Sheila Ostrander, Lynn Schroeder - Psychic Disc... -

Sheila tapped a translated file from a laboratory in Leningrad. "But this is what terrifies me. This is what the CIA is going to ignore until it's too late. The research into long-distance telepathic hypnosis. They aren't just trying to read minds, Lynn. They are trying to control them from thousands of miles away."

Slowly, the chaos of their notes began to take a powerful, cohesive shape. They wrote about the blind Bulgarian mystic Baba Vanga, whose predictions were so accurate the government put her on the official payroll. They detailed the extraordinary telekinetic abilities of Nina Kulagina, who could move objects and stop a frog's heartbeat using nothing but her mind, verified under strict laboratory conditions. They described the "biophysical effect"—the use of dowsing rods by Soviet geologists to find oil and gold, turning ancient folklore into state-sponsored industry. Sheila Ostrander, Lynn Schroeder - Psychic Disc...

Spurred directly by the revelations in Sheila and Lynn's book, the US government quietly initiated its own top-secret research programs. This frantic catch-up effort would eventually evolve into the famous Stargate Project, where the military spent decades researching remote viewing and psychic espionage. Sheila tapped a translated file from a laboratory

It had started as a simple, albeit ambitious, journalistic endeavor. Sheila and Lynn, two independent American writers with a keen interest in the fringe sciences, had decided to venture behind the Iron Curtain. At a time when Western academia laughed off the concept of psychic phenomena as superstitious nonsense, rumors suggested that the Soviet Union was pouring millions of rubles into top-secret parapsychological research. The research into long-distance telepathic hypnosis

"Remember Dr. Lozanov in Bulgaria?" Lynn asked, her eyes shining with the memory. "The suggestology experiments? He was teaching students entire foreign languages in a matter of weeks just by putting them into a state of deep relaxation and reading to them. No conscious effort. The brain just... absorbed it."

The atmosphere in the room shifted, growing heavier. They both knew they were playing a dangerous game. During their travels, they had been followed by grim men in gray trench coats. Their hotel rooms had been searched, and several of their local contacts had suddenly become unavailable or outright terrified to speak to them. They had carried their notes across borders hidden in the linings of their suitcases and encoded in innocuous-looking travel journals.

Within the sterile, windowless offices of the Pentagon and the CIA, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain was not dismissed. It was read with intense, paranoid scrutiny. Intelligence analysts realized that if the Soviets were indeed mastering the mechanics of the human mind, the United States was facing a massive "psychic gap."