Mind Machines Source: The Prague Post July 5, 2000
Is Czech mind control equipment science-fiction or
science-fact? Declassified U.S. documents show that unsuccessful
attempts were made to control our thoughts ... or is that what we were
meant to think?
In 1975, the United States Defense Intelligence Agency
had hot news. Very hot news.
According to the agency, which spent much of the Cold
War supplying presidents, generals and admirals with data, Soviet
scientists had spirited several baby rabbits from their mother and
murdered them -- one by one -- aboard a submarine.
The reason the DIA took an active interest in the
massacre was not concern over Soviet rabbit abuse.
No, the Washington agency cared because it had reason to
believe the rabbits were psychic.
The Cold War has produced many documents that, when
examined now, appear to generously entwine the sublime with the
ridiculous. Few, however, are quite as earnest as the 1975 report that
attempts to detail Czech and Soviet advances in parapsychology
So it was that the administration of President Gerald
Ford learned of the dead rabbits -- assassinated, said the DIA,
because they were believed to have demonstrated a capacity for
telepathic communication.
Mental warfare
Worse still, wrote the alarmed agency, the East appeared
on the verge of the unthinkable: total mind control. Even human
murders, they suggested, might be triggered by the mind.
Soviet and Czech citizens, specially trained in
mind-power, could hone their psychic powers, the agency warned.
And what then?
"Such a cadre of trained but anonymous individuals could
be used for any number of covert activities."
What might Moscow and Prague do with ultimate mind
technology?
"If the Soviet reports are even partly true," the DIA
harangued, "and if mind-to-mind transference can be used for such
applications as interplanetary communications or the guiding of
interplanetary spacecraft, the Soviets have accomplished a scientific
breakthrough of tremendous significance."
Some 30 years later, a chatty Zdenek Reidak, president
of the International Association for Psychotronic Research, relaxes in
the kitchen of his rural house in Chvalkovice, two hours' drive
northeast of Prague.
"You always take an interest in what you don't have," he
says of the solemn 71-page report, released under the U.S. Freedom of
Information Act and now posted on the DIA's Web site, www.dia.mil.
"The Russians are a more mystically inclined people. They were also
willing to make serious and systematic investigations."
The 65-year-old Reidak, who has organized dozens of
parapsychology conferences since 1973, is mentioned repeatedly in DIA
documents. "The Americans' approach was kind of naive," he says.
"There is a difference between the existence of a [psychic] phenomenon
and the possibility for its
practical use."
But that didn't deter the DIA, which openly feared a
growing "psychic gap" between the East and West.
It claimed communist scientists were "far ahead of their
Western counterparts" in understanding and applying psychic phenomena.
It suggested the East was on the verge of creating machines capable of
harnessing mental energy for military purposes.
Among the key researchers was a Czech named Robert
Pavlita, who died in 1991. Pavlita created the so-called "psychotronic
generator." The "generators" seem simple enough. Some look like steel
rings. Others are shaped like wooden boxes. Most are no larger than a
paperback.
But size didn't matter. Pavlita believed -- and to some
extent so did the DIA -- that "the secret is in the form." The
generators were allegedly able to amass human mental energy and
release it mechanically or electromagnetically.
The DIA said that "when flies were placed in the gap of
a circular generator, they died instantly." It added: "The generators
can do some of the things a psychic subject can do.
The "things" included turning rotors, magnetizing
nonmagnetic materials and killing flies -- a process the DIA was
convinced would be turned on human beings.
Pavlita's research, while benign, only further unnerved
U.S. intelligence: "Pavlita aimed a generator at his daughter's head
from a distance of several yards ... she became dizzy and her
equilibrium was disrupted."
And the DIA's prognosis wasn't good. "Soviet or Czech
perfection of psychotronic weapons would pose a severe threat to enemy
military, embassy or security functions," the agency said.
One man's research
Even now, while they discuss the research willingly,
Pavlita's colleagues are hampered by the Czech scientist's penchant
for secrecy. "The problem is that Pavlita never told anyone how the
generators functioned," said Ladislav
Sir, 70, who directed Pavlita's experiments in the early 1980s.
"I think that [the generators] worked as talismans,"
says the appropriately cryptic Sir. "Once they had accumulated the
mental energy of the activating person, they could release it in other
ways. If there such a thing as voodoo, I think the generators work on
the same principle."
Voodoo or not, the authors of the DIA report took
psychotronic findings seriously.
Atomic fears trumped other Cold-War paranoias, and the
DIA darkly noted "the increasing validity" of Soviet claims that new
psychic energy findings were "of no less significance than the
discovery of atomic energy."
Using similar words one year later, Air Force
Intelligence chief George Keegan warned the U.S. intelligence
community against the soon-to-be infamous -- yet nonexistent -- Soviet
"death ray." Based on blurry photos of a nuclear facility in
Kazakhstan, Keegan was convinced that the Soviets were
developing a particle beam weapon capable of annihilating U.S.
missiles with massive electron "lightning bolts."
Keegan called it the "most important strategic
undertaking since the development of the atomic bomb."
Last year, The Washington Post tied Keegan's public
stumping against the death ray in 1977 to the rebirth of the
multi-billion dollar Strategic Defense Initiative, known as "Star
Wars." After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1992, the Russians
revealed they had only been developing rockets at the facility.
Unanswered questions
Unlike the death ray, however, some remain convinced
that the psychic research was legitimate.
"The psychotronics report was declassified by the
Americans for one of two reasons," says Sir. "One: it doesn't work and
therefore doesn't matter. Two: their own research continues, top
secret, and they simply want to make people believe that it is
nonsense. I don't think that it is nonsense."
Reidak is less certain about Pavlita's findings but
believes they were significant. "I don't think that Pavlita was
dealing with 'psychic energy,' " he says. "Pavlita discovered a way to
harness the interaction between living and inanimate matter."
Reidak said he became friends with Pavlita after
publicly defending him against charges of fraud.
"I saw him conduct his experiments. Some of it I didn't
understand, but I know that what I saw was real," he says.
But Reidak added that Pavlita seemed to be the only one
able to make the machines work. He thinks the Americans lost interest
in Pavlita's research because the findings could not be duplicated.
All of which makes Robert Richardson laugh.
Richardson works in the DIA's Freedom of Information
Office. "I couldn't say much one way or the other about the content of
the documents, but people just love these things. We give 'em out like
candy. But most people want to know about the UFOs."
"Ermolayev is reported to have the ability to levitate
(suspend) objects in midair by concentrating psychic energy at a focal
point in space. *footnote" -- Page 44 * [source cited: The National
Enquirer]
"Control and manipulation of the human consciousness
must be considered a primary goal." -- Page 31
"The usual way of charging the device with psychic
energy is to touch the temple area of the head with the hand, then
touch the device." -- Page 47
Excerpts from: Soviet and Czechoslovakian Parapsychology
Research, DIA Task PT 1810-12-75 Published September 1975
Erik German may be reached at egerman@praguepost.cz
by Erik German
http://www.praguepost.cz/news070500a.html