Ninel Kulagina

Ninel Kulagina (1926–1990), also known as Nina Kulagina, was a celebrated Soviet psychic and a decorated World War II hero, having served as a front-line soldier and tank radio operator for the Red Army. She gained international attention for her purported psychokinetic abilities, particularly her capacity to move matter with her mind¹.

Kulagina's abilities reportedly manifested in childhood, with objects spontaneously moving when she became angry. Starting in the mid-1960s, her psychokinetic feats became the subject of state-run television programs in the Soviet Union, such as Science Films produced by Leningrad Studios. She was filmed moving objects sealed inside a glass aquarium, including metal salt shakers, matchsticks, and cigar canisters¹.

In the United States, skeptics often dismissed her demonstrations as fraud. However, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense were not as dismissive, especially after a classified film from March 10, 1970, at the Ukhtomskii Military Institute in Leningrad, showed Kulagina allegedly stopping a frog's heart with her mind. This film caused significant alarm within the American defense community¹.

The experiment, overseen by Soviet military doctor Genady Sergeyev, involved Kulagina concentrating for about twenty minutes to stop a surgically removed frog's heart, which was still beating in Ringer's solution. Her physiological responses, including a heart rate of 240 and elevated blood pressure, were monitored. According to declassified documents, the heart activity ceased after approximately 7 minutes in the first experiment and 22 minutes in a second. She was also reportedly able to "reactivate" the heart¹.

Another experiment involved Kulagina attempting to increase the heart rate of a skeptical physician, which reportedly reached dangerous levels within minutes. While some U.S. analysts suspected a Soviet disinformation campaign, others, particularly from the Medical Intelligence Office of the U.S. Army, considered the military applications of such abilities to be extremely important¹.

Kulagina's alleged abilities contributed to the Pentagon's decision to launch a joint intelligence assessment of the "Soviet psychoenergetic threat," a term coined to encompass Soviet research into anomalous mental phenomena and electromagnetic weapons programs¹. Her work, along with that of H. S. Tsien in China, highlighted the perceived need for the U.S. to invest in its own psychic research programs.