Zhang Baosheng

Zhang Baosheng was born approximately 1955 in Liaoning Province, northeastern China. He became the most prominent practitioner of claimed Extraordinary Human Body Function (EHBF) abilities in China during the period of state-sponsored parapsychology research associated with the Extraordinary Powers Craze of the late 1970s and 1980s. His demonstrations focused primarily on apparent teleportation of small objects - pills, paper notes, insects - into and out of sealed glass vials and other containers, conducted at military research facilities in Beijing under conditions that researchers claimed ruled out conventional sleight-of-hand. The results from his sessions were among the most significant findings cited in Chinese EHBF research and were included in assessments that reached senior government and military officials.¹

Discovery and Beijing Testing

Zhang came to the attention of researchers from Peking University's physics department around 1982, apparently through reports circulating in Liaoning about his claimed abilities. He was brought to Beijing, where he was examined at multiple facilities including the Beijing Institute of Space Medico-Engineering, a research center operated under Chinese military control and formally part of the aerospace medical establishment. At these facilities, scientists designed experiments intended to eliminate conventional explanations for his demonstrations: pills would be placed in sealed glass vials; Zhang would hold the container and claim to be causing the pills to teleport through the glass.¹

Films of Zhang's sessions at Beijing Institute of Space Medico-Engineering were reportedly shown to officials at the National Defense Science and Technology Commission and other government bodies as evidence of EHBF phenomena with potential strategic implications. The researchers who conducted these sessions included military scientists with institutional investment in demonstrating that EHBF was real and scientifically tractable.²

DIA Assessment

Hal Puthoff's 1982 classified DIA report, "Psychoenergetics Research in the People's Republic of China," documented the Chinese EHBF research programs and provided American intelligence with its first comprehensive assessment of the scale and institutional structure of Chinese psi research. Puthoff's report, compiled for the Defense Intelligence Agency's Psychoenergetics program, described the Zhang Baosheng experiments among the most significant EHBF demonstrations being studied by Chinese military researchers. This intelligence was used by DIA officials including Jack Vorona to justify continued American investment in the STAR GATE program on the grounds that the United States required a comparable research effort.²

The competitive logic - that if China had a functioning EHBF research program, the United States needed equivalent capabilities - paralleled the reasoning used to justify American remote viewing research in response to Soviet psychoenergetics programs. Zhang's sessions thus contributed indirectly to the sustained funding of American remote viewing research through the 1980s.

Disputed Results

Zhang's results were contested from the beginning by Chinese researchers who suspected fraud. Skeptics argued that the filmed demonstrations were inadequate as evidence because they did not rule out sophisticated sleight-of-hand techniques; that the research teams had institutional incentives to find positive results; and that the experimental protocols had not been designed with adequate input from professional magicians who could evaluate the possibility of deception. As the Extraordinary Powers Craze declined in the late 1980s and Chinese government support for EHBF research was withdrawn, Zhang's results were increasingly attributed to stage magic rather than genuine anomalous phenomena. He reportedly worked in subsequent years as a stage magician and entertainer.¹