Revealed: The Soviet Union’s $1 Billion ‘Psychotronic’ Arms Race with the US

[Ichingcarpenter]

A few snips from the article:



Over the years, the Soviets focused on a number of areas, many of which mirrored US efforts. For example, the US Project MKULTRA, was a 20-year CIA program that studied ways of manipulating people’s minds and altering their brain function.

The Soviets had a similar program. This included experiments in parapsychology, which the Soviets called psychotronics. The work built on a long-standing idea in Soviet science that the human brain could receive and transmit a certain kind of high frequency electromagnetic radiation and that this could influence other objects too.

Like MKULTRA, this program also included a study of the effects of electromagnetic waves on humans and led to the development psychotronic weapons, which were intended to alter people’s minds.

Kernbach also describes significant Soviet research on non-local signal transmission based on the Aharonov-Bohm effect. This occurs when a charged particle is influenced by an electromagnetic field, even when it is confined to a region where the field strength is zero.

https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/1b0b3d97df54



Submission by the researcher to the Cornell University Library site:

Unconventional research in USSR and Russia: short overview

Serge Kernbach
(Submitted on 4 Dec 2013 (v1), last revised 5 Dec 2013 (this version, v2))
This work briefly surveys unconventional research in Russia from the end of the 19th until the beginning of the 21th centuries in areas related to generation and detection of a 'high-penetrating' emission of non-biological origin. The overview is based on open scientific and journalistic materials. The unique character of this research and its history, originating from governmental programs of the USSR, is shown. Relations to modern studies on biological effects of weak electromagnetic emission, several areas of bioinformatics and theories of physical vacuum are discussed.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.1148

[Berlum]

1. Mystery's a thing not easily captured

...and once deceased not easily exhumed...Dan Fogelberg

[Ichingcarpenter]

2. Made for TV movie 2003

An average man discovers he's the unwitting target of an ultra secret domestic black-op centering on mind control.

[Berlum]

3. OK, bookmarked for later watching

Gotta wonder what Mind Control stuff the Republicons are up to, beyond their ongoing Corporate Media, Inc. (R) brain bendery.

[Berlum]

4. Time for a counterattack !

[DirkGently]

5. Isn't it funny how we & our leaders chuckle at "way out" speculation

on "way out" phenomena, and what governments might be up to, and then find out, in a wide variety of cases, that they WERE ABSOLUTELY DOING THAT VERY THING?

Now, there's a difference between positing that there have been *successful* mind control programs, attempts at telekinesis, remote viewing, contacting aliens, etc., and recognizing that these things have been heavily pursued by the very authorities that laugh so dismissively at people asking questions about them.

In other words,

THE GOVERNMENT IS, AND HAS BEEN, TRYING TO CONTROL PEOPLE'S MINDSZ!!! (caps & punctuation for intentionally goofy emphasis)

It's just probably not that good at it. Yet.

So how is it we so readily dismiss vast swaths of people as crackpots and tinfoil hatters, when their speculations are based on things we keep confirming were considered real and important to our most serious, best-funded, purportedly unquestionable authority figures?

I just think there's a disconnect somewhere. On the one hand, there are whole categories we lump into the realm of the absurd, where no "serious" person dare tread. On the other hand, our supposed best and brightest, under the express direction of our most sober leadership have (and I would bet any number of farms continue to) poured huge resources into investigating these very things under the obvious assumption that all kinds of fringey things may very well be real.

I think it's a deliberate suppression -- not of some great supernatural secret -- but just generally of the pursuit or inquiry by the unauthorized into any area that might conceivably be amazing or paradigm changing.

It's why I think militant skeptics are as deluded as "true believers" in whatever unproveable fringe idea. Everything is an unproveable fringe idea, until it's proven.

But we put all this energy into laughing at or shouting down the unusual or the seemingly unlikely, as though nothing unusual or unlikely have ever turned out to be true, even while we recognize that is not the case.

[MisterP]

6. someone called it "hysterical materialism"

they don't go "in my judgment it's unlikely, and it's being debased by Discovery-Channel-style antics"--they go into full C.S. Lewis Villain mode, ranting about how the New Dark Ages are just around the corner, or make claims based on Jack Chick's sources or leave themselves open to Zeitgeist and that "sugar ... is sugar!" and the Cato Institute and John Stossel and William Manchester and Islamophobes and ...

[DirkGently]

7. It seems like a fearful point of view

... founded on an unsupportable central conceit that we can know what we don't know, and what is or is not unknown or unknoweable.

The Stossel-flavored libertarians do seem to take up a big hunk of air in this area. In love with de-bunking, which is fine up to a point, but then it becomes this need to deny that anything they can't immediately grasp, as though it might burn them.

[Jesus Malverde]

8. Why You Should Care about Pentagon Funding of Obama’s BRAIN Initiative

In two recent posts (here and here), I complained that the big new BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative, to which Barack Obama has committed $110 million next year and possibly billions over the next decade, may be premature.

I stupidly neglected to mention an important reason to look askance at the initiative: its biggest funder is the Pentagon, more specifically the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. According to the White House, Darpa is putting up $50 million, more than the National Institutes of Health ($40 million) and National Science Foundation ($20 million).

There’s nothing new about the militarization of brain science. Ten years ago, when I was writing an article on how information is encoded in the brain, Darpa was already a major funder of research on neural coding and neural prosthetics. Darpa program manager Alan Rudolph told me back then that the agency was interested in a wide range of potential applications, including “performance enhancement” of soldiers via either implanted or external electrodes linked to electronic devices.

One specific possibility, Rudolph told me, was a brain-machine interface that would allow soldiers to control a jet or other weapon system through thought alone, as in the 1982 Clint Eastwood film Firefox. In the film, the thought-control device utilizes external electrodes, but Rudolph said that electrodes could also be implanted in the brain. “Implanting electrodes into healthy people is not something we’re going to do any time soon,” Rudolph explained, “but 20 years ago no one would have thought we’d put a laser in the eye either. So this is an agency that leaves the door open on what’s possible.” Yes, Rudolph was talking about that familiar fantasy of science fiction, bionic soldiers.

So what’s changed over the past decade? Several things come to mind: First, major media have become less concerned about the militarization of brain science. A decade ago, conservative New York Times pundit William Safire worried that science might allow powerful institutions to “hack into the wetware between our ears.” Today, few prominent journalists question Darpa’s role in the BRAIN Initative. The best critique I’ve read is by physician/blogger Peter Freed, who asserts that Pentagon funding of the BRAIN Initiative fulfills President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 warning about the growing power of the “military-industrial complex.”

Second, as I have pointed out previously, neuroscientists are pursuing military funding much more eagerly and openly, as evidenced both by the BRAIN Initiative and by this 2009 publication of the National Research Council, Opportunities in Neuroscience for Future Army Applications. Overseen by leading neuroscientists, including Floyd Bloom and Michael Gazzaniga, the report advises researchers how to tap into military funding. The report advocates “collaborating with pharmaceutical companies to employ neuropharmaceuticals for general sustainment or enhancement of soldier performance, and improving cognitive and behavioral performance using interdisciplinary approaches and technological investments.”

The third change over the last decade is that the Pentagon has become much cagier about its motives in supporting brain research. Darpa now claims that its primary interest in brain science is treatment of injured soldiers. As the White House put it, Darpa hopes that brain science will “dramatically improve the way we diagnose and treat warfighters suffering from post-traumatic stress, brain injury and memory loss.”

For a more candid look at the Pentagon’s long-standing interest in neuroscience, see Mind Wars by respected bioethicist Jonathan Moreno of the University of Pennsylvania. Originally published in 2006, the book was re-released last year with updated information. As I pointed out last fall, Moreno documents the Pentagon’s interest in neurotechnologies that can enhance soldiers’ capabilities as well as disabling and monitoring the minds of enemies.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2013/05/22/why-you-should-care-about-pentagon-funding-of-obamas-brain-initiative/