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| created | updated | title | tags | description | category | summary | ||||
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| 2025-07-22 | 2026-10-08 | Psi Gap |
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The "psi gap" was a perceived disparity in psychic research capabilities between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. | Intelligence Concept | The 'Psi Gap' was a perceived disparity in Psi research capabilities between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. |
The "Psi Gap" was a perceived disparity in Psi research capabilities between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. This concept gained prominence following reports of extensive Soviet and Eastern European Parapsychology research, particularly after the sensational 1960 article The Nautilus (Telepathy Project), which Leonid Vasiliev cited in 1960 in arguing for Soviet psi research and which the 1972 DIA report says stimulated Soviet parapsychology research.123
The 1972 Controlled Offensive Behavior - USSR report by the Defense Intelligence Agency explicitly warned of a "devastating 'psi gap,'" stating that "Soviet knowledge in this field is superior to that of the West." This alarmist assessment, which outlined potential military applications of psi such as telepathic communication and psychokinesis, contributed to the U.S. intelligence community's increased interest in and funding of its own psi research, including the Stargate Project, in an effort to catch up with perceived Soviet advancements.1
The 1975 DIA study described rumors of ship-to-shore experiments with the Nautilus and said the "experiments" "probably were mythical," while noting that the claims had "one tangible consequence" for Soviet research.4
Footnotes
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Schnabel, Jim. Remote Viewers. Dell, 1997. ↩︎
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Anfilov, Gleb. "Is Telepathy Possible?" The Soviet Review, vol. 2, no. 6 (June 1961), pp. 3-7, translated from Znanie-Sila, 1960, no. 12. https://archive.org/details/sim_russian-social-science-review_1961-06_2_6 ↩︎
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LaMothe, John D. Controlled Offensive Behavior: USSR, ST-CS-01-169-72, July 1972, Section II, para. 3, CIA-RDP96-00792R000600360001-2, https://cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00792r000600360001-2. ↩︎
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Maire, Louis F., III, and J. D. LaMothe. Soviet and Czechoslovakian Parapsychology Research, DST-1810S-387-75, September 1975, CIA-RDP96-00787R000500420001-2, https://cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00787r000500420001-2. ↩︎