Original subtitles

Throughout time, governments and the people

who work for them have done strange and even terrible

things in the name of national interest.

Tonight, soldiers spiked with dangerous drugs.

No one's going to volunteer to test brain-frying chemicals.

And citizens with unusual gifts

recruited to spy.

Psychic spies would be able to unlock Soviet secrets.

What about channeling an enemy's

deepest fears to defeat them?

The Viet Cong began hearing these disembodied,

echoing voices.

These soldiers are terrified

that their very worst nightmares might have come to life.

Sometimes the best weapons governments use are mind games.

Now it's time to bring these strange secrets to light.

The 1950s is a boom time for pharmaceutical companies.

They're turning out radical new psychoactive drugs

that give some in the U.S. military an idea.

Could these drugs be turned into weapons?

To find out,

they decide to test them on American soldiers.

Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland,

headquarters of the U.S.

Chemical and Biological Defense Command.

The military is attempting to create

a non-lethal weapon,

something that can incapacitate the soldiers on the other side,

but not necessarily kill them.

So at Edgewood Arsenal, they began developing

psychoactive compounds.

They decide that their best candidate

is this substance known as

3-quinuclidinyl benzilate, or BZ.

BZ is developed as a stomach medicine.

Side effects like confusion and hallucinations

mean it never gets FDA approval.

But it's those side effects that interest the Army.

Now the team faces a problem.

Where will they find people to test BZ on?

The Army gives them permission to recruit volunteer soldiers

from around the country.

Recruiters tell the troops they'll be testing equipment.

The Edgewood team

wants to record exactly what happens

to the volunteers on BZ.

So they construct a mock communications outpost

and fill it with cameras to record their experiments.

The team doses four volunteers

with varying amounts of this horrific drug.

They want to see

how these young men are going to react

while they're high on BZ.

And they test them across a broad range of scenarios,

including simulating a poison gas attack.

The peak of the compound's physical effects

was reached within four to six hours,

the peak of mental incapacitation

several hours later,

when a simulated chemical alarm sounded.

The initial results are promising.

The men are distracted. They're disoriented.

It seems like BZ is the non-lethal weapon

the Army dreamed of.

Soon BZ testing takes an ominous turn.

Ronald Zadrozny is the soldier

given the highest dose of BZ.

And this causes him to go into a drug-induced psychosis

for 36 hours,

and he still has lingering effects afterwards,

which makes him nervous and panicky.

Other volunteers are also badly affected,

but the Army decides the experiments should continue.

In November 1964, the Edgewood team

is ready to test BZ outside.

They settle on Dugway Proving Ground as a safe space

to test this out of doors.

When you're at Dugway,

you are far away from prying eyes.

You're out in the middle of nowhere.

In that way, Dugway is the perfect place to go.

The men suit up in the pre-dawn cold

and are then doused with the gas.

These unfortunate troops are dosed with choking amounts

of BZ gas for 15 minutes.

Then these befuddled volunteers are taken for evaluation.

The test proves that BZ can incapacitate soldiers,

making them unable to fight.

The Army is convinced of the potential for BZ weapons

on the battlefield.

Meanwhile, back at Edgewood, testing on BZ

variants continues.

In 1975,

after details of CIA LSD experiments leak out,

President Ford instructs VP Nelson Rockefeller

to investigate.

The Rockefeller Commission starts to go through

the Army's dirty laundry.

And in June 1975, they haul Army

bosses in to interrogate them about the Edgewood experiments.

When the Congressional investigators ask them

what's going on, they just start fessing up like Boy Scouts

and they tell them, like, yeah, the BZ testing is ongoing

and it's been going on for years.

The things that have been done,

which are in contradiction to the statutes.

But--

The Army admits that somewhere between 2,100

and 2,900 volunteers were subjected

to BZ gas during the course of their experiments.

BZ is not the only drug they test.

The US Army dosed some 7,000 unsuspecting soldiers

with more than 250 different chemical agents.

The volunteers aren't told what they're testing,

so there's no way they could give informed consent.

So basically, the soldiers are being treated like lab rats.

So the lawmakers are naturally furious.

In 1975, the BZ research program is shut down...

but that doesn't stop U.S. intelligence agencies

from developing other ways to play mind games.

In 1968, they decided to turn

the Viet Cong's own weapons against them.

It's the summer of 1968...

and U.S. troops are fighting the Communist Viet Cong

near the Cambodian border.

A North Vietnamese fighter takes deadly aim

at a vulnerable GI on patrol.

But when the Communist soldier pulls the trigger,

he signs his own death warrant.

His Chinese-made AK-56 explodes on firing...

Killing him instantly.

The GI got lucky, but this is not a one-off.

The thing about these deadly misfires

is that they weren't accidents at all.

The extraordinary truth is that the exploding guns

are the result of a secret U.S. military operation.

Anybody who's ever fired a gun

has the same nightmare

that one day they're going to pull the trigger,

and the round in the chamber

is going to blow up in their own face.

And this nightmare is exactly what was playing

through the mind of every VC combat member

during Vietnam.

It's not until 30 years later...

that a book by a Vietnam vet reveals the operation...

code named Eldest Son.

The Vietnam Studies and Operations Group

was charged with a mission to undermine the will to fight

of the Viet Cong.

The SOG identified that along the Ho Chi Minh Trail,

there were several munitions cache areas

where the Viet Cong would resupply ammunition,

actual bullets and rounds for their guns.

The recon teams were finding

these caches of ammunition.

So they come up with this brilliant idea.

And that is, rather than trying to haul

this ammo off or destroy it on sight,

why don't we just sabotage it?

But importantly, not sabotage all of it.

Sabotage some of it.

They'll make the communists afraid of their own guns

by booby trapping their bullets.

But how would they pull this off?

Sabotage is a very tricky business,

because it's part engineering and part espionage.

And that's exactly what the SOG had to do

to find a way to engineer a round that would explode,

but still look like other rounds.

First, they refill the bullets with high explosive.

But there's a problem.

The most commonly available military-grade explosive

at the time actually had a white color to it

that did not match the gunpowder

that was inside the round itself.

If the communists investigate,

they'll detect the fakes.

So the SOG had to create a whole new different kind

of explosive that had the same power

but matched the color of black powder.

The next challenge is

how to get the sabotaged bullets back

in Viet Cong hands.

SOG's Green Beret reconnaissance patrols

come up with an ingenious solution.

So the Viet Cong don't suspect sabotage,

they make sure to load up only one phony bullet

in each magazine or ammo can.

We're not going to kill them

one soldier at a time, one bullet at a time.

What we're going to do is we're going to create

psychological chaos among the enemy's ranks.

And that's a pretty big win for a pretty low investment.

Eldest Son is so successful in Vietnam

that the U.S. makes it part

of its psychological warfare arsenal.

It will use the tactic again years later

in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In World War II,

the U.S. Army creates a top secret unit

whose sole job is fooling the enemy.

It calls itself the Ghost Army

for a very good reason.

Nothing about this Army is real.

It's 1944, and the United States

is preparing to take the fight to Hitler

by invading Nazi-occupied Europe.

America needs to leverage any advantage they can find.

So Army chiefs turn to an industry

where the nation leads the world, show business.

The Pentagon creates the Ghost Army.

They're not using rifles and machine guns.

This unit will ultimately use Hollywood stagecraft

to fight the enemy.

The purpose of the Ghost Army is to create diversions

and feints and deception.

Officially known as

the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops,

the Ghost Army is made up of just 1,100 men.

The concept is that you're engaging

in force multiplication

by having a small group of soldiers pretend,

and give the enemy the impression

that they're actually a very large group of soldiers,

up to two divisions.

So you have a unit with about 1,000 people in it

that is able to make the enemy

think it's 30,000 strong.

In June 1944, the Ghost Army vanguard

Task Force Mason gets an airlift

onto the battleground in France.

Here, their mission is to support

the U.S. 928th Artillery Division

by providing an attractive target

for German gunners.

The Ghost Army inflate a series of rubber howitzers

matching the real guns.

The idea is to draw in the Nazi fire

to get them to focus on that area

where these inflatable weapons are,

as opposed to where American soldiers actually are.

The Ghost Army has to keep their inflatable guns

ahead of the real artillery for almost a month,

taking as many hits as possible themselves.

So these guys are either just really, really brave

or really crazy, possibly both.

Over the next 12 months,

the Ghost Army supports the Allies

in some 20 operations

before this wartime Hollywood team

gives their finest performance on the banks of the Rhine

in March 1945.

The biggest obstacle that we had to confront

after the Normandy landings

was crossing the Rhine.

General Patton and his Ninth Army

are trapped behind the river, which blocks them off

from the path to Berlin.

Rivers are a natural obstacle,

especially to heavy-treaded vehicles like tanks.

You have to bring in Army engineers,

start erecting bridges.

It turns into a big mess.

Meanwhile, German forces are waiting on the other side,

and they're just poised to rain hell

on any allied troops

that try to make that difficult river crossing.

The Ghost Army is ordered

to divert German defenders' attention

from Patton's crossing point...

to draw the fiercest German fire.

The first phase is to generate sneaky signals traffic.

Ghost Army communications teams fill the airwaves

with bogus radio chatter, creating the illusion

of a huge Army on the move.

But that's just the beginning

for the Ghost Army.

During the day, sonic teams play

the sound of heavy construction

through 500-pound speaker systems.

To the Germans on the other side,

it sounds as if pontoon bridges are being constructed.

The enemy would then be led to believe

that I'm about to be attacked by this very powerful force,

when in actuality, all that was over there

were a couple of Jeeps with loudspeakers on them.

The supporting cast plays its part

behind the lines,

but the key part of the operation is yet to come.

The Germans are conducting

daily photo reconnaissance sorties

over allied lines,

measuring what our strength looks like across the river.

So that if there's any noticeable build up,

those photo reconnaissance aircraft, they will detect it.

To fool these pilots, the Ghost Army creates

an entirely fake front line.

600 inflatable Sherman tanks and field artillery pieces

are moved into position purposely

so that an aircraft can photograph them,

and the enemy can then be left to wonder,

all right, it looks like there's a build-up here.

The Nazis react as intended,

pounding the Ghost Army's position with artillery fire.

Three of the unit lose their lives, but the ruse works.

Patton's Army crosses the Rhine miles up the river,

facing only scattered Nazi resistance.

They take only minimal casualties.

This is a critical victory for the Allies.

In 2024, the Ghost Army is presented

with the Congressional Gold Medal for Heroism.

It can be quite difficult to quantify

psychological operations,

but it has been estimated

that the Ghost Army saved

tens of thousands of American lives

during the war.

1953, the CIA starts an experiment

with a top secret goal--

find drugs to control the human mind.

It will become one of the government's

most notorious projects.

Its name is MKUltra.

CIA Director Allen Dulles has a big problem.

There was a great fear at the time...

that American prisoners held by the North Koreans

were being subjected to brainwashing.

The CIA suspects

that the communists might be utilizing

mind altering drugs, not only to extract information,

but to reprogram the brains

of American soldiers in captivity.

The CIA suspects that one of them

is a new wonder drug called lysergic acid diethylamide,

popularly known as LSD.

LSD was discovered in 1943

by Albert Hofmann at Sandoz Labs.

It's still pretty untested, but it has the potential

of being the greatest mind-altering drug

that the agency has come across so far.

The CIA director initiates a program

to explore the brainwashing potential of LSD

and other psychoactive drugs.

You have to understand the sense of emergency

that was gripping the United States

in the early 1950s.

What Dulles wanted and why MKUltra was created

was a search for a silver bullet...

a magic potion

that would break down the person who ingested it

or break down his facade of lies.

The CIA hopes to use brainwashing on spies,

foreign prisoners,

and ultimately even foreign leaders

like Fidel Castro.

Dulles charges chemist and poison expert

Sidney Gottlieb to run the program.

Gottlieb spends $240,000

to buy as much LSD as he can get his hands on.

Gottlieb went to Sandoz and said, I'll buy it all.

I want to corner the market on this stuff.

And Sidney Gottlieb became America's

first government-authorized drug dealer.

He is the man who brought LSD to the CIA.

Gottlieb decides the best way to evaluate

this incredibly powerful new psychedelic drug

is to test it on humans across the country.

MKUltra funds 149 research projects

across 80 institutions.

The CIA has never wanted for money.

Cash is its most powerful secret weapon.

Among the institutions taking part

in Gottlieb's experiments

are 44 colleges and universities,

as well as hospitals, pharmaceutical companies

and even prisons.

All manner of drugs became the focus of these experiments,

and all manner of unwitting human Guinea pigs.

For example, there was a federal prison in Kentucky

that housed people who had been heroin junkies

before their arrest.

A number of these prisoners

were inducted into the MKUltra program,

and without their knowledge,

they were fed LSD for 77 days in a row.

What this essentially meant is that you were

in a drug-induced schizophrenic state.

I can't imagine that these were good trips.

In 1957, Gottlieb enlists Canadian psychiatrist

Ewen Cameron.

Between 1957 and 1964,

Cameron conducts a series of hideous experiments

for the CIA, attempting to use LSD

and other extreme treatments to break down the human mind

and rebuild it from scratch.

Ewen Cameron softens his patients up

by getting them into an insulin-induced coma.

He then exposes them to LSD

and other forms of psychological torture.

The subjects of these experiments had no idea

they were in the middle of a giant CIA experiment.

They were just normal people looking for psychiatric help,

and they came out destroyed.

Gottlieb takes some of

his most extreme experiments overseas.

The CIA set up secret detention centers

across Asia and even in Europe,

far away enough from home and congressional oversight

so they won't attract any unwanted attention.

Here, Gottlieb's team will experiment on suspects

like foreign agents captured by the CIA for other reasons.

They call these subjects expendable.

MKUltra runs for 20 years.

We don't know how many people were affected

or how badly they were harmed.

But nothing works,

and brainwashing remains elusive.

The CIA cancels MKUltra and Gottlieb retires in 1973.

They know it's not a good look for the agency.

So to bury the evidence,

Gottlieb and outgoing CIA Director Helms

decide to destroy all of the records.

Gottlieb literally takes box upon box of hard copy

MKUltra documentation back to the CIA archive

to have is shredded and destroyed.

But he doesn't quite manage to destroy all of it.

Those remaining MKUltra documents

will come back to haunt the CIA.

In 1975, Congress launches an investigation

into the agency exposing projects like MKUltra.

Sidney Gottlieb testifies before Congress,

but claims he doesn't remember much about the experiments...

and he gets off scot-free.

The CIA officers

who took part in this doubtless felt

that the United States was at war,

and that there were no rules in such a game.

The mission was more important than the rules,

even though those rules might be the laws of God and man.

In the 1950s,

Communist militias are battling U.S. influence

across the Pacific.

To gain an edge.

American PsyOps teams turned to mind games.

The Philippines, early 1950s.

The U.S. backed Filipino government

is fighting an insurrection by guerrillas known as the Huk.

The Huk rebellion was a Communist rebellion,

and like others in Southeast Asia,

it was seen as something that the United States

had to conquer.

The U.S. is on the defensive as Huk rebels

hidden in the dense forests

threaten to overrun nearby towns.

But as the guerrillas prepare their next assault,

these fierce fighters stumble across something unsettling.

Early one morning, a group of devoted Huk rebels

is moving through the jungle.

What they find chills them to the bone.

They find one of their missing soldiers lying dead.

His body is completely drained of blood.

There's no bullet wounds.

There's no blade marks.

Instead, there's just two small punctures in his neck.

The reason why is revealed in a 1972 memoir

written by a man involved in the conflict,

Local CIA Station Chief Edward Lansdale.

Edward Lansdale was a firm proponent

of the use of psychological warfare.

He really believes

that if you can terrify your enemies,

you make them a lot less effective on the battlefield.

Lansdale knows of a local legend

he can use to beat the Huk, using fear instead of firepower.

Every culture has its scary monsters.

And in the case of the Philippines,

one of the key monsters is the aswang.

An aswang is a shapeshifting, vampiric, blood sucking demon.

Edward Lansdale wants to harness

the local cultural beliefs of fear

around this sort of vampire

and use that to terrorize the people in the countryside.

Lansdale gets a native Filipino psychological warfare

team under his command to spread rumors

among the locals in town.

They claim a terrifying vampiric aswang demon

has been seen stalking the area.

The word starts to reverberate

throughout the community, and it scares people.

Next, Lansdale ups the ante.

Lansdale's psychological warfare team

creeps into the jungle and sets up an ambush.

It's very dark in the forest at night,

so they have no problem hiding.

When a Huk patrol comes along,

they wait for the very last man

and then grab him without making a sound.

They kill him without leaving any marks on the body.

Then they puncture his neck with two small puncture wounds.

They hang it by its feet so that all of the blood

will drain out through the wounds.

The body is then taken

and left in a rebel-held area

where they know it's going to be discovered.

When the Huks come back through the area,

they find their comrade drained of blood.

These Huk soldiers are terrified

that their very worst nightmares

might have come to life.

They abandon their stronghold,

and they stop launching attacks in that region.

In 1954, the Huk surrendered to Philippine troops

and the rebellion is over...

in no small part thanks to Lansdale's tactics.

One reason governments use PsyOps is because they work.

In 1969, the U.S. tries

a new kind of terrifying mind game

against the Viet Cong.

By the beginning of 1969...

American forces are getting bogged down in Vietnam.

The U.S. is going all out with saturation

bombing and even chemical warfare,

but it's just not working.

If anything, the Viet Cong

are winning the upper hand.

There are some people that suggest

that maybe the United States should try a different tactic.

Then something stirs in the forest.

VC troops operating at night

begin to hear anguished, disembodied voices

echoing through the darkness.

When you're patrolling in the jungle at night,

your senses are limited.

So you can only imagine

how creepy it must have been

to hear these sort of disembodied voices.

The ghosts are all part of a campaign

of psychological warfare against North Vietnamese troops.

It's called Operation Wandering Soul.

We are playing on North Vietnamese superstitions

by claiming that the wandering souls

of their unburied dead in the South

are guiding our bombs.

The average Viet Cong soldier

is a teenager

who's not particularly well educated.

They're very superstitious, if you will.

They believe that spirits can haunt the Earth.

If your body is left unburied,

the presumption is that the soul can't move on,

that it becomes a wandering soul.

But where are these ghostly voices

really coming from?

No surprise,

but the haunting voices, they're not ghosts.

Instead, they're American tape recordings being blared out

from massive speaker systems.

PsyOps teams put Vietnamese voices

through an echo chamber.

They process it and add

horror show sound effects to up the ante.

We don't know how effective Wandering Soul

was against the enemy,

but we do know it spooked our allies.

There are specific orders issued to the Army

that they are not to play this in earshot

of their South Vietnamese allies,

because it wasn't just affecting the target audience,

the Viet Cong,

but it was also affecting our allies

and scaring the hell out of them, too.

During the 1970s, U.S. spy agencies report

that the Soviet Union is experimenting

with a new espionage tool, telepathy.

They respond with a mission that sounds out of this world,

Project Stargate.

At the Stanford Research Institute,

scientists funded by the CIA

are running a series of experiments

to test a psychic technique

known as remote viewing,

the ability to telepathically see faraway things

using only the power of the mind.

The agency hopes it will help them spy

on the Soviet Union.

These guys are so desperate for information

from behind the Iron Curtain that they will try anything.

So maybe, just maybe, this remote viewing

could be the way to get it

and with no risk of getting caught.

If it works, the U.S. government

would gain a way to systematically create

psychic spies, and that would give an incredible advantage

to the national security infrastructure

of the United States.

It would change the nature of warfare forever.

American doctor and paranormal

enthusiast Andrija Puharich

hears of a promising potential candidate.

He's a former Israeli paratrooper

who claims to possess paranormal powers, Uri Geller.

Puharich introduces Geller

to the remote viewing researchers.

At Stanford, Geller's psychic ability

will be put to the test.

Researchers film the trials.

15 drawings were placed in double sealed envelopes

in a safe.

Geller's task was to draw

what he perceived in the envelope.

What they hope he'll be able to do

is reproduce images only through utilizing

the power of his mind.

If he could do what he said he could do,

it could transform the world of intelligence collection.

This is Geller's representation

of what he believed was sealed in the envelope.

At no time during these experiments

did he have any advance knowledge

of the target material.

A secret report from 1973

reveals that Geller seems to be getting results.

So to get ahead of the Soviets,

they doubled down on paranormal research.

The CIA transfers the remote viewing research

to the Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA,

who embark on a series of projects later consolidated

under the code name Stargate.

Stargate is the DIA's ultimate mind game.

If it works, it could maybe even win the whole Cold War.

The government decides it's time

to test remote viewing

during major international events.

First, they try it when a Soviet bomber

crashes into dense jungle in the Central African Republic.

If America can find the plane first,

they'll be able to study

the secret Soviet technology inside.

This is an opportunity too good to miss.

Time is running out.

They need to act quickly.

However, conventional intelligence

is drawing a blank.

They have to think outside the box.

Intelligence teams call in a Stargate

test subject, Rosemary Smith.

They show Smith the part of Africa

where they believe the plane has gone down.

Rosemary Smith actually used a technique

she called map dowsing.

She took a pendulum,

and it was a weight on the end of it,

and she uses that to divine the location

of the downed jet.

She eventually settles on a location.

The team converts those to coordinates.

The ground team went out, and lo and behold,

the bomber was there, very close to the exact location

where she said it was going to be.

It's a win for the remote viewing team.

So now they apply it in a high-stakes situation

where U.S. citizens are in danger.

Islamic fundamentalists

have just taken over the country,

when radicals invade the U.S. embassy

and seize more than 60 American hostages.

I'm from Utah.

I was a political secretary, and I'm 33.

Hunkered down in Fort Meade,

the Stargate team focus on Iran

and the American hostages.

One of the remote viewers claims

he has a vision of a sick hostage

on a stretcher.

But which one?

He suggests the hostage is associated

with a royal playing card.

You know, like the king, the queen, or the jack.

Just four days later,

a hostage suffering from multiple sclerosis

is released and flown home.

His name is Richard Queen.

The vision of the stricken man

and a royal card matching his last name,

which is Queen, suggest that this is a hit.

Maybe they're actually on to something.

Stargate research continues for years

until the mid-'90s, when the government questions

how much it really is bringing to the table.

Lawmakers want to know

what is the upshot of decades of big dollar DIA

spending on this strange secret program?

They tasked the CIA to evaluate Stargate.

In September 1995, the CIA releases its report.

It is kind of eerie, but incredibly enough,

this report suggests

that remote viewing generates

more so-called hits

than you'd get by simple chance alone.

In other words, there might be something more than random

guessing going on here.

But even when there are so-called hits,

the research does not show that they are

caused by paranormal means.

The report does not explain

the better-than-chance hit rate.

To this day, no one has.

But that can't save the remote viewing program.

In June 1995, the Stargate program is finally shut down.

During the 1950s, the U.S. and Soviet Union

install ballistic missiles on submarines.

But it's hard to communicate with these subs underwater.

Reports suggest scientists from both nations

try something unusual, mind games.

An article in a French scientific magazine

sends shockwaves through the Soviet Navy.

This former French resistance fighter turned sci-fi author,

Jacques Bergier, claims he has inside information

about mind games

on board the world's first nuclear powered submarine,

the USS "Nautilus."

The "Nautilus" has just made

an incredible record breaking journey.

It has stayed submerged for six whole days

and it has traveled underneath the North Pole.

Bergier's article claims

that on the "Nautilus" voyage,

the Navy tests a new form of sub

to shore communication, telepathy.

Communication with the submarine

is a huge challenge,

because when they're underwater, for the most part,

they can't receive radio broadcasts.

So the thought was, well, what if we could use telepathy?

What if we could use ESP to accomplish

this super important task?

It sounds incredible, but worryingly to the Soviets,

this article claims

that paranormal mental communication

is working.

Bergier's article is making some fantastical claims

that they have a person on the sub underwater

who is sending telepathic communications

to a person on land who receives them.

That's kind of bonkers.

The experiments themselves,

according to Bergier's article,

were using something called Zener cards,

which were commonly used in ESP research.

The sender would look at cards,

and the receiver would attempt to identify the shapes

that he saw on these cards.

And according to Bergier, it worked fantastically well.

This story is impossible to verify.

But if it's true, it's a game changer.

"Nautilus" could receive its firing orders

while still hidden deep beneath the waves.

A form of communication that is silent

and can't be intercepted by the enemy

is just what they need.

The Soviets are playing catch-up.

They come up with their own psychic test,

which is revealed in a declassified CIA report.

Buried in the documents are details of a sinister Soviet

sub-to-shore telepathy experiment,

this one using animals.

Soviet scientist Pavel Naumov is pursuing research

that suggests there's a strong psychic link

between mother and child

that could make telepathy easier.

His theory is that no matter how far apart

the mother and child are,

the mother can sense the death of that child,

that they are connected.

To test the idea,

Soviet scientists separate a mother rabbit

from her babies.

They send her young out on a submarine far out to sea.

On land, the scientists insert electrodes

into the mother rabbit's skull

so they can measure the electrical activity

in her brain.

Then the telepathic communication test begins.

On the submarine deep underwater,

these scientists are taking the baby rabbits

and one by one mercilessly executing them.

Back on shore, Naumov, the Soviet scientist,

was monitoring the brain activity

of the mother rabbit.

Surprisingly, the test seems to work.

Naumov claims that the mother rabbit's brain

has a signal spike

every time one of her little baby bunnies is murdered.

This spurs a fever of activity

inside the Soviet Union,

so that by 1967, there are 30 labs

spending millions of rubles

on this sort of weird paranormal research.

The record kind of goes dark after that.

I'm sure the Soviets continue to try telepathy,

but in the end, there's no evidence

that this was ever put into practice successfully.

From dangerous psychedelic drugs

to projects designed to trick the enemy,

nations have always used mind games as weapons.

Sometimes these tactics are disturbing,

but sometimes they lead to surprising victories.

I'm David Duchovny.

Thanks for watching Secrets Declassified.