Free Republic

CIA officials believed that Soviet scientists took part in 'several successful Extra-Sensory Perception (ESP) experiments' in the 1980s, according to a recently-declassified document from the time. The U.S. spies wrote in an April 1991 memo that they thought the Russians had made remarkable progress in understanding ESP - reception of information not gained through the recognized physical senses, but sensed with the mind. They reported back that one Soviet scientist, Konstantin Buteyko, 'had perfected his method in the early 1980s'.

The Soviet Union had the world's best radar - until a Cold War plane crash gave Britain the chance to pinch it. Michael Smith reports. The Cold War was at its peak when on April 6, 1966, a top-secret Soviet fighter aircraft crashed into the Havelsee, a lake straddling the British and Russian sectors of Berlin. The British mounted a salvage operation, promising to return the aircraft and the bodies of its two pilots to the Russians. But as a barge and a crane were set up on the lake's surface to recover the aircraft, beneath the surface there was...