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ashington, Aug. 8 -- History's first undersea voyage across the top of the world, a distance of 1,830 miles under the polar icecap, was disclosed at the White House today. |
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Copyright 2001 The New York Times CompanyChildren's Privacy Notice |
Posted on 08/03/2002 9:26:33 AM PDT by swarthyguy
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It was quite likely that the early origins of the Soviet research machine may have begun with the work of Bernard Bernardovich Kazhinsky, a student in Tiflis (now Tbilisi), in the state of Georgia boarding on the Black Sea. His interests apparently were triggered by a telepathic experience of his own.
In February, 1922, Kazhinsky was invited to address the All-Russian Congress of the Association of Naturalists, a top scientific organization perhaps equivalent to the American Institutes of Mental health today.
The topic of his lecture was HUMAN THOUGHT-ELECTRICITY, and he quickly published a book under the same title. Having been invited to address the All-Russian Congress, it would be clear that the Congress supported and funded Kazhensky's work, while his research thereafter apparently became classified.
By 1923, he had published his early findings in a book entitled THOUGHT TRANSFERENCE. This book attracted favorable attention among important brain researchers at the time.
More visible and easier to document was the work of Professor Leonid L. Vasiliev, later to become Chief of the Department of Physiology at the University of Leningrad. Born in 1891, Vasiliev had been a student of Leningrad physiologist Vladimir M. Bekhterev who had established the Leningrad Brain Research Institute. His granddaughter, Natalia P. Bekhtereva, had joined the Institute in 1921, and ultimately became its director.
Vasiliev became a member of the Committee for the Study of Mental Suggestion the following year. "Mental suggestion," or hypnosis, became central to his interest. In 1928, he visited Paris, as well as other Western European cities. Vasiliev spoke and wrote French fluently, and the Paris Institut Metapsychique International (IMI) remained his major contact with Western psychical research throughout his life.
Vasiliev established an ideological basis for the Soviet research in several books, lectures, and articles. His basic thesis was the experimental facts of telepathy, for example, should be examined from a physiological (or material) viewpoint, so that they could not be exploited by advocates of "religious superstition" (or an idealistic view-point). He was criticized as providing a pseudo-scientific framework for a return to idealism under the mantle of Marxist dialectical materialism.
His major and influential book BIOLOGICAL RADIO COMMUNICATION was published in Kiev by the Ukrainian Academy of Science in 1962.
Kazhinsky concluded that "experimental confirmation of the fact that communication between two people, separated by long distances, can be carried out through water, over air and across metal barrier by means of cerebral radiation in the course of thinking, and without conventional communication facilities."
He added: "One important feature of the above-mentioned experiment is worthy of attention. The electromagnetic waves accompanying the thought-formation process (visual perceptions) in the inductor's brain reached the cells of the indicatee's cortex after having traveled a long distance, not only in the air and through water but also through the hull of a submarine.
"This would justify the following conclusions: 1) these electromagnetic waves were propagated spheroidally, not in a narrow directed beam; 2) these waves penetrated though the submarine hull, which did not block them, that is, it did not act as a `Faraday cage'."
Kazhinsky noted that a radio receiver in the marine laboratory of the Soviet scientific research vessel VITYAZ had been unsuccessful in intercepting electric waves emitted in the water by the torpedo fish.
He added that: "the radio receivers in the submarine did not intercept these waves. This prompts the conclusion that some electromagnetic waves of a biological origin possess yet another, still unknown, characteristic which distinguishes them from conventional radio waves. It is possible that our ignorance of that particular characteristic impedes further development of research work in that field."
Vasiliev noted in another book EXPERIMENTS IN DISTANT INFLUENCE (which first appeared in Moscow in 1962) that while official denials of the shore-to-submarine experiment suggested "a certain caution," nevertheless "This experiment showed - and herein resides its principal value - that telepathic information can be transmitted without loss through a thickness of water, and through the sealed metal covering of a submarine - that is, through substances which greatly interfere with radio communication. "Such materials completely absorb short waves and partly absorb medium waves, the latter being considerably attenuated, whereas the factor (still unknown to us) which transmits suggestion penetrates them without difficulties."
Many have claimed that the infamous NAUTILUS story of 1959 in the United States served as the major prod for Soviet bio-communications research. However, by 1959, some four decades after the Soviet research had already begun, presumably their machine would not have needed such a prod.
The NAUTILUS was the world's first nuclear powered submarine, launched in 1954 and christened by First Lady Mamie Eisenhower, wife of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The NAUTILUS made its first voyage under the North Pole in 1958. Soon afterward, French accounts claimed that while the submarine was cruising deep in Arctic waters it received telepathic messages from a research center maintained by the Westinghouse Corporation at Friendship, Maryland. The U.S. Navy denied that such a test had ever taken place, or that it was otherwise engaged in telepathy experiments.
However, several sources in France appeared which claimed otherwise. My own efforts to obtain confirmation of the French reports were unsuccessful.
The reports held that such major U.S. corporations as Westinghouse, General Electric in Schenectady, N.Y., and Bell Telephone in Boston had begun telepathy research in 1958.
The aim was to develop thought transmission by telepathy, to record and produce telepathic signals, and to determine the amplitude and frequencies on which telepathy operated.
According to the French sources, President Eisenhower had received a study prepared by the Rand Corporation of Los Angeles, a "think tank" under contract to the armed forces and other U.S. government agencies.
The report was said to recommend studying the use of telepathy to establish communication with submarines, particularly those cruising in waters under the Polar Ice Cap where radio communication channels were particularly difficult.
Westinghouse's Friendship Laboratory allegedly undertook just such an experiment with the U.S.S. NAUTILUS, linking one person on Land (the sender or inductor) with another person in the submarine (the receiver or inductee), while the vessel was submerged. Representatives of the U.S. Navy and Air Force were present during the experiment, according to the reports.
The original French reports fixed the starting date as July 25, 1959. The tests continued daily for a total of sixteen days. The person in charge was identified as Colonel William H. Bowers, director of the Biological Department of the Air Force research institute and the man who directed the experiments at Friendship.
Later accounts identified the sender or inductors as "Smith" a student at Duke University, who was confined in one of the Westinghouse laboratory's buildings during the experimental period.
The procedure was designed to have Smith transmit "visual impressions" twice daily at specified times. Using methods developed by J. B. Rhine at the Parapsychology Laboratory, Duke University, Durham, N.C., a controlled timing device shuffled one thousand ESP cards in a revolving drum in such a manner as to drop five cards on a table, one at a time, at one-minute intervals. Smith pricked each card up as it came out of the drum, looked at it, and sought to memorize the image. At the same time, he drew a picture of the symbol (square, cross, star, wavy lines, or circle) on a piece of paper before him. Each test thus produced a sheet of paper covered with five symbols. Smith sealed each paper into an envelope, which Col. Bowers locked into a cage.
At the same time, a Navy lieutenant, identified as "Jones," sat isolated in a stateroom on the NAUTILUS, functioning as the recipient of the images Smith sought to convey by telepathy.
Twice daily Jones drew five symbols on a sheet of paper, choosing from among the same symbols used by Smith. He placed the sheet inside an envelope, sealed it, and turned it over to his superior, Captain William R. Andersen. The captain wrote the time and date of the experiment on the envelope and put it into a safe in his own cabin. During the sixteen-day experiment period, Jones saw no one else except for one sailor who brought him meals and performed other routine services.
The final segment of these events, as reported in France, began with the arrival of the NAUTILUS at Groton, its cruise completed.
The envelopes were removed from the commander's sage, sent by car under escort to the nearest military airfield, flown to Friendship Airport, near Baltimore, and then taken to Col. Bowers's laboratory. There the two sets of sheets were taken from their envelopes, dates and times matched with each other, and the results tabulated. In over 70 percent of the cases, the figures tallied: Jones had correctly "guessed" three-fourths of the images seen by Smith.
I was put off by these reports, particularly by the high score ascribed to these experimental subjects, and by their all-too-typical American names.
On the other hand, the NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE had reported in November 8, 1958, that the Westinghouse Electric Corporation had begun to study ESP using specially designed apparatus.
Dr. Peter A. Castruccio, director of the company's newly organized Astronautic Institute, had spoken of the ESP studies as "very promising," with the caution that "a lot more work must be done before we can come up with anything practical."
I questioned W. D. Crawford, Staff Section, Air Arm Division of Westinghouse, on the project and he said that "while these studies have scientific value, any conclusion at this time would be premature and inconclusive."
These statements were published in the NEWSLETTER of the Parapsychology Foundation (January-February 1959), as was a report that Bell Telephone Laboratories had considered an ESP research project but had abandoned it.
The NAUTILUS story is often referred to as hoax, since the French and other sources remain unconfirmed. However, the telepathic part of the story might have added interest to the Soviet effort, already four decades long by 1958.
In any event, in Paris, a prominent member of the Institut Metapsychique International, Raphel Kherumain, collected articles on the NAUTILUS story and mailed them to his long-time professional friend, Leonid Vasiliev.
Whether of fact of hoax, the implications that the Americans MIGHT be conducting ESP experiments did enter into the ongoing monolithic research machine which influenced the lives of countless men and women, and caused expenditures which by 1983 were supposed to amount to $500 million annually.
My dad served on USS Saratoga (CV-3) and my son-in-law graduated from the USNA in 1994. My close friend through grade school and high school went Navy with years in subs before training nuclear plant operators worldwide. His droll comment at his mom's funeral was that he would keep the Commies out of California.
Lt. Jack Daly was lased with subsequent severe optic damage in 1997 working intelligence off Washington as the Russian Kapitan Man surveilled our boomers--yet the Navy treated Daly like dirt and Strobe Talbott assisted the Russian's in a smooth escape.
The above account of alleged parapsychological experiments may be phlogistonic bull droppings, but CIA's Sydney Gottlieb and his MK-ULTRA program was certainly involved in some very silly things.
The suicide allegedly borne of depression of Forrestal by sky-diving thirteen floors from Bethesda put the new Defense Department in different hands, as the suicide borne of depression of Boorda did the Navy thirty-six years later.
With the demise of tin foil, the accompanying lead poisoning drops off in the literature. Had Lt. Daly had on his aluminum goggles he'd still be qualified.
In the new work by James Bamford, Body of Secrets, the account is given of our No Such Agency operatives being dropped off on Arctic ice to erect and man radar posts for brief periods, pending daring snatch retrievals using aircraft and hook-and-harness apparati--much like U.S. Mail service on early railroads.
Or perhaps Commander Anderson and the men of the Nautilus were simply flagged down by a pink sub full of mermaids with mai tais.
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