Bioinformation Programme

Inheriting Bekhterev's programme, Leonid Vasiliev begins rigorous experiments in 'mental suggestion at a distance' in Leningrad, using hypnosis and electromagnetic shielding.

The Sukhumi station opens a radiobiology programme on monkeys whose findings will lower accepted human radiation-safety limits, of grim relevance after Chernobyl.

The primate station begins training monkeys for spaceflight, supplying the rhesus 'cosmonauts' who will ride the Bion satellites into orbit.

Physicists Puthoff and Targ begin remote-viewing studies at SRI, launching the programme that will end as 'Star Gate', the American answer to the Soviet psi scare.

Détente formalizes the European order. Behind it, both superpowers quietly continue their parapsychology programmes.

The CIA absorbs and closes the US psychic-spying programme after a review finds it never produced actionable intelligence. The Cold-War psi race quietly ends.

The American Institutes for Research reports that whatever laboratory anomaly might exist, US psychic-spying never yielded actionable intelligence. The programme is closed.

Eight decades late, Shostakovich's unfinished 1932 satire about a human-ape hybrid, inspired by Ivanov's programme, finally premieres in Los Angeles.

The CIA releases its full Star Gate archive online, letting historians finally separate the documented programmes from the folklore of psychic spies.