Ingo Swann helped design the United States' threat analysis of the Soviets' bio-information transfer program. Swann was an artist who'd made a name for himself as a parapsychological research subject in NYC.

This page is about how the CIA initiated its Remote Viewing program, and how Ingo Swann helped convince the Spooks that it was worthwhile: https://www.newdualism.org/papers/H.Puthoff/CIA-Initiated%20...

I met Ingo Swann at one of his talks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32587071

Swann covered Bernard Bernardovich Kazhinskiy's formative experience in the opening pages of his posthumously-published book, Psychic Literacy [1] (Kazhinskiy is the subject of this Atlas Obscura submission.):

> I. The Psychic Renaissance Begins

> In 1923, IN THE NEWLY-formed Soviet Union, a psychic Event took place in a most unlikely situation. Yet, insofar as anything that affects human affairs can be said to have beginnings, it commenced a new epoch regarding what we in the United States call psychical or parapsychological research.

> For forty-six years the meaning of this Event remained almost completely unappreciated in the United States -- until, in 1969, its implications began to be grasped within an aura of disbelief. What this Event was, along with its enormous impact, takes some explaining. But in a precise sense, it cracked open a special door to a different kind of future -- a door whose existence had long been suspected by some, but hotly debated by the many.

> This first Event, and others analogous to it that were to follow, eventually came to have what we like to call "great implications." The vista of these implications is now widening. They have begun to change our human image, our conception of our collective potential, and the nature of our immediate and distant future.

> In retrospect, why the 1923 Soviet Event remained cloaked in obscurity as far as American comprehensions are concerned is understandable. Frankly speaking, Americans were not at all prepared to expect that psychic matters would ever take on anything other than fringe meaning. Thus, at the time, it certainly would not have been possible to assess this obscure Event as one that was destined to aim world society toward a future in which psychic matters woud take on fundamental importance. But unquestionably it did so, and thus it is of great interest to understand the how and why.

> The Tiflis Event

> In 1919, IN THE CITY of Tiflis (later called Tbilisi) in the Georgian S.S.R., there lived a man named Bernard Bernardovich Kazhinski During August of that year, his best friend fell ill of a fatal disease diagnosed as typhus. One night during the death crisis Kazhinski, was suddenly awakened out of a deep sleep by a noise that sounded like a silver spoon striking glass. In vain he looked for what might have caused this sound.

> The next afternoon, he learned his friend had died during the night. Arriving at the dead man's house to pay his respects, he noticed a glass with a silver spoon in it on the night table next to the bed in which the corpse was laid out. Seeing him studying these objects the dead man's mother burst anew into tears. She explained that she had been about to give her son his medicine, but at the very moment she put the spoon to his lips he died, and she had dropped the spoon into the empty glass. When the mother demonstrated just how she had done this Kazhinski heard the exact sound that had awakened him at the very moment his friend had died -- even though their mutual homes were a mile apart.

> Kazhinski was very moved and excited. How was it possible that the tone had communicated itself to him across such a distance and awakened him from a deep sleep? Kazhinski, a confirmed materialist, had no time for "superstition", but, apparently, he was a man who could acknowledge a strange fact drawn from his own experience. So, on that August day he vowed he would solve the mystery of what had linked his own mind with that of the mother and the dying friend.

> In order to fulfill his vow, Kazhinski began to study the human nervous system under the famous scientist Alexander Vassilievitch Leontivich and became an electro-technologist specializing in studying the electrical nature of the human nervous system. By 1923 he had collected facts and had concluded that the human nervous system can react, by means unknown, to stimuli not accessible to the normal five senses. In 1923 he published his findings in a book entitled Thought Transference. The book interested a number of Soviet scientists -- and, in this way, a new epoch in psychic research began.

> [...]

[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Psychic_Literacy_the_Co... (77 page preview)

(edit: rewording, fixed link)