علم نفس الحاسة السادسة

by Sheila Ostrander, Lynn Schroeder, هنريت عبودي (ترجمة)

هل يمكن التخاطب بالفكر؟ هل تمكن الرؤية عن غير طؤيق العين؟ هل يمكن للفكر أن يؤثر في المادة؟ وهل ظواهر مثل التنويم المنغاطيسي والتخاطر(التلباثي) والاستبصار وسبق العلم والتقمص والتلكينيزيا(تحريك الأشياء بقوة الذهن) وسائر تظاهرات الحاسة السادسة قابلة للبرهان والتفسير العلميين؟
إن هذا الكتاب، الذي كتبته أمركيتان مختصتان في شؤون الباراسيكولوجيا السوفياتية ، يقدم برهاناً وتفسيراً عقلانيين وعلميين معاً لكل ما جرت العادة على تصنيفه حتى الآن في عداد الظاهرات الغيبية والشعوذات اللاعقلانية.
والكتبتان، إذ تحصران موضوع بحثهما بالباراسيكولوجيا السوفياتية ، تقوداننا إلى عالم أخّاذ يصطرع فيه التصور المادي للتاريخ مع ظاهرات ما كانت توصف إلى ا ليوم إلا بأنها روحية.
كتاب فريد في نوعه في المكتبة العربية، ورحلة في أغوار النفس البشرية تكشف عن وقائع علمية هي بالفعل أغرب مما يمكن أن يتخيله الخيال .

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Psychology, Science, Paranormal, Research, Conspiracy Theories

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

Reviews

[Gregsamsa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elephant.

I don't think a more important book than this was published during the cold war, with the exception of all other books published during the cold war.

I underexaggerate. I know what you're thinking. I just made you think what you did merely by presenting dark shapes on light because you've been conditioned to process these shapes mentally in a largely pre-determined way. If I want you to think of an elephant, it doesn't matter where you live (elephant) or your cultural background; your exposure to English (elephant) renders you susceptible to anything I want to put in your mind (elephant).

An experiment: To start with clean randomness, think of any 2-digit number, but avoid easy-repeaty numbers such as 11, 22, 33, etc. Got it? No, seriously, DO IT.

Now produce a second 2-digit number by reversing the first one. Transpose digits. DO IT.

Meaning appears through the apprehension of difference. Find the difference between your two double-digit numbers, the first one and the reversed one. Subtract the smaller from the larger. I'm serious. DO IT.

Now we impose alterations upon the random to disguise the base, as authors do when writing a whole novel instead of just stating the theme: if you have a double-digit number after subtracting the smaller from the larger, add the two digits together. DO IT. Now if it's below the number 6, multiply it by 2 or 3, your choice. If it is above the number 6, subtract 5.

Seriously, DO IT.

For further randomization we shall switch modes and you will count that number's place into the English Alphabet (1=A, 2=C, 3=B, etc.) until you arrive at a letter. DO IT.

Switching modes again, change that letter into a country whose name begins with that letter. DO IT. Use Google if necessary.

Take that country's second letter, and think of a mammal that starts with that letter.

This was all a rudimentary demonstration of psychic implantation techniques which survived all manner of "rational" distortion (ELEPHANT!) Conclusion: I HAVE MYSTERIOUS POWERS! Do you have a better explanation?

In the experiment above, I attempted to persuade you to think something irrational by veiling, confusing, and occluding causal factors. The game was rigged from the beginning. You aren't a dupe if you didn't get the game from the beginning; you were busy doing my given distractions, and you weren't given the end or purpose against which to analyze each step's role. My hero Houdini once said something to the effect "The fact that you cannot immediately provide an alternative explanation for something is not in itself proof of the given one."

Yeah yeah we all know that, intellectually. But it is so easy to let the disadvantaged feeling that accompanies our lack of a reasonable explanation to act as a rhetorical or logical disadvantage when it is not. Your lack of an explanation for something will likely be mirrored by a lack in the other side: evidence you cannot examine yourself, no objective corroboration you can verify, or unpresented motives and interests of all participants, for example.

This book, a tour of psychic experimentation and research through Soviet Russia and its satellite nations, is loaded with unverifiable assertions, so it's perfect for a purely rhetorical analysis. It was also, for me, a fun stupid read because as you might have noticed I have a certain fascination for fringe ideas and the curious logic by which they operate. The two main claims are that in the Soviet Union "Top-level physiologists, geologists, engineers, physicists, and biologists abruptly plunged into work on ESP" in the early 1960's, when "the Stalinist taboo against all things psychic vanished with a bang."

The second major assertion is that these efforts yielded results and proof.

The relationship between these two claims is interesting. The first one could be wildly innaccurate, a gross exaggeration of whatever interest the Soviets had in psychic phenomena, but this has no effect (logically) on whether the "discoveries" are true or not. The second claim (of discoveries) rests entirely on the first (Soviet interest), but only the barest conservative estimate is necessary. Therefore the claim of rabid enthusiasm for psychic research among Soviet officials has a certain surplus beyond the conditions demanded by the second claim. What end does this surplus serve? It's not the reverse situation: where true discoveries sparked the interest.

This book indulges every American cold-war attitude and urge regarding the Soviets, and they aren't all negative; they balance: the Soviets are scary atheists, but this means they're more hard-nosed fact-based materialists, less likely to take things on faith. They are our enemies, scheming for any advantage they might find, but truly revolutionary discoveries will one day be the property of all humankind, and maybe dispassionate pursuit of scientific truth can transcend politics. The Soviets are evil totalitarian tyrants, so naturally their experiments are like crazy rigorous and exhaustive, strictly controlled. The Soviets supress the idea of individual achievement and personal enrichment in favor of communal good, but that excludes money-grubbing charlatains from the system.

Wake up: this next bit is more interesting than my analysis. Americans never produced an iconic psychic like Rasputin (Oh dear, maybe we're less psychically gifted naturally!), and nothing ticks a one-upsmanship box like a mysterious power, except one non-mysterious power: "Rasputin was also extraordinary at influencing bodies in another way. Daintily bred noblewomen would spend one minute with the matted monk and tumble gurgling into bed with him." Sorry, no citation of source for that one.

I'm intrigued by the choice of words: "daintily bred noblewomen." I guess the presumption is that slatternly trollops would be easier to seduce than proper corsetted and repressed elites. I'd imagine that whores would be MUCH more difficult to impress, especially to the point of gurgling, but what do I know? This is not my, ahem, area. My point is that there's a potency issue poking up here, and I find that fascinating, especially in the context of Cold War missle-size machismo. Psychic power as phallic power, as opposed to the historical associations with diffuse mysterious chaotic lady-parts power. As backwards as it seems, this is actually an innovation.

This book takes the approach which declares there's no such thing as the supernatural, only things science has yet to understand. We are assured the interest is scientific. The project isn't so much this affected demystification, but a new mystification which is funny because it's old now. Instead of enshrouding psychic phenomena in enigma and unknowability, the oxblood drapes of mystery are replaced with the iron curtain of political taboo and distant menace. It's mid-century modern mystery, replacing at last that old gas-lamp parlor scene. The mystic in draping robes is replaced by the dehumanized automaton in a lab coat. Both connote The End, one through dim funereal imagery, the other fairly automatic for generations trained in elementary school that a knees-down fetal "duck-and-cover" strategy was your only protection against nuclear conflagration.

A note on the notation: I've never seen this: the endnotes are arranged by author alphabetically, but noted sequentially, so within the text the first endnote is 282, and on the next page there's an endnote superscript 405. Notation here is clearly a trope of academic respectability, and one wonders if some readers are more impressed by an initial 3-digit citation than a mere hovering 1. In books like these there is always an attempt at scholastic credibility, but only to a point. What's telling is the point at which it departs from academic norms. I don't know why they do depart, as it's utterly feasible to write a 100% bullshit book that adheres to all the cosmetic formalities, but they do depart eventually. This one did it immediately in its confusion of endnotes and bibliography, unless paranormal research had its own respectable conventions like, say, MLA or the social sciences. Perusing the notes, you have no way to tell where any particular source is referenced in the text.

Of course this is also done in all the typical ways: the cited source is inaccessible (esp. in 1970), or vague, or absent ("unknown") or a quote from a live seminar.

Another fun technique is the positing of arguments within the field: "A mathematician, [Dr. Ippolit] Kogan has shown that, in principle, telepathy between people close together could ride electro-magnetic waves. In this he differs from many colleagues. As Dr. Alexei Gubko of the Ukranian Institute of Psychology, a seasoned researcher, puts it, 'Most scientists are now inclined to believe that the brain radiates a special, hitherto unknown type of energy responsible for telepathy'."

That first claim is actually cited: an article in the Russian radio engineering journal Radiotechnika titled "Is Telepathy Possible?"

A Russian radio journal surely sporting Soviet-style graphics, featuring an article on telepathy? You have NO IDEA how badly I'd like to get my hands on such a gorgeous specimen! But such searching is a Google rabbit-hole, dead-ending in such places as this Wiki page. The article is cited all over the place in multiple Google Books, but I'm a tad dubious as to how many of its quoters had access to the original.

Anyway, if it's necessary to accept presumption A in order to consider the relative merits of arguments B and C, then claims B and C argue not only for themselves but obliquely persuade toward presumption A while appearing to make it tangential. Who cares?

I do, because I'm interested in rhetorical techniques that do not yet have names and are not handled in respectable rhetorics. This one happens all the time, as in the USA when Arguer A claims that corporate donations to political campaigns should have some limits, while Arguer B claims there should be no limits; both persuade toward the presumption that the funneling of corporate wealth into elections for the purpose of influencing the results toward further enhancement of the wealth (and future influence) of the donor is at all legitimate to begin with, an underanalyzed presumption skipped over by staging arguments whose both sides persuade to its acceptance, and re-locate the controversy to a less central aspect.

Yes, I know what you are thinking (again (elephant)): what does this have to do with psychics and isn't this far too long a review for a nothing of a book? True enough, but I feel that ridiculous arguments can throw into relief certain modes and methods of persuasion that may become more fascinating if you're on pain pills as a result of surgery to remove a migrating vertebra shard. Wait, where was I?

When your flesh is artificially deadened by prescribed chemicals, there's something doleful about the way your face succumbs to the pull of fingers stretching its rubbery mass this way or that and you realize what a thin construct The Self is and how tenuous a circuit it completes through The Face as its vector icon, but wouldn't shaving it be so much less existentially trying if the blades were kept super-sharp through the magic of pyramid power?

It would! This book detours through that research avenue as well, spinning "ambiguous results" and "a jumbled mass of meaningless symbols" into mystery as evidence of magic. Well sure. Why not.

This inconclusive=mysterious=magical strategy is used on test results involving telekinesis, ESP, aura detection, dowsing, prophecy, and psychic healing.

Another tactic is to adjust the credibility of a source as need dictates. A paranormal scientist lauded in Pravda as a "top researcher" is asserted as such uncritically, but when that same paper exposes a charlatain housewife claiming to move apples with her mind, it's a rag "full of lies." This happens in the United States as well, to everything from the Congressional Budget Office to the Department of Labor--quoted as gospel or dismissed as partisan and biased, often by the same people, depending upon how well the reports serve any certain argument. Internationally the same occurs with the WHO, Human Rights Watch, and the Red Cross. Compare reception of their evaluations of, say, Cuba vs. Israel.

But in the cases of these rhetorical feints, when corroboration is obscure or unavailable, when interdependent claims use surplus proof of one toward proof of another, when assertions blend challenge with flattery, when death and sex make inappropriate entrance, when the presentation of a conflict side-steps a central presumption, when ambiguity or need for further research is transformed into proof, all these fallacies are strikingly common examples of how the game is rigged from the beginning (elephant).

It's a shame that the bad rep Rhetoric has acquired has retarded general awareness of it as a subject of study, the subject best suited to call this stuff out as questionable as has been its purpose for over 2,000 years.

But things flow the opposite direction: the rhetorical term "slippery slope," meaning the fallacy of asserting that allowance of one thing will allow worst case scenarios without providing any causal specifics (if you smoke pot, you'll end up on heroin; if we allow gay marriage, then people will marry animals) is now referred to as if it's a law of causation itself.

"That's a slippery slope" used to be a burn on someone's bad argument; now it's an expression of validation for just such bad thought. If we allow this to continue we will throw out all the greats and only read Nicholas Sparks and instead of physics students will study mental spoon-bending and we'll end up like Denmark.

[Sandra Nedopričljivica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Zanimljiva knjiga o paranormalnim ispitivanjima i njihovim istraživačima u Istočnoj Europi: tadašnjim Sovjetskom Savezu, Čehoslovačkoj i Bugarskoj. Kirlijanova fotografija, telepatija, psihokineza samo su jedne od tema koju su proučavale dvije američke novinarke.

Meni je ipak najbolja priča o slijepoj babi Vangi i kako kažu autorice:
"Vanga je u svojem brižnom životu sklopila posebni sporazum s vremenom. Ona jasno vidi kroz vrijeme. Svojim slijepim očima ona vidi onda kad drugi sa zdravim očima ostaju slijepi."

[Leo deSouza · Rating 5 out of 5]

For the record. For future generations since it was published, the book is absolutelly fantastic.

I never ask anyone to be a believer, but I think it is fair to ask from people to be, at least, open to new ideas.

After reading this book, either you conclude that it is a well elaborated piece of fake registers, or that things really happen. There is no middle term.

[Charlie Canning · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1967, Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder were invited to Moscow to attend a conference on ESP. After the conference, the two traveled throughout Russia, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia gathering research on the paranormal. What they discovered was extraordinary: precognition, auras, prophecy, past lives, faith healing, the power of forms – the list goes on and on.

In a chapter entitled, “Pavel Stepanek, An Answer For The Skeptics,” Ostrander and Schroeder write about a young Czech named Pavel Stepanek who had proven there is such a thing as psychic ability. In a series of tightly controlled experiments conducted by teams from all over the world, Stepanek had correctly predicted the color or position or design of thousands of cards that he could not see in any conventional sense. Although Stepanek’s success rate was thousands of times higher than statistical chance, scientists continued to doubt the results. It wasn’t until Stepanek had gone through 42,598 cards that “Stepanek turned in one of his few negatively significant psi scores. He scored less cards right than you should by chance. Unconsciously he used clairvoyance to miss.” (352) No doubt.

For me, the most important part of the Czechoslovakian section of Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain is the kind of proofs offered by the Czech researchers. Two of the researchers offered live demonstrations rather than statistical proofs. They did this for two reasons. The first is that much of what is referred to as psychic phenomena is not subject to rational proof. This makes sense when you consider that the experience itself is not rational. You can take a person’s temperature with a thermometer or weigh them with a scale but how are you going to assess the spirit with such crude devices?

The other reason the Czech researchers insisted on demonstrations rather than proofs is that a demonstration is qualitatively different than a proof. You can feel a demonstration with your whole being. When you feel something strongly enough, you know it is true.

For those who insist on a “scientific” proof for everything, there’s Pavel Stepanek and the 42,598 cards. The guy proved beyond a reasonable doubt that he is psychic. I mean, 42,598 cards? Enough already. For everyone else, there’s the demonstration method. You’ve got your own receiver – turn it on and see if it works. If it doesn’t, you may need to adjust your set.

[Emmy Lou Musgrave · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an incredibly interesting book, yet very hard to get through.

All about the parapsychological studies that went on in Soviet Russia and other Communist countries in the 1960's. Now, I'm someone that does practice witchcraft and (semi)believes in psychic phenomenon, so this book was mind-boggling for me. However, I will always be a bit skeptical. This book outlines actual scientific studies done by world renowned scientists, Nobel Prize winners, and the like. Some of the conclusions they came to seem legit. To be fair to the skeptics, I personally haven't done current research yet onto the studies mentioned in the book, but I plan on looking further into it. I will say that the only thing I found to be complete bullshit was the chapter on "astrological birth control". That one is just like, the female hormone cycle. But the rest of the studies mentioned seemed to have a solid leg to stand on.

I will be doing more research on this stuff for sure!

[Velvetink · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this a long time ago, just brought it back from my parents house to re-read again. I found it interesting at the time, but can't rate it till a re-read.

[cindabella · Rating 5 out of 5]

Psychic Discoveries, The Iron Curtain Lifted is about the realm of the unexplained, what is also described as parapsychology, such as communication through dreams and thought.

For example, Mikhail Lomonosov, the founder of Moscow University had a dream one night of his father, who was a fisherman, shipwrecked on an uninhabited Arctic island. On waking he tried without success to try and contact his father. HIs brother told him that no one had heard from his father’s ship for 4 months. So MIkhail asked the local fishermen to go and search the Arctic island and if they found his father’s body, to give it a proper burial. The fishermen went to the Arctic island and found MIkhail’s father and buried him.

D I Mendeleyev the famous chemist saw his entire periodic table of elements one night in a well lit dream and Russian psychic Mikhail Kuni had a dream of his mother being bitten by a rat, and then a telegram arrived later that day saying that he should come quick as his mother had been bitten by a rat and gangrene had set in.

Another example of communication unexplained by science was when some scientists placed baby rabbits in a submarine and kept the mother rabbit in a lab on shore where they implanted electrodes deep within her brain. When the submarine was deep below the ocean, assistants killed the baby rabbits one by one. The mother rabbit didn't know what was happening at the moment her children died, yet at each synchronised instant of death, her brain reacted. There was communication.

Communication between human thought and water has also been documented in the books by Masaru Emoto; and in Psychic Discoveries, The Iron Curtain Lifted, the impact of psychic healers charging water with positive intent and then using the charged water to nourish barley seeds showed that these plants significantly outgrew untreated seeds. Research has also shown that plants have emotion, memory and ESP.

Over 90% of blood plasma is water and Russian scientists looked at the effects of thought on blood cells. Research showed that white blood cell count increased after suggested positive emotions and decreased after impressing negative emotions.

Cells, tissues and organs can also be influenced by those with the ability to do so. One such person was Ninel Kulagina who could make a frog’s heart beat faster or slower. Electrocardiograph recordings showed a reaction similar to an electric shock just before the heart stopped.

Influencing human brain waves with positive or negative emotions has effects such as impacting RNA in lab cultures and healing animals and humans. Deep feelings of love and caring were generated and focused on DNA in a lab dish, the result was a change in the DNA. Russian death row prisoners were experimented on in a negative way using such lethal tests as psychokinesis to paralyse sections of their spinal cords.

The US CIA also used prisoners and patients in mental hospitals to conduct their MK ULTRA experiments, the effects of which were that some people emerged with their entire memories erased.

Other examples of phenomena unexplained by science is dowsing. This technique has been used by the Czech military in World War I to locate traps, mines, weapons, drinking water, and to track the enemy precisely.

US marines used dowsing to locate underground tunnels in the Vietnam War where the Viet Cong were hiding.

A former member of the Czech army said ‘We used clairvoyance...we’d put soldiers with PSI ability in a trance and they would tell us the exact position of the Hungarian army, help us locate soldiers we’d lost’.

Psychics were also used for warnings, news about concentration camps, immigration and partisan groups during World War II and the Nazi occupation.

The CIA also used similar techniques they referred to as remote viewing and project Stargate where psychics such as Pat Price were employed to hunt down Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, find plutonium in North Korea and monitor Saddam Hussein’s hideouts during the Gulf War. This technique was also used to help drug enforcement agencies in the US.

The dark psychic aspects of the Nazi movement which most Westerners try to explain by the logic of cause and effect; the winning of elections or by a diagnosis of madness were said by the Czechs to have been influenced by Hitler, who was a very skilled practitioner of the occult, being a clairvoyant and a medium. He also surrounded himself with astrologers, clairvoyants and prophets and the Nazi movement was deeply involved with the dark arts of occult, particularly Tibetan magic, according to the authors,

Electromagnetic field radiators to arouse aggressive states in animals or slow down their reactions to danger have also been developed according to a prominent Russian parapsychologist Dr Larissa Vilenkaya, with the goal of applying these techniques to humans.

Nikola Tesla believed that if energy beamed into the ionosphere, electric power could be sent wirelessly to anywhere on the earth. The Russian TESLA project and US HAARP project use the ionosphere for surveillance of space around the planet and deep inside the earth and oceans. The Russians, according to the book can also use the ionosphere to communicate with submarines, to deflect missiles and to change the weather.

The authors also discuss teaching and learning using the yoga technique of savasanna where students are taught in a relaxed state resulted in learning rates 50% faster than traditional teaching methods used in educational institutions.

[Antti Ahonen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ihan kiinnostava kurkistus kadonneeseen maailmaan, paljon kiinnostavia yksityiskohtia. Kirjoitustyyli on vähän erikoinen ja faktojen todennettavuus vähän kyseenalainen, mutta hyvä kirja kaikille aiheesta kiinnostuneille.

[Rob Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating look at the history of remote viewing research in Eastern Europe with some info not readily available elsewhere. There is an interesting contradiction I'm still trying to understand - in some obvious ways the United States has been a much more open society than Russia for quite a while with freedom of the press, etc. So why is it that in other ways the Russian culture and Russian scientific scene has long been so much more open minded and ready for new paradigms than those in the West generally are? In Russia there also seems to be more openness and a lot less fear of ridicule in discussing curious objects on Mars that don't appear to be natural. Perhaps when you think of yourself as the "First World", the only remaining superpower and the winner of the Cold War, that could mean in a sense you have more to lose by major paradigm changes or threats to the existing power structure.

[Tiina Mahlamäki]

1970 julkaistu ja 1975 suomennettu teos kuvaa Neuvostoliittolaisia, Tsekkoslovakialaisia ja Bulgarialaisia henkilöitä, joilla on väitetysti telepaattisia tai telekineettisiä kykyjä sekä tutkijoita – luonnontieteilijöitä ja tiedemiehiä –, jotka tutkivat heitä. Mukana myös ennustajia, lavataikureita, taikavarpuja ja kirliankuvausta. Teosta ei ollenkaan kehystetä, ketkä tämän ovat kirjoittaneet ja missä tarkoituksessa? Sen tarkoituksena lienee osoittaa tai väittää, että rautaesiripun takana tehdään tärkeää tutkimusta paranormaaleista ilmiöistä ja että ollaan löydetty suuria ja merkittäviä voimia, joista lännessä ei vielä tiedetä mitään.

[Samar Almazyad · Rating 3 out of 5]

ترجمة ممتازة جداً ومتقنة جداً .. طبعة الكتاب قديمة جداً من ١٩٩١ .. اعتبر الكتاب خيبة أمل ان لم تكن أمريكي ومتخصص بالباراسايكولوجي .. الكتاب ليس للعامة ومعلوماته هي نتاج بحث وسفر خاص لكشف الإنتاج الروسي وتحفيز الأمريكان .. والأزفت فيه كثير مواقف مذكورة لاتمت إلى الباراسايكولوجي حسب رأيي وحسب ثقافتي وديني اللي يؤمن بوجود الجن ..الظاهرة اللي مايؤمنو فيها الغربين .. كتاب دسم ومرهق .. الثلاث نجمات هي للترجمة الاحترافية .

[Thomas · Rating 1 out of 5]

It was a lot more fun having this book on my shelf for years than it was to actually read it. That said, it illustrated quite well the paired and fateful decadence of capitalism and revisionist socialism.

[Maggie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read as much of this weird Kremlin propaganda as I could slog through before giving up. It is not great. Two stars for ludicrous content.

[Lisa Hofmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome book, worth reading.

[E. Kahn · Rating 1 out of 5]

Man, remember when you could just claim any goddamn thing and say those secretive Soviets proved it?

Good times.

[Df · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of this list of well completed criteria for a good book, the setting’s description was of the highest quality. The authors provided detailed descriptions of where they were at each stage, when these events took place, why the conference was held at its location, why the people who attended were significant, and what was gathered from each conversation and lecture. The information on the experiments conducted by the various scientists are extremely detailed, and give accounts of the first psychic experiences of the test subjects, their lives and practices up to the tests, and the specific steps taken in the tests themselves and the extent of the subjects’ abilities. Some accounts even included the current whereabouts and lives of the subjects.
Some of the downsides of this book are of the authors’ possible biases and the second-hand information. First off, the authors did not conduct any of these experiments themselves, but rather researched the results of others, and recorded their findings. Secondly, the authors seemed to come to the conference with the preconception that psychic abilities do exist, which could have lead them to not question some of the results. In addition, the authors do not request for any of these claims to be proven, but merely take the word of others.
Although the authors may have had their own preconceptions, that does not detract from the results of the experiments, nor the tittles of those who conducted them. It is pointed out on numerous occasions that those who conducted the experiments were not open-minded, or believers in psychic abilities. The conductors of the tests were skeptics, whose purposes in the experiments were to disprove the existence of psychic abilities and phenomena. Though their efforts were great, in many instances the skeptics not only failed to disprove the existence of psychic abilities, but rather found themselves becoming believers. In some cases, these skeptics’ plans completely backfired, and they ended up proving the existence of psychic abilities!

[Stephen Coates · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is certainly comprehensive, covering telepathy, telekinesis, acupuncture, Kirlian photography, astrological birth control, a blind woman who could read books by passing her finger over text and a whole lot more, most in Russia but with chapters on research in Bulgaria and what was then Czechoslovakia. It was certainly interesting and thought provoking, especially to one who is of the view that the human mind has many capabilities which are largely dormant. However, close to 50 years have passed, not that I have followed the topics with great detail but I am not aware of much follow up research or confirmation of the claimed capabilities in controlled clinical settings. Still an interesting read but the end of the book should not be the end of the reader’s enquiry into the subjects covered.

[Mikko · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lystikäs, iloisen kritiikitön kuvaus 60-luvulla itäblokin alueella vaikuttaneista meedioista, telepaateista ja heidän tempuistaan innostuneista tiedemiehistä. Sisällöltään köykäinen mutta hauska lukukokemus joka voi olla myös opettavainen jos koko ajan pitää mielessään kysymyksen "mikä tässä koeasetelmassa on pielessä?".

[Ted · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not a brilliant or detailed book but the only English-language text documenting Soviet research into what the West considers paranormal behavior. Information moldy--from the mid 60's--but that's all there is, so if that's what you need, it's a valuable text.

[Tone · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting contrast to some of the programs that were going on in the US but I'm going to have to label this fiction. If this technology were real then where is it now?

[Abel]

i want to read

[Oma Eagle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have 1970 edition

[Signor Mambrino · Rating 1 out of 5]

utter shit. a waste of time.

[J. N. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved this book as a teenager