Leonid Vasiliev's Soviet telepathy experiments
A Leningrad physiologist who ran long-distance 'mental suggestion' experiments and revived Soviet parapsychology around 1960.
1960 CE · 59.94, 30.31 · status: disputed
The account
Vasiliev had worked on telepathy since the 1920s. His 1960s work, and Western rumours of US Navy telepathy tests, helped convince both superpowers that the other side was investing in psi. It became the root of the 'psychotronics' race. DIA's 1975 survey traces Vasiliev's work to Bekhterev's Leningrad Institute for Brain Research, says such experiments were forbidden after 1937, and credits French press rumours of US Navy telepathy tests aboard the submarine Nautilus, which it says were probably mythical, with letting him publish in 1959 and 1962 (p.11, p.21). It reports Soviet psi funding of 20 million rubles in 1973, believed to come mainly from military sources (p.21).
The sceptical view
His results were never independently replicated under tight controls.
Connections in the atlas
- Nina Kulagina
- DIA survey: Soviet and Czechoslovakian Parapsychology Research
- SCANATE and the start of remote viewing at SRI