Psychokinesis

Psychokinesis (PK, also telekinesis) is the reported influence of a person on a physical or biological system without contact or known physical interaction. The term covers visible movement of objects, effects on instruments and living preparations, and (in the vocabulary of Robert G. Jahn's 1978 survey) poltergeist cases. It is one of the two core subjects of Parapsychology, alongside extrasensory perception, and the word the Defense Intelligence Agency used for what Soviet and Czechoslovak laboratories called bioenergetics.¹²

Soviet and Czechoslovak research, 1960s to 1975

A July 1972 DIA document, "Controlled Offensive Behavior - USSR" (ST-CS-01-169-72), written by Captain John LaMothe for the Medical Intelligence Office of the Army Surgeon General, devoted a section to ESP and psychokinesis. It reported that Genady Sergeyev of the Ukhtomsky Institute in Leningrad had conducted several years of laboratory work on Ninel Kulagina (the report's spelling is Nina Kulagina, with the pseudonym "Nelya Mikhailova"); that she was reported to have moved clock pendulums, bread, matches and large crystal bowls under scientific control; that Sergeyev recorded heightened luminescence at her eyes during object movement; and that Western scientists had been unable to observe her after February 1971, "a veil of secrecy" having been placed on Sergeyev and Kulagina. Paragraph 11, marked C/NFD, stated that scientists reported she had stopped the beating of a frog's heart in solution and restarted it, "perhaps the most significant PK test done," whose "military implications in controlled offensive behavior, if true, are extremely important." The bibliography lists observations of Kulagina by J. G. Pratt and C. Ransom and by M. Ullman.¹

A September 1975 DIA study, "Soviet and Czechoslovakian Parapsychology Research" (DST-1810S-387-75), by Louis F. Maire III and Major LaMothe, again prepared under the Army Surgeon General's medical intelligence office, gave PK its own part. It defined PK as influence on animate or inanimate objects at a distance "by means of uncontrolled or controlled biological energy fields," and listed motion, apparent levitation, changes in physiological processes, creation of measurable fields around target objects, and images on shielded photographic emulsions. It reported that Soviet researchers worked with a small number of "gifted" subjects, while Czechoslovak researchers held that most people could produce PK effects. The leading Soviet theorists it named were Viktor Adamenko of the Moscow Institute of Radiophysics, Viktor Inyushin of Kazakh University and Sergeyev; Sergeyev and Inyushin proposed a "bioplasma" energy, and the biophysicist Aleksandr Dubrov of the Institute of Earth Physics proposed "biogravitation." Dubrov cited tests at Moscow University in 1973 and 1974 in which the psychic Boris Ermolayev kept an object suspended between his hands. According to Sergeyev, Kulagina stopped a frog heart preparation 24 feet away in five minutes in 1970, imprinted images on film sealed in black envelopes, and lost 1.5 to 2.0 pounds in weight after sessions. Adamenko's subject Alla Vinogradova produced similar effects with less physiological stress, and the Czech inventor Robert Pavlita's "psychotronic generators" were described as devices meant to make PK demonstrable by nearly anyone.²

SRI International, 1972 to 1974

Stanford Research Institute (SRI) personnel observed what the March 12, 1974 SRI progress report called one of "the first psychoenergetically produced physical effects" in early 1972: an apparent perturbation of a Josephson effect magnetometer, in a pilot study too short for statistical analysis. Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ wrote the same report. On Uri Geller, it stated: "Although metal bending by Mr. Geller has been observed in our laboratory, we have not been able to combine such observations with adequately controlled experiments to obtain data sufficient to support the paranormal hypothesis." The sentence was repeated in the Puthoff and Targ paper in Nature of October 18, 1974, as quoted in an SRI fact sheet answering a book by James Randi.³⁵

The October 31, 1974 progress report (covering April to August 1974) described a series of tests, made "at the suggestion of the client," on a client-supplied Develco superconducting second-derivative gradiometer, with the subject four meters from the probe. For the subject it called Subject 1, in 13 ten-trial runs (64 activity and 66 no-activity periods), 63 signal events were recorded, of which 21 fell in the activity periods and 2 in the no-activity periods; the report gave p = 0.004 and concluded "a highly probable cause-effect relationship," with the generation of a magnetic field "most probable" as the mechanism, and cautioned that an electronics interference effect could not be ruled out. Subjects 2 and 6 produced nonsignificant results. The report also described a laser-monitored torsion pendulum in a sealed bell jar.⁴

Princeton, McDonnell and the academic laboratories, 1977 to 1983

In the spring of 1977 an undergraduate, Carol Kay Curry, asked Robert G. Jahn, Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University, to supervise independent work in psychic phenomena. Jahn's report in the Princeton Alumni Weekly of December 4, 1978 divided PK by energy scale: macroscopic effects (Geller's spoon bending, the salt-shaker movements attributed to Kulagina, the self-levitations attributed to the Frenchman Girard), which "to the best of our knowledge have evaded well-controlled, systematic experimentation"; small-energy effects registered on magnetometers, torsion pendulums and strain gauges; microscopic effects on radioactive decay and random generators; and recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis in poltergeist cases, for which he cited surveys by J. G. Pratt and William G. Roll. The report was filed in the STARGATE collection of the CIA.⁶

In 1979 the chairman of McDonnell Douglas, James S. McDonnell, made a $500,000 grant that established a parapsychology laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis, with the physicist Peter R. Phillips as director, according to the Parapsychological Association's newsletter of October 1979.⁷ Two teenage subjects tested there over a period of about three years were, according to Randi, his plants. A January 28, 1983 press conference by Randi made the arrangement public ("Project Alpha"). A SECRET DIA background paper dated March 4, 1983 and approved by Jack Vorona, prepared in case Congress asked about a connection to the DoD project GRILL FLAME, stated that the McDonnell researchers "never claimed nor published anything that remotely indicated these teenagers had valid psychic ability," that the laboratory had ended work with them in July 1982, and that Randi was "solely interested in promoting his image as a clever magician." It also stated that "the types of experiments receiving the most severe attack by Mr. Randi involve psychokinesis (PK), an aspect of parapsychology that is not examined under the SRI contract," and that "PK experiments of the type conducted at the McDonnell Laboratory are inherently more difficult to fraud-proof than the investigations involving long distance remote viewing pursued at SRI."⁸

SRI psychoenergetics program, 1985 to 1986

An SRI interim report of December 1986 by Edwin May, Beverly Humphrey and C. M. Pleass of the University of Delaware, prepared for the contracting officer's technical representative, Peter J. McNelis, treated PK-type data from algae. Pleass claimed that individuals could change the velocity of single Dunaliella cells; SRI formulated a different hypothesis, "Intuitive Data Sorting," in which the individual initiates a run at a moment when the algae will naturally swim at the required velocity, and the report proposed a test of that model.⁹