Lehal Library

Then, in 1969, an event took place when a very leading Soviet scientist came to the United States and read a paper at a rather obscure conference at Big Sur, California. When the elements of this paper were properly sorted out and its implications vaguely comprehended, well, it was now relatively certain that whatever the Soviets were doing, it represented a potential "threat." At that point it ceased to matter if the Soviets were chasing empty psychic winds. What mattered was that a world superpower, an exceedingly powerful one in cold-war terms, had willingly involved itself in such research -- and MIGHT have made ominous breakthroughs regarding it. And this time panic buttons were pushed -- for "distant influencing," whatever it was, made everyone in the "know" quite nervous -- for "distant influencing" was uncomfortably near the concept of "mind control via distant influencing." After all, Russia had a long tradition of Svengali types who were alleged to effect mind control at a distance. One of the amusing fallouts of all of this, and which I witnessed in part, was that many American intelligence analysts who had been academically trained to ignore and laugh at psychical research and parapsychology began scrambling to read a few books along those lines. Only ultimately to comprehend, of course, that the Soviet effort bore very little resemblance to its assumed American counterpart -- parapsychology.