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Capital One Bank Guy (0:00)
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Aaron Manke (0:34)
Welcome to Erin Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of curiosities.
Narrator (1:06)
In the 1960s and 70s, the US and the Soviet Union were in a race for control, for nuclear power, for outer space, and of course, for our minds. But I'm not talking about propaganda or even ideology. I'm talking about how in 1971 lone housewife in Russia set off a new type of Cold War where two world powers tried to create weapons of psychic destruction. Sometime in the early 1970s, tapes smuggled out of the Soviet Union made their way to the CIA. One video, recorded on March 10th of 1970, quickly became an object of fascination to the Agency. The tape showed 44 year old Nina Kuliana, a housewife and former Red army soldier, in an observation room somewhere in Leningrad. Sitting in front of her on a table was a tiny, still beating heart. The heart had been taken from a frog just minutes before and placed in a solution that would allow it to keep beating for up to an hour after death. Both Nina and the tiny heart were wired with electrodes which recorded their heart rates. As CIA analysts watched, the small dark haired woman on the tape focused intently. To their amazement, the frog heart began to beat faster. Nina screwed up her face in concentration again and the frog heartbeat slowed. And finally, after a few minutes, Nina focused one last time. And right before the analyst's eyes, through the power of thought alone, she stopped the frog heart cold. Dozens of tapes trickled in from across the Iron Curtain showing Nina moving matchsticks across a table with her mind separating egg whites from yolks, even accelerating a researcher's heartbeat to dangerous levels. And needless to say, the CIA was shocked. It seemed that the Soviets had found someone who could master esp, or extrasensory perception. You see, for decades, researchers at the fringes of respectable science had been looking into the world of esp, psychical Researchers, as they called themselves, were bent on discovering whether humans could do extraordinary things with psychic energy, such as reading another person's thoughts, viewing a place halfway around the world, or or even moving objects with their minds. With the discovery of Nina's tapes, the world of psychical research immediately went from crackpot theories to serious government funded science. The American government commissioned an intelligence report on what they called Soviet psychoenergetic threat. When it was finished, it was a bombshell. Researchers and intelligence officials believed the Soviets were trying to develop mind control and wanted to use people with powers like Nina's to defeat their enemies. By 1978, the CIA began its own top secret ESP program, which they called Stargate. Hoping to spy on the Soviets, researchers especially focused on remote viewing or using a psychic to see inside a place on the other side of the world. They gave their subjects the coordinates of Soviet military bases and asked them to describe what they saw. In some cases, the results were scarily accurate. Both countries continued psychical research for the next few decades, although as far as we know, they've yet to employ telekinesis or remote viewing as wide scale weapons. However, sources report that military psychics were used by Russia as recently as the Chechen wars, which ended in 2009. And as for Nina, well, she gained international notoriety for her part in the psychic Cold War. She claimed to newspapers that she realized her powers when she was young, when she noticed that things near her would move when she got angry. According to her, her mother had the same ability to fine tune it. She began to meditate, to prepare herself, to concentrate intensely on moving objects with her mind. And while she had many supporters in the military, she found even more critics once she went public with her powers. It was pointed out that many of her miraculous tricks could be faked using sleight of hand. Not to mention, the Soviet Union had a reputation for exaggerating their victories for use in propaganda. And wouldn't you know it, Nina was caught cheating during demonstrations using magnets and tiny threads. And it was believed by some that she had faked all of her powers. Even Pravda, the official communist newspaper of the Soviet Union, called her a fraud. In 1987, another magazine called her a fake. And Nina sued and won the lawsuit. And she maintained the truth of her abilities until she died in 1990. Maybe Nina really did have powers. Or perhaps she was faking all along. Either way, with all the news coverage of the debate, she really did a great job of getting inside our heads.