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ESP WARS by Edwin C. May, Victor Rubel, & Loyd Auerbach. Palo Alto, CA: Laboratories for Fundamental Research, 2014. Pp. xii + 323. $20 (paperback). ISBN 978-1500743000.
The literature concerning the psychic arms race between America and the Soviet Union is an intriguing mixture of fact and fiction. Many of the claims are bound to exceed boggle thresholds, but some seem more plausible. ESP Wars allegedly contains the true stories as narrated by some of the key players.
The book starts with a wide-ranging historical survey with accounts from ancient times, including stories about shamans, yogis, and saints. Alongside well-known mediums, there are also fascinating individuals such as Blavatsky and Rasputin who make an appearance. Messing does not appear, but Hanussen, "Prophet of the Third Reich," does, in a section concerning Nazi occultism, a subject which, like the named individuals, is itself surrounded by myths. When Hitler came to power he began to persecute those involved in the occult, and something similar occurred under Stalin's regime: "Books on occultism were removed from shelves all across the country, members of esoteric groups were sent to camps and shot" (pp. 44-45). Officially, in the late 1930s occultism and psi research in the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
The history of psi research in the West and the East is also outlined. Oddly, neither the declassified reports nor the accounts by parapsychologists who had been in the Soviet Union are cited or even mentioned. Project MKULTRA, initiated by the CIA in 1953, is briefly covered. According to the authors, the CIA's interest in psi was due to its ". . . potential both as a means of mental manipulation and as a method of covertly sending and receiving information" (p. 53).
The well-known story about the telepathy experiment involving the U.S. submarine Nautilus, which allegedly took place in 1959, is naturally also covered. The authors appear oblivious to Martin Ebon's (1983) investigation: in short, this suggests it to have been a hoax by the author Jacques Bergier, who may have been deliberately fed disinformation. The story did function as an ignition spark for the psychic arms race-Soviet parapsychologists successfully used it to argue that psi research should start anew. With minor exceptions no psi research has officially been...