New CIA Document Details Experiments on Extrasensory Perception and Telepathy

In Stranger Things, intelligence officers used psychic methods in an attempt to gather intelligence on enemies, or perhaps outwit them on the battlefield. As you know by now, that decision is what tore open a tear between dimensions, allowing Stranger Things to become a masterful fictional tale, and one of Netflix's flagship programs all these years later. While there are no Demogorgons walking the world in real life — ahem, at least to the knowledge of the public — the series was still based on conspiracies and intelligence experiments that have since come to light.

Now, in the year 2021, one eager truth-seeker has uncovered a new document from the Central Intelligence Agency that details one peculiar Russian experiment in the late-1980s. According to the heavily-redacted PDF made available by The Black Vault, the Russian government launched several experiments in the '80s to try psychically altering disease and ailments, to an extent.

Six years ago, I discovered the @CIA had multiple documents on Extrasensory Perception or ESP - but they were classified.

Recently, I finally pried one loose with a Mandatory Declassification Review request, but the other remains classified.

Here it is:https://t.co/ofIQOHB6Zn

— 🇺🇸 T̷h̷e̷ ̷B̷l̷a̷c̷k̷ ̷V̷a̷u̷l̷t̷ 🇺🇸 (@blackvaultcom) January 25, 2021

In one case, the document says some 3,000 patients at the Clinical and Experimental Medicine Institute — located in the Siberian city Novosibirsk — participated in one experiment, and were kept to a special diet and rest regimen. "A medical specialist attempted psychically to transmit bioenergy to patients to enable them to control or cure asthma, sinusitis, allergies, chronic bronchitis, pulmonary inflammation, and heart disease," the document reads.

For the uninitiated, "extrasensory perception" is a term coined by the late Rudolf Tischner to describe potential psychic abilities — you know, like telepathy, precognition, or clairvoyance.

The declassified information even details how the experiments took place, as patients sat in the middle of a room between "two concave mirrors" than hung on walls opposite each other.

In case you were wondering if the experiments worked, the document suggests "an unidentified institute in Leningrad took part in several successful extrasensory perception experiments" in the mid-1980s. How successful, or what the report's author deems as successful, is not show in the report.

You can read it in full on The Black Vault website here.

Cover photo by Dennis Brack/Bloomberg via Getty Image