01x05 - Mind Games

[bunniefuu]

Throughout time,

governments and the people

who work for them have

done strange and even terrible

things in the name of national interest.

Tonight, soldiers spiked

with dangerous drugs.

No one's going to volunteer

to test brain-frying chemicals.

And citizens with unusual

gifts recruited to spy.

Psychic spies would be

able to unlock Soviet secrets.

What about channeling an enemy's

deepest fears to defeat them?

The viet cong began

hearing these disembodied,

echoing voices.

These soldiers are

terrified that their very

worst nightmares

might have come to life.

Sometimes the best weapons

governments use are mind games.

Now it's time to bring

these strange secrets to light.

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The 1950s is a boom time

for pharmaceutical companies.

They're turning out

radical new psychoactive

drugs that give some in

the U.S. military an idea.

Could these drugs be

turned into weapons?

To find out, they decide to

test them on American soldiers.

Edgewood arsenal,

Maryland, headquarters

of the U.S. chemical and

biological defense command.

The military is attempting to

create a non-lethal weapon,

something that can incapacitate

the soldiers on the other side,

but not necessarily k*ll them.

So at edge wood arsenal,

they began developing

psychoactive compounds.

They decide that their best candidate

is this substance

known as 3-quinuclidinyl

benzilate, or bz.

Bz is developed as a stomach medicine.

Side effects like confusion

and hallucinations

mean it never gets fda approval.

But it's those side effects

that interest the army.

Now the team faces a problem.

Where will they find people to test bz on?

The army gives them permission

to recruit volunteer soldiers

from around the country.

Recruiters tell the troops

they'll be testing equipment.

The edge wood team wants

to record exactly what happens

to the volunteers on bz.

So they construct a mock

communications outpost

and fill it with cameras to

record their experiments.

The team doses four

volunteers with varying

amounts of this horrific drug.

They want to see how these

young men are going to react

while they're high on bz.

And they test them across

a broad range of scenarios,

including simulating a poison gas attack.

The peak of the

compound's physical effects

was reached within

four to six hours, the peak

of mental incapacitation

several hours later,

when a simulated

chemical alarm sounded.

The initial results are promising.

The men are distracted.

They're disoriented.

It seems like bz is the non-lethal weapon

the army dreamed of.

Soon bz testing takes an ominous turn.

Ronald zadrozny is the soldier

given the highest dose of bz.

And this causes him to go

into a drug-induced psychosis

for 36 hours, and he still has

lingering effects afterwards,

which makes him nervous and panicky.

Other volunteers are also badly affected,

but the army decides the

experiments should continue.

In November 1964, the edge wood team

is ready to test bz outside.

They settle on dug way

proving ground as a safe space

to test this out of doors.

When you're at dug way, you

are far away from prying eyes.

You're out in the middle of nowhere.

In that way, dug way is

the perfect place to go.

The men suit up in the

pre-dawn cold and are

then doused with the gas.

These unfortunate troops are

dosed with choking amounts

of bz gas for 15 minutes.

Then these befuddled

volunteers are taken for evaluation.

The test proves that bz

can incapacitate soldiers,

making them unable to fight.

The army is convinced of

the potential for bz weapons

on the b*ttlefield.

Meanwhile, back at

edge wood, testing on bz

variants continues.

In 1975, after details of CIA

LSD experiments leak out,

president Ford instructs

vp Nelson rockefeller

to investigate.

The rockefeller commission

starts to go through

the army's dirty laundry.

And in June 1975, they haul army

bosses in to interrogate them

about the edge wood experiments.

When the congressional

investigators ask them what's

going on, they just start

fessing up like boy scouts

and they tell them, like,

yeah, the bz testing is ongoing

and it's been going on for years.

The things that have been done,

which are in contradiction to the statutes.

But

The army admits that

somewhere between 2,100

and 2,900 volunteers were subjected

to bz gas during the

course of their experiments.

Bz is not the only drug they test.

The us army dosed

some 7,000 unsuspecting

soldiers with more than

250 different chemical agents.

The volunteers aren't

told what they're testing,

so there's no way they

could give informed consent.

So basically, the soldiers

are being treated like lab rats.

So the lawmakers are naturally furious.

In 1975, the bz research

program is shut down,

but that doesn't stop U.S. intelligence

agencies from developing

other ways to play mind games.

In 1968, they decided

to turn the viet cong's

own weapons against them.

It's the summer of 1968, and U.S. troops

are fighting the communist viet cong

near the Cambodian border.

A north Vietnamese

fighter takes deadly aim

at a vulnerable gi on patrol.

But when the communist

soldier pulls the trigger,

he signs his own death warrant.

His Chinese-made

ak-56 explodes on firing

k*lling him instantly.

The gi got lucky, but

this is not a one-off.

The thing about these deadly misfires

is that they weren't accidents at all.

The extraordinary truth

is that the exploding g*ns

are the result of a secret

U.S. military operation.

Anybody who's ever fired a g*n

has the same nightmare

that one day they're

going to pull the trigger,

and the round in the chamber

is going to blow up in their own face.

And this nightmare is exactly what

was playing through the mind

of every vc combat member

during Vietnam.

It's not until 30 years later that a book

by a Vietnam vet reveals the operation,

code named eldest son.

The Vietnam studies

and operations group

was charged with a

mission to undermine the will

to fight of the viet cong.

The sog identified that

along the h* chi minh trail,

there were several

munitions cache areas where

the viet cong would resupply

ammunition, actual b*ll*ts

and rounds for their g*ns.

The recon teams were finding

these caches of ammunition.

So they come up with this brilliant idea.

And that is, rather than trying to haul

this a*mo off or destroy it on sight,

why don't we just sabotage it?

But importantly, not sabotage all of it.

Sabotage some of it.

They'll make the communists

afraid of their own g*ns

by booby trapping their b*ll*ts.

But how would they pull this off?

Sabotage is a very tricky business,

because it's part engineering

and part espionage.

And that's exactly what the sog had

to do to find a way to

engineer a round that

would explode, but still

look like other rounds.

First, they refill the

b*ll*ts with high expl*sive.

But there's a problem.

The most commonly available

military-grade expl*sive

at the time actually

had a white color to it

that did not match the

gunpowder that was inside

the round itself.

If the communists investigate,

they'll detect the fakes.

So the sog had to create

a whole new different kind

of expl*sive that had the same power

but matched the color of black powder.

The next challenge is how to

get the sabotaged b*ll*ts back

in viet cong hands.

Sog's green beret

reconnaissance patrols come

up with an ingenious solution.

So the viet cong don't suspect sabotage,

they make sure to load

up only one phony b*llet

in each magazine or a*mo can.

We're not going to k*ll

them one soldier at a time,

one b*llet at a time.

What we're going to do is we're going

to create psychological chaos

among the enemy's ranks.

And that's a pretty big win

for a pretty low investment.

Eldest son is so successful in Vietnam

that the U.S. makes it

part of its psychological

warfare arsenal.

It will use the tactic again years

later in Iraq and Afghanistan.

- In world w*r ii, the U.S.

- army creates a top secret unit

whose sole job is fooling the enemy.

It calls itself the ghost

army for a very good reason.

Nothing about this army is real.

It's 1944, and the United States

is preparing to take the

fight to Hitler by invading

n*zi-occupied Europe.

America needs to leverage

any advantage they can find.

So army chiefs turn to an industry

where the nation leads

the world, show business.

The Pentagon creates the ghost army.

They're not using

r*fles and machine g*ns.

This unit will ultimately use Hollywood

stagecraft to fight the enemy.

The purpose of the ghost

army is to create diversions

and feints and deception.

Officially known as the 23rd

headquarters special troops,

the ghost army is made

up of just 1,100 men.

The concept is that

you're engaging in force

multiplication by having

a small group of soldiers

pretend, and give the enemy

the impression that they're

actually a very large group

of soldiers, up to two divisions.

So you have a unit

with about 1,000 people

in it that is able to make the

enemy think it's 30,000 strong.

In June 1944, the ghost army vanguard

task force Mason gets an

airlift onto the battleground

in France.

Here, their mission is to support

the U.S. 928th a*tillery division

by providing an attractive

target for German gunners.

The ghost army inflate a series of rubber

howitzers matching the real g*ns.

The idea is to draw in the n*zi fire

to get them to focus on that area

where these inflatable weapons are,

as opposed to where

American soldiers actually are.

The ghost army has to keep

their inflatable g*ns ahead

of the real a*tillery for almost a month,

taking as many hits

as possible themselves.

So these guys are either

just really, really brave or really

crazy, possibly both.

Over the next 12 months, the

ghost army supports the allies

in some 20 operations before

this wartime Hollywood team

gives their finest performance

on the banks of the rhine

in march 1945.

The biggest obstacle

that we had to confront

after the normandy landings

was crossing the rhine.

General patton and his ninth army

are trapped behind the

river, which blocks them

off from the path to Berlin.

Rivers are a natural obstacle,

especially to heavy-treaded

vehicles like tanks.

You have to bring in army engineers,

start erecting Bridges.

It turns into a big mess.

Meanwhile, German forces

are waiting on the other side,

and they're just poised to rain hell

on any allied troops that try to make

that difficult river crossing.

The ghost army is ordered

to divert German defenders'

attention from patton's

crossing point to draw

the fiercest German fire.

The first phase is to generate

sneaky signals traffic.

Ghost army communications

teams fill the airwaves

with bogus radio chatter,

creating the illusion

of a huge army on the move.

But that's just the

beginning for the ghost army.

During the day, Sonic teams play

the sound of heavy construction through

500-pound speaker systems.

To the Germans on the other side,

it sounds as if pontoon

Bridges are being constructed.

The enemy would then be

led to believe that I'm about

to be attacked by this

very powerful force,

when in actuality, all that was

over there were a couple of jeeps

with loudspeakers on them.

The supporting cast plays

its part behind the lines,

but the key part of the

operation is yet to come.

The Germans are conducting

daily photo reconnaissance

sorties over allied lines,

measuring what our strength

looks like across the river.

So that if there's any noticeable build up,

those photo reconnaissance

aircraft, they will detect it.

To fool these pilots,

the ghost army creates

an entirely fake front line.

600 inflatable sherman tanks

and field a*tillery pieces are

moved into position

purposely so that an aircraft can

photograph them, and the

enemy can then be left to wonder,

all right, it looks like

there's a build-up here.

The Nazis react as intended,

pounding the ghost army's

position with a*tillery fire.

Three of the unit lose their

lives, but the ruse works.

Patton's army crosses

the rhine miles up the river,

facing only scattered n*zi resistance.

They take only minimal casualties.

This is a critical victory for the allies.

In 2024, the ghost army is presented

with the congressional

gold medal for heroism.

It can be quite difficult to quantify

psychological operations,

but it has been estimated

that the ghost army saved tens

of thousands of American lives

during the w*r.

1953, the CIA starts an experiment

with a top secret goal

find drugs to control the human mind.

It will become one of the government's

most notorious projects.

Its name is mkultra.

CIA director Allen

Dulles has a big problem.

There was a great fear at the time

that American prisoners

held by the north Koreans

were being subjected to brainwashing.

The CIA suspects that the

communists might be utilizing

mind altering drugs, not

only to extract information,

but to reprogram the brains

of American soldiers in captivity.

The CIA suspects that one of them

is a new wonder drug called

lysergic acid diethylamide,

popularly known as LSD.

LSD was discovered in 1943

by Albert hofmann at sandoz labs.

It's still pretty untested,

but it has the potential

of being the greatest

mind-altering drug that

the agency has come across so far.

The CIA director initiates a program

to explore the brainwashing

potential of LSD

and other psychoactive drugs.

You have to understand the sense

of emergency that was

gripping the United States

in the early 1950s.

What Dulles wanted and

why mkultra was created

was a search for a silver

b*llet, a magic potion that

would break down the

person who ingested it

or break down his facade of lies.

The CIA hopes to use

brainwashing on spies,

foreign prisoners, and

ultimately even foreign leaders

like fidel Castro.

Dulles charges chemist

and poison expert

Sidney gottlieb to run the program.

Gottlieb spends $240,000

to buy as much LSD

as he can get his hands on.

Gottlieb went to sandoz

and said, I'll buy it all.

I want to corner the market on this stuff.

And Sidney gottlieb became america's

first government-authorized drug dealer.

He is the man who

brought LSD to the CIA.

Gottlieb decides the best way to evaluate

this incredibly powerful new

psychedelic drug is to test it

on humans across the country.

Mkultra funds 149 research projects

across 80 institutions.

The CIA has never wanted for money.

Cash is its most powerful secret weapon.

Among the institutions taking part

in gottlieb's experiments

are 44 colleges and universities,

as well as hospitals,

pharmaceutical companies

and even prisons.

All manner of drugs became

the focus of these experiments,

and all manner of unwitting

human Guinea pigs.

For example, there was a

federal prison in Kentucky

that housed people who had been heroin

junkies before their arrest.

A number of these prisoners

were inducted into the mkultra

program, and without their knowledge,

they were fed LSD for 77 days in a row.

What this essentially meant is that you

were in a drug-induced

schizophrenic state.

I can't imagine that

these were good trips.

In 1957, gottlieb enlists

Canadian psychiatrist

ewen Cameron.

Between 1957 and 1964, Cameron

conducts a series of hideous

experiments for the CIA,

attempting to use LSD and

other extreme treatments

to break down the human

mind and rebuild it from scratch.

Ewen Cameron softens his

patients up by getting them

into an Insulin-induced coma.

He then exposes them

to LSD and other forms

of psychological t*rture.

The subjects of these experiments

had no idea they were in the middle

of a giant CIA experiment.

They were just normal people

looking for psychiatric help,

and they came out destroyed.

Gottlieb takes some of his most extreme

experiments overseas.

The CIA set up secret detention centers

across Asia and even in

Europe, far away enough

from home and congressional oversight

so they won't attract

any unwanted attention.

Here, gottlieb's team will experiment

on suspects like foreign agents captured

by the CIA for other reasons.

They call these subjects expendable.

Mkultra runs for 20 years.

We don't know how

many people were affected

or how badly they were harmed.

But nothing works, and

brainwashing remains elusive.

The CIA cancels mkultra

and gottlieb retires in 1973.

They know it's not a

good look for the agency.

So to Bury the evidence, gottlieb

and outgoing CIA director helms decide

to destroy all of the records.

Gottlieb literally takes box

upon box of hard copy mkultra

documentation back to the

CIA archive to have is shredded

and destroyed.

But he doesn't quite

manage to destroy all of it.

Those remaining mkultra documents will

come back to haunt the CIA.

In 1975, congress

launches an investigation

into the agency exposing

projects like mkultra.

Sidney gottlieb testifies before congress,

but claims he doesn't remember

much about the experiments,

and he gets off scot-free.

The CIA officers who

took part in this doubtless

felt that the United States was at w*r,

and that there were

no rules in such a game.

The mission was more

important than the rules,

even though those rules might

be the laws of god and man.

In the 1950s, communist

militias are battling U.S.

Influence across the pacific.

To gain an edge.

American psyops teams

turned to mind games.

The Philippines, early 1950s.

The U.S. backed Filipino government

is fighting an insurrection by

guerrillas known as the huk.

The huk rebellion was

a communist rebellion,

and like others in Southeast Asia,

it was seen as something

that the United States

had to conquer.

The U.S. is on the

defensive as huk rebels

hidden in the dense forests threaten

to overrun nearby towns.

But as the guerrillas

prepare their next as*ault,

these fierce fighters stumble

across something unsettling.

Early one morning, a

group of devoted huk rebels

is moving through the jungle.

What they find chills them to the bone.

They find one of their

missing soldiers lying dead.

His body is completely drained of blood.

There's no b*llet wounds.

There's no blade marks.

Instead, there's just two

small punctures in his neck.

The reason why is revealed

in a 1972 memoir written

by a man involved in the conflict,

local CIA station chief Edward lansdale.

Edward lansdale was a

firm proponent of the use

of psychological warfare.

He really believes that if

you can terrify your enemies,

you make them a lot less

effective on the b*ttlefield.

Lansdale knows of a local legend

he can use to beat the huk, using

fear instead of firepower.

Every culture has its scary monsters.

And in the case of the Philippines,

one of the key monsters is the aswang.

An aswang is a shape shifting,

vampiric, blood sucking demon.

Edward lansdale wants to harness

the local cultural beliefs of fear

around this sort of vampire and use

that to terrorize the

people in the countryside.

Lansdale gets a native

Filipino psychological warfare

team under his

command to spread rumors

among the locals in town.

They claim a terrifying

vampiric aswang demon has

been seen stalking the area.

The word starts to reverberate

throughout the community,

and it scares people.

Next, lansdale ups the ante.

Lansdale's psychological warfare team

creeps into the jungle

and sets up an ambush.

It's very dark in the forest at night,

so they have no problem hiding.

When a huk patrol comes along,

they wait for the very last man

and then grab him

without making a sound.

They k*ll him without leaving

any marks on the body.

Then they puncture his neck

with two small puncture wounds.

They hang it by its feet

so that all of the blood

will drain out through the wounds.

The body is then taken and left

in a rebel-held area where they know

it's going to be discovered.

When the huks come

back through the area,

they find their comrade drained of blood.

These huk soldiers are terrified

that their very worst nightmares

might have come to life.

They abandon their stronghold,

and they stop launching

attacks in that region.

In 1954, the huk surrendered

to philippine troops

and the rebellion is over, in no small part

thanks to lansdale's tactics.

One reason governments use

psyops is because they work.

In 1969, the U.S. tries a

new kind of terrifying mind

game against the viet cong.

By the beginning of 1969,

American forces are getting

bogged down in Vietnam.

The U.S. is going all out with saturation

bombing and even chemical warfare,

but it's just not working.

If anything, the viet cong

are winning the upper hand.

There are some people that suggest

that maybe the United States

should try a different tactic.

Then something stirs in the forest.

Vc troops operating at night begin

to hear anguished, disembodied voices

echoing through the darkness.

When you're patrolling

in the jungle at night,

your senses are limited.

So you can only imagine how creepy

it must have been to hear

these sort of disembodied voices.

The ghosts are all part of a campaign

of psychological warfare against

north Vietnamese troops.

It's called operation wandering soul.

We are playing on north

Vietnamese superstitions

by claiming that the wandering souls

of their unburied dead in the

south are guiding our bombs.

The average viet cong

soldier is a teenager who's not

particularly well educated.

They're very superstitious, if you will.

They believe that spirits

can haunt the earth.

If your body is left

unburied, the presumption

is that the soul can't move on, that it

becomes a wandering soul.

But where are these ghostly

voices really coming from?

No surprise, but the haunting

voices, they're not ghosts.

Instead, they're American

tape recordings being blared out

from massive speaker systems.

Psyops teams put Vietnamese voices

through an echo chamber.

They process it and add horror show

sound effects to up the ante.

We don't know how

effective wandering soul

was against the enemy, but

we do know it spooked our allies.

There are specific

orders issued to the army

that they are not to play this in earshot

of their south Vietnamese allies,

because it wasn't just

affecting the target audience,

the viet cong, but it was

also affecting our allies

and scaring the hell out of them, too.

During the 1970s,

U.S. spy agencies report

that the Soviet union is experimenting

with a new espionage tool, telepathy.

They respond with a mission

that sounds out of this world,

project Stargate.

At the Stanford research institute,

scientists funded by the

CIA are running a series

of experiments to test a

psychic technique known

as remote viewing, the

ability to telepathically

see faraway things using

only the power of the mind.

The agency hopes it will help

them spy on the Soviet union.

These guys are so

desperate for information

from behind the iron curtain

that they will try anything.

So maybe, just maybe,

this remote viewing

could be the way to get it and

with no risk of getting caught.

If it works, the U.S. government

would gain a way to systematically create

psychic spies, and that would

give an incredible advantage

to the national security infrastructure

of the United States.

It would change the

nature of warfare forever.

American doctor and paranormal

enthusiast andrija puharich hears

of a promising potential candidate.

He's a former Israeli paratrooper

who claims to possess

paranormal powers, uri geller.

Puharich introduces geller

to the remote viewing researchers.

At Stanford, geller's psychic ability

will be put to the test.

Researchers film the trials.

15 drawings were placed

in double sealed envelopes

in a safe.

Geller's task was to draw what

he perceived in the envelope.

What they hope he'll be able to do

is reproduce images

only through utilizing

the power of his mind.

If he could do what he said he could do,

it could transform the world

of intelligence collection.

This is geller's representation

of what he believed was

sealed in the envelope.

At no time during these experiments

did he have any advance knowledge

of the target material.

A secret report from

1973 reveals that geller

seems to be getting results.

So to get ahead of the Soviets,

they doubled down on

paranormal research.

The CIA transfers the

remote viewing research

to the defense

intelligence agency, or dia,

who embark on a series of

projects later consolidated

under the code name Stargate.

Stargate is the dia's ultimate mind game.

If it works, it could maybe

even win the whole cold w*r.

The government decides it's time

to test remote viewing during

major international events.

First, they try it when a Soviet b*mber

crashes into dense jungle in

the Central African Republic.

If america can find the plane first,

they'll be able to study the secret Soviet

technology inside.

This is an opportunity too good to miss.

Time is running out.

They need to act quickly.

However, conventional

intelligence is drawing a blank.

They have to think outside the box.

Intelligence teams call in a Stargate

test subject, Rosemary Smith.

They show Smith the part of Africa

where they believe the

plane has gone down.

Rosemary Smith

actually used a technique

she called map dowsing.

She took a pendulum, and it

was a weight on the end of it,

and she uses that to divine the location

of the downed jet.

She eventually settles on a location.

The team converts those to coordinates.

The ground team went

out, and lo and behold,

the b*mber was there, very

close to the exact location

where she said it was going to be.

It's a win for the remote viewing team.

So now they apply it in

a high-stakes situation

where U.S. citizens are in danger.

Islamic fundamentalists have just taken

over the country, when

radicals invade the U.S. embassy

and seize more than

60 American hostages.

I'm from Utah.

I was a political secretary, and I'm 33.

Hunkered down in fort

Meade, the Stargate team focus

on Iran and the American hostages.

One of the remote viewers claims

he has a vision of a sick

hostage on a stretcher.

But which one?

He suggests the hostage is associated

with a royal playing card.

You know, like the king,

the queen, or the Jack.

Just four days later, a hostage

suffering from multiple sclerosis

is released and flown home.

His name is Richard queen.

The vision of the stricken

man and a royal card

matching his last name, which is queen,

suggest that this is a hit.

Maybe they're actually on to something.

Stargate research continues

for years until the mid-'90s,

when the government

questions how much it really

is bringing to the table.

Lawmakers want to know what is

the upshot of decades of big dollar

dia spending on this

strange secret program?

They tasked the CIA

to evaluate Stargate.

In September 1995, the

CIA releases its report.

It is kind of eerie, but incredibly enough,

this report suggests that remote viewing

generates more so-called

hits than you'd get

by simple chance alone.

In other words, there might

be something more than random

guessing going on here.

But even when there are so-called hits,

the research does not show that they are

caused by paranormal means.

The report does not explain

the better-than-chance

hit rate.

To this day, no one has.

But that can't save the

remote viewing program.

In June 1995, the Stargate

program is finally shut down.

During the 1950s, the

U.S. and Soviet union

install ballistic missiles on submarines.

But it's hard to communicate

with these subs underwater.

Reports suggest

scientists from both nations

try something unusual, mind games.

An article in a French

scientific magazine

sends shock waves

through the Soviet Navy.

This former French resistance

fighter turned Sci-Fi author,

Jacques bergier, claims he

has inside information about mind

games on board the

world's first nuclear powered

submarine, the USS "nautilus."

The "nautilus" has just

made an incredible record

breaking journey.

It has stayed submerged

for six whole days

and it has traveled

underneath the north pole.

Bergier's article claims

that on the "nautilus" voyage,

the Navy tests a new

form of sub to shore

communication, telepathy.

Communication with the submarine

is a huge challenge,

because when they're

underwater, for the most part, they can't

receive radio broadcasts.

So the thought was, well,

what if we could use telepathy?

What if we could use esp to accomplish

this super important task?

It sounds incredible, but

worryingly to the Soviets,

this article claims that

paranormal mental communication

is working.

Bergier's article is making

some fantastical claims

that they have a person

on the sub underwater

who is sending telepathic

communications to a person

on land who receives them.

That's kind of bonkers.

The experiments themselves,

according to bergier's article,

were using something

called zener cards, which were

commonly used in esp research.

The sender would look

at cards, and the receiver

would attempt to identify the shapes

that he saw on these cards.

And according to bergier,

it worked fantastically well.

This story is impossible to verify.

But if it's true, it's a game changer.

"Nautilus" could receive

its firing orders while still

hidden deep beneath the waves.

A form of communication that is silent

and can't be intercepted by the enemy

is just what they need.

The Soviets are playing catch-up.

They come up with their

own psychic test, which is

revealed in a declassified CIA report.

Buried in the documents

are details of a sinister

Soviet sub-to-shore

telepathy experiment,

this one using animals.

Soviet scientist pavel naumov

is pursuing research that

suggests there's a strong psychic link

between mother and child

that could make telepathy easier.

His theory is that no matter

how far apart the mother

and child are, the mother can

sense the death of that child,

that they are connected.

To test the idea, Soviet

scientists separate a mother

rabbit from her babies.

They send her young out

on a submarine far out to sea.

On land, the scientists insert electrodes

into the mother rabbit's skull so they

can measure the electrical

activity in her brain.

Then the telepathic

communication test begins.

On the submarine deep underwater,

these scientists are taking

the baby rabbits and one by one

mercilessly executing them.

Back on shore, naumov,

the Soviet scientist,

was monitoring the brain

activity of the mother rabbit.

Surprisingly, the test seems to work.

Naumov claims that

the mother rabbit's brain

has a signal spike every time

one of her little baby bunnies

is m*rder*d.

This spurs a fever of activity

inside the Soviet union, so that by 1967,

there are 30 labs spending millions

of rubles on this sort of

weird paranormal research.

The record kind of goes dark after that.

I'm sure the Soviets

continue to try telepathy,

but in the end, there's no

evidence that this was ever put

into practice successfully.

From dangerous psychedelic

drugs to projects designed

to trick the enemy, nations have always

used mind games as weapons.

Sometimes these tactics are disturbing,

but sometimes they

lead to surprising victories.