Leonid Vasiliev's Soviet telepathy experiments
- DIA survey: Soviet and Czechoslovakian Parapsychology Research
- SCANATE and the start of remote viewing at SRI