SOVIET RESEARCH
SOVIET PSYCHOTRONICS
Appendix
Centers of USSR Parapsychology Studies
Following is a list of research institutes in the Soviet Union that have been reported as being engaged, or as having been engaged in studies related to parapsychology.
A.S. Popov All-Union Scientific and Technical Society of Radio Technology and Electrical Engineering, Moscow; Laboratory of Bio-Information, 1965-1975; Laboratory of Bio-Energetics, established 1978.
Scientific Research Institute of General and Educational Psychology, USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, Moscow. Baumann Institute of Advanced Technology, Moscow; Laboratory of Dr. Wagner. Institute of Energetics, Moscow; Laboratory of Dr. Sokolov. Moscow State University; Laboratory of Prof. Kholodov. State Instrument Engineering College, Department of Physics, Moscow. Moscow Institute of Aviation. I.V. Pavlov Institute, Moscow. Institute of Reflexology, Moscow. Moscow University, Department of Theoretical Physics. Department of Geology, Moscow State University. Interdepartmental Commission for Coordination of Study on the Biophysical Effect, Moscow (dowsing research). Adjunct Laboratory of Medical and Biological Problems, Moscow. University of Leningrad, Laboratory on the Physiology of Labor; Department of Physiology, Laboratory of Biological Cybernetics. A.A. Uktomskii Physiological Institute, Leningrad. Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, Department of Cybernetics. University of Leningrad, Bekhterev Brain Institute. Research Institute of Psychology, Ukrainian SSR Academy of Sciences. Institute of Problems of Information Transmission of the USSR Academy of Science, Moscow. Pulkovo Observatory, Leningrad. Filatov Institute, Laboratory of the Physiology of Vision, Odessa. Scientific-Industrial Unit “Quantum,” Krasnodar. State University of Georgia, Tbiblisi (Tiflis). Kazakhstan State University, Alma Ata, Kazakhstan. Institute of Cybernetics of the Ukrainian SSR, Kiev. Institute of Clinical Physiology, Kiev. Scientific Research Institute of Biophysics, Department of Cybernetics, Puschino. Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology, Kharkov. Institute of Automation and Electricity, Special Department No. 8, Siberian Academy of Science (1965-1969), Novosibirsk. Institute of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, Novosibirsk.
Parapsychology: Fiction Or Reality?
(W.P. Zinchenko, A.N. Leontiev, B.M. Lomov, and A.R. Luria)
The transition of Soviet parapsychology from the relatively open decade that began in I960 to more restricted operations in the field was signaled by four leading psychologists in the Moscow journal Questions in Philosophy (No. 9, September 1973). Western parapsychologists generally assumed that the article was based on research and a first draft complied by Professor Zinchenko. The paper gained prestige through the participation of Professor A. R. Luria (1902-1977), whose original experiments and writings gained worldwide attention during his lifetime. The paper argued that parapsychological studies should be taken out of the hands of self-styled specialists, whom the authors obviously regarded as nonscientific amateurs. Future research, they suggested, should be undertaken by professionals, so that “the attention of serious scientific organizations” would be directed toward “unanswered questions of the human psyche. “
The question stated in the title of this article has been discussed for many decades in the scientific and popular literature of the entire world. Long periods of silence have alternated with a flood of reports on some paranormal phenomena. The authors of this article do not count themselves among the many specialists in parapsychology. We were compelled to write it by the increasing number of publications (mostly in popular science periodicals), here and abroad, concerning the observations and investigations of subjects possessing paranormal abilities. It should be noted that an overwhelming number of these publications are by journalists and only in a few isolated cases by professional scientists, among them psychologists and physiologists. These publications are frequently of a promotional nature and do not meet generally accepted requirements of accurate scientific investigation, but have nevertheless been received sympathetically by scientists in different disciplines. We are not even speaking of the common mass reader. A good indication, relevant to this point, are the results of a survey conducted in 1972 by the editors of the English journal New Scientist and published the following January. About 70 percent of the 1,500 scientists who answered the journal’s questionnaire (out of a total of 72,000 questionnaires that were sent out), considered paranormal phenomena either as firmly established fact (25 percent) or as entirely possible (42 percent). (1)
Similar data which would characterize the attitude of Soviet scientists to this problem are not available to us, but the numerous irresponsible publications are a cause for justifiable alarm. It therefore seems to us that it is time to express the attitude of the Association of Psychologists of the USSR toward parapsychology, whose status was considered at one of the meetings of the Association’s Presidium.
1. The Area Of Parapsychological Investigations
In the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, parapsychology is defined as the area of investigation studying, primarily: (1) forms of sensitivity offering means of receiving information which cannot be explained by the actions of known sense organs; (2) corresponding forms of influence of a living being on physical phenomena, taking place outside the organism, without the intermediate aid of muscles (by desire, thought induction, etc).
The majority of contemporary parapsychologists recognize the following kinds of sensitivities:
Telepathy: Mutual thought communication between inductor and recipient. Through it two people exchange information without the participation of sense organs. Basically, telepathy is sensing the state of another live organism.
Clairvoyance: This also is an extra- or supersensory perception of certain occurrences, events, objects; the communication of information without participation of known sense organs.
Precognition (Proscopy): A special case of clairvoyance: the prediction of events based on information received from the future and which cannot be arrived at by reasoning.
Dowsing (also called Bio-Physical Effect): Based on the claim that some individuals are supposed to be able to discover accumulations of subterranean water, ore, caves, and certain other objects with the aid of an antenna (bent wire or twig, etc.).
Paradiagnosis: Establishment of medical diagnosis based on clairvoyance, without patient contact.
The forms of sensitivity listed above are frequently grouped together under the term “extrasensory perception” (ESP).
There are separate classifications of forms of influencing physical events.
Psychokinesis: Mental influence of a person on surrounding objects: for example, on the normal electric activity in growth; on spatial position of different objects (not too heavy, as a rule).
Mental Photography: A special case of psychokinesis; it consists of a man’s ability, by looking into the lens of a camera, to imprint on the film the image of an object which he visualizes (but which in reality is absent).
Paramedicine: An area close to parapsychology, which includes various unexplained methods of treatment: laying-on-of-hands, mental induction (without use of speech and without direct contact, at times at great distance), and others.
All the occurrences listed above are united by the term “parapsychology.” Other terms used are: “psychotronic,” “bio-information,” “bio-introscopy,” etc. In the past, hypnotic events were mistakenly included in parapsychology. At present, hypnosis is used in parapsychology as one means to induce certain paranormal events. Teaching of Yoga is also mistakenly included here. Sometimes even astrology.
As is evident from the above statements, various areas are combined into one, because of the mystery and puzzlement caused by the occurrences studied. However, it is wrong in principle to consider such a basis sufficient for grouping these occurrences into a separate field of scientific investigation.
2. Brief Historical Review And Status Of Parapsychology Abroad
We shall not review in this article the paranormal abilities long ascribed to shamans, sorcerers, lamas, yogis, etc. Parapsychology, as a method of systematic experimental observations and investigations, appeared in European culture in 1882 when the first parapsychological association was organized in London, and which still exists. It is called the Society for Psychical Research. Since then, numerous similar organizations have been formed and dissolved in many countries. At present there exist a few dozen similar associations, in most cases nonprofessional and with small memberships. As a rule, these groups maintain small laboratories supported by members or by special funds. Many of these organizations are affiliates of the “International Parapsychology Association.”
Parapsychological research is carried out on a small scale at a number of universities (usually private) in the USA and in other centers of scientific research. According to unofficial sources, the expenditures of the US federal government on parapsychological research amount to half a million dollars annually. Some large corporations also provide financial support for these investigations. One example of the new organizations is the recently formed corporation of Edgar Mitchell, the US astronaut who conducted four experiments in telepathic communication during his trip to the Moon (no significant results were obtained).
The task of this corporation is development of human abilities, investigations in the area of paramedicine and psychokinesis. Mitchell hopes to make his corporation self-supporting. Among consultants of the corporation are the well-known Werner von Braun and a few scientists from relatively well regarded research centers. In the USA there also exists the “Academy of Parapsychology and Medicine” (California).
According to a count made by parapsychologists there are over 240 laboratories and associations in 30 countries. This estimate is obviously somewhat high. The majority of these organizations are in the United States. In 1969 the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which includes different scientific societies, accepted the Parapsychological Association as a member.
From time to time, separate and, as a rule, limited scientific research projects of parapsychological interest are carried out at commercial corporations in the United States. Computer technology is utilized in carrying out investigations in these labs. Their research is directed toward establishing the existence of ESP.
3. Publications Abroad
Parapsychological observations, as a rule, are published in specialized journals appearing in a number of countries. In the USA their number exceeds ten; in England, five; in Italy, six; in France, two. Some of them include both parapsychology and astrology. There are also journals in other European countries and Japan. In addition, different scientific publishing houses publish a large number of monographs, summaries of conferences and symposia.
Articles on parapsychology, particularly when of sensational nature, are highlighted in publications of the type of Life, Look, Stem [Germany], and sometimes even in such well-established scientific journals as Science, Nature, and others.
Scientific journals in the fields of psychology, physiology, and other sciences do not as a rule publish reports of parapsychological investigations. Between 1960 and 1970 in all scientific psychology journals of the world there were published, all in all, 13 parapsychological research reports. Of these, 8 cases reported positive results; in others the existence of paranormal events was not confirmed. It is interesting that, during the same period, parapsychological journals of the world published 143 experimental observations with positive and 19 with negative results.
Reviews, criticisms, and accounts of uncontrolled investigations are not included in the above totals. (2) Numerous textbooks and teaching aids for conducting parapsychological research were published. The last textbook, by R. Ashby, came out in 1972. (3) The International Association of Scientific Psychology does not allow presentation of papers or lectures on parapsychological research at its congresses. This is included in its bylaws. Apparently by chance, an exception was made at the Twentieth International Psychological Congress (Tokyo, 1972), where a lecture by American parapsychologist S. Krippner was heard.
While on the topic of publications, one must mention some of the political speculations on parapsychology. We have in mind first of all the book by S. Ostrander and L. Schroeder, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain. The book was written in 1968 as a result of the authors’ visit to the USSR, NRB [Bulgaria] and ChSSR [Czechoslovakia]. The authors (nonscientists) have written a low-level text of the promotional variety. In it, parapsychology serves as advertisement for anti-Sovietism, and vice-versa. These methods proved commercially successful, and in less than a year the book went through five printings.
The book, written on a very low professional level, overflows with factual errors, mistakes, and undisguised anti-Soviet thrusts. The book excessively exaggerates the “accomplishments” of our parapsychologists. One encounters similar exaggerations quite frequently in the West, particularly in parapsychological and popular publications (more often without the open anti-Soviet accompaniment). One sees speculations frequently on the following subjects: parapsychology and defense, psychological warfare, espionage, etc. All this simultaneously serves to drum up additional funds for parapsychological research. In general, such books are, nevertheless, few in parapsychological literature.
4. Parapsychology In The USSR
In the early 1920s Professor L.L. Vasiliev conducted research on telepathy and clairvoyance, at first with the participation of academician V.M. Bekhterev whose student he was at that time in Leningrad. (4) Similar research was conducted by B. B. Kazhinsky in the Ukraine. Results of these investigations were published by the authors in three monographs, which appeared in 1959 and 1962.
There is no organization uniting parapsychologists in the Soviet Union. Enthusiastic students of these or similar phenomena occasionally form sections within other technic-scientific organizations. A section on bioinformation was established in 1965 by staff members of the A.S. Popov Technic-Scientific Society of Radiotechnology and Electroncommunication in Moscow. The group’s main area of investigation is telepathy.
In 1967 a Pan-Union Section of Technical Parapsychology and Biointroscopy was organized at the Central Administration of the Science-Technology Society of the Instrument-Manufacturing industry. Within the framework of this society two science-technology seminars were conducted in 1968 and 1971 on Bio-physical Effects (twig-conductivity) [dowsing]. In 1971 the Inter-science Commission for the Coordination of Projects on the Problem of Biophysical Effects was elected. There are also some small groups, or separate individuals, working in different institutions, or at teaching-research centers, who during their working time or their free time carry on observations and investigations of parapsychological effects.
For a number of years, in Nizhniy Tagil and other cities in the Ural, an investigation was conducted of “skin vision” (the so-called Rosa Kuleshova effect), which at times is grouped with parapsychological occurrences but in reality has nothing in common with them. Reports of results of numerous inspections, analogous cases observed abroad and quite recently in Moscow, give grounds for concluding that this phenomenon – that is, “skin vision” – really exists and calls for careful study. However, so far it would be difficult to make any definite conclusions about its mechanism.
5. Publications In The USSR
Usually matters related to parapsychology are printed in thesis collections and reports of different conferences and symposia. Thus, for example, in 1972 five lectures related to telekinesis were published in a collection of materials of the conferences “Some Questions on Biodynamics and Bioenergetics of the Organism in Health and Pathology; Bio-stimulation by Laser Beams,” held at the Kazakh University. Soviet parapsychologists sometimes publish their work in technical journals (for example, Radio technology), but mostly in popular science and mass magazines (most often youth magazines), and in newspapers. As a rule, these are announcements of work done abroad.
Many publications are prepared by journalists who, with their characteristic inclination to exaggeration and sensationalism, at times turn assumed results of experiments into supposedly authentic ones. The number of such publications is very high. It is sufficient to point out magazines such as Technology – Youth, Young Naturalist, Knowledge – Strength. In 1973, even Social Industry took a stand on many occasions. Then, also, popular publications as a rule pay no attention to published negative responses of specialists.
Soviet and foreign publications are characterized by exaggerations of results on both sides. Thus, going by reports in the American press, in 1966 in the Soviet Union telepathic experiments were organized and carried out over long distances – Moscow-Novosibirsk, Moscow-Leningrad – supposedly producing credible positive results, which obviously is fiction. On the other hand, it was reported in Komsomolskaya Pravda that during the telepathic experiments on the Apollo 14 mission, positive results were obtained.
Edgar Mitchell, who organized and participated in these experiments, wrote that they were of an exploratory nature, that negative results were obtained, and, what’s more, that the number of successes was much below that predicted by the theory of probability. (The last would deserve some attention were it not for Mitchell’s statement about the promotional nature of the experiments.)
During the last decade, no fewer than five hundred articles published in the USSR dealt with different questions of parapsychology. Mostly these were poor reports of badly constructed “experiments” deserving no attention. Their authors did not check on the requirements for correctness of the experiments, which were formulated by parapsychologists themselves. N. Kulagina, the universal object of telepathic and psychokinetic investigations, has attracted particularly great attention in our press.
6. Who Are The Parapsychologists?
The majority of parapsychologists have neither a biological nor a psychological education. Among them are considerably more representatives of the exact sciences – engineers, mathematicians, physicists – who, as a rule, do not have any psychological training. Very frequently within the last decade, specialists from these disciplines have switched over to work in medical, psychological and physiological institutions (without sufficient backgrounds). Then, some of them want to quickly investigate the most mysterious and most interesting aspects. As a rule, these are people qualified in their own fields, but not in psychology, who had a chance to observe some “puzzling” psychological events, or who became victims of charlatan tricks.
Frequently these specialists may have quite legitimate motivations: for example, to find some new type of connection that would make possible the transfer of important information (telepathy); to find a new kind of energy, so as to influence from a distance the detonator of some installation (psychokinesis), etc. Strange as it may sound, some of these scientists often exhibit a childlike trust and innocence.
Occasionally one meets, among parapsychologists, psychiatrists and physicians of other specialties who in their practice, more often than others, have a chance to observe inexplicable anomalies. There is also the category of rather clever, skillful people who have no formal education. They are the ones who play the part of impresarios and promoters of those who really have some kind of unusual abilities. And it is precisely these people who demand recognition of parapsychology as a separate independent science.
Thus, among parapsychologists and their supporters there are charlatans as well as entirely serious specialists, who must be protected from scientifically irresponsible characters who exploit these specialists for their own ends.
The subjects of psychological investigation are, as a rule, neurotics who have increased sensitivities, and in a number of cases are simply sick people. For example, it can be shown that in people with “skin vision” there is distinctly pathological heightening of excitability of the midbrain, hysteria, etc.
7. Parapsychological Methods
In the first decades of its existence, parapsychology was using rather primitive methods of investigation and demonstration, such as card guessing, dream or thought induction, etc. Distrust and disclosures forced parapsychologists to look for new means of demonstration.
The influx of engineers and physicists had a great influence on methods of investigation. They brought to parapsychology their own methods, assuming that the human brain functions as an electronic machine and that it is possible to transfer concepts from corresponding branches of physics for its study. Contemporary parapsychology thus utilizes a number of newer techniques, particularly from computer and laser technology. Many spokesmen of parapsychology mistakenly believe that the paranormal occurrences that they study are common physical occurrences based on electromagnetic radiation and that, in spite of its insignificant quantity, this energy can be calculated and measured.
The study and the measurement of electromagnetic fields, known under different names (bioplasmas electroaurogram, biopotential, etc.) are continued jointly with various traditional methods of investigation (for example, guessing one out of five Zener cards, induction at a distance, movement of an object without contact).
Instrumental methods for the evaluation of functional states of an individual, including the newest methods, were sufficiently developed in the framework of parapsychology; for example, the Kirlian effect (photography of live tissues in high-frequency currents) was used by parapsychologists sooner than by physiologists or psychologists. Some special methods of investigation being developed by parapsychology, though not revealing the nature of parapsychological phenomena, sometimes prove to be useful to psychophysiology and experimental psychology.
Instrumental methods of parapsychology are also being perfected.
Ten years ago L. L. Vasiliev wrote about experiments with a “free material,” where the experimenter tries to find out something about an object [telepathically] from a multitude of possible objects unknown to him at the time of the experiment: “The unavoidable defect of similar experiments lies in the fact that their evaluation is entirely subjective, and it is doubtful whether the subjectivity can be removed.” (5)
Since then, a method has been developed to analyze the results with the help of “judges” who know what was “perceived,” know also what could have been sent out, and from the “perceived” try to find out what really was sent out. When this turns out to be possible, it proves the existence of a channel of communication-contact between the points of induction and reception. M.M. Bonhard and M.S. Smirnov have written about these and some other indispensable and useful methods in an article dedicated to requirements for a “telepathic” experiment. (6)
8. Credibility Problem In Parapsychological Investigations
The history of parapsychology is a history of revelations that at times have attracted the participation of scientists of world renown, such as D. I. Mendeleyev, American physicist Robert Wood, etc. This naturally evoked and evokes the distrust and annoyance of specialists because investigation reveals too many cases of simple mystification and cheating during parapsychological experiments. The second reason for distrust is the inability to reproduce paranormal occurrences; that is, they do not meet the requirements of credibility as scientific facts.
This irreproducibility is explained by the difficulty in setting up the experiments, due primarily to the peculiar nature of parapsychological phenomena. They appear under special conditions and it is difficult to induce them in life. According to descriptions by parapsychologists, such occurrences are very elusive and unstable, and disappear whenever some inner or outer condition appears to be unfavorable to them. The opinion is also stated that even when favorable conditions can be maintained, it is impossible to retain, for any length of time, the state in which appearance of parapsychological phenomena is possible.
Herein lies the main contradiction and main difficulty in interpreting parapsychological phenomena. Parapsychological literature is filled with supersensational descriptions, something like Ted Serios’s ability (experimenter: Professor Eisenbud, USA), while on the Soviet-Turkish border, to visualize and then to photograph with his eyes Soviet missile installations!
In some cases professional circus performers, illusionists in particular, have been invited as experts to parapsychological experiments to show similar tricks. In general, parapsychology has produced a great many anti-parapsychological methods and means of demystification. Specialists of great experience in this field are also found in the Soviet Union. However, none of the disclosures have any effect on parapsychologists who are True Believers. As in religion, in parapsychology faith is more aggressive than facts. The truly aggressive effort to propagandize paranormal events, the sensationalism and promotions of other kinds or type, are connected with this faith.
Here is an appropriate quotation of Hansel, author of a highly critical book on parapsychology published in 1970 in the USSR: “One cannot declare categorically that results of these experiments are explainable by cheating, but neither can one think … that these experiments give conclusive proof of extrasensory perception.” (7)
Apparently some of the so-called parapsychological phenomena really exist. However, recognition of their existence is hindered by uncertainty about the channel for transmission of information or influence. Major hopes and efforts are now concentrated in the study of the electromagnetic field, of organisms as a means for biological contact and as information carriers. These investigations are carried out on insects, animals, and man, but in recent years many authorities, at least outwardly, have not associated their work with parapsychology. So far, no physical basis for these occurrences has been demonstrated. Many parapsychologists see the reason for this in the fact that major sciences are not involved in the phenomena they study.
To us it appears that the fault is mostly with the parapsychologists themselves, who have done much to set themselves apart, outside of science.
9. Brief Summaries
Among phenomena included in parapsychology one should distinguish between the “supernatural” phenomena imagined and promoted by mystics and charlatans, and those that really exist but that so far have not received satisfactory scientific psychological or physical explanation. The first call for disclosure and demystification. The study of the latter must be continued in related scientific institutions – psychological, physiological, biophysical, medical, and others.
The manner in which universal parapsychological opinions are spread now, too often taking on the form of promotion, objectively has a negative effect, feeding unstable elements searching for a scientifically inaccessible, mysterious origin.
Analysis of the status of so-called parapsychology shows that it is badly hampered by anti-scientific concepts and to a high degree has become an area of activity by so-called “specialists.” Some of them have declared themselves to be leaders and participants in organizations that never even existed in our country, for example, “The Institute of Technical Parapsychology.” It is essential to curtail the activity of the little-qualified and militant parapsy-
chologists who have taken upon themselves the voluntary and not at all unprofitable function of propaganda, giving numerous lectures on parapsychology, even before scientific audiences. These lectures are in fact, irresponsible mixtures of mythology and reality. The uncritical attitude toward parapsychology of some serious scientists can be explained by positivistic carelessness toward scientific theory and methodology. There are no valid grounds for the existence of parapsychology as a separate science, since the only thing unifying parapsychologists is the mystery and inexplicableness of the occurrences they study.
Also impermissible, it seems to us, is the practice of publication in papers, magazines, and the popular press of sensational, scientifically unfounded material on parapsychology. For some reason there is, in this particular field, a disregard of the tradition usually observed by self-respecting scientists: Serious scientific achievements are first published in special scientific literature, and only then in popular periodicals.
There is today a definite need to organize the scientific research work into areas of real occurrences described in parapsychology. Since many investigations in parapsychology are carried out by physicists and engineers, it would be expedient to evaluate the direction and scientific level of the study of the biophysical effect and electromagnetic fields generated by live organisms as possible means of biological connection, as well as a number of other phenomena, and to do it at the Institute of Biophysics, Academy of Sciences, USSR, and at the Institute for Problems of Information Transmission, Academy of Sciences, USSR. Reviewing them from the standpoint of biophysics and communications theory may help to demystify these phenomena.
Psychological Institutes of the Academy of Sciences and other psychological institutions should also review the possibility of strict scientific investigations of these phenomena. It obviously would be expedient to organize, within the structure of one of the psychological institutions, a laboratory for the study of individuals who possess unusual abilities (and not necessarily only of a paranormal nature). Results of these investigations should obviously, after careful examination, be published in scientific literature (and only then in popular literature).
It seems to us that the attention of serious scientific organizations to the phenomena described in parapsychology will help reveal their true nature, will block the road to charlatans who are counting on the general public’s quite natural curiosity about the unanswered secrets of the human psyche, and will dispel the myth of existence of a “parapsychological movement” in the USSR.
References
1. New Scientist (London), January 25, 1973. Analysis of a survey conducted by Dr. Christopher Evans.
2. M Billig “Positive and Negative Experimental Psi Results in Psychology and Para-psyology.” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (London). Vol. 46, No. 753,
3. Robert H. Ashby. The Guidebook for the Study of Psychical Research. New York: S. Weiser,
4. L.L Vasiliev. Mysterious, Phenomena of the Human Psyche, 2nd ed. Moscow, 1963. 5. Ibid., pp. 134-135.
6. M M Bonharda and M.S. Smirnov. “The Telepath, Experiment: Necessary Requirements.” Nauka i Zhizh (Science and Life), No 12, 1967. 7. C.E.M. Hansel. Parapsychology. Mir (Moscow), 1970, p. 295. [See U.S. edition, ESP: Scientific Evaluation. New York: Scribner's, 1966.]
~~~~
Naumov, In His Own Defense
Edward K. Naumov
The following is a translation of a letter of appeal, addressed by the Moscow parapsychologist Edward K. Naumov (see Chapter 5, “The Tragedy of Edward Naumov”) to the Department of Science of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR on May 11, 1974. At that time, Naumov had been tried on various charges growing out of his parapsychological activities. He was subsequently sentenced to two years in a labor camp, although he was freed in 1975 after serving approximately one year of his sentence.
Mr. Naumov’s open letter, which he circulated among friends and colleagues under the title “Open the Way to New Ideas!,” represents a defense against the accusations made against him by what he describes as “the investigative organs” of the KGB, the State Security agency, as well as the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). At the same time, he mentions that the KGB’s own Department of Technical Control provided a film showing his illustrated lectures as evidence. This text is based on a translation provided by the Washington Research Center, San Francisco.
Abbreviations and acronyms used by Mr. Naumov may be defined as follows: NII are the Russian initials of “Scientific Research Institute;” “Introskopii” stands for the study of the interior of non-transparent entities and may refer to techniques as diverse as infrared photography and clairvoyance; “Bwintroskopii” is the biological approach to the preceding concept; NIR means “research work” in a general sense; VUZ refers to Higher Education and VUZakh refers to college graduates; MGU are the Russian initials for the Moscow State University, MIFI refers to the Moscow Institute of Physical Engineering; MFTI stands for the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology; and VNIIIMT are the Russian initials for the All-Union Research Institute for Medical Technology.
Present circumstances compel me to address the following appeal to you.
I have given more than ten years of my life to the study of parapsychology. I had hoped to follow in the footsteps of my teachers, Professors L. L. Vasiliev and B. B. Kazhinsky. I placed great significance in attracting the scientific community to parapsychology. In 1965 I was one of the organizers of the Bioinformat on section of the the A. S. Popov Society of Radiotechnics and Electrocommunications.
Within the section for which I was responsible, various experimental research projects were planned and conducted. The findings were frequently published in the Soviet and foreign press. Several seminars, symposia, and conferences were held. And in 1967, with the support of the Director of Nil Introskopii, Professor P.K. Oshchepkov, I was an organizer and Chairman of the All-Union Section of Technical Parapsychology and Biointroskopii. For the first time in our country, two All-Union seminars were held on the problem of biophysical effects. As a result of the meeting of various researchers interested in these problems, research in our country was stimulated.
In 1961, as a member of the Union of the Soviet Society of Friendship and Culture, affiliated with representatives of foreign countries, I sought to develop scientific and fraternal contacts with foreign parapsychologists. In 1966, the International Congress of Psychologists was held in Moscow. Parapsychologists from foreign countries who took part expressed hopes of meeting with Soviet colleagues.
I turned to the President of the Congress, Professor A.N. Leontev, with a request to organize a symposium on parapsychology. Leontev rejected my request and based his refusal on provisions of the Charter of the International Council of Psychologists. The Bioinformation Section, the House of Medical Workers, and the House of Friendship with People of Foreign Countries then sponsored a symposium on parapsychology.
The meetings with foreign parapsychologists demonstrated the great interest of Soviet scientists in foreign research. Later, these meetings became more frequent and took on a permanent character. I personally established scientific and fraternal contacts with more than thirty-five countries and two hundred scientific centers, institutes, laboratories, corporations, and firms. In my contacts with foreign scientists, I publicized the achievements of Soviet research, defending the competence of Soviet science. I regarded this as my patriotic duty.
Recently, in our country and abroad, high-frequency photography (the Kirlian effect) has achieved widespread fame. This method was found to be useful in technology, biology, and medicine. Unfortunately, whereas the Kirlian method was little known within scientific circles of our country, it stimulated great interest in the United States and other countries. As research began on this method, conferences were held, monographs were published, and motion picture films were made. Working together with [Semyon] Kirlian, for many years I and my colleagues actively publicized this discovery, and promoted its recognition throughout the world.
A similar situation emerged in our case, when I and many Soviet scientists observed psychokinetic effects. I shot film of the effect that had stimulated such interest and discussion abroad. I often turned to organizations and to individual scientists, trying to draw their attention to the experimental finding of those phenomena. Not only did psychological barriers hinder us – e.g., the lack of openness to new ideas – but articles in the press appeared that viewed our findings as mystification and cunning trickery.
Thus, all my efforts had almost no positive effects, while Czech, English, and American researchers were conducting experiments and publishing the results in their scientific journals. Once academician A.L. Mints expressed an interesting thought: “The further advance of Soviet science will stagnate if our scientists do not undertake new tasks in those areas … even … where it is impossible to guarantee the success of the research beforehand. Alas, everywhere and always we are extremely enthusiastic about tasks that have emerged in other countries. Too often, new ideas advanced by Soviet scientists experience a second birth only after foreign publications have indicated their significance and prospects.”
In my work, I placed great significance in the collection and analysis of national and foreign information. I compiled The Bibliographic Collection of National and Foreign Works on Parapsychology and Related Problems; I am preparing to publish A Bibliographic Collection on Bioenergetics; also, Contemporary Problems of Biological Bonds and Related Phenomena, in five volumes; Research Perspectives of Parapsychological Research Abroad, in five volumes; and various informational textbooks, in ten volumes. Recently I have been in the process of completing an Encyclopedic Dictionary on Parapsychology and Related Problems. In my materials one can learn about questions concerning financing, the structure of NIR, scientific research programs, and the prospects for their development in areas of parapsychology abroad. Acquiring that information is especially needed at this time, when every scientific discovery can be used in many different ways.
An American journalist commented recently: “It is possible that the [U.S.] government will soon develop a general program of research for the practical implementation of these phenomena. If Congress and the President will not take the necessary steps to develop such programs, we can expect that the Pentagon already has. The military, doubtless, recognizes the importance of investigating the possibility of influencing the masses by such means as creating visual illusions and hallucinations with the aid of automatic devices. We must ascertain how this is done, and do it soon, before other, powerful nations discover the answers to these questions.”
In line with social and informational activities, I promoted the achievements of contemporary parapsychology. I lectured before the most skilled of audiences: leading and prominent institutes – the Radiotechnological Institute of the Academy of Sciences, USSR; the Institute of Physics AN USSR; the Institute of Radiotechnics and Electronics AN USSR; the I. Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy; the Institute of the Problems of Management; the Nil of Automatic Apparatus; the Institute of Space Medicine; the Institute of Medical-Biological Problems; and others. I lectured before organizations of the Ministry of Defense USSR – the Academy of the General Staff, the Frunze Academy, and others; before prominent VUZakh – MGU, MIFI, MFTI, and others; before the editorial staffs of newspapers, journals, radio, and television. My objectives were to attract the attention and interest of specialists in different fields to the new scientific problems with which the whole world is presently concerned.
These lectures contained no damaging information, nor did they express anti-scientific views. On the contrary, they were designed to clear parapsychological phenomena of mysticism by adherence to a materialistic point of view. My lectures dealt with little-explored potentialities of the mind, the problems of informational power sources – of biological fields – that belong to man and to all living things, the comprehension of which can deepen our understanding of human nature itself. That is why my lectures evoked great interest.
In lecturing, I attempted to stimulate the development of contacts with various Nil, departments, foundations, and organizations. In this regard, I developed recommendations, suggestions, and scientific programs (for example, in 1973, I developed and proposed an Nil program, “Biokompleks,” for MIFI, for VNIIMT, etc.), as well as these projects: Project of the Center for Coordination of NIR, Division of Planning and Forecasting, Bureau for the Investigation of the Especially Gifted in ESP Areas.
At present, I have been accused by investigative organs of the MVD of unlawful lecturing (which has been characterized as criminal), of illegally publicizing parapsychology, and of engaging in criminal activities. To this day, I do not understand why my scientific-practical activities are considered in the least criminal.
I cannot imagine how scientific publicizing, a desire to support the prominence of Soviet science, stand behind one’s country, and awaken in people an awareness of new scientific issues could be considered criminally punishable. In the Soviet state, there are no laws forbidding lectures such as I gave. Therefore, the accusation was not judicially motivated, and the conclusions, summarized in the verdict, do not correspond to actual fact.
I never lectured for mercenary motives. And, if I was paid for several lectures, I spent that money on parapsychology (that can be proven by consulting a list of expenditures in my criminal file). Besides, I gave more than four hundred lectures without compensation. These lectures, which lasted four to six hours, were accompanied by numerous illustrated materials, showings of unique films (many of which were donated by foreign colleagues), and psychological experiments, etc. I thus made the most of the personal effort, knowledge, and experience acquired after many years of creative endeavor. I considered this useful to the State.
During the investigation and search, the following scientific materials were confiscated: thirty-five films, a card-index of names and addresses of Soviet and foreign scientists interested in parapsychology, and a corresponding-member diploma from the Parapsychological Association. These documents were filed and identified as material evidence of my criminality. During the investigation, I handed over scientific materials to the investigating organs, hoping to prove the lawfulness of my lectures. Later, however, these materials were used against me.
The investigation attempted to prove that parapsychology was a pseudoscience, and that my lectures were anti-scientific. (Surely, then, if I could not prove the contrary, I would not have been accused of engaging in private enterprise, but of swindling.) The Director of the Institute of Psychiatry,
AMN USSR, Academician A. V. Snezhnevsky, held an examination that led to the confiscation of my files. He concluded that all of my lectures and the information at my disposal were nothing but primitive charlatanism and mysticism. In scientific circles, Academician Snezhnevsky is known as an opponent of parapsychology. Snezhnevsky has a preconceived opinion on such problems as acupuncture and cure-by-fasting – methods verified by time and practice, approved by the USSR Health Department, and successfully utilized in national health clinics.
Today, parapsychology has won a distinguished world audience. It is known that the Philosophical Encyclopedia defines parapsychology as a “field of psychological research.” In 1969, the Parapsychological Association obtained the right to join the American Association for the Advancement of Science in the U.S.A. In 1972, psychological tradition was broken when, in Tokyo, at the International Congress of Psychologists, Soviet and foreign scientists reported on parapsychology.
In 1973, at the International Conference on Psychotronics held in Prague, the International Association of Psychotronic Research was established (a Soviet representative, G.A. Samoylev – a colonel in the Academy of the National Militia, MVD, was elected Vice-President for the Eastern Hemisphere). At present there are sufficient subsidies to allow parapsychological research a successful future development. New centers, laboratories, institutions, and corporations are being established in many countries. International cooperation is improving.
That is why the above-mentioned analysis reflects Snezhnevsky’s personal views, which are at variance with, and out of keeping with, the modern role of international parapsychology. Because of this, I insisted on a second scientific opinion. Side by side with Academician Snezhnevsky’s examination, a second opinion was provided by the Department of Technical Control of the KGB, Council of Ministers, USSR, which showed that the films illustrating my lectures were documentary and original, and that they contained no tricks, no mystification, and no fiction.
For one year (the period of investigation) I had no chance to conduct scientific research. Despite great difficulties, emotional stress, and an administrative prohibition on travel, I attempted to continue working. And when I was senior engineer in the Bio-conduction Lab of the VNIIIMT, Department of Health, USSR, I pioneered and organized the so-called “non-traditional methods” in medicine: research in acupuncture technique, research in biological fields for diagnosis and therapy, and the influence of low-frequency laser beams on bio-energetic processes inside the human organism. Despite the fact that my research proposals were included in the thematic plan of our institute, I was many times advised to resign, and at last I did so.
Notwithstanding these difficulties, I considered it my duty to continue working – though alone! Frequently, during the first stages of growth, a new science is promoted by enthusiasts who have a correct scientific orientation and an understanding of the prospects of this or that field of science. The prominent Russian scientist K. A. Tsiolkovsky, who himself passed through an enthusiast stage, discussed the future of parapsychological research:
“In the coming cosmonautic era, telepathic abilities will be of great value, and will serve the general progress of mankind.” The foresight of this Russian scientist was corroborated fifty years later by the well-known American astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who, by conducting telepathic experiments between the spacecraft Apollo 14 and earth, introduced a new experimental mode in space flights. He wrote: “My experi-ence exceeded all expectations. It is not now a question of believing or disbelieving in biological bonds. Nowadays, the important thing is to perform serious scientific work. For mankind, these experiments may be more significant than space research itself.” We have only to add that the tenacity of American scientists and astronauts in this work will make the practical implementation of these phenomena not too far distant.
Not long ago, in scientific circles, there was a widespread negative and critical attitude toward parapsychology. The existence of parapsychological phenomena was also ignored.
The history of Soviet science knows of cases in which “scientific critics” – some philosophers and journalists – strongly hindered the development of new ideas. In 1962, Academician [Peter] Kapitsa, reporting in the Moscow House of Scientists, spoke out against the philosophical critics of the theory of relativity: “How nice it would be if our physicists would follow the conclusions of the philosophers and cease to work on the theory of relativity and nuclear physics. What a situation we’d put our country in!” It is very sad but it is a fact that, for some philosophers, an A-bomb explosion was necessary before they ceased to display their ignorance.
One unscrupulous Leningrad journalist, who became notorious for his scandalous and illiterate articles on Soviet science, also took an active part in the “scientific criticism” of “physical idealism.” It developed later that he was the most uncommon of ignoramuses in the most elementary physical problems, especially in quantum mechanics. On one occasion, the most eminent Soviet physicists, Academicians N. Semenov, Fok, Landau, Lifshits, and others, sharply rebuffed the Leningrad journalist, V. Lvov, by protesting the space given to him in Soviet journals. In 1967, Lvov repented thusly “Please don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
In those years, I presumptuously came out against Einstein, Friedman, Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, Landau, and Frankel.” Unable to contend with the progressives in physics, Lvov then began to expose anti-scientific tendencies in parapsychology. This situation arose at a time when parapsychology badly needed defending from the side of official psychology. Unlike the physicists, the psychologists did not seriously challenge this ignoramus; rather, by reason of their negative attitude, the psychologists themselves hindered the development of Soviet parapsychology.
Vast experimental research using modern psycho-physiological methods, electronics, mathematics, the growing interest in this research, and wide official recognition have led many scientists and Soviet psychologists to change their attitudes toward parapsychology, and to recognize not only the existence of parapsychological phenomena, but the scientific legitimacy of the question itself.
Having acknowledged the problem, and made use of the vast body of information collected by me and my colleagues, psychologists misinterpreted my public activity. Actually, we only planned to publicize information and make contacts with foreign parapsychologists; yet I was compromised as a specialist and treated as an incompetent. The efforts of my colleagues and me to publicize, to inform, and to promote parapsychology were highly praised in Europe and America. I was elected to membership in the Society for Psychical Research, London; the parapsychological societies of Japan, Italy, and Switzerland; the American Society for Psychical Research; the Institute of Noetic Sciences (founded by U. S. astronaut Edgar Mitchell), and the International Parapsychological Association.
New research cannot begin without those who lay the foundations; without those who have gained the requisite knowledge and experience; without informed individuals, creative and practical connections. Similarly, we must seek new ways of international cooperation, and assist in peace and progress. These are praiseworthy patriotic duties. Without these, today’s parapsychological achievements would not be possible. In leading institutes of the Soviet Union today, preconditions for the development of scientific research in parapsychology and related fields are springing up. That is a significant and important achievement for our country.
Recently, I successfully interested several leading institutes in these problems; that ushered in a new era in experimental research. I am sure, despite everything, that research in these problems has a brilliant future! The inspired words K.E. Tsiolskoskii said to my teacher now give me strength and perseverance: “Nearly always the new, the advanced, and the progressive meet the firm opposition of old opponents.” I myself experienced and observed that the more courageous an idea, the more embittered became the internal opposition to it. But do not avoid the fight. Work! Experiment! Open the way to new ideas on behalf of people, science, and life!
Centers of USSR Parapsychology Studies
Following is a list of research institutes in the Soviet Union that have been reported as being engaged, or as having been engaged in studies related to parapsychology.
A.S. Popov All-Union Scientific and Technical Society of Radio Technology and Electrical Engineering, Moscow; Laboratory of Bio-Information, 1965-1975; Laboratory of Bio-Energetics, established 1978.
Scientific Research Institute of General and Educational Psychology, USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, Moscow. Baumann Institute of Advanced Technology, Moscow; Laboratory of Dr. Wagner. Institute of Energetics, Moscow; Laboratory of Dr. Sokolov. Moscow State University; Laboratory of Prof. Kholodov. State Instrument Engineering College, Department of Physics, Moscow. Moscow Institute of Aviation. I.V. Pavlov Institute, Moscow. Institute of Reflexology, Moscow. Moscow University, Department of Theoretical Physics. Department of Geology, Moscow State University. Interdepartmental Commission for Coordination of Study on the Biophysical Effect, Moscow (dowsing research). Adjunct Laboratory of Medical and Biological Problems, Moscow. University of Leningrad, Laboratory on the Physiology of Labor; Department of Physiology, Laboratory of Biological Cybernetics. A.A. Uktomskii Physiological Institute, Leningrad. Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, Department of Cybernetics. University of Leningrad, Bekhterev Brain Institute. Research Institute of Psychology, Ukrainian SSR Academy of Sciences. Institute of Problems of Information Transmission of the USSR Academy of Science, Moscow. Pulkovo Observatory, Leningrad. Filatov Institute, Laboratory of the Physiology of Vision, Odessa. Scientific-Industrial Unit “Quantum,” Krasnodar. State University of Georgia, Tbiblisi (Tiflis). Kazakhstan State University, Alma Ata, Kazakhstan. Institute of Cybernetics of the Ukrainian SSR, Kiev. Institute of Clinical Physiology, Kiev. Scientific Research Institute of Biophysics, Department of Cybernetics, Puschino. Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology, Kharkov. Institute of Automation and Electricity, Special Department No. 8, Siberian Academy of Science (1965-1969), Novosibirsk. Institute of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, Novosibirsk.
Parapsychology: Fiction Or Reality?
(W.P. Zinchenko, A.N. Leontiev, B.M. Lomov, and A.R. Luria)
The transition of Soviet parapsychology from the relatively open decade that began in I960 to more restricted operations in the field was signaled by four leading psychologists in the Moscow journal Questions in Philosophy (No. 9, September 1973). Western parapsychologists generally assumed that the article was based on research and a first draft complied by Professor Zinchenko. The paper gained prestige through the participation of Professor A. R. Luria (1902-1977), whose original experiments and writings gained worldwide attention during his lifetime. The paper argued that parapsychological studies should be taken out of the hands of self-styled specialists, whom the authors obviously regarded as nonscientific amateurs. Future research, they suggested, should be undertaken by professionals, so that “the attention of serious scientific organizations” would be directed toward “unanswered questions of the human psyche. “
The question stated in the title of this article has been discussed for many decades in the scientific and popular literature of the entire world. Long periods of silence have alternated with a flood of reports on some paranormal phenomena. The authors of this article do not count themselves among the many specialists in parapsychology. We were compelled to write it by the increasing number of publications (mostly in popular science periodicals), here and abroad, concerning the observations and investigations of subjects possessing paranormal abilities. It should be noted that an overwhelming number of these publications are by journalists and only in a few isolated cases by professional scientists, among them psychologists and physiologists. These publications are frequently of a promotional nature and do not meet generally accepted requirements of accurate scientific investigation, but have nevertheless been received sympathetically by scientists in different disciplines. We are not even speaking of the common mass reader. A good indication, relevant to this point, are the results of a survey conducted in 1972 by the editors of the English journal New Scientist and published the following January. About 70 percent of the 1,500 scientists who answered the journal’s questionnaire (out of a total of 72,000 questionnaires that were sent out), considered paranormal phenomena either as firmly established fact (25 percent) or as entirely possible (42 percent). (1)
Similar data which would characterize the attitude of Soviet scientists to this problem are not available to us, but the numerous irresponsible publications are a cause for justifiable alarm. It therefore seems to us that it is time to express the attitude of the Association of Psychologists of the USSR toward parapsychology, whose status was considered at one of the meetings of the Association’s Presidium.
1. The Area Of Parapsychological Investigations
In the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, parapsychology is defined as the area of investigation studying, primarily: (1) forms of sensitivity offering means of receiving information which cannot be explained by the actions of known sense organs; (2) corresponding forms of influence of a living being on physical phenomena, taking place outside the organism, without the intermediate aid of muscles (by desire, thought induction, etc).
The majority of contemporary parapsychologists recognize the following kinds of sensitivities:
Telepathy: Mutual thought communication between inductor and recipient. Through it two people exchange information without the participation of sense organs. Basically, telepathy is sensing the state of another live organism.
Clairvoyance: This also is an extra- or supersensory perception of certain occurrences, events, objects; the communication of information without participation of known sense organs.
Precognition (Proscopy): A special case of clairvoyance: the prediction of events based on information received from the future and which cannot be arrived at by reasoning.
Dowsing (also called Bio-Physical Effect): Based on the claim that some individuals are supposed to be able to discover accumulations of subterranean water, ore, caves, and certain other objects with the aid of an antenna (bent wire or twig, etc.).
Paradiagnosis: Establishment of medical diagnosis based on clairvoyance, without patient contact.
The forms of sensitivity listed above are frequently grouped together under the term “extrasensory perception” (ESP).
There are separate classifications of forms of influencing physical events.
Psychokinesis: Mental influence of a person on surrounding objects: for example, on the normal electric activity in growth; on spatial position of different objects (not too heavy, as a rule).
Mental Photography: A special case of psychokinesis; it consists of a man’s ability, by looking into the lens of a camera, to imprint on the film the image of an object which he visualizes (but which in reality is absent).
Paramedicine: An area close to parapsychology, which includes various unexplained methods of treatment: laying-on-of-hands, mental induction (without use of speech and without direct contact, at times at great distance), and others.
All the occurrences listed above are united by the term “parapsychology.” Other terms used are: “psychotronic,” “bio-information,” “bio-introscopy,” etc. In the past, hypnotic events were mistakenly included in parapsychology. At present, hypnosis is used in parapsychology as one means to induce certain paranormal events. Teaching of Yoga is also mistakenly included here. Sometimes even astrology.
As is evident from the above statements, various areas are combined into one, because of the mystery and puzzlement caused by the occurrences studied. However, it is wrong in principle to consider such a basis sufficient for grouping these occurrences into a separate field of scientific investigation.
2. Brief Historical Review And Status Of Parapsychology Abroad
We shall not review in this article the paranormal abilities long ascribed to shamans, sorcerers, lamas, yogis, etc. Parapsychology, as a method of systematic experimental observations and investigations, appeared in European culture in 1882 when the first parapsychological association was organized in London, and which still exists. It is called the Society for Psychical Research. Since then, numerous similar organizations have been formed and dissolved in many countries. At present there exist a few dozen similar associations, in most cases nonprofessional and with small memberships. As a rule, these groups maintain small laboratories supported by members or by special funds. Many of these organizations are affiliates of the “International Parapsychology Association.”
Parapsychological research is carried out on a small scale at a number of universities (usually private) in the USA and in other centers of scientific research. According to unofficial sources, the expenditures of the US federal government on parapsychological research amount to half a million dollars annually. Some large corporations also provide financial support for these investigations. One example of the new organizations is the recently formed corporation of Edgar Mitchell, the US astronaut who conducted four experiments in telepathic communication during his trip to the Moon (no significant results were obtained).
The task of this corporation is development of human abilities, investigations in the area of paramedicine and psychokinesis. Mitchell hopes to make his corporation self-supporting. Among consultants of the corporation are the well-known Werner von Braun and a few scientists from relatively well regarded research centers. In the USA there also exists the “Academy of Parapsychology and Medicine” (California).
According to a count made by parapsychologists there are over 240 laboratories and associations in 30 countries. This estimate is obviously somewhat high. The majority of these organizations are in the United States. In 1969 the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which includes different scientific societies, accepted the Parapsychological Association as a member.
From time to time, separate and, as a rule, limited scientific research projects of parapsychological interest are carried out at commercial corporations in the United States. Computer technology is utilized in carrying out investigations in these labs. Their research is directed toward establishing the existence of ESP.
3. Publications Abroad
Parapsychological observations, as a rule, are published in specialized journals appearing in a number of countries. In the USA their number exceeds ten; in England, five; in Italy, six; in France, two. Some of them include both parapsychology and astrology. There are also journals in other European countries and Japan. In addition, different scientific publishing houses publish a large number of monographs, summaries of conferences and symposia.
Articles on parapsychology, particularly when of sensational nature, are highlighted in publications of the type of Life, Look, Stem [Germany], and sometimes even in such well-established scientific journals as Science, Nature, and others.
Scientific journals in the fields of psychology, physiology, and other sciences do not as a rule publish reports of parapsychological investigations. Between 1960 and 1970 in all scientific psychology journals of the world there were published, all in all, 13 parapsychological research reports. Of these, 8 cases reported positive results; in others the existence of paranormal events was not confirmed. It is interesting that, during the same period, parapsychological journals of the world published 143 experimental observations with positive and 19 with negative results.
Reviews, criticisms, and accounts of uncontrolled investigations are not included in the above totals. (2) Numerous textbooks and teaching aids for conducting parapsychological research were published. The last textbook, by R. Ashby, came out in 1972. (3) The International Association of Scientific Psychology does not allow presentation of papers or lectures on parapsychological research at its congresses. This is included in its bylaws. Apparently by chance, an exception was made at the Twentieth International Psychological Congress (Tokyo, 1972), where a lecture by American parapsychologist S. Krippner was heard.
While on the topic of publications, one must mention some of the political speculations on parapsychology. We have in mind first of all the book by S. Ostrander and L. Schroeder, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain. The book was written in 1968 as a result of the authors’ visit to the USSR, NRB [Bulgaria] and ChSSR [Czechoslovakia]. The authors (nonscientists) have written a low-level text of the promotional variety. In it, parapsychology serves as advertisement for anti-Sovietism, and vice-versa. These methods proved commercially successful, and in less than a year the book went through five printings.
The book, written on a very low professional level, overflows with factual errors, mistakes, and undisguised anti-Soviet thrusts. The book excessively exaggerates the “accomplishments” of our parapsychologists. One encounters similar exaggerations quite frequently in the West, particularly in parapsychological and popular publications (more often without the open anti-Soviet accompaniment). One sees speculations frequently on the following subjects: parapsychology and defense, psychological warfare, espionage, etc. All this simultaneously serves to drum up additional funds for parapsychological research. In general, such books are, nevertheless, few in parapsychological literature.
4. Parapsychology In The USSR
In the early 1920s Professor L.L. Vasiliev conducted research on telepathy and clairvoyance, at first with the participation of academician V.M. Bekhterev whose student he was at that time in Leningrad. (4) Similar research was conducted by B. B. Kazhinsky in the Ukraine. Results of these investigations were published by the authors in three monographs, which appeared in 1959 and 1962.
There is no organization uniting parapsychologists in the Soviet Union. Enthusiastic students of these or similar phenomena occasionally form sections within other technic-scientific organizations. A section on bioinformation was established in 1965 by staff members of the A.S. Popov Technic-Scientific Society of Radiotechnology and Electroncommunication in Moscow. The group’s main area of investigation is telepathy.
In 1967 a Pan-Union Section of Technical Parapsychology and Biointroscopy was organized at the Central Administration of the Science-Technology Society of the Instrument-Manufacturing industry. Within the framework of this society two science-technology seminars were conducted in 1968 and 1971 on Bio-physical Effects (twig-conductivity) [dowsing]. In 1971 the Inter-science Commission for the Coordination of Projects on the Problem of Biophysical Effects was elected. There are also some small groups, or separate individuals, working in different institutions, or at teaching-research centers, who during their working time or their free time carry on observations and investigations of parapsychological effects.
For a number of years, in Nizhniy Tagil and other cities in the Ural, an investigation was conducted of “skin vision” (the so-called Rosa Kuleshova effect), which at times is grouped with parapsychological occurrences but in reality has nothing in common with them. Reports of results of numerous inspections, analogous cases observed abroad and quite recently in Moscow, give grounds for concluding that this phenomenon – that is, “skin vision” – really exists and calls for careful study. However, so far it would be difficult to make any definite conclusions about its mechanism.
5. Publications In The USSR
Usually matters related to parapsychology are printed in thesis collections and reports of different conferences and symposia. Thus, for example, in 1972 five lectures related to telekinesis were published in a collection of materials of the conferences “Some Questions on Biodynamics and Bioenergetics of the Organism in Health and Pathology; Bio-stimulation by Laser Beams,” held at the Kazakh University. Soviet parapsychologists sometimes publish their work in technical journals (for example, Radio technology), but mostly in popular science and mass magazines (most often youth magazines), and in newspapers. As a rule, these are announcements of work done abroad.
Many publications are prepared by journalists who, with their characteristic inclination to exaggeration and sensationalism, at times turn assumed results of experiments into supposedly authentic ones. The number of such publications is very high. It is sufficient to point out magazines such as Technology – Youth, Young Naturalist, Knowledge – Strength. In 1973, even Social Industry took a stand on many occasions. Then, also, popular publications as a rule pay no attention to published negative responses of specialists.
Soviet and foreign publications are characterized by exaggerations of results on both sides. Thus, going by reports in the American press, in 1966 in the Soviet Union telepathic experiments were organized and carried out over long distances – Moscow-Novosibirsk, Moscow-Leningrad – supposedly producing credible positive results, which obviously is fiction. On the other hand, it was reported in Komsomolskaya Pravda that during the telepathic experiments on the Apollo 14 mission, positive results were obtained.
Edgar Mitchell, who organized and participated in these experiments, wrote that they were of an exploratory nature, that negative results were obtained, and, what’s more, that the number of successes was much below that predicted by the theory of probability. (The last would deserve some attention were it not for Mitchell’s statement about the promotional nature of the experiments.)
During the last decade, no fewer than five hundred articles published in the USSR dealt with different questions of parapsychology. Mostly these were poor reports of badly constructed “experiments” deserving no attention. Their authors did not check on the requirements for correctness of the experiments, which were formulated by parapsychologists themselves. N. Kulagina, the universal object of telepathic and psychokinetic investigations, has attracted particularly great attention in our press.
6. Who Are The Parapsychologists?
The majority of parapsychologists have neither a biological nor a psychological education. Among them are considerably more representatives of the exact sciences – engineers, mathematicians, physicists – who, as a rule, do not have any psychological training. Very frequently within the last decade, specialists from these disciplines have switched over to work in medical, psychological and physiological institutions (without sufficient backgrounds). Then, some of them want to quickly investigate the most mysterious and most interesting aspects. As a rule, these are people qualified in their own fields, but not in psychology, who had a chance to observe some “puzzling” psychological events, or who became victims of charlatan tricks.
Frequently these specialists may have quite legitimate motivations: for example, to find some new type of connection that would make possible the transfer of important information (telepathy); to find a new kind of energy, so as to influence from a distance the detonator of some installation (psychokinesis), etc. Strange as it may sound, some of these scientists often exhibit a childlike trust and innocence.
Occasionally one meets, among parapsychologists, psychiatrists and physicians of other specialties who in their practice, more often than others, have a chance to observe inexplicable anomalies. There is also the category of rather clever, skillful people who have no formal education. They are the ones who play the part of impresarios and promoters of those who really have some kind of unusual abilities. And it is precisely these people who demand recognition of parapsychology as a separate independent science.
Thus, among parapsychologists and their supporters there are charlatans as well as entirely serious specialists, who must be protected from scientifically irresponsible characters who exploit these specialists for their own ends.
The subjects of psychological investigation are, as a rule, neurotics who have increased sensitivities, and in a number of cases are simply sick people. For example, it can be shown that in people with “skin vision” there is distinctly pathological heightening of excitability of the midbrain, hysteria, etc.
7. Parapsychological Methods
In the first decades of its existence, parapsychology was using rather primitive methods of investigation and demonstration, such as card guessing, dream or thought induction, etc. Distrust and disclosures forced parapsychologists to look for new means of demonstration.
The influx of engineers and physicists had a great influence on methods of investigation. They brought to parapsychology their own methods, assuming that the human brain functions as an electronic machine and that it is possible to transfer concepts from corresponding branches of physics for its study. Contemporary parapsychology thus utilizes a number of newer techniques, particularly from computer and laser technology. Many spokesmen of parapsychology mistakenly believe that the paranormal occurrences that they study are common physical occurrences based on electromagnetic radiation and that, in spite of its insignificant quantity, this energy can be calculated and measured.
The study and the measurement of electromagnetic fields, known under different names (bioplasmas electroaurogram, biopotential, etc.) are continued jointly with various traditional methods of investigation (for example, guessing one out of five Zener cards, induction at a distance, movement of an object without contact).
Instrumental methods for the evaluation of functional states of an individual, including the newest methods, were sufficiently developed in the framework of parapsychology; for example, the Kirlian effect (photography of live tissues in high-frequency currents) was used by parapsychologists sooner than by physiologists or psychologists. Some special methods of investigation being developed by parapsychology, though not revealing the nature of parapsychological phenomena, sometimes prove to be useful to psychophysiology and experimental psychology.
Instrumental methods of parapsychology are also being perfected.
Ten years ago L. L. Vasiliev wrote about experiments with a “free material,” where the experimenter tries to find out something about an object [telepathically] from a multitude of possible objects unknown to him at the time of the experiment: “The unavoidable defect of similar experiments lies in the fact that their evaluation is entirely subjective, and it is doubtful whether the subjectivity can be removed.” (5)
Since then, a method has been developed to analyze the results with the help of “judges” who know what was “perceived,” know also what could have been sent out, and from the “perceived” try to find out what really was sent out. When this turns out to be possible, it proves the existence of a channel of communication-contact between the points of induction and reception. M.M. Bonhard and M.S. Smirnov have written about these and some other indispensable and useful methods in an article dedicated to requirements for a “telepathic” experiment. (6)
8. Credibility Problem In Parapsychological Investigations
The history of parapsychology is a history of revelations that at times have attracted the participation of scientists of world renown, such as D. I. Mendeleyev, American physicist Robert Wood, etc. This naturally evoked and evokes the distrust and annoyance of specialists because investigation reveals too many cases of simple mystification and cheating during parapsychological experiments. The second reason for distrust is the inability to reproduce paranormal occurrences; that is, they do not meet the requirements of credibility as scientific facts.
This irreproducibility is explained by the difficulty in setting up the experiments, due primarily to the peculiar nature of parapsychological phenomena. They appear under special conditions and it is difficult to induce them in life. According to descriptions by parapsychologists, such occurrences are very elusive and unstable, and disappear whenever some inner or outer condition appears to be unfavorable to them. The opinion is also stated that even when favorable conditions can be maintained, it is impossible to retain, for any length of time, the state in which appearance of parapsychological phenomena is possible.
Herein lies the main contradiction and main difficulty in interpreting parapsychological phenomena. Parapsychological literature is filled with supersensational descriptions, something like Ted Serios’s ability (experimenter: Professor Eisenbud, USA), while on the Soviet-Turkish border, to visualize and then to photograph with his eyes Soviet missile installations!
In some cases professional circus performers, illusionists in particular, have been invited as experts to parapsychological experiments to show similar tricks. In general, parapsychology has produced a great many anti-parapsychological methods and means of demystification. Specialists of great experience in this field are also found in the Soviet Union. However, none of the disclosures have any effect on parapsychologists who are True Believers. As in religion, in parapsychology faith is more aggressive than facts. The truly aggressive effort to propagandize paranormal events, the sensationalism and promotions of other kinds or type, are connected with this faith.
Here is an appropriate quotation of Hansel, author of a highly critical book on parapsychology published in 1970 in the USSR: “One cannot declare categorically that results of these experiments are explainable by cheating, but neither can one think … that these experiments give conclusive proof of extrasensory perception.” (7)
Apparently some of the so-called parapsychological phenomena really exist. However, recognition of their existence is hindered by uncertainty about the channel for transmission of information or influence. Major hopes and efforts are now concentrated in the study of the electromagnetic field, of organisms as a means for biological contact and as information carriers. These investigations are carried out on insects, animals, and man, but in recent years many authorities, at least outwardly, have not associated their work with parapsychology. So far, no physical basis for these occurrences has been demonstrated. Many parapsychologists see the reason for this in the fact that major sciences are not involved in the phenomena they study.
To us it appears that the fault is mostly with the parapsychologists themselves, who have done much to set themselves apart, outside of science.
9. Brief Summaries
Among phenomena included in parapsychology one should distinguish between the “supernatural” phenomena imagined and promoted by mystics and charlatans, and those that really exist but that so far have not received satisfactory scientific psychological or physical explanation. The first call for disclosure and demystification. The study of the latter must be continued in related scientific institutions – psychological, physiological, biophysical, medical, and others.
The manner in which universal parapsychological opinions are spread now, too often taking on the form of promotion, objectively has a negative effect, feeding unstable elements searching for a scientifically inaccessible, mysterious origin.
Analysis of the status of so-called parapsychology shows that it is badly hampered by anti-scientific concepts and to a high degree has become an area of activity by so-called “specialists.” Some of them have declared themselves to be leaders and participants in organizations that never even existed in our country, for example, “The Institute of Technical Parapsychology.” It is essential to curtail the activity of the little-qualified and militant parapsy-
chologists who have taken upon themselves the voluntary and not at all unprofitable function of propaganda, giving numerous lectures on parapsychology, even before scientific audiences. These lectures are in fact, irresponsible mixtures of mythology and reality. The uncritical attitude toward parapsychology of some serious scientists can be explained by positivistic carelessness toward scientific theory and methodology. There are no valid grounds for the existence of parapsychology as a separate science, since the only thing unifying parapsychologists is the mystery and inexplicableness of the occurrences they study.
Also impermissible, it seems to us, is the practice of publication in papers, magazines, and the popular press of sensational, scientifically unfounded material on parapsychology. For some reason there is, in this particular field, a disregard of the tradition usually observed by self-respecting scientists: Serious scientific achievements are first published in special scientific literature, and only then in popular periodicals.
There is today a definite need to organize the scientific research work into areas of real occurrences described in parapsychology. Since many investigations in parapsychology are carried out by physicists and engineers, it would be expedient to evaluate the direction and scientific level of the study of the biophysical effect and electromagnetic fields generated by live organisms as possible means of biological connection, as well as a number of other phenomena, and to do it at the Institute of Biophysics, Academy of Sciences, USSR, and at the Institute for Problems of Information Transmission, Academy of Sciences, USSR. Reviewing them from the standpoint of biophysics and communications theory may help to demystify these phenomena.
Psychological Institutes of the Academy of Sciences and other psychological institutions should also review the possibility of strict scientific investigations of these phenomena. It obviously would be expedient to organize, within the structure of one of the psychological institutions, a laboratory for the study of individuals who possess unusual abilities (and not necessarily only of a paranormal nature). Results of these investigations should obviously, after careful examination, be published in scientific literature (and only then in popular literature).
It seems to us that the attention of serious scientific organizations to the phenomena described in parapsychology will help reveal their true nature, will block the road to charlatans who are counting on the general public’s quite natural curiosity about the unanswered secrets of the human psyche, and will dispel the myth of existence of a “parapsychological movement” in the USSR.
References
1. New Scientist (London), January 25, 1973. Analysis of a survey conducted by Dr. Christopher Evans.
2. M Billig “Positive and Negative Experimental Psi Results in Psychology and Para-psyology.” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (London). Vol. 46, No. 753,
3. Robert H. Ashby. The Guidebook for the Study of Psychical Research. New York: S. Weiser,
4. L.L Vasiliev. Mysterious, Phenomena of the Human Psyche, 2nd ed. Moscow, 1963. 5. Ibid., pp. 134-135.
6. M M Bonharda and M.S. Smirnov. “The Telepath, Experiment: Necessary Requirements.” Nauka i Zhizh (Science and Life), No 12, 1967. 7. C.E.M. Hansel. Parapsychology. Mir (Moscow), 1970, p. 295. [See U.S. edition, ESP: Scientific Evaluation. New York: Scribner's, 1966.]
~~~~
Naumov, In His Own Defense
Edward K. Naumov
The following is a translation of a letter of appeal, addressed by the Moscow parapsychologist Edward K. Naumov (see Chapter 5, “The Tragedy of Edward Naumov”) to the Department of Science of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR on May 11, 1974. At that time, Naumov had been tried on various charges growing out of his parapsychological activities. He was subsequently sentenced to two years in a labor camp, although he was freed in 1975 after serving approximately one year of his sentence.
Mr. Naumov’s open letter, which he circulated among friends and colleagues under the title “Open the Way to New Ideas!,” represents a defense against the accusations made against him by what he describes as “the investigative organs” of the KGB, the State Security agency, as well as the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). At the same time, he mentions that the KGB’s own Department of Technical Control provided a film showing his illustrated lectures as evidence. This text is based on a translation provided by the Washington Research Center, San Francisco.
Abbreviations and acronyms used by Mr. Naumov may be defined as follows: NII are the Russian initials of “Scientific Research Institute;” “Introskopii” stands for the study of the interior of non-transparent entities and may refer to techniques as diverse as infrared photography and clairvoyance; “Bwintroskopii” is the biological approach to the preceding concept; NIR means “research work” in a general sense; VUZ refers to Higher Education and VUZakh refers to college graduates; MGU are the Russian initials for the Moscow State University, MIFI refers to the Moscow Institute of Physical Engineering; MFTI stands for the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology; and VNIIIMT are the Russian initials for the All-Union Research Institute for Medical Technology.
Present circumstances compel me to address the following appeal to you.
I have given more than ten years of my life to the study of parapsychology. I had hoped to follow in the footsteps of my teachers, Professors L. L. Vasiliev and B. B. Kazhinsky. I placed great significance in attracting the scientific community to parapsychology. In 1965 I was one of the organizers of the Bioinformat on section of the the A. S. Popov Society of Radiotechnics and Electrocommunications.
Within the section for which I was responsible, various experimental research projects were planned and conducted. The findings were frequently published in the Soviet and foreign press. Several seminars, symposia, and conferences were held. And in 1967, with the support of the Director of Nil Introskopii, Professor P.K. Oshchepkov, I was an organizer and Chairman of the All-Union Section of Technical Parapsychology and Biointroskopii. For the first time in our country, two All-Union seminars were held on the problem of biophysical effects. As a result of the meeting of various researchers interested in these problems, research in our country was stimulated.
In 1961, as a member of the Union of the Soviet Society of Friendship and Culture, affiliated with representatives of foreign countries, I sought to develop scientific and fraternal contacts with foreign parapsychologists. In 1966, the International Congress of Psychologists was held in Moscow. Parapsychologists from foreign countries who took part expressed hopes of meeting with Soviet colleagues.
I turned to the President of the Congress, Professor A.N. Leontev, with a request to organize a symposium on parapsychology. Leontev rejected my request and based his refusal on provisions of the Charter of the International Council of Psychologists. The Bioinformation Section, the House of Medical Workers, and the House of Friendship with People of Foreign Countries then sponsored a symposium on parapsychology.
The meetings with foreign parapsychologists demonstrated the great interest of Soviet scientists in foreign research. Later, these meetings became more frequent and took on a permanent character. I personally established scientific and fraternal contacts with more than thirty-five countries and two hundred scientific centers, institutes, laboratories, corporations, and firms. In my contacts with foreign scientists, I publicized the achievements of Soviet research, defending the competence of Soviet science. I regarded this as my patriotic duty.
Recently, in our country and abroad, high-frequency photography (the Kirlian effect) has achieved widespread fame. This method was found to be useful in technology, biology, and medicine. Unfortunately, whereas the Kirlian method was little known within scientific circles of our country, it stimulated great interest in the United States and other countries. As research began on this method, conferences were held, monographs were published, and motion picture films were made. Working together with [Semyon] Kirlian, for many years I and my colleagues actively publicized this discovery, and promoted its recognition throughout the world.
A similar situation emerged in our case, when I and many Soviet scientists observed psychokinetic effects. I shot film of the effect that had stimulated such interest and discussion abroad. I often turned to organizations and to individual scientists, trying to draw their attention to the experimental finding of those phenomena. Not only did psychological barriers hinder us – e.g., the lack of openness to new ideas – but articles in the press appeared that viewed our findings as mystification and cunning trickery.
Thus, all my efforts had almost no positive effects, while Czech, English, and American researchers were conducting experiments and publishing the results in their scientific journals. Once academician A.L. Mints expressed an interesting thought: “The further advance of Soviet science will stagnate if our scientists do not undertake new tasks in those areas … even … where it is impossible to guarantee the success of the research beforehand. Alas, everywhere and always we are extremely enthusiastic about tasks that have emerged in other countries. Too often, new ideas advanced by Soviet scientists experience a second birth only after foreign publications have indicated their significance and prospects.”
In my work, I placed great significance in the collection and analysis of national and foreign information. I compiled The Bibliographic Collection of National and Foreign Works on Parapsychology and Related Problems; I am preparing to publish A Bibliographic Collection on Bioenergetics; also, Contemporary Problems of Biological Bonds and Related Phenomena, in five volumes; Research Perspectives of Parapsychological Research Abroad, in five volumes; and various informational textbooks, in ten volumes. Recently I have been in the process of completing an Encyclopedic Dictionary on Parapsychology and Related Problems. In my materials one can learn about questions concerning financing, the structure of NIR, scientific research programs, and the prospects for their development in areas of parapsychology abroad. Acquiring that information is especially needed at this time, when every scientific discovery can be used in many different ways.
An American journalist commented recently: “It is possible that the [U.S.] government will soon develop a general program of research for the practical implementation of these phenomena. If Congress and the President will not take the necessary steps to develop such programs, we can expect that the Pentagon already has. The military, doubtless, recognizes the importance of investigating the possibility of influencing the masses by such means as creating visual illusions and hallucinations with the aid of automatic devices. We must ascertain how this is done, and do it soon, before other, powerful nations discover the answers to these questions.”
In line with social and informational activities, I promoted the achievements of contemporary parapsychology. I lectured before the most skilled of audiences: leading and prominent institutes – the Radiotechnological Institute of the Academy of Sciences, USSR; the Institute of Physics AN USSR; the Institute of Radiotechnics and Electronics AN USSR; the I. Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy; the Institute of the Problems of Management; the Nil of Automatic Apparatus; the Institute of Space Medicine; the Institute of Medical-Biological Problems; and others. I lectured before organizations of the Ministry of Defense USSR – the Academy of the General Staff, the Frunze Academy, and others; before prominent VUZakh – MGU, MIFI, MFTI, and others; before the editorial staffs of newspapers, journals, radio, and television. My objectives were to attract the attention and interest of specialists in different fields to the new scientific problems with which the whole world is presently concerned.
These lectures contained no damaging information, nor did they express anti-scientific views. On the contrary, they were designed to clear parapsychological phenomena of mysticism by adherence to a materialistic point of view. My lectures dealt with little-explored potentialities of the mind, the problems of informational power sources – of biological fields – that belong to man and to all living things, the comprehension of which can deepen our understanding of human nature itself. That is why my lectures evoked great interest.
In lecturing, I attempted to stimulate the development of contacts with various Nil, departments, foundations, and organizations. In this regard, I developed recommendations, suggestions, and scientific programs (for example, in 1973, I developed and proposed an Nil program, “Biokompleks,” for MIFI, for VNIIMT, etc.), as well as these projects: Project of the Center for Coordination of NIR, Division of Planning and Forecasting, Bureau for the Investigation of the Especially Gifted in ESP Areas.
At present, I have been accused by investigative organs of the MVD of unlawful lecturing (which has been characterized as criminal), of illegally publicizing parapsychology, and of engaging in criminal activities. To this day, I do not understand why my scientific-practical activities are considered in the least criminal.
I cannot imagine how scientific publicizing, a desire to support the prominence of Soviet science, stand behind one’s country, and awaken in people an awareness of new scientific issues could be considered criminally punishable. In the Soviet state, there are no laws forbidding lectures such as I gave. Therefore, the accusation was not judicially motivated, and the conclusions, summarized in the verdict, do not correspond to actual fact.
I never lectured for mercenary motives. And, if I was paid for several lectures, I spent that money on parapsychology (that can be proven by consulting a list of expenditures in my criminal file). Besides, I gave more than four hundred lectures without compensation. These lectures, which lasted four to six hours, were accompanied by numerous illustrated materials, showings of unique films (many of which were donated by foreign colleagues), and psychological experiments, etc. I thus made the most of the personal effort, knowledge, and experience acquired after many years of creative endeavor. I considered this useful to the State.
During the investigation and search, the following scientific materials were confiscated: thirty-five films, a card-index of names and addresses of Soviet and foreign scientists interested in parapsychology, and a corresponding-member diploma from the Parapsychological Association. These documents were filed and identified as material evidence of my criminality. During the investigation, I handed over scientific materials to the investigating organs, hoping to prove the lawfulness of my lectures. Later, however, these materials were used against me.
The investigation attempted to prove that parapsychology was a pseudoscience, and that my lectures were anti-scientific. (Surely, then, if I could not prove the contrary, I would not have been accused of engaging in private enterprise, but of swindling.) The Director of the Institute of Psychiatry,
AMN USSR, Academician A. V. Snezhnevsky, held an examination that led to the confiscation of my files. He concluded that all of my lectures and the information at my disposal were nothing but primitive charlatanism and mysticism. In scientific circles, Academician Snezhnevsky is known as an opponent of parapsychology. Snezhnevsky has a preconceived opinion on such problems as acupuncture and cure-by-fasting – methods verified by time and practice, approved by the USSR Health Department, and successfully utilized in national health clinics.
Today, parapsychology has won a distinguished world audience. It is known that the Philosophical Encyclopedia defines parapsychology as a “field of psychological research.” In 1969, the Parapsychological Association obtained the right to join the American Association for the Advancement of Science in the U.S.A. In 1972, psychological tradition was broken when, in Tokyo, at the International Congress of Psychologists, Soviet and foreign scientists reported on parapsychology.
In 1973, at the International Conference on Psychotronics held in Prague, the International Association of Psychotronic Research was established (a Soviet representative, G.A. Samoylev – a colonel in the Academy of the National Militia, MVD, was elected Vice-President for the Eastern Hemisphere). At present there are sufficient subsidies to allow parapsychological research a successful future development. New centers, laboratories, institutions, and corporations are being established in many countries. International cooperation is improving.
That is why the above-mentioned analysis reflects Snezhnevsky’s personal views, which are at variance with, and out of keeping with, the modern role of international parapsychology. Because of this, I insisted on a second scientific opinion. Side by side with Academician Snezhnevsky’s examination, a second opinion was provided by the Department of Technical Control of the KGB, Council of Ministers, USSR, which showed that the films illustrating my lectures were documentary and original, and that they contained no tricks, no mystification, and no fiction.
For one year (the period of investigation) I had no chance to conduct scientific research. Despite great difficulties, emotional stress, and an administrative prohibition on travel, I attempted to continue working. And when I was senior engineer in the Bio-conduction Lab of the VNIIIMT, Department of Health, USSR, I pioneered and organized the so-called “non-traditional methods” in medicine: research in acupuncture technique, research in biological fields for diagnosis and therapy, and the influence of low-frequency laser beams on bio-energetic processes inside the human organism. Despite the fact that my research proposals were included in the thematic plan of our institute, I was many times advised to resign, and at last I did so.
Notwithstanding these difficulties, I considered it my duty to continue working – though alone! Frequently, during the first stages of growth, a new science is promoted by enthusiasts who have a correct scientific orientation and an understanding of the prospects of this or that field of science. The prominent Russian scientist K. A. Tsiolkovsky, who himself passed through an enthusiast stage, discussed the future of parapsychological research:
“In the coming cosmonautic era, telepathic abilities will be of great value, and will serve the general progress of mankind.” The foresight of this Russian scientist was corroborated fifty years later by the well-known American astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who, by conducting telepathic experiments between the spacecraft Apollo 14 and earth, introduced a new experimental mode in space flights. He wrote: “My experi-ence exceeded all expectations. It is not now a question of believing or disbelieving in biological bonds. Nowadays, the important thing is to perform serious scientific work. For mankind, these experiments may be more significant than space research itself.” We have only to add that the tenacity of American scientists and astronauts in this work will make the practical implementation of these phenomena not too far distant.
Not long ago, in scientific circles, there was a widespread negative and critical attitude toward parapsychology. The existence of parapsychological phenomena was also ignored.
The history of Soviet science knows of cases in which “scientific critics” – some philosophers and journalists – strongly hindered the development of new ideas. In 1962, Academician [Peter] Kapitsa, reporting in the Moscow House of Scientists, spoke out against the philosophical critics of the theory of relativity: “How nice it would be if our physicists would follow the conclusions of the philosophers and cease to work on the theory of relativity and nuclear physics. What a situation we’d put our country in!” It is very sad but it is a fact that, for some philosophers, an A-bomb explosion was necessary before they ceased to display their ignorance.
One unscrupulous Leningrad journalist, who became notorious for his scandalous and illiterate articles on Soviet science, also took an active part in the “scientific criticism” of “physical idealism.” It developed later that he was the most uncommon of ignoramuses in the most elementary physical problems, especially in quantum mechanics. On one occasion, the most eminent Soviet physicists, Academicians N. Semenov, Fok, Landau, Lifshits, and others, sharply rebuffed the Leningrad journalist, V. Lvov, by protesting the space given to him in Soviet journals. In 1967, Lvov repented thusly “Please don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
In those years, I presumptuously came out against Einstein, Friedman, Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, Landau, and Frankel.” Unable to contend with the progressives in physics, Lvov then began to expose anti-scientific tendencies in parapsychology. This situation arose at a time when parapsychology badly needed defending from the side of official psychology. Unlike the physicists, the psychologists did not seriously challenge this ignoramus; rather, by reason of their negative attitude, the psychologists themselves hindered the development of Soviet parapsychology.
Vast experimental research using modern psycho-physiological methods, electronics, mathematics, the growing interest in this research, and wide official recognition have led many scientists and Soviet psychologists to change their attitudes toward parapsychology, and to recognize not only the existence of parapsychological phenomena, but the scientific legitimacy of the question itself.
Having acknowledged the problem, and made use of the vast body of information collected by me and my colleagues, psychologists misinterpreted my public activity. Actually, we only planned to publicize information and make contacts with foreign parapsychologists; yet I was compromised as a specialist and treated as an incompetent. The efforts of my colleagues and me to publicize, to inform, and to promote parapsychology were highly praised in Europe and America. I was elected to membership in the Society for Psychical Research, London; the parapsychological societies of Japan, Italy, and Switzerland; the American Society for Psychical Research; the Institute of Noetic Sciences (founded by U. S. astronaut Edgar Mitchell), and the International Parapsychological Association.
New research cannot begin without those who lay the foundations; without those who have gained the requisite knowledge and experience; without informed individuals, creative and practical connections. Similarly, we must seek new ways of international cooperation, and assist in peace and progress. These are praiseworthy patriotic duties. Without these, today’s parapsychological achievements would not be possible. In leading institutes of the Soviet Union today, preconditions for the development of scientific research in parapsychology and related fields are springing up. That is a significant and important achievement for our country.
Recently, I successfully interested several leading institutes in these problems; that ushered in a new era in experimental research. I am sure, despite everything, that research in these problems has a brilliant future! The inspired words K.E. Tsiolskoskii said to my teacher now give me strength and perseverance: “Nearly always the new, the advanced, and the progressive meet the firm opposition of old opponents.” I myself experienced and observed that the more courageous an idea, the more embittered became the internal opposition to it. But do not avoid the fight. Work! Experiment! Open the way to new ideas on behalf of people, science, and life!
cont.
The Rampancy Of Parapsychology And The Decline Of The Superpowers
Hsin Ping
The paper reproduced on these pages was published in the Peking journal Scientia Sinica, July-August 1975. It accused the United States and the Soviet Union of encouraging parapsychological studies in order to detract from socio-economic difficulties. An article along similar lines appeared in the Chinese Communist Party’s theoretical journal, Hung Chi (Red Flag) on January 1, 1975. Both articles associated parapsychology with “religious superstition.” However after Mao Zedong’s death, the Peking government changed emphasis concerning a wide variety of social and economic trends.
Chairman Mao has pointed out: “A given culture is the ideological reflection of the politics and economics of a given society” (On New Democracy). As the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, beset by troubles at home and abroad, are now in the grip of serious political and economic crises, and are both in the plight as described by the Chinese verse, “Flowers fall off, do what one may,” their predicament is bound to be reflected in their decadent bourgeois culture.
Idealist thinking of all shades and various kinds of pseudoscience have found their way into spheres of science and technology of the two superpowers. As a conspicuous instance of this one may cite the rampancy of parapsychology – a queer hybrid offspring given birth by the union of “science” and religion, and a “church science” which “is openly helping the exploiters to replace the old and decayed religious prejudices by new, more odious and vile prejudices” (V. I. Lenin: On the Significance of Militant Materialism).
In recent years, the U.S. and Soviet authorities have advocated and subsidized researches into psychic phenomena. Numerous scientific organizations, military research centers and many scientists (including those in the field of high-energy physics, astronautics, computer technology, laser device, etc.) are participating in this undertaking, in addition to the research institutes and personnel specifically concerned. Scientific journals, popular magazines and newspapers have repeatedly published articles and reports on this subject.
Some of them even boasted that parapsychology is “a new scientific paradigm, like Newton’s laws of motion or Einstein’s theory of relativity.” (1) The Soviet Union, on the other hand, has put up a clamor that parapsychology makes “science move on to the threshold of an outstanding discovery,” (2) and that parapsychology “is no illusion, it is fact.” (3) Just as Lenin pointed out: “In the marketplace it often happens that the vendor who shouts loudest and calls God to witness is the one with the shoddiest goods for sale” (Workers’ Unity and Intellectuahst “Trends”). The great fuss made of parapsychology by the two superpowers is precisely of this kind.
I
Parapsychology originated at the turn of the last century in the guise of science. In essence, it is a form of humbuggery that peddles the rotten products of superstition and religion. And indeed, sometimes parapsychology did manage to do things which religion by itself could not have achieved. What really is parapsychology?
Firstly, “the immortality of the soul,” that the soul survives after death and one may be able to have dialogues with it through a medium, to call it back and even to have it photographed.
Secondly, “extrasensory perception (ESP),” that knowledge may not originate in perception of the external world through man’s physical sense organs. ESP includes telepathy (two persons far apart can transfer thoughts to one another without using any communication devices; this is also called thought transference or long-distance thought suggestion), clairvoyance (vision through obstacles, such as perceiving objects behind the walls of a safe), and precognition (apprehension of future events extrasensorily and extrara-tionally).
Thirdly, “psychokinesis,” that one can cause objects to move or change in shape or form by purely paranormal means, i.e., without physical contact of any kind.
By now, as such superstition like the so-called “immortality of the soul” has gradually been on the wane, the superpowers have more than ever attempted to distort new scientific achievements to fit the framework of parapsychology so as to beguile people out of the right way and to confuse their minds. To name a few instances: With the advent of radio technology, parapsychologists have suggested that the human brain is capable of thought transference through transmission and reception of electromagnetic waves, and then a mass of “research work” has opened up in ESP; with new developments in bio-electric technique, it was learned that the artificial limb of an amputee could be innervated by myo-electric signals, in consequence of which parapsychologists began to practice psychokinesis with great vigor.
However, what is false cannot become true. Trickery will never sell for long. In December 1973, an Israeli psychic by the name of Uri Geller, who caused quite a sensation in the Western world, claimed to be able to demonstrate trans-oceanic telepathy. A parapsychologist in London served as an experimenter while Geller himself was on the other side of the Atlantic, in New York, and communication between them was conducted by transatlantic telephone.
During the demonstration, the experimenter held a photo of a police car and pretended to transmit it to Geller; but Geller, thousands of miles away, could say nothing about the picture. Only after a long pause did he begin to make many random guesses, which of course resulted in Complete failure. After repeated suggestions and coaching by the experimenter, Geller finally scribbled a confused drawing, “a fat sausage with, at the rear, a part that comes down and looks like, say, an elephant’s foot, then goes along toward the front and becomes a sort of a breast.”
This was, of course, not a police car; nevertheless the experimenter declared it to be a “a partial success.” Again, in June 1974, Geller demonstrated psychokinesis by trying to bend a key. In this demonstration, he got the spectators moving about the room and, in the midst of confusion, when none of them were concentrating, he quickly spread his legs, but splitting his trousers, and stealthily pressed the key against the metal rail at the front of his sofa. The key was bent, but his trousers ripped, and the trick was clearly exposed on the spot. (4) These so-called parapsychological demonstrations which caused a sensation in the Western world are nothing but outright quackery!
Being not content to lag behind in this enterprise, one of the Soviet revisionists’ official journals talked glibly about an experiment in long-distance thought transference. The experimenter, in Moscow, picked up a new object every ten minutes, concentrating his attention on it, and supposedly transferred its image to another psychical “expert” in far-off New Siberia. It was bragged that the experiment was quite successful.
Evidence for this has been that in one demonstration the experimenter held up a screwdriver, and among the indistinct utterances of the psychical expert were such words as “something long,” “rather plastic-made,” “black plastic-made,” etc. (5) In fact, all these piecemeal and equivocal words, just like the other so-called experiments of this sort, are but sheer nonsense. Who can understand for sure what nonsense these quacks have said, for these words have nothing to do with the image of a screwdriver at all! Yet the Soviet revisionist “scientists” deliberately pieced these chosen words together as an evidence that “the experiment was successful,” to say nothing of the fact that they concealed from the public the particulars about the experiment. What hypocrisy it is!
What is based on artifacts and subjective conjectures made from them must in the end lead to idealism and mysticism. From the preceding instances it is clear that the so-called scientific facts of parapsychology so extravagantly boasted by the two superpowers can never stand the test of practice; they are nothing but filthy products picked up from the time-worn remnants of theology and superstition, with only superficial changes made.
II
Parapsychology, from its beginning, is a reaction to materialism. Its main body, the so-called ESP, is in direct opposition to the theory of knowledge of dialectical materialism. As to why parapsychology “received the greater interest and the greater amount of investigation,” J. B. Rhine, the American authority in psychical research, avowed: “The reason was that telepathy was believed to offer a special challenge to materialism, and materialism had begun to dominate the intellectual thought of the day.” (6) Hired scholars of the Soviet revisionists’ clique also have similarly stressed that the “facts” of parapsychology must be used as a basis “to give an impetus to the development of theory, and to make new generalizations and conclusions.” Based on “clairvoyance” they have made an epistemological formula which states that knowledge runs directly “from the outside world to the brain”; another formula from telepathy is that knowledge can be transmitted “from brain to brain.” (7) Such are the vicious attacks they have unscrupulously launched on the theory of knowledge of dialectical materialism.
The theory of knowledge of Marxist dialectical materialism holds that knowledge is a reflection of the objective external world, which can be fully made known to man. Knowledge, being a complex dialectical process, passes from perceptual to rational knowledge and then [has] to be applied in social practice to ascertain whether it is correct. Chairman Mao in his brilliant work Where Do Correct Ideas Come From? has pointed out: “Often, a correct idea can be arrived at only after many repetitions of the process leading from matter to consciousness and then back to matter, that is, leading from practice to knowledge and then back to practice.”
In the process of social practice, “countless phenomena of the objective external world are reflected in a man’s brain through his five sense organs – the organs of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch.” Sensation is a reflection in the brain of particular attributes of external objects. Apart from the material world and the motion of matter, there will be no such thing as either reflection or sensation, and hence no cognitive activity. All knowledge depends upon the interrelated activity of the brain and the sense organs.
The sense organs and the brain being parts of an inseparable whole, sense organs cannot give rise to sensations without the participation of the brain; apart from the sensory channels the brain will not produce sensations by itself. The function of each sense organ, besides sending afferent nerve impulses to the brain through sensory nerves, is also functionally regulated by the brain. Any such attempt as to separate the sensory apparatus from the brain will in the end find itself contrary to the facts of science.
Man’s perception and knowledge of the external environment depend, to a large extent, on his past experience gained from social practice, and are regulated by his existing level of consciousness. However, the primal source of cognition, knowledge and volition, ultimately lies in the external world, which is reflected in our minds through the senses. Without sensations, the connecting link between the external world and our consciousness would be lost. Sensation is the transformation of the energy of external stimuli into the fact of consciousness. To deny our sensory process is to deny the possibility of the apprehension of the external world.
With the onward movement of class struggle, the struggle for production and the advance of science and technology, there comes about a deepening of man’s knowledge of his external world as well as of his own cognitive process. The material changes caused by the active reformation of the external world by man, in turn, promote the development of his cognitive activity. By the aid of new instruments and devices for promoting knowledge, human cognitive ability transcends the limitations set by the sense organs. For examples: the telescope is used to make astronomical observations in space, the microscope to see the internal structures of a cell or molecule, and through a radio-receiver one gets broadcast messages transmitted by electromagnetic waves.
In other words, due to the creative power of man, with his inventions of instrumental aids for knowing, things originally incapable of reception by the naked sense organs are now transformed into things receivable. All this points to the fact that only by way of the sense organs can external stimuli be transformed into conscious facts.
Marx pointed out: “… the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations” (Theses on Feuerbach). This marks the fundamental distinction between dialectical materialism and old materialism, as well as various forms of idealism. Man’s reflection of external reality is conditioned by given social and class factors, always exhibiting the relationship of man to his surrounding world. Thus, there are differences among different individuals in their reflection of the same external reality.
Hence, the crucial points of the artifact of ESP in parapsychology may be summarized thus.
In the first place, there is the denial of the role of sensory activity and of practice in the process of knowledge. Once the sense organ [is] being bypassed, the brain is cut off from the outside world, thereby leading to a negation of the possibility for the brain to reflect external objects through practice.
The revisionists’ so-called “from outside world to the brain” formula denies the fundamental principle that consciousness is a reflection of the objective world. And their so-called “from brain to brain” formula is, in essence, a statement that human consciousness has been bestowed to us from heaven, or is innate in the mind. The term brain in the vocabulary of the parapsychologists is but a synonym for the soul. Recently, in an American publication we have read such words as: “All of the body is in the mind, but not all of the mind is in the body,” (8) which openly discloses the idealist apriorism of parapsychology. In the struggle between the two lines of epistemological thought in the history of philosophy, parapsychology always belongs to the reactionary idealist camp.
In the second place, there is the denial of the class nature of social practice, and of the class nature of thought and knowledge brought about by practice. The so-called ESP and the epistemological formula of “from brain to brain” neither base themselves on objective reality, nor admit their verification by objective reality, so that in this way knowledge is erroneously reduced to the spontaneous activity of the brain itself. Consequently, all knowledge and thought lose their class nature, and thus parapsychology denies the distinction between revolution and counter-revolution, ignores the facts of class struggle and plays the part of an apologist for imperialism, revisionism and counterrevolution.
In class society, the struggle between the two lines in philosophy reflects the class interests of different classes. It is one aspect of class struggle. As Lenin concludes: “The struggle of parties in philosophy … in the last analysis reflects the tendencies and ideology of the antagonistic classes in modern society” (Materialism and Empirio-criticism).
III
It is by no means incidental, but has deep-lying social and class roots, that the two superpowers are vigorously propagating the effect of psychical research.
Parapsychology originated in the era when capitalism developed into imperialism. In the epoch of imperialism and proletarian revolution, a new deluge of psychical research takes place whenever bourgeois society undergoes a radical revolutionary change, or when imperialism is in the throes of severe political and economic crises. At such turning points of history, parapsychology, as a rule, seeks alliance with various forms of religion, gives aid to the monopoly capitalist class in its counter-revolutionary scheme and, like doses of opium, attempts to paralyze the reasoning power of the masses.
After the 1870s, the main capitalist countries passed on to the stage of imperialism and, in turn, were caught up in serious political and economic crises. The birth of Marxism and its wide propagation among the working class gave impetus to the proletarian revolutionary movement. Besides using force and violence, the monopoly capitalist class also called upon parapsychology to play the role of priests in its suppression of the workers’ revolutionary movement.
In 1882, the world’s first Society of Psychical Research was established in England, and two years later an organization of the same name was set up in the United States, and thereafter Germany, Russia, France, Holland and some other countries also formed societies or associations devoted to the same end. Parapsychology, at its very beginning, tried to prove experimentally the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, and to provide some “scientific basis” for religion. As a matter of fact, parapsychology and religion have always been akin to each other; it is not at all surprising that theologians asserted that the advent of psychical research lent credence to the hypothesis of the existence of the soul, that parapsychology had made positive contributions to the stand taken by religion.
As is well known, quite a number of the founders of psychical research were either spiritualists or subjective idealists, such as F.W.H. Meyers, Oliver Lodge, William James, to name only a few. They advocated the founding of a new religion based on psychical communication (i.e., telepathy). James even pledged to undertake after his death the task in the search of ways and means of spiritual intercourse with friends and relatives, in his effort to make one believe that the living could communicate with spirits in the other world.
Just at the time of the advent of psychical research, Engels, the militant champion of materialism, wrote his brilliant article “Natural Science in the Spiritual World” in which he thoroughly exposed and criticized this pseudoscience. As he has pointed out, “spiritualists” are shameless gangsters who “care nothing that hundreds of alleged facts are exposed as imposture and dozens of alleged mediums as ordinary tricksters.”
During the 1920s and 1930s when the capitalist system in the world was stricken with over-all crisis, the monopolistic bourgeoisie turned politically to fascist rule, while in the ideological realm it ardently advocated mysticism and fideism. To satisfy this need, parapsychology was again put in the limelight. The American Society of Psychical Research openly declared that parapsychology is religion. The American Spiritualists’ Society issued a declaration saying that according to the investigations of parapsychology, man’s individual personality (i.e., the class nature of monopolistic bourgeoisie – the author) would survive forever in the other world, and the door for advance and development (i.e., the perpetual sovereignty of the monopolistic bourgeoisie – the author) would never be shut upon us either in the present world or after our death; all these sayings were nothing other than attempts to praise and glorify capitalist exploitation.
In 1930 the British House of Commons passed a bill for the “protection of psychical research” so as to give it legal status. The Japanese government, in the 1930s, also appointed its official organs to take over the administration of various psychical research institutes.
However, parapsychology never enjoyed any popularity in the Soviet Union under Lenin’s and Stalin’s leadership. In 1922 Lenin published the brilliant work On the Significance of Militant Materialism, calling on all communists and revolutionary people to propagandize atheism and “to expose and indict unflinchingly all modern ‘graduated flunkeys of clericalism.’ “
“The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class” (Manifesto of the Communist Party). Since the Khrushchev and Brezhnev renegade clique staged an over-all restoration of capitalism, parapsychology has been resuscitated in order to meet the political need of the revisionists. Chieftains of parapsychology in the Soviet Union hurriedly corresponded with the International Psychical Research Institute in Paris.
In 1959 the Soviet Government Political Books Publishing House published the book The Mysterious Phenomena of the Human Psyche, followed by numerous other books such as Suggestion from a Distance, Experimental Studies in Mental Suggestion, etc. Soviet journals and magazines such as The Communist Youth League Pravda, Problems of Philosophy, Successor, Socialist Industry, Radio Technique, etc., have printed works and reports on parapsychology issue after issue. Statistics from material so far available show that during the last decade publications on the subject amounted to a total of over 500 articles, averaging one article per week.
It is worth noting that parapsychology, being “the most inexpressible foulness, … the most shameful ‘infection’” (V.I. Lenin: To Maxim Gorky, written on November 13 or 14, 1913), is used by the revisionists as a tool for deceiving the working people and especially for poisoning the younger generation, and to this end these articles were mostly published in popular scientific journals and juvenile magazines such as Science and Life, Knowledge is Power, Technique for Youth, Young Naturist, etc.
Meanwhile, Soviet universities and institutes have opened up new departments for parapsychological research. In 1960 the biology department of Leningrad University established a laboratory for parapsychological experimentation; in 1965 the Section of Bioinformation of the Moscow Commission of Popov’s Scientific Technical Society of Radiotechnique and Electro-communication was established to undertake the study of thought transference as its basic research problem, and then followed the establishment of the All-Union Section of Technical Parapsychology and Biointroscope of the Central Commission of Scientific-Technical Society of the Instrument-making Industry in 1967, and that of the Interdepartmental Commission for the Coordination of Work on the Problem of Biophysical Effect in 1971 to coordinate the study of parapsychology in different disciplines. They have conducted psychical experiments to an extensive scale, and have given lectures and held meetings to popularize Western parapsychology.
The resurrection and the rampancy of parapsychology in the Soviet Union are due to the support given by the Soviet revisionists’ renegade clique, which have banged the drum to clear the way for psychical research by mobilizing its propaganda machine. For instance, the official The Communist Youth League Pravda frequently publishes news and articles on parapsychology, sometimes even accompanied by an editorial note to denote approval and recommendation.
The frantic craze for parapsychology in the U.S.S.R. has aroused astonishment even in the United States. One commentator said: “The Soviet Union has studied ESP for years, and the Russians’ work, considered ahead of U.S. efforts, looms like a psychical Sputnik.” (9) Another said: “None of the Western parapsychologists foresaw that it was a Russian university which took the lead in establishing a research laboratory of parapsychology financed by the government.” (10) Thus in U.S., to keep up with the other superpower, the Pentagon and CIA constantly keep themselves well informed on new developments in parapsychology. NASA, NRC and other organizations as well as the U.S. Federal Government have readily offered financial support for psychical research.
Of course, the fact that the Soviet revisionists and the U.S. imperialists gave such an enthusiasm to parapsychology is by no means “to study for the pursuit of knowledge,” still less are they conducting objective “scientific research.” At present, the capitalist world is confronted with the most serious political and economic crises since World War II. The U.S.-Soviet superpowers have become the biggest international oppressors and exploiters of our time.
They are the potential source of a new world war. Under these political and economic conditions the two superpowers, with the ambition of seeking world hegemony, suppressing revolution, preparing for war, deceiving the masses and getting around their difficulties, besides concerning themselves with armaments expansion and the stepping up of nuclear arms race, have now chosen parapsychology as another weapon.
This is not because parapsychology can perform miracles or work wonders, but because these two superpowers are both being driven into a corner; they are in a wretched plight indeed! Persons sent to the U.S.S.R. from the United States to investigate the situation in parapsychology there discussed on the basis of Soviet research “the possible use of parapsychological forces for espionage and sabotage.” (11) Americans on the basis of their own experiments in telepathy have remarked: “There seems to be a great untapped potential in the human mind,” and “perhaps we can evolve man and his social structure so that he can cope with the problems we face.” (12) All this clearly shows that parapsychology is a pseudoscience which directly serves the interests of the bourgeois and revisionist politics. And “modern pseudoscience actually serves as a vehicle for the grossest and most infamous reactionary views” (V. I. Lenin: On the Significance of Militant Materialism).
Just as the war policy of Soviet revisionism or U.S. imperialism can never save them from extinction, nor will parapsychology help them to avoid their dooms. The revolutionary people of the world will eventually dump the two hegemonic powers, together with all their parapsychology; the two superpowers will surely be discarded by history.
References
[1] [9] [12] Business Week, January 26, 1974. (U.S.) [2] [5] Communist Youth League Pravda, No. 157, 1966. (U.S.S.R.) [3] Knowledge Is Power, No. 10, 1972. (U.S.S.R.) [4] New Scientist, 64, No. 919, October 17, 1974. (England) [6] Encyclopaedia Americana, Vol. 22, 1963. [7] Science and Life, No. 6, 1961. (U.S.S.R.) [8] [11] Science Year, 1974. (U.S.) [10] Parapsychology Bulletin, No. 57, May 1961. (U.S.)
~~~~
East Berlin: Modern Superstition, Disguised As Science
Wolfgang Spickermann
While other Eastern European countries have shown a lively interest in parapsychology (psychotronics), East Germany – the German Democratic Republic – has displayed official coldness toward the subject. International conferences in the field are attended by representatives from Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Poland, but never by residents of East Germany. Even at a time when Soviet researchers either attended such meetings in person or submitted papers that were read or circulated in their absence, no East Germans were present. In this respect, the East German position has been closer to that of Communist China, at least during Mao Zedong’s lifetime, than to that of the Soviet Union, where serious study of parapsychology has been publicly advocated.
Mr. Spickermann’s article, published in Neues Deutschland, the official daily paper of the East German Communist Party (the SED, or Sozialistische Einheits-Partei Deutschlands), appeared under the heading of “Ideological Questions” on February 8-9, 1975. It was subtitled “Parapsychology – Latest Fad of the Irrational.” The article appeared at a time when demonstrations by Israeli psychic-conjurer Uri Geller attracted considerable attention in the United States and Europe; Geller appeared able to bend forks and keys by willpower, and performed other apparently psychokinetic, telepathic, and clairvoyant feats.
Some two hundred years ago, Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) managed to attract spectacular attention. He maintained that he was able to achieve contact with the spirit world. As a representative of Spiritualism, he prompted the interest of Immanuel Kant, who collected news items about Swedenborg and spent the sum of seven pounds sterling to order the spirit medium’s “major work” from London.
However, Kant soon concluded that the Arcana Coelestia (Secrets of the Heavens) amounted to eight volumes of “complete nonsense,” and he did the best he could to make up for the money he had wasted: He wrote a critical volume, Dreams of a Ghostseer, Analyzed through Dreams of the Metaphysical. This work appeared in Konigsberg, anonymously, in 1766. Kant used it to unmask the improper and regressive intent of mysticism; he served not only as a passionate inspiration of German Enlightenment, but also as an unimpeachable guardian of progressive thought. Kant spoke of himself as “the author of this text,” who had to “confess with a degree of humility that he had been naive enough to track down the accuracy of some of these narratives,” and “he found – as one does where one has no business looking – that there was nothing there.”
Today, when one hears of miraculous, mystical experiences among contemporary ghostseers, one feels transported back to the days of Swedenborg. So-called factual books, articles in large-circulation newspapers and magazines, as well as the radio and television programs of the imperialist countries have rediscovered it all: supernatural powers that enable gifted people to read the thoughts of others (telepathy), trace hidden objects, move objects without physical or mechanical means (psychokinesis), and prophesy accurately the events of the future.
Thus the “medium” Uri Geller, for example, appeared before the cameras of the FRG [Federal Republic of Germany - West Germany] and, by means of his “magic powers,” bent forks which, before the eyes of his audience, broke into pieces. In seeming sympathy, forks and knives in households throughout Federal Germany also bent, or so some overeager viewers maintained later.
One day, a large-circulation newspaper shouted URI GELLER BENDS ALL OF GERMANY. And a popular technological magazine for young readers took it upon itself to report all this as a decisive turn in natural science, comparable only to the achievements of Albert Einstein.
However, experts employed to endorse Geller’s bending skills were less impressed. They testified that the bending as well as the breaking were the results of previous treatment of the utensils with a solution of quicksilver nitrate. Things always go better with chemistry.
When specific chemical substances interact with mechanical stress upon certain mixtures, so-called stress-tear corrosion results. This can happen in the case of a silver-plated fork, an alloy of copper, nickel, and zinc, briefly moistened with a poisonous solution of quicksilver nitrate, or a similarly appropriate solution.
Its impact changes the crystalline pattern of the materials so that they lose their solidity, A break can then result from minute distortions, already present in the material, or through brief back-and-forth bending prior to the performance. All that is then needed is the skill of an experienced conjurer, who knows how to use distracting maneuvers, and who presents a prepared fork to an amazed audience at the right moment.
However, Uri Geller, with all his remarkable versatility, is only one among many. Astrologers, clairvoyants, prayers-for-health currently experience increasing success in the capitalist countries. Numerous universities and research institutes in the U.S.A., FRG, and other countries employ scientists who seriously investigate the so-called supernatural manifestations of telepathy, telekinesis and other occult happenings. It should be noted that the reality of these manifestations is taken for granted. The name chosen for this new branch of science is “parapsychology,” and the occult subject of this form of study is briefly known as “psi.”
Sensational reports, which emanate from researchers equipped with academic degrees and which are widely publicized in the bourgeois mass media, are gaining a widening circle of consumers. Some 25 percent of the readers of the British scientific periodical New Scientist, for example, are convinced that there exists something like extrasensory perception. Another 42 percent regard it as not entirely impossible. These results emerged from a survey made in 1972. A survey made in 1973 showed that 2 percent of adult men and women in the FRG [West Germany] firmly believe in witches, while 12 percent could not make up their minds. And in medicine, too, occultism and superstition have gained fertile ground. Thus, the number of licensed (non-medical) health practitioners in Munich gained 20 percent during a three-year period.
The most recent wave of spiritism, more or less disguised as scientific, passed some forty years ago over a populace buffeted by economic crises and fears. Worldwide economic depression and rampant unemployment created a fertile ground during the 1920s and 1930s, when prophets of black magic, clairvoyants, card-readers, and magic-dispensing prayers-for-health were everywhere. One has only to remember the “clairvoyant” Erik Hanussen, whom the fascists used as an instrument of their propaganda [Hanussen prophesied Hitler's rise to power, but was murdered by Nazi leaders who regarded him as dangerously ambitious. - Ed.] Another team were the brothers Willy and Rudi Schneider, originally from Hitler’s birthplace, Braunau-on-Inn [Austria], who during the 1920s ranked as stars in occult clubs in Munich, Paris, and London. Or the Bavarian peasant girl Therese of Konner-sreuth, whose alleged ability to rival unearthly forces (she displayed Jesus-stigmata on her hands and feet) attracted thousands of pilgrims.
Once again, today, the crisis in the capitalist countries encourages the revival of irrational trends within bourgeois ideology. At a time when the crisis within bourgeois philosophy manifests itself, among other things, in a form of skeptical pragmatism, while political economics cause pessimistic headlines, and while conservatism has once again become acceptable in public life, respectable academicians are able to achieve television and publicity success through mystical pseudo-science.
The roots of all this rest within exploitative society itself. Class interests force the ideologists of the ruling classes to hide certain objective facts, and to find “causes” for social conditions and circumstances, such as the “right” to exploitation. One example is the bourgeois papering-over of the relationship of wage labor to capital or the means of capitalist exploitation as such, which Karl Marx demystified in Das Kapital and showed to be scientifically inaccurate.
Human consciousness is decisively formed by material existence and economic-social conditions. Karl Marx noted in The German Ideology: “Even the foggy creations of the human mind are necessarily sublimates of life processes that are based on material, empirically conceivable and material conditions.”
Lacking a scientific world view, and without Marxism-Leninism, many people in the capitalist countries face social, economic, and political changes, quite helpless and confused. Particularly in moments of crisis, social theories offered by the ruling class prove to be useless, providing no answers to the pressing questions of life. Many seek an escape from this frustration by turning toward a mystical belief in miracles. The mass media of the ruling classes nourish this process as much as possible, particularly as occultism and superstition correspond to the nature of the ruling ideology. Mysticism is, after all, well suited to distract the masses from important and substantive economic and political questions.
Mysticism disguised as science has, today in particular, selected such complicated areas as brain research, microbiology, and biochemistry – in other words, areas that have made great progress during recent decades, but where many problems demand further research.
Here we find a parallel to the mysticism of past centuries. All along, unsolved scientific questions have encouraged speculations that had nothing to do with an understanding of the real world. Lack of knowledge concerning electricity and atmospheric conditions once led people to consider such events as lightning and thunder as the acts of gods. And lack of anatomic knowledge has, in past centuries, led to totally inappropriate methods of treatment and prayers-for-health.
Research in the natural sciences does not proceed without a philosophy. Data that is gained by experimental, empirical methods is never interpreted from within itself. Working hypotheses, based on previous levels of knowledge, are essential. Without a materialistic ideology, research in the natural sciences lacks orientation toward a correct interpretation of the results a scientist’s work has created, and he stumbles in the dark.
Dramatic developments in the natural sciences during this century, the emergence in physics of quantum and relativity theories, or the successes in genetics, for example, are in the main trends that can only be correctly interpreted when one employs dialectical materialism. Without such a means of evaluation, the natural scientist stands defenseless in the face of the vagaries of bourgeois ideology, including superstition disguised as science. “In order not to face such an event helplessly,” V. I. Lenin wrote in his work On the Meaning of a Challenging Materialism, “we have to comprehend that, without a sophisticated philosophical basis, no natural science, no materialism can succeed in the struggle against the onslaught of bourgeois ideas and the reconstitution of a bourgeois ideology.” In order to survive this struggle and to continue it to a victorious end, the natural scientist has to be a modern materialist, a conscious adherent to the materialism represented by Marx, which means he has to be a dialectical materialist.
Today, parapsychologists at times utilize the most modern experimental equipment in order to find experimental proof for their mystical working hypotheses. But their success is often the same as it was two hundred or one hundred years ago. Because, at times, these researchers suffer the same fate as William Crookes, who discovered the element thallium, and of whom Friedrich Engels [for many years Marx's closest collaborator] wrote in his Dialectic of Nature: “Mr. Crookes began about 1871 to study spiritistic manifestations, and utilized a variety of physical and mechanical apparatus, spring-scales, electric batteries, etc. Whether he brought along that essential device, a skeptical-critical head, or whether it lasted to the end in good working condition, will have to be decided later on.
In any event, Mr. Crookes was soon as quickly trapped as Mr. Wallace,” another explorer of nature, who had turned toward spiritism. [Alfred Russel Wallace developed a theory of human evolution separately, but at the same time as, Charles Darwin; he was a convinced spiritist. - Ed]
Engels notes in the same work: “In fact, pure empiricism is unable to handle the spiritists. First, the ‘higher phenomena’ are only revealed when the particular ‘researcher’ has already been trapped to a point where he only sees what he is supposed to see, or wants to see. … Second, the spiritists do not care whether hundreds of alleged facts are revealed to be trickery, or dozens of alleged mediums turn out to be simple tricksters. As long as not every one of the supposed miracles has been explained away, they control sufficient territory.”
Falsification has for quite some time managed to invade “scientifically” operated parapsychology. Quite recently, such a scandal affected the Institute for Parapsychology at Durham (USA). There, experiments with rats were supposed to prove that even animals are able to precognize events and to influence them.
The working hypothesis assumed that the animals, sufficiently stimulated, anticipated randomly created stimulation impulses and consequently influenced the generator by means of psychokinesis. It therefore created a sensation when the head of the experiment and director of the Institute, W.J. Levy, presented results that confirmed this impossible assumption. However, these results had been forged, and the psychokinetic miracle did not take place. Levy has since then admitted the manipulation, and resigned as director of the institute.
When we communists say that, with the socialist world system, a new era has begun, we express a preference for our system: this means the manipulators of darkness, misleading superstitions, and the profiteers of human ignorance are once and for all deprived of a nourishing soil.
Serious natural scientists and Marxist philosophers among us are engaged in unmasking such modern merchants of darkness. Among the passionate defenders of scientific honor stands Professor Dr. Otto Prokop and his collaborators of the Institute of Legal Medicine at Humboldt University in [East] Berlin. There, such occult undertakings as “thought photography” and “life emanations” are being unmasked as conscious frauds.
We Marxists-Leninists, in principle, consider the world as knowable and changeable by the efforts of man, who to us ranks as the highest of all things.
~~~~
Outline of CIA Project on ESP
The following text, released by the Central Intelligence Agency under the Freedom of Information Act, deals with a twofold project designed to examine the potential use of extrasensory perception for “practical problems of intelligence.” The author of the memorandum outlined a project of at least three years in length and estimated the cost for its first year. The project was envisioned as aiming at reliability and repeatability among “exceptionally gifted individuals” and at the utilization of “scattered” ESP results through “statistical concentration.”
Names, telephone numbers, and other items that might permit the identification of individuals or departments were deleted by the CIA at the time the document was released in 1981, and such deletions are noted in the text. There are no indications whether the project was actually undertaken, nor is it clear whether the text is an interoffice memorandum between two agency officials or was addressed to a CIA official by a researcher working under a contract or grant outside the agency. The memorandum is dated January 7, 1952.
January 7, 1952
If, as now appears to us as established beyond question, there is in some persons a certain amount of capacity for extrasensory perception (ESP), this fact, and consequent developments leading from it, should have significance for professional intelligence service. Research on the problems of extrasensory perception has been in the hands of a very few workers and has not been directed to the purpose here in mind, or to any practical application whatever. However, having established certain basic facts, now, after long and patient efforts and more resistance than assistance, it now appears that we are ready to consider practical application as a research problem in itself.
There are two main lines of research that hold specific promise and need further development with a view to application to the intelligence project. These two are by no means all that could be done to contribute to that end; rather, everything that adds anything to our understanding of what is taking place in ESP is likely to give us advantage in the problem of use and control. Therefore, the Rockefeller-financed project of finding the personality correlates of ESP and the excursions into the question of ESP in animals, recently begun, as well as several major lines of inquiry, are all to the good.
The two special projects of investigation that ought to be pushed in the interest of the project under discussion are, first, the search for and development of exceptionally gifted individuals who can approximate perfect success in ESP test performance, and, second, in the statistical concentration of scattered ESP performance, so as to enable an ultimately perfect reliability and application.
We have something definite to go on in each case, and it is with this in mind that we are inclined to make a serious effort to push the research in the direction of reliable application to the practical problem of intelligence. First, a word about the “special subject”: On a number of occasions, through the years, several different scientific investigators have, under conditions of excellent control, obtained strikingly long runs of unbroken success from subjects in ESP tests. The conditions allowed no alternative. At least one of them occurred with the target cards and experimenter in one building and the subject several hundred yards away in another.
Due to the elusive, unconscious nature of ESP ability, these same subjects could not reliably repeat, and during the years of investigation under the conditions of extreme limitations with which the work has had to be done, it has not been possible to solve the problem of overcoming this difficulty and bringing the capacity under reliable control. We have recently learned of two persons definitely reported to be able to keep up their rate of almost unbroken success over much longer stretches of time. These investigations have been going on in scientific laboratories, and from reports in our hands we have no reason to question their reliability.
We have not been able to bring the subjects here or extend our investigation to the laboratories concerned. It looks, however, as if in these two cases the problem of getting and maintaining control over the ESP function has been solved. If it has, the rest of the way to practical application seems to us a matter of engineering with no insuperable difficulties. Even if there is anything wrong with one or both of these cases, this more extended control must come eventually, we think, and we have had in mind many lines of research, designed to try to bring it [about].
I shall not enlarge on the practical and technological developments that would be followed in bringing a capacity, such as that demonstrated in these card tests, of getting information in a practical situation. It will be seen that if a subject under control test conditions can identify the order of a deck of cards, several hundred yards away in another building, or can “identify” the thought of another person several hundred miles away, the adaptation to the practical requirements for obtaining secret information should not give serious difficulty.
The other practice on which research should be concentrated, we believe, is that of developing ways of using small percentages of success in such a way that reliable judgment can be made. While we are still exploring the advantages of this instrument of application, we have gone far enough to see how it is entirely possible and practical to use a small percentage of success, above that expected by chance alone, so as to concentrate the slight significance attaching to a given trial to the point where reliance can be placed upon the final application to the problem in hand. I believe you went into this matter thoroughly enough with [name of individual or unit deleted] that I will not need to review here the actual devices and procedures by which this concentration of reliability is brought about.
If we were to undertake to push this research as far and as fast as we can reasonably well do in the direction of practical application to the problems of intelligence, it would be necessary to be exceedingly careful about thorough cloaking of the undertaking. I should not want anyone here in the [word or words deleted], except [two names apparently deleted] and myself to know about it. We are all three cleared for security purposes to the level of “Secret.” I would perhaps feel bound to have confidential discussion on the matter with [name or names apparently deleted]. Funds necessary for the support of the work would understandably carry no identification and raise no questions.
If there is no reason why there could not be, at any time it was justified, a renegotiation of additional needs that might arise that cannot be anticipated at this stage, I should prefer to proceed with some restraint in estimating what such a project would involve in the matter of funds. I shall estimate a research team of five persons working on this project primarily. There will be no careful line drawn.
There will be a great deal of exchange and, of course, no designation in the [several words deleted] a separate unit. For our purposes at the moment, however, the [deleted] can consider that such a test might consist of [name apparently deleted], a well-qualified statistician and two research workers qualified not only to handle groups of subjects but assist in the evaluative procedures as well. The total salary estimate for these five people would be between $22,500 and $25,000. In order to take advantage of mechanical aid in the statistical work and such other matters as traveling expenses, it would be advisable to add $5,000 as a conservative estimate.
I think $30,000 would be well spent on the first year. It is almost anyone’s guess as to what the next year would lead us into, but it would almost certainly be more and probably a great deal more. I doubt if it would be profitable to try to fix it at this time.
Frustrated as we have been by having to deal in short-term projects and the wastefulness of effort that accompanies the attempt to do long-term research projects on that basis, I am about ready to say that without pretty definite assurance of at least a three-year program I should not want to try to assemble the personnel, design and research program and put the overall effort into what is really a major undertaking like this.
Much as I feel the urgency of having our country have as much a lead as possible in this matter, I do not think it is advisable to undertake it unless there is a certain amount of confidence on both sides of the agreement, and these short-term grants-in-aid are, after all, usually measures of limited confidence.
I might add that, while the Russians have both officially and through their leading psychologists disapproved of our kind of work, as they would have to do because of the philosophy of Marxian materialism, I have seen at least one reference to the fact that they have done experiments on our lines, giving a materialist interpretation. If you can give me any information on this, I would appreciate it. Sometime we might discuss what the Nazis undertook to do …
google_protectAndRun("ads_core.google_render_ad", google_handleError, google_render_ad);
Hsin Ping
The paper reproduced on these pages was published in the Peking journal Scientia Sinica, July-August 1975. It accused the United States and the Soviet Union of encouraging parapsychological studies in order to detract from socio-economic difficulties. An article along similar lines appeared in the Chinese Communist Party’s theoretical journal, Hung Chi (Red Flag) on January 1, 1975. Both articles associated parapsychology with “religious superstition.” However after Mao Zedong’s death, the Peking government changed emphasis concerning a wide variety of social and economic trends.
Chairman Mao has pointed out: “A given culture is the ideological reflection of the politics and economics of a given society” (On New Democracy). As the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, beset by troubles at home and abroad, are now in the grip of serious political and economic crises, and are both in the plight as described by the Chinese verse, “Flowers fall off, do what one may,” their predicament is bound to be reflected in their decadent bourgeois culture.
Idealist thinking of all shades and various kinds of pseudoscience have found their way into spheres of science and technology of the two superpowers. As a conspicuous instance of this one may cite the rampancy of parapsychology – a queer hybrid offspring given birth by the union of “science” and religion, and a “church science” which “is openly helping the exploiters to replace the old and decayed religious prejudices by new, more odious and vile prejudices” (V. I. Lenin: On the Significance of Militant Materialism).
In recent years, the U.S. and Soviet authorities have advocated and subsidized researches into psychic phenomena. Numerous scientific organizations, military research centers and many scientists (including those in the field of high-energy physics, astronautics, computer technology, laser device, etc.) are participating in this undertaking, in addition to the research institutes and personnel specifically concerned. Scientific journals, popular magazines and newspapers have repeatedly published articles and reports on this subject.
Some of them even boasted that parapsychology is “a new scientific paradigm, like Newton’s laws of motion or Einstein’s theory of relativity.” (1) The Soviet Union, on the other hand, has put up a clamor that parapsychology makes “science move on to the threshold of an outstanding discovery,” (2) and that parapsychology “is no illusion, it is fact.” (3) Just as Lenin pointed out: “In the marketplace it often happens that the vendor who shouts loudest and calls God to witness is the one with the shoddiest goods for sale” (Workers’ Unity and Intellectuahst “Trends”). The great fuss made of parapsychology by the two superpowers is precisely of this kind.
I
Parapsychology originated at the turn of the last century in the guise of science. In essence, it is a form of humbuggery that peddles the rotten products of superstition and religion. And indeed, sometimes parapsychology did manage to do things which religion by itself could not have achieved. What really is parapsychology?
Firstly, “the immortality of the soul,” that the soul survives after death and one may be able to have dialogues with it through a medium, to call it back and even to have it photographed.
Secondly, “extrasensory perception (ESP),” that knowledge may not originate in perception of the external world through man’s physical sense organs. ESP includes telepathy (two persons far apart can transfer thoughts to one another without using any communication devices; this is also called thought transference or long-distance thought suggestion), clairvoyance (vision through obstacles, such as perceiving objects behind the walls of a safe), and precognition (apprehension of future events extrasensorily and extrara-tionally).
Thirdly, “psychokinesis,” that one can cause objects to move or change in shape or form by purely paranormal means, i.e., without physical contact of any kind.
By now, as such superstition like the so-called “immortality of the soul” has gradually been on the wane, the superpowers have more than ever attempted to distort new scientific achievements to fit the framework of parapsychology so as to beguile people out of the right way and to confuse their minds. To name a few instances: With the advent of radio technology, parapsychologists have suggested that the human brain is capable of thought transference through transmission and reception of electromagnetic waves, and then a mass of “research work” has opened up in ESP; with new developments in bio-electric technique, it was learned that the artificial limb of an amputee could be innervated by myo-electric signals, in consequence of which parapsychologists began to practice psychokinesis with great vigor.
However, what is false cannot become true. Trickery will never sell for long. In December 1973, an Israeli psychic by the name of Uri Geller, who caused quite a sensation in the Western world, claimed to be able to demonstrate trans-oceanic telepathy. A parapsychologist in London served as an experimenter while Geller himself was on the other side of the Atlantic, in New York, and communication between them was conducted by transatlantic telephone.
During the demonstration, the experimenter held a photo of a police car and pretended to transmit it to Geller; but Geller, thousands of miles away, could say nothing about the picture. Only after a long pause did he begin to make many random guesses, which of course resulted in Complete failure. After repeated suggestions and coaching by the experimenter, Geller finally scribbled a confused drawing, “a fat sausage with, at the rear, a part that comes down and looks like, say, an elephant’s foot, then goes along toward the front and becomes a sort of a breast.”
This was, of course, not a police car; nevertheless the experimenter declared it to be a “a partial success.” Again, in June 1974, Geller demonstrated psychokinesis by trying to bend a key. In this demonstration, he got the spectators moving about the room and, in the midst of confusion, when none of them were concentrating, he quickly spread his legs, but splitting his trousers, and stealthily pressed the key against the metal rail at the front of his sofa. The key was bent, but his trousers ripped, and the trick was clearly exposed on the spot. (4) These so-called parapsychological demonstrations which caused a sensation in the Western world are nothing but outright quackery!
Being not content to lag behind in this enterprise, one of the Soviet revisionists’ official journals talked glibly about an experiment in long-distance thought transference. The experimenter, in Moscow, picked up a new object every ten minutes, concentrating his attention on it, and supposedly transferred its image to another psychical “expert” in far-off New Siberia. It was bragged that the experiment was quite successful.
Evidence for this has been that in one demonstration the experimenter held up a screwdriver, and among the indistinct utterances of the psychical expert were such words as “something long,” “rather plastic-made,” “black plastic-made,” etc. (5) In fact, all these piecemeal and equivocal words, just like the other so-called experiments of this sort, are but sheer nonsense. Who can understand for sure what nonsense these quacks have said, for these words have nothing to do with the image of a screwdriver at all! Yet the Soviet revisionist “scientists” deliberately pieced these chosen words together as an evidence that “the experiment was successful,” to say nothing of the fact that they concealed from the public the particulars about the experiment. What hypocrisy it is!
What is based on artifacts and subjective conjectures made from them must in the end lead to idealism and mysticism. From the preceding instances it is clear that the so-called scientific facts of parapsychology so extravagantly boasted by the two superpowers can never stand the test of practice; they are nothing but filthy products picked up from the time-worn remnants of theology and superstition, with only superficial changes made.
II
Parapsychology, from its beginning, is a reaction to materialism. Its main body, the so-called ESP, is in direct opposition to the theory of knowledge of dialectical materialism. As to why parapsychology “received the greater interest and the greater amount of investigation,” J. B. Rhine, the American authority in psychical research, avowed: “The reason was that telepathy was believed to offer a special challenge to materialism, and materialism had begun to dominate the intellectual thought of the day.” (6) Hired scholars of the Soviet revisionists’ clique also have similarly stressed that the “facts” of parapsychology must be used as a basis “to give an impetus to the development of theory, and to make new generalizations and conclusions.” Based on “clairvoyance” they have made an epistemological formula which states that knowledge runs directly “from the outside world to the brain”; another formula from telepathy is that knowledge can be transmitted “from brain to brain.” (7) Such are the vicious attacks they have unscrupulously launched on the theory of knowledge of dialectical materialism.
The theory of knowledge of Marxist dialectical materialism holds that knowledge is a reflection of the objective external world, which can be fully made known to man. Knowledge, being a complex dialectical process, passes from perceptual to rational knowledge and then [has] to be applied in social practice to ascertain whether it is correct. Chairman Mao in his brilliant work Where Do Correct Ideas Come From? has pointed out: “Often, a correct idea can be arrived at only after many repetitions of the process leading from matter to consciousness and then back to matter, that is, leading from practice to knowledge and then back to practice.”
In the process of social practice, “countless phenomena of the objective external world are reflected in a man’s brain through his five sense organs – the organs of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch.” Sensation is a reflection in the brain of particular attributes of external objects. Apart from the material world and the motion of matter, there will be no such thing as either reflection or sensation, and hence no cognitive activity. All knowledge depends upon the interrelated activity of the brain and the sense organs.
The sense organs and the brain being parts of an inseparable whole, sense organs cannot give rise to sensations without the participation of the brain; apart from the sensory channels the brain will not produce sensations by itself. The function of each sense organ, besides sending afferent nerve impulses to the brain through sensory nerves, is also functionally regulated by the brain. Any such attempt as to separate the sensory apparatus from the brain will in the end find itself contrary to the facts of science.
Man’s perception and knowledge of the external environment depend, to a large extent, on his past experience gained from social practice, and are regulated by his existing level of consciousness. However, the primal source of cognition, knowledge and volition, ultimately lies in the external world, which is reflected in our minds through the senses. Without sensations, the connecting link between the external world and our consciousness would be lost. Sensation is the transformation of the energy of external stimuli into the fact of consciousness. To deny our sensory process is to deny the possibility of the apprehension of the external world.
With the onward movement of class struggle, the struggle for production and the advance of science and technology, there comes about a deepening of man’s knowledge of his external world as well as of his own cognitive process. The material changes caused by the active reformation of the external world by man, in turn, promote the development of his cognitive activity. By the aid of new instruments and devices for promoting knowledge, human cognitive ability transcends the limitations set by the sense organs. For examples: the telescope is used to make astronomical observations in space, the microscope to see the internal structures of a cell or molecule, and through a radio-receiver one gets broadcast messages transmitted by electromagnetic waves.
In other words, due to the creative power of man, with his inventions of instrumental aids for knowing, things originally incapable of reception by the naked sense organs are now transformed into things receivable. All this points to the fact that only by way of the sense organs can external stimuli be transformed into conscious facts.
Marx pointed out: “… the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations” (Theses on Feuerbach). This marks the fundamental distinction between dialectical materialism and old materialism, as well as various forms of idealism. Man’s reflection of external reality is conditioned by given social and class factors, always exhibiting the relationship of man to his surrounding world. Thus, there are differences among different individuals in their reflection of the same external reality.
Hence, the crucial points of the artifact of ESP in parapsychology may be summarized thus.
In the first place, there is the denial of the role of sensory activity and of practice in the process of knowledge. Once the sense organ [is] being bypassed, the brain is cut off from the outside world, thereby leading to a negation of the possibility for the brain to reflect external objects through practice.
The revisionists’ so-called “from outside world to the brain” formula denies the fundamental principle that consciousness is a reflection of the objective world. And their so-called “from brain to brain” formula is, in essence, a statement that human consciousness has been bestowed to us from heaven, or is innate in the mind. The term brain in the vocabulary of the parapsychologists is but a synonym for the soul. Recently, in an American publication we have read such words as: “All of the body is in the mind, but not all of the mind is in the body,” (8) which openly discloses the idealist apriorism of parapsychology. In the struggle between the two lines of epistemological thought in the history of philosophy, parapsychology always belongs to the reactionary idealist camp.
In the second place, there is the denial of the class nature of social practice, and of the class nature of thought and knowledge brought about by practice. The so-called ESP and the epistemological formula of “from brain to brain” neither base themselves on objective reality, nor admit their verification by objective reality, so that in this way knowledge is erroneously reduced to the spontaneous activity of the brain itself. Consequently, all knowledge and thought lose their class nature, and thus parapsychology denies the distinction between revolution and counter-revolution, ignores the facts of class struggle and plays the part of an apologist for imperialism, revisionism and counterrevolution.
In class society, the struggle between the two lines in philosophy reflects the class interests of different classes. It is one aspect of class struggle. As Lenin concludes: “The struggle of parties in philosophy … in the last analysis reflects the tendencies and ideology of the antagonistic classes in modern society” (Materialism and Empirio-criticism).
III
It is by no means incidental, but has deep-lying social and class roots, that the two superpowers are vigorously propagating the effect of psychical research.
Parapsychology originated in the era when capitalism developed into imperialism. In the epoch of imperialism and proletarian revolution, a new deluge of psychical research takes place whenever bourgeois society undergoes a radical revolutionary change, or when imperialism is in the throes of severe political and economic crises. At such turning points of history, parapsychology, as a rule, seeks alliance with various forms of religion, gives aid to the monopoly capitalist class in its counter-revolutionary scheme and, like doses of opium, attempts to paralyze the reasoning power of the masses.
After the 1870s, the main capitalist countries passed on to the stage of imperialism and, in turn, were caught up in serious political and economic crises. The birth of Marxism and its wide propagation among the working class gave impetus to the proletarian revolutionary movement. Besides using force and violence, the monopoly capitalist class also called upon parapsychology to play the role of priests in its suppression of the workers’ revolutionary movement.
In 1882, the world’s first Society of Psychical Research was established in England, and two years later an organization of the same name was set up in the United States, and thereafter Germany, Russia, France, Holland and some other countries also formed societies or associations devoted to the same end. Parapsychology, at its very beginning, tried to prove experimentally the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, and to provide some “scientific basis” for religion. As a matter of fact, parapsychology and religion have always been akin to each other; it is not at all surprising that theologians asserted that the advent of psychical research lent credence to the hypothesis of the existence of the soul, that parapsychology had made positive contributions to the stand taken by religion.
As is well known, quite a number of the founders of psychical research were either spiritualists or subjective idealists, such as F.W.H. Meyers, Oliver Lodge, William James, to name only a few. They advocated the founding of a new religion based on psychical communication (i.e., telepathy). James even pledged to undertake after his death the task in the search of ways and means of spiritual intercourse with friends and relatives, in his effort to make one believe that the living could communicate with spirits in the other world.
Just at the time of the advent of psychical research, Engels, the militant champion of materialism, wrote his brilliant article “Natural Science in the Spiritual World” in which he thoroughly exposed and criticized this pseudoscience. As he has pointed out, “spiritualists” are shameless gangsters who “care nothing that hundreds of alleged facts are exposed as imposture and dozens of alleged mediums as ordinary tricksters.”
During the 1920s and 1930s when the capitalist system in the world was stricken with over-all crisis, the monopolistic bourgeoisie turned politically to fascist rule, while in the ideological realm it ardently advocated mysticism and fideism. To satisfy this need, parapsychology was again put in the limelight. The American Society of Psychical Research openly declared that parapsychology is religion. The American Spiritualists’ Society issued a declaration saying that according to the investigations of parapsychology, man’s individual personality (i.e., the class nature of monopolistic bourgeoisie – the author) would survive forever in the other world, and the door for advance and development (i.e., the perpetual sovereignty of the monopolistic bourgeoisie – the author) would never be shut upon us either in the present world or after our death; all these sayings were nothing other than attempts to praise and glorify capitalist exploitation.
In 1930 the British House of Commons passed a bill for the “protection of psychical research” so as to give it legal status. The Japanese government, in the 1930s, also appointed its official organs to take over the administration of various psychical research institutes.
However, parapsychology never enjoyed any popularity in the Soviet Union under Lenin’s and Stalin’s leadership. In 1922 Lenin published the brilliant work On the Significance of Militant Materialism, calling on all communists and revolutionary people to propagandize atheism and “to expose and indict unflinchingly all modern ‘graduated flunkeys of clericalism.’ “
“The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class” (Manifesto of the Communist Party). Since the Khrushchev and Brezhnev renegade clique staged an over-all restoration of capitalism, parapsychology has been resuscitated in order to meet the political need of the revisionists. Chieftains of parapsychology in the Soviet Union hurriedly corresponded with the International Psychical Research Institute in Paris.
In 1959 the Soviet Government Political Books Publishing House published the book The Mysterious Phenomena of the Human Psyche, followed by numerous other books such as Suggestion from a Distance, Experimental Studies in Mental Suggestion, etc. Soviet journals and magazines such as The Communist Youth League Pravda, Problems of Philosophy, Successor, Socialist Industry, Radio Technique, etc., have printed works and reports on parapsychology issue after issue. Statistics from material so far available show that during the last decade publications on the subject amounted to a total of over 500 articles, averaging one article per week.
It is worth noting that parapsychology, being “the most inexpressible foulness, … the most shameful ‘infection’” (V.I. Lenin: To Maxim Gorky, written on November 13 or 14, 1913), is used by the revisionists as a tool for deceiving the working people and especially for poisoning the younger generation, and to this end these articles were mostly published in popular scientific journals and juvenile magazines such as Science and Life, Knowledge is Power, Technique for Youth, Young Naturist, etc.
Meanwhile, Soviet universities and institutes have opened up new departments for parapsychological research. In 1960 the biology department of Leningrad University established a laboratory for parapsychological experimentation; in 1965 the Section of Bioinformation of the Moscow Commission of Popov’s Scientific Technical Society of Radiotechnique and Electro-communication was established to undertake the study of thought transference as its basic research problem, and then followed the establishment of the All-Union Section of Technical Parapsychology and Biointroscope of the Central Commission of Scientific-Technical Society of the Instrument-making Industry in 1967, and that of the Interdepartmental Commission for the Coordination of Work on the Problem of Biophysical Effect in 1971 to coordinate the study of parapsychology in different disciplines. They have conducted psychical experiments to an extensive scale, and have given lectures and held meetings to popularize Western parapsychology.
The resurrection and the rampancy of parapsychology in the Soviet Union are due to the support given by the Soviet revisionists’ renegade clique, which have banged the drum to clear the way for psychical research by mobilizing its propaganda machine. For instance, the official The Communist Youth League Pravda frequently publishes news and articles on parapsychology, sometimes even accompanied by an editorial note to denote approval and recommendation.
The frantic craze for parapsychology in the U.S.S.R. has aroused astonishment even in the United States. One commentator said: “The Soviet Union has studied ESP for years, and the Russians’ work, considered ahead of U.S. efforts, looms like a psychical Sputnik.” (9) Another said: “None of the Western parapsychologists foresaw that it was a Russian university which took the lead in establishing a research laboratory of parapsychology financed by the government.” (10) Thus in U.S., to keep up with the other superpower, the Pentagon and CIA constantly keep themselves well informed on new developments in parapsychology. NASA, NRC and other organizations as well as the U.S. Federal Government have readily offered financial support for psychical research.
Of course, the fact that the Soviet revisionists and the U.S. imperialists gave such an enthusiasm to parapsychology is by no means “to study for the pursuit of knowledge,” still less are they conducting objective “scientific research.” At present, the capitalist world is confronted with the most serious political and economic crises since World War II. The U.S.-Soviet superpowers have become the biggest international oppressors and exploiters of our time.
They are the potential source of a new world war. Under these political and economic conditions the two superpowers, with the ambition of seeking world hegemony, suppressing revolution, preparing for war, deceiving the masses and getting around their difficulties, besides concerning themselves with armaments expansion and the stepping up of nuclear arms race, have now chosen parapsychology as another weapon.
This is not because parapsychology can perform miracles or work wonders, but because these two superpowers are both being driven into a corner; they are in a wretched plight indeed! Persons sent to the U.S.S.R. from the United States to investigate the situation in parapsychology there discussed on the basis of Soviet research “the possible use of parapsychological forces for espionage and sabotage.” (11) Americans on the basis of their own experiments in telepathy have remarked: “There seems to be a great untapped potential in the human mind,” and “perhaps we can evolve man and his social structure so that he can cope with the problems we face.” (12) All this clearly shows that parapsychology is a pseudoscience which directly serves the interests of the bourgeois and revisionist politics. And “modern pseudoscience actually serves as a vehicle for the grossest and most infamous reactionary views” (V. I. Lenin: On the Significance of Militant Materialism).
Just as the war policy of Soviet revisionism or U.S. imperialism can never save them from extinction, nor will parapsychology help them to avoid their dooms. The revolutionary people of the world will eventually dump the two hegemonic powers, together with all their parapsychology; the two superpowers will surely be discarded by history.
References
[1] [9] [12] Business Week, January 26, 1974. (U.S.) [2] [5] Communist Youth League Pravda, No. 157, 1966. (U.S.S.R.) [3] Knowledge Is Power, No. 10, 1972. (U.S.S.R.) [4] New Scientist, 64, No. 919, October 17, 1974. (England) [6] Encyclopaedia Americana, Vol. 22, 1963. [7] Science and Life, No. 6, 1961. (U.S.S.R.) [8] [11] Science Year, 1974. (U.S.) [10] Parapsychology Bulletin, No. 57, May 1961. (U.S.)
~~~~
East Berlin: Modern Superstition, Disguised As Science
Wolfgang Spickermann
While other Eastern European countries have shown a lively interest in parapsychology (psychotronics), East Germany – the German Democratic Republic – has displayed official coldness toward the subject. International conferences in the field are attended by representatives from Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Poland, but never by residents of East Germany. Even at a time when Soviet researchers either attended such meetings in person or submitted papers that were read or circulated in their absence, no East Germans were present. In this respect, the East German position has been closer to that of Communist China, at least during Mao Zedong’s lifetime, than to that of the Soviet Union, where serious study of parapsychology has been publicly advocated.
Mr. Spickermann’s article, published in Neues Deutschland, the official daily paper of the East German Communist Party (the SED, or Sozialistische Einheits-Partei Deutschlands), appeared under the heading of “Ideological Questions” on February 8-9, 1975. It was subtitled “Parapsychology – Latest Fad of the Irrational.” The article appeared at a time when demonstrations by Israeli psychic-conjurer Uri Geller attracted considerable attention in the United States and Europe; Geller appeared able to bend forks and keys by willpower, and performed other apparently psychokinetic, telepathic, and clairvoyant feats.
Some two hundred years ago, Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) managed to attract spectacular attention. He maintained that he was able to achieve contact with the spirit world. As a representative of Spiritualism, he prompted the interest of Immanuel Kant, who collected news items about Swedenborg and spent the sum of seven pounds sterling to order the spirit medium’s “major work” from London.
However, Kant soon concluded that the Arcana Coelestia (Secrets of the Heavens) amounted to eight volumes of “complete nonsense,” and he did the best he could to make up for the money he had wasted: He wrote a critical volume, Dreams of a Ghostseer, Analyzed through Dreams of the Metaphysical. This work appeared in Konigsberg, anonymously, in 1766. Kant used it to unmask the improper and regressive intent of mysticism; he served not only as a passionate inspiration of German Enlightenment, but also as an unimpeachable guardian of progressive thought. Kant spoke of himself as “the author of this text,” who had to “confess with a degree of humility that he had been naive enough to track down the accuracy of some of these narratives,” and “he found – as one does where one has no business looking – that there was nothing there.”
Today, when one hears of miraculous, mystical experiences among contemporary ghostseers, one feels transported back to the days of Swedenborg. So-called factual books, articles in large-circulation newspapers and magazines, as well as the radio and television programs of the imperialist countries have rediscovered it all: supernatural powers that enable gifted people to read the thoughts of others (telepathy), trace hidden objects, move objects without physical or mechanical means (psychokinesis), and prophesy accurately the events of the future.
Thus the “medium” Uri Geller, for example, appeared before the cameras of the FRG [Federal Republic of Germany - West Germany] and, by means of his “magic powers,” bent forks which, before the eyes of his audience, broke into pieces. In seeming sympathy, forks and knives in households throughout Federal Germany also bent, or so some overeager viewers maintained later.
One day, a large-circulation newspaper shouted URI GELLER BENDS ALL OF GERMANY. And a popular technological magazine for young readers took it upon itself to report all this as a decisive turn in natural science, comparable only to the achievements of Albert Einstein.
However, experts employed to endorse Geller’s bending skills were less impressed. They testified that the bending as well as the breaking were the results of previous treatment of the utensils with a solution of quicksilver nitrate. Things always go better with chemistry.
When specific chemical substances interact with mechanical stress upon certain mixtures, so-called stress-tear corrosion results. This can happen in the case of a silver-plated fork, an alloy of copper, nickel, and zinc, briefly moistened with a poisonous solution of quicksilver nitrate, or a similarly appropriate solution.
Its impact changes the crystalline pattern of the materials so that they lose their solidity, A break can then result from minute distortions, already present in the material, or through brief back-and-forth bending prior to the performance. All that is then needed is the skill of an experienced conjurer, who knows how to use distracting maneuvers, and who presents a prepared fork to an amazed audience at the right moment.
However, Uri Geller, with all his remarkable versatility, is only one among many. Astrologers, clairvoyants, prayers-for-health currently experience increasing success in the capitalist countries. Numerous universities and research institutes in the U.S.A., FRG, and other countries employ scientists who seriously investigate the so-called supernatural manifestations of telepathy, telekinesis and other occult happenings. It should be noted that the reality of these manifestations is taken for granted. The name chosen for this new branch of science is “parapsychology,” and the occult subject of this form of study is briefly known as “psi.”
Sensational reports, which emanate from researchers equipped with academic degrees and which are widely publicized in the bourgeois mass media, are gaining a widening circle of consumers. Some 25 percent of the readers of the British scientific periodical New Scientist, for example, are convinced that there exists something like extrasensory perception. Another 42 percent regard it as not entirely impossible. These results emerged from a survey made in 1972. A survey made in 1973 showed that 2 percent of adult men and women in the FRG [West Germany] firmly believe in witches, while 12 percent could not make up their minds. And in medicine, too, occultism and superstition have gained fertile ground. Thus, the number of licensed (non-medical) health practitioners in Munich gained 20 percent during a three-year period.
The most recent wave of spiritism, more or less disguised as scientific, passed some forty years ago over a populace buffeted by economic crises and fears. Worldwide economic depression and rampant unemployment created a fertile ground during the 1920s and 1930s, when prophets of black magic, clairvoyants, card-readers, and magic-dispensing prayers-for-health were everywhere. One has only to remember the “clairvoyant” Erik Hanussen, whom the fascists used as an instrument of their propaganda [Hanussen prophesied Hitler's rise to power, but was murdered by Nazi leaders who regarded him as dangerously ambitious. - Ed.] Another team were the brothers Willy and Rudi Schneider, originally from Hitler’s birthplace, Braunau-on-Inn [Austria], who during the 1920s ranked as stars in occult clubs in Munich, Paris, and London. Or the Bavarian peasant girl Therese of Konner-sreuth, whose alleged ability to rival unearthly forces (she displayed Jesus-stigmata on her hands and feet) attracted thousands of pilgrims.
Once again, today, the crisis in the capitalist countries encourages the revival of irrational trends within bourgeois ideology. At a time when the crisis within bourgeois philosophy manifests itself, among other things, in a form of skeptical pragmatism, while political economics cause pessimistic headlines, and while conservatism has once again become acceptable in public life, respectable academicians are able to achieve television and publicity success through mystical pseudo-science.
The roots of all this rest within exploitative society itself. Class interests force the ideologists of the ruling classes to hide certain objective facts, and to find “causes” for social conditions and circumstances, such as the “right” to exploitation. One example is the bourgeois papering-over of the relationship of wage labor to capital or the means of capitalist exploitation as such, which Karl Marx demystified in Das Kapital and showed to be scientifically inaccurate.
Human consciousness is decisively formed by material existence and economic-social conditions. Karl Marx noted in The German Ideology: “Even the foggy creations of the human mind are necessarily sublimates of life processes that are based on material, empirically conceivable and material conditions.”
Lacking a scientific world view, and without Marxism-Leninism, many people in the capitalist countries face social, economic, and political changes, quite helpless and confused. Particularly in moments of crisis, social theories offered by the ruling class prove to be useless, providing no answers to the pressing questions of life. Many seek an escape from this frustration by turning toward a mystical belief in miracles. The mass media of the ruling classes nourish this process as much as possible, particularly as occultism and superstition correspond to the nature of the ruling ideology. Mysticism is, after all, well suited to distract the masses from important and substantive economic and political questions.
Mysticism disguised as science has, today in particular, selected such complicated areas as brain research, microbiology, and biochemistry – in other words, areas that have made great progress during recent decades, but where many problems demand further research.
Here we find a parallel to the mysticism of past centuries. All along, unsolved scientific questions have encouraged speculations that had nothing to do with an understanding of the real world. Lack of knowledge concerning electricity and atmospheric conditions once led people to consider such events as lightning and thunder as the acts of gods. And lack of anatomic knowledge has, in past centuries, led to totally inappropriate methods of treatment and prayers-for-health.
Research in the natural sciences does not proceed without a philosophy. Data that is gained by experimental, empirical methods is never interpreted from within itself. Working hypotheses, based on previous levels of knowledge, are essential. Without a materialistic ideology, research in the natural sciences lacks orientation toward a correct interpretation of the results a scientist’s work has created, and he stumbles in the dark.
Dramatic developments in the natural sciences during this century, the emergence in physics of quantum and relativity theories, or the successes in genetics, for example, are in the main trends that can only be correctly interpreted when one employs dialectical materialism. Without such a means of evaluation, the natural scientist stands defenseless in the face of the vagaries of bourgeois ideology, including superstition disguised as science. “In order not to face such an event helplessly,” V. I. Lenin wrote in his work On the Meaning of a Challenging Materialism, “we have to comprehend that, without a sophisticated philosophical basis, no natural science, no materialism can succeed in the struggle against the onslaught of bourgeois ideas and the reconstitution of a bourgeois ideology.” In order to survive this struggle and to continue it to a victorious end, the natural scientist has to be a modern materialist, a conscious adherent to the materialism represented by Marx, which means he has to be a dialectical materialist.
Today, parapsychologists at times utilize the most modern experimental equipment in order to find experimental proof for their mystical working hypotheses. But their success is often the same as it was two hundred or one hundred years ago. Because, at times, these researchers suffer the same fate as William Crookes, who discovered the element thallium, and of whom Friedrich Engels [for many years Marx's closest collaborator] wrote in his Dialectic of Nature: “Mr. Crookes began about 1871 to study spiritistic manifestations, and utilized a variety of physical and mechanical apparatus, spring-scales, electric batteries, etc. Whether he brought along that essential device, a skeptical-critical head, or whether it lasted to the end in good working condition, will have to be decided later on.
In any event, Mr. Crookes was soon as quickly trapped as Mr. Wallace,” another explorer of nature, who had turned toward spiritism. [Alfred Russel Wallace developed a theory of human evolution separately, but at the same time as, Charles Darwin; he was a convinced spiritist. - Ed]
Engels notes in the same work: “In fact, pure empiricism is unable to handle the spiritists. First, the ‘higher phenomena’ are only revealed when the particular ‘researcher’ has already been trapped to a point where he only sees what he is supposed to see, or wants to see. … Second, the spiritists do not care whether hundreds of alleged facts are revealed to be trickery, or dozens of alleged mediums turn out to be simple tricksters. As long as not every one of the supposed miracles has been explained away, they control sufficient territory.”
Falsification has for quite some time managed to invade “scientifically” operated parapsychology. Quite recently, such a scandal affected the Institute for Parapsychology at Durham (USA). There, experiments with rats were supposed to prove that even animals are able to precognize events and to influence them.
The working hypothesis assumed that the animals, sufficiently stimulated, anticipated randomly created stimulation impulses and consequently influenced the generator by means of psychokinesis. It therefore created a sensation when the head of the experiment and director of the Institute, W.J. Levy, presented results that confirmed this impossible assumption. However, these results had been forged, and the psychokinetic miracle did not take place. Levy has since then admitted the manipulation, and resigned as director of the institute.
When we communists say that, with the socialist world system, a new era has begun, we express a preference for our system: this means the manipulators of darkness, misleading superstitions, and the profiteers of human ignorance are once and for all deprived of a nourishing soil.
Serious natural scientists and Marxist philosophers among us are engaged in unmasking such modern merchants of darkness. Among the passionate defenders of scientific honor stands Professor Dr. Otto Prokop and his collaborators of the Institute of Legal Medicine at Humboldt University in [East] Berlin. There, such occult undertakings as “thought photography” and “life emanations” are being unmasked as conscious frauds.
We Marxists-Leninists, in principle, consider the world as knowable and changeable by the efforts of man, who to us ranks as the highest of all things.
~~~~
Outline of CIA Project on ESP
The following text, released by the Central Intelligence Agency under the Freedom of Information Act, deals with a twofold project designed to examine the potential use of extrasensory perception for “practical problems of intelligence.” The author of the memorandum outlined a project of at least three years in length and estimated the cost for its first year. The project was envisioned as aiming at reliability and repeatability among “exceptionally gifted individuals” and at the utilization of “scattered” ESP results through “statistical concentration.”
Names, telephone numbers, and other items that might permit the identification of individuals or departments were deleted by the CIA at the time the document was released in 1981, and such deletions are noted in the text. There are no indications whether the project was actually undertaken, nor is it clear whether the text is an interoffice memorandum between two agency officials or was addressed to a CIA official by a researcher working under a contract or grant outside the agency. The memorandum is dated January 7, 1952.
January 7, 1952
If, as now appears to us as established beyond question, there is in some persons a certain amount of capacity for extrasensory perception (ESP), this fact, and consequent developments leading from it, should have significance for professional intelligence service. Research on the problems of extrasensory perception has been in the hands of a very few workers and has not been directed to the purpose here in mind, or to any practical application whatever. However, having established certain basic facts, now, after long and patient efforts and more resistance than assistance, it now appears that we are ready to consider practical application as a research problem in itself.
There are two main lines of research that hold specific promise and need further development with a view to application to the intelligence project. These two are by no means all that could be done to contribute to that end; rather, everything that adds anything to our understanding of what is taking place in ESP is likely to give us advantage in the problem of use and control. Therefore, the Rockefeller-financed project of finding the personality correlates of ESP and the excursions into the question of ESP in animals, recently begun, as well as several major lines of inquiry, are all to the good.
The two special projects of investigation that ought to be pushed in the interest of the project under discussion are, first, the search for and development of exceptionally gifted individuals who can approximate perfect success in ESP test performance, and, second, in the statistical concentration of scattered ESP performance, so as to enable an ultimately perfect reliability and application.
We have something definite to go on in each case, and it is with this in mind that we are inclined to make a serious effort to push the research in the direction of reliable application to the practical problem of intelligence. First, a word about the “special subject”: On a number of occasions, through the years, several different scientific investigators have, under conditions of excellent control, obtained strikingly long runs of unbroken success from subjects in ESP tests. The conditions allowed no alternative. At least one of them occurred with the target cards and experimenter in one building and the subject several hundred yards away in another.
Due to the elusive, unconscious nature of ESP ability, these same subjects could not reliably repeat, and during the years of investigation under the conditions of extreme limitations with which the work has had to be done, it has not been possible to solve the problem of overcoming this difficulty and bringing the capacity under reliable control. We have recently learned of two persons definitely reported to be able to keep up their rate of almost unbroken success over much longer stretches of time. These investigations have been going on in scientific laboratories, and from reports in our hands we have no reason to question their reliability.
We have not been able to bring the subjects here or extend our investigation to the laboratories concerned. It looks, however, as if in these two cases the problem of getting and maintaining control over the ESP function has been solved. If it has, the rest of the way to practical application seems to us a matter of engineering with no insuperable difficulties. Even if there is anything wrong with one or both of these cases, this more extended control must come eventually, we think, and we have had in mind many lines of research, designed to try to bring it [about].
I shall not enlarge on the practical and technological developments that would be followed in bringing a capacity, such as that demonstrated in these card tests, of getting information in a practical situation. It will be seen that if a subject under control test conditions can identify the order of a deck of cards, several hundred yards away in another building, or can “identify” the thought of another person several hundred miles away, the adaptation to the practical requirements for obtaining secret information should not give serious difficulty.
The other practice on which research should be concentrated, we believe, is that of developing ways of using small percentages of success in such a way that reliable judgment can be made. While we are still exploring the advantages of this instrument of application, we have gone far enough to see how it is entirely possible and practical to use a small percentage of success, above that expected by chance alone, so as to concentrate the slight significance attaching to a given trial to the point where reliance can be placed upon the final application to the problem in hand. I believe you went into this matter thoroughly enough with [name of individual or unit deleted] that I will not need to review here the actual devices and procedures by which this concentration of reliability is brought about.
If we were to undertake to push this research as far and as fast as we can reasonably well do in the direction of practical application to the problems of intelligence, it would be necessary to be exceedingly careful about thorough cloaking of the undertaking. I should not want anyone here in the [word or words deleted], except [two names apparently deleted] and myself to know about it. We are all three cleared for security purposes to the level of “Secret.” I would perhaps feel bound to have confidential discussion on the matter with [name or names apparently deleted]. Funds necessary for the support of the work would understandably carry no identification and raise no questions.
If there is no reason why there could not be, at any time it was justified, a renegotiation of additional needs that might arise that cannot be anticipated at this stage, I should prefer to proceed with some restraint in estimating what such a project would involve in the matter of funds. I shall estimate a research team of five persons working on this project primarily. There will be no careful line drawn.
There will be a great deal of exchange and, of course, no designation in the [several words deleted] a separate unit. For our purposes at the moment, however, the [deleted] can consider that such a test might consist of [name apparently deleted], a well-qualified statistician and two research workers qualified not only to handle groups of subjects but assist in the evaluative procedures as well. The total salary estimate for these five people would be between $22,500 and $25,000. In order to take advantage of mechanical aid in the statistical work and such other matters as traveling expenses, it would be advisable to add $5,000 as a conservative estimate.
I think $30,000 would be well spent on the first year. It is almost anyone’s guess as to what the next year would lead us into, but it would almost certainly be more and probably a great deal more. I doubt if it would be profitable to try to fix it at this time.
Frustrated as we have been by having to deal in short-term projects and the wastefulness of effort that accompanies the attempt to do long-term research projects on that basis, I am about ready to say that without pretty definite assurance of at least a three-year program I should not want to try to assemble the personnel, design and research program and put the overall effort into what is really a major undertaking like this.
Much as I feel the urgency of having our country have as much a lead as possible in this matter, I do not think it is advisable to undertake it unless there is a certain amount of confidence on both sides of the agreement, and these short-term grants-in-aid are, after all, usually measures of limited confidence.
I might add that, while the Russians have both officially and through their leading psychologists disapproved of our kind of work, as they would have to do because of the philosophy of Marxian materialism, I have seen at least one reference to the fact that they have done experiments on our lines, giving a materialist interpretation. If you can give me any information on this, I would appreciate it. Sometime we might discuss what the Nazis undertook to do …
google_protectAndRun("ads_core.google_render_ad", google_handleError, google_render_ad);