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Psychic Soldiers, Mind Readers, and Dolphin Drones: The Cold War's Weird Paranormal History

How Soviet séances and CIA remote viewers sparked a decades-long arms race no one was supposed to know about

Arthur McFarlane | 5.31.2026 8:00 AM

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(Illustration: Midjourney)

In the February 2019 issue of Armeiiskii Sbornik, the Russian Ministry of Defense's official magazine, there is an article titled "Supersoldiers for the Wars of the Future." The article claims, among other things, that the Soviet and Russian militaries learned to psychically control dolphins, disrupt radio and television broadcasts, and crash computers. 

These psychic experiments began in 1924, when Gleb Bokii, head of the special section of the Soviet secret police, opened a secret laboratory at 21 Kuznetsky Bridge in Moscow. With the help of Alexander Barchenko, his spiritual guru, he conducted top-secret experiments on hypnotism, brainwashing, and mind reading.

These exploits were far from the Special Section's most eccentric. Bokii hosted wild orgies in a secret dacha in the suburbs of Moscow. Invited guests farmed, sunbathed, cooked, and ate together in the nude before engaging in group sex. Barchenko planned an expedition to Tibet to find the legendary Buddhist Kingdom of Shambhala. He believed that an ancient civilization hiding beneath the Earth's surface, in Tibet, held advanced scientific knowledge that could be used to accelerate the path to communism. When Soviet Foreign Minister Grigory Chicherin heard about the proposed expedition, he quashed it and greenlit a separate expedition with the more prosaic goal of probing anti-British feeling in Lhasa.

Bokii and Barchenko's Psychic Experiments Sparked an Arms Race

The Special Section kicked off a century-long paranormal arms race—with surprising legacies that can still be felt today. 

The Russian fascination with exotic spirituality predates the Soviet era. Russian orientalism flourished after the 1858 Treaty of Aigun, which granted the czar lands that formerly belonged to China's Qing dynasty. Russian explorers and academics ventured into Inner Asia, and further afield into Xinjiang and Tibet. The intelligentsia of St. Petersburg snapped up their travel accounts, ethnographic studies, and spiritual guidebooks. In the imperial capital, Eastern spirituality met European new age trends: hollow-earth theory and meditation, reincarnation and tantric sex, Lamaism and occult........

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