The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Ninel Kulagina.md

aliases	category	tags	summary	born	died	location	relations	created	updated
Ninel Kulagina Nina Kulagina Nina S. Kulagina Ninel Sergeyevna Kulagina Ninel Sergeevna Kulagina Ninel Sergeyevna Mikhailova Nelya Mikhailova Nelia Mikhailova Nelli Kulagina N. Kulagina Mrs. Kulagina Mrs. Mikhailova	Psychics & Remote Viewers	Person Psychic Psychokinesis SovietUnion Leningrad Psychoenergetics DIA	Leningrad war veteran who from 1964 demonstrated moving small objects without contact, was tested by Soviet commissions through 1983, and was cited in a 1987 DIA briefing as vouched for by two academicians.	1926-07-30	1990-04-11	Leningrad, Soviet Union	type with start role fn employed_by Red Army 1941 radio operator in a tank regiment during the siege of Leningrad 1 type with role fn spouse_of Viktor Kulagin married a naval engineer, Viktor Vasilievich Kulagin; three children 1 type with start end role fn subject_of Leonid Vasiliev 1964 1966 first Soviet laboratory scientist said by her husband and by Edward Naumov to have worked with her; Vasiliev died in 1966 3 type with start role fn subject_of Mendeleev Institute of Metrology 1965 committee observation of the movement of aluminum pipes and match containers; report quoted in Moskovskaya Pravda in 1968 4 type with start end role fn subject_of Genady Sergeyev 1965 1970 laboratory studies in Leningrad, including the frog heart preparations of 1970 5 type with start role fn subject_of Polenov Neurosurgical Institute 1970 Leningrad commission test of image exposure on sealed photographic paper, held in a medical facility 10 type with start end role fn subject_of Kobzarev Commission 1975 1978 evaluated in 1978 by the Academy of Sciences review commission chaired by Yuri Kobzarev 11 type with start end role fn subject_of Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics 1981 1983 tested in the institute's laboratory under Yuri Gulyaev; Gulyaev told visitors in 1983 that work with her continued to a limited extent 14 type with reverse start role fn subject_of Chelovek i Zakon true 1986 defamation suit against the Ministry of Justice monthly Man and Law, decided in her favor, with a retraction ordered 20	2026-05-14	2026-10-05

Ninel Sergeyevna Kulagina was born on July 30, 1926, in Leningrad, with the maiden name Mikhailova, and lived there all her life. The first name "Ninel" is "Lenin" spelled backward. In the Soviet press she appeared as Nelya Mikhailova; in the West she became known as Nina Kulagina. She served in the Red Army during the Siege of Leningrad as a radio operator in a tank regiment, was wounded in the abdomen at seventeen, and after the war married Viktor Vasilievich Kulagin, a naval engineer, with whom she had three children.¹ Annie Jacobsen describes her as a decorated front-line soldier whose abilities first appeared in childhood, objects moving when she became angry.²

First demonstrations, 1963 to 1968

In December 1963 Kulagina heard a radio report about Rosa Kuleshova, a woman said to see colors with her fingertips, and told her husband she could do the same. According to the account of James Conrad, summarized in the Society for Psychical Research's Psi Encyclopedia, she identified hidden colors, read text and coin dates and copied drawings while blindfolded; the couple told a doctor some weeks later.¹ The Leningrad newspaper Smena reported on January 16, 1964 that she had read from a magazine blindfolded at the Leningrad Psychoneurological Institute; the skeptic Martin Gardner wrote that a simple blindfold could not exclude peeking and that in a second Leningrad institute she performed under lax controls but not under tight ones.¹

Her husband stated that the first Soviet laboratory scientist to invite her was Leonid Vasiliev of Leningrad State University, whose junior associates thought she was deceiving the old professor with invisible threads and whose university ordered him to stop.¹ In 1968 Eduard Naumov told the American writers Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder that Vasiliev had worked with Kulagina until his death in 1966. The two writers recorded that two American specialists in Soviet affairs had heard of no such work, and that a Soviet scientist who visited American laboratories in 1965 said Vasiliev's laboratory was closed.³

Television followed in the mid-1960s: Jacobsen writes that the state programs Science Films, produced by Leningrad Studios, showed her moving metal salt shakers, matchsticks and cigar canisters sealed in a glass aquarium.² The Mendeleev Institute of Metrology in Moscow examined her in 1965. A Moskovskaya Pravda article of March 17, 1968 by the journalist Lev Kolodny quoted its committee: "The committee at the present time cannot give an explanation of the observed phenomena of the transference of objects," after an aluminum pipe 20 millimeters across was moved 90 millimeters under a glass lid and in direct view and by television camera.⁴ A Moskovskaya Pravda article by V. Chizhov of June 4, 1968, as summarized in the Psi Encyclopedia, cited the Leningrad evening paper Vechernii Leningrad for the statement that in 1965 scientists of the same institute had unanimously concluded she used "small magnets concealed in intimate places," and cited the Leningrad Psychoneurological Institute as having called her claims a "public fraud."¹

In the spring of 1968 Ostrander and Schroeder attended a Moscow conference on parapsychology held at the House of Friendship. They reported that on its opening morning copies of Pravda circulated in the hall carrying an attack that called her a fraud and swindler who used magnets concealed "in 'intimate places,'" that the film Naumov had made of her could not be shown, that she was barred from attending, and that the second day of the conference was canceled. They also reported a campaign of crank telephone calls to her home, from callers who had to know her real name and address, and that scientists hid her in the countryside outside Leningrad. Before the attack, they were told, the physicist Yakov Terletsky had written in Moskovskaya Pravda on March 17, 1968 that "Mrs. Mikhailova displays a new and unknown form of energy," and the Hero of Socialist Labor A. Mikhulin and E. Sitkovsky of the Communist Party's Academy of Social Sciences were quoted in her support.³ The Chizhov article also stated that she had served a sentence for "fraudulent intrigues."¹ Her husband and Ostrander and Schroeder gave a different account of that record: a 1966 conviction arising from brokering refrigerators and furniture for neighbors, a sentence commuted to hospital treatment after a senior scientist intervened.¹

Laboratory work with Genady Sergeyev

Genady Sergeyev of Leningrad, described by the DIA as a mathematician working for the Soviet military, studied Kulagina from the mid-1960s. The Defense Intelligence Agency report of July 1972 stated that he had "conducted several years of intensive lab research" on her, recorded "heightened biological luminescence radiating from Kulagina's eyes" during object movements, and that she could not move objects in a vacuum; it added that Western scientists had not been able to visit or observe her since February 1971 and that "a veil of secrecy has been placed on Sergeyev and Mrs. Kulagina for unknown reasons."⁵ A DIA briefing of 1987 listed Sergeyev's work in "Vasil'yev's lab" for 1965 to 1970 under the headings "communication (EEG code)," "remote action" and "N. Kulagina."⁶

The U.S. Army Medical Intelligence and Information Agency study of September 1975 recorded Sergeyev's description of her electrical and mechanical effects. She could move objects of a few ounces to nearly a pound at a distance of about 1.5 feet, with a limit near 3 feet 4 inches, could not affect an electroscope, caused no measurable field between herself and the object, and could not succeed in storms. The study listed her pulse and breathing rising during tests, pain in the upper spine and neck, a taste of iron or copper, a blood sugar rise, and a loss of 1.5 to 2.0 pounds within an hour. It stated that Sergeyev measured the energy around her body at half that of a non-psychic person and inferred that she drew energy from her surroundings and discharged it on the target.⁷

Three versions of the frog heart experiment exist, all deriving from Sergeyev. The 1975 study stated that in 1970 a frog heart preparation in a glass jar two and a half feet away stopped five minutes after the start of the first trial and, in a second preparation, after 23 minutes.⁷ The DIA report of March 30, 1978 stated that normally such hearts continue 1.5 to 2 hours, that in the first experiment the electrocardiogram showed activity stopping about 7 minutes after she began concentrating, with the heart in a ceramic container, and that in the second, with the heart in a metal container, activity stopped after 22 minutes, Kulagina being 1.5 meters from the targets throughout; Sergeyev measured weak electric and magnetic fields at the heart. In a further trial she tried to raise the heart rate of a skeptical physician, both were monitored by electroencephalogram and electrocardiogram, abrupt changes appeared in both within a minute, and after five minutes Sergeyev judged the physician's heart activity to have reached dangerous levels and ended the trial.⁸ A 1985 U.S. Army Command and General Staff College thesis by Major W. Gary Norton, summarizing Russell Targ and Keith Harary's book The Mind Race, stated that the heart stopped within forty seconds and could not be restarted by electrostimulation.⁹ Jacobsen writes that a classified Soviet film of March 10, 1970 at the Ukhtomskii Military Institute in Leningrad, in which Sergeyev appears, showed the frog heart experiment, that her heart rate reached 240 during it, and that the film alarmed the American defense community; she adds that some U.S. analysts suspected a disinformation campaign while the Medical Intelligence Office of the U.S. Army judged the military implications extremely important.² The 1972 DIA report called the frog heart test "perhaps the most significant PK test done" and stated that its "military implications in controlled offensive behavior, if true, are extremely important."⁵

Western visitors

Five Western researchers, all of whom learned of her through the 1968 documentary film, tested her intermittently: Jürgen Keil, Benson Herbert, J. Gaither Pratt, Montague Ullman and J. A. Fahler. Pratt was the only American scientist at the 1968 Moscow conference.¹³ Keil, Herbert, Ullman and Pratt published a survey in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research in 1976 that put her success rate near 80 percent and stated that no direct evidence of deception had been found. Keil wrote that the Metrology committee's report mentioned a strong magnetic field around her body but that no search for hidden magnets was made, and that she had moved glass, plastic, aluminum, copper, bronze, silver, ceramic, paper, fabric, water, wood and bread. Keil and Fahler felt a burning heat from her touch that left marks without blisters, while a thermometer between her hand and the observer showed no change.¹ In the Psi Encyclopedia's summary of her case, the critics who cited concealed magnets rely on Gardner, who called her "a pretty, plump, dark-eyed little charlatan" and wrote that Soviet psychologists "caught her cheating using techniques familiar to all magicians."¹

Review commissions, 1970 to 1978

A DIA report of March 22, 1982 listed three Soviet examinations of her. A Leningrad commission of 1970 designed its own test in a medical facility, the "A. L. Polenov Neurosurgical Institute" in the DIA text, of her ability to "project images onto sealed unexposed photographic paper." Its report stated that "the tests indicated Kulagina possesses the ability to produce exposures of photographic materials, upon the commission requests, using a method which is unknown to the commission," which the DIA analysts read as an affirmative finding in guarded language; the results did not circulate widely in the Party or appear in open journals.¹⁰

In 1975 the Academy of Sciences began the review commission chaired by the radar pioneer Yuri Kobzarev "under the direction of" Vladimir Kotelnikov, vice president of the Academy and director of the Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics. The DIA report stated that the commission arranged experiments and took part in them as observers, that it evaluated Kulagina in 1978 and "similar conclusions were reached," and that a document signed by Kobzarev in 1978 contained the statement "I am persuaded that the phenomena demonstrated by N. Kulagina ... are by no means tricks but rather the existence of the manifestation of unusual capabilities in man. My conviction is shared by many people including a group of professors and academicians." The same passage identifies two other subjects named in that statement, R. Kuleshova and L. Korabelnikova, and states that a similar document was signed by Kotelnikov, Kobzarev "and others" and asserted the reality of psychokinetic phenomena.¹¹ A DIA briefing given to the U.S. Air Force in 1987 reproduced the statement of Kobzarev, quoting "N. Kulagina (psychokinesis)" and "L. Korabelnikova (extrasensory perception)," and Kotelnikov's sentence "Psychokinetic abilities of N. Kulagina are real."¹² The 1982 report also stated that the commission's recommendations led to the creation in 1978 of a Bioelectronics Section of the Popov Society, and that Kulagina was among the subjects investigated in that section's laboratory with sensitive instruments and possibly light-sensitive materials.¹³

Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics, 1977 to 1985

The DIA report stated that the institute became actively engaged in psychoenergetics research in 1977 or 1978, with Deputy Director Yuri Gulyaev the principal investigator, using acoustic, electromagnetic and ultraviolet and infrared sensors, and that experiments "with Kulagina and with healers (probably including Davitashvili)" were said to have been positive in the sense that some sensors showed signals coincident with attempts. It listed the intended effects as moving non-metallic objects, influencing the output of a surface acoustic wave device, and producing images on sealed photographic plates.¹⁴

The newspaper Izvestiya reported on July 3, 1986, in an article by its science observer B. Konovalov, that a group under G. N. Dulnev, rector of the Leningrad Institute of Precision Mechanics and Optics, had studied Kulagina in 1977 and 1978 and established that she affected weights at a distance, including through glass, scattered laser light of certain wavelengths and generated magnetic field pulses, with her arterial pressure reaching 180 to 200 during sessions; that "at the beginning of 1978 a group of Moscow scientists headed by academician Yu. B. Kobzarev investigated Kulagina's unusual abilities," where Gulyaev "(now academician)" detected acoustic clicks emanating from her; and that experiments with her were also conducted in the Moscow laboratory, where in the "working regime" the luminescence of her fingers rose about a thousand-fold, the conductivity of the medium near her hands pulsed with acoustic clicks, and low-frequency electric signals appeared. The article stated that "not everyone agrees with the explanation suggested by specialists at the IRE laboratory."¹⁵

In September 1983 Targ and Harary were received at the institute's building overlooking Gorky Park. Gulyaev told them, according to their account, that he had been able "to a limited extent" to continue his work with Kulagina, and described a trial in which he picked a book at random from his office shelves and asked her to name the letter beginning each paragraph.¹⁶ The physicist Alexander Taratorin, who worked in the institute's laboratory for physical fields of biological objects, wrote in 1997 that the institute's deputy director Gulyaev had gone to Leningrad with Kobzarev to expose her; that Kobzarev had brought an oscilloscope with an electrode which registered a strong electric field around her hands; that she dispersed a laser beam with her hands, moved a sugar cube and a matchbox, and caused short ultrasonic pulses in a sensitive microphone; that the input stage of an amplifier burned out during experiments; and that she produced a burn on the skeptical Gulyaev's hand in seconds. Taratorin stated that rumors of the Leningrad tests reached the leadership and that the laboratory was then funded. He wrote that she was invited to Moscow only after the laboratory's first report on healers, that each trial cost her great effort, with blood pressure rising and her face reddening, and that after almost a week of work the laboratory concluded that fine droplets of histamine, possibly through the sweat glands, were sprayed from her palm and formed a charged aerosol, which he said accounted for the clicks in the microphone, the scattering of the laser beam, the corrosion of skin and the charging of objects; he added that she soon died and took her secret with her.¹⁷ Later Moscow accounts by the laboratory's leaders explained her effects physiologically: the journalist Lev Kolodny quoted Gulyaev as saying she expelled from her palms "a cloud of caustic and negatively charged sweat" that charged objects, and quoted Eduard Godik, the laboratory head, that a deposit on optical filters used during her tests suggested droplets of sweat forming conductive bridges to the amplifier input.¹⁸ Kolodny also quoted the academician Evgeny Aleksandrov, who said Kulagina fixed compact samarium-cobalt magnets in matches, under her nails or on her belt.¹⁸ Godik told the newspaper Argumenty i Fakty in 2014 that the physicists identified droplets of electrically charged sweat from her palms.¹⁹ Kolodny's book names her case "the K phenomenon," studied in the institute's laboratory alongside the "D phenomenon" of Dzhuna Davitashvili.²⁰

Libel suit and death

In 1986 Kulagina sued the monthly Chelovek i Zakon, published by the Soviet Ministry of Justice of the Soviet Union, which had accused her of cheating; a second police investigation of her was cited by the defense. Scientists, a journalist and a documentary filmmaker testified for her, among them Edward Naumov, who stated she had shown no wish for publicity or profit. The court found that the magazine could produce no tangible evidence of fraud, did not endorse her ability, and ordered a retraction.²¹ She died on April 11, 1990, of a heart attack, after a long period of poor health.¹

In U.S. intelligence files

Jacobsen writes that her case, with that of Qian Xuesen in China, contributed to the Pentagon's decision to launch a joint intelligence assessment of the "Soviet psychoenergetic threat," and to the argument that the United States needed its own psychic research programs.² The DIA's 1972 report listed her under the pseudonym "Nelya Mikhailova."⁵ Her effects were also the subject of the thesis by Norton and of the 1978 DIA study of Warsaw Pact "paraphysics."⁸⁹

Footnotes

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1. K. M. Wehrstein, "Ninel Sergeyevna (Nina) Kulagina," Psi Encyclopedia, Society for Psychical Research, https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/ninel-kulagina/ (summarizing J. Conrad 2016; L. Kolodny, "When Apples Fall," Moskovskaya Pravda, March 17, 1968; V. Chizhov, "Wonder in a Sieve," Moskovskaya Pravda, June 4, 1968; V. V. Kulagin, in L. Kolodny, ed., Fenomen "D" i drugie, Politizdat, 1991; H. H. J. Keil, B. Herbert, M. Ullman and J. G. Pratt, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 56 (1976), pp. 197-235; M. Gardner, 1981/1989). ↩︎

2. Annie Jacobsen, Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis (Little, Brown and Company, 2017). ↩︎

3. Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain (Prentice-Hall, 1970), chapters on the 1968 Moscow conference ("Political Smoke Screens and Parapsychology"), read in the archive.org copy of the 1984 printing. https://archive.org/details/shelia-ostrander-psychic-discoveries-behind-the-iron-curtain-1984 ↩︎

4. L. Kolodny, "When Apples Fall," Moskovskaya Pravda, March 17, 1968, p. 107 of the translation by S. Medhurst in Journal of Paraphysics 1968, no. 2, as quoted in Wehrstein (note 1). ↩︎

5. Defense Intelligence Agency, "Controlled Offensive Behavior - USSR (U)," ST-CS-01-169-72, July 1972, paras. 9-11, CIA-RDP96-00788R001300010001-7. https://archive.org/details/CIA-RDP96-00788R001300010001-7 ↩︎

6. Henry E. Shinol, Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff, Studies and Analyses, Headquarters USAF, to the Defense Intelligence Agency, "Soviet Parapsychology Research Briefing," June 12, 1987, and DIA cover note of July 14, 1987, with slides "Soviet Activities in Psychoenergetics," CIA-RDP96-00789R002600320001-8 to -004-5. https://archive.org/details/CIA-RDP96-00789R002600320004-5 ↩︎

7. Defense Intelligence Agency, "Soviet and Czechoslovakian Parapsychology Research (U)," DST-1810S-387-75, September 1975, prepared by U.S. Army Medical Intelligence and Information Agency, Part III (Psychokinesis Research), CIA-RDP96-00787R000500420001-2. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00787r000500420001-2 ↩︎

8. Defense Intelligence Agency, "Paraphysics R&D - Warsaw Pact (U)," DST-1810S-202-78, March 30, 1978 (prepared by the Foreign Technology Division, Air Force Systems Command; information cutoff October 1, 1977), section on G. A. Sergeyev. https://archive.org/details/ParaphysicsRDWarsawPact_201609 ↩︎

9. W. Gary Norton, Major, USA, "Psychokinesis and Its Possible Implication to Warfare Strategy," master's thesis, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, 1985, DTIC ADB097979. https://archive.org/details/DTIC_ADB097979 ↩︎

10. Defense Intelligence Agency, Defense Technical Intelligence Report DST-1810D-948-82-RPT-4, "The Soviet Psychoenergetics Research Program (U)," March 22, 1982 (information cutoff January 15, 1982), section II.C "Previous Reviews," declassified in part 2011, NSA-RDP96X00790R000100020003-3. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-nsa-rdp96x00790r000100020003-3 ↩︎

11. DST-1810D-948-82-RPT-4 (note 10), section II.B "Psychoenergetics Review Commission." ↩︎

12. Shinol briefing slides (note 6), slide quoting "Yu. B. Kobzerev" and "V. A. Kotel'nikov." ↩︎

13. DST-1810D-948-82-RPT-4 (note 10), section III.A, Bioelectronics Section of the Popov Society. ↩︎

14. DST-1810D-948-82-RPT-4 (note 10), section III.B, Institute for Radioengineering and Electronics. ↩︎

15. B. Konovalov, "Extrasense Through the Eyes of Physics," Izvestiya, July 3, 1986, p. 6, as translated in JPRS-UBB-86-022, USSR Report: Life Sciences, Biomedical and Behavioral Sciences, December 5, 1986, pp. 105-108. https://archive.org/details/jprs-report_jprs-ubb-86-022 ↩︎

16. Russell Targ and Keith Harary, The Mind Race: Understanding and Using Psychic Abilities (Villard Books, 1984), "From Moscow to Yerevan," as excerpted in CIA-RDP96-00792R000500400002-7 and CIA-RDP96-00792R000600150005-1. https://archive.org/details/CIA-RDP96-00792R000600150005-1 ↩︎

17. Alexander Taratorin, "Nevydumannaya istoriya ekstrasensov v Rossii" (1997), lib.ru. http://lib.ru/ZHURNAL/istoria.txt_with-big-pictures.html The article was written by a member of the laboratory. ↩︎

18. Lev Kolodny, "Mify i pravda o Dzhune," Moskovsky Komsomolets, October 14, 2016, quoting Gulyaev, Godik's book Zagadka ekstrasensov, and Evgeny Aleksandrov. https://www.mk.ru/social/2016/10/14/mify-i-pravda-o-dzhune-esli-ne-izvinitsya-to-zadumatsya.html ↩︎

19. "A chto nauka? Smogli li uchenye razgadat zagadku ekstrasensov," Argumenty i Fakty, no. 42, October 14, 2014 (interview with Eduard Godik). https://aif.by/social/a_chto_nauka_smogli_li_uchenye_razgadat_zagadku_ekstrasensov ↩︎

20. Lev Kolodny, preface to Dzhuna. Tayna velikoy tselitelnitsy (first published as Fenomen "D" i drugie, Politizdat, 1991). https://mybook.ru/author/lev-kolodnyj/dzhuna-tajna-velikoj-celitelnicy/read/ ↩︎

21. Wehrstein (note 1), citing Chelovek i Zakon 1986, no. 9, and 1987, no. 6. ↩︎