The very famous character of Eleven by Stranger Things it may have been inspired by the Russian Nina Kulaginaa figure known in the 1960s for his alleged abilities to telekinesis. In addition to being able to move objects with her mind, Kulagina was said to be gifted with telepathy and the ability to see from a distanceand precisely for all these reasons he came observed in the laboratory by a team of Soviet scientists. The creators of the famous television show, the Duffer Brothers, have not confirmed the connection between the two stories, but in the past they had declared several times that to create Eleven they were inspired above all by the real protagonists of paranormal experiments (for example those suggested by the controversial program MKUltra), and Nina Kulagina seems to have many points in common with the protagonist of the series. The connection between the science el’exploration of psychic experimentsin fact, is a recurring theme in both stories, but what remains, for many scientists, is the idea that Kulagina was a skilled con artist.
The life of Nina Kulagina and her alleged paranormal abilities
Born on July 10, 1926 in Leningrad, Nina Sergeyevna Kulagina she joined the Red Army at 14, serving on the front lines on the T-34 tank as a radio operator and becoming a sergeant major. After World War II ended, she started a family, and almost twenty years passed before her alleged paranormal abilities – which she noticed because objects around her moved on their own when she got angry – became the subject of scholarly attention.
Once word of these skills spread, about forty Russian scientists (including two Nobel Prize winners) decided to test it and study it, and several were produced in the 1960s silent films in black and white in which Kulagina appeared to move objects on the table in front of her without touching them.
Nina would also have been able, by concentrating very intensely, to separate the broken eggs which had been immersed in water, separating the yolks from the whites, and which suffered damages in the process accelerated physical changes recorded by scientists: heartbeat, brain waves and magnetic field.
To make sure that external electromagnetic pulses did not interfere, it was placed inside one a few times metal cage as he removed a specific match from a pile of matches under a glass dome.
THE’best known experiment perhaps it is the one conducted in the Leningrad laboratory in March 1970, when scientists put a frog in front of Kulagina to see if its control abilities also extended to cells, tissues and organs. The woman stared carefully at the frog, focusing on the rhythm of the heart, which beat sometimes slowly, sometimes faster, and then succeeded in her aim: stop the heartbeat completely.
Speaking of heartbeats, it seems that his beats reached up to 240 per minute, in addition to sweat, post-concentration dizziness and various ailments. He reported severe back pain several times at the end of the experiments.
The Fraud Allegations: What Was True?
As time passed, the skepticism of many scholars became increasingly widespread. The Italian Committee for the Control of Claims on Pseudosciencefor example, argued that it was really unlikely that Kulagina was endowed with the power of telekinesis. The science communicator Massimo Polidoro, however, stated that the long preparation times and the uncontrolled environments (like the hotel rooms) in which the experiments took place left room fordeceit.
Some even hypothesized that Kulagina got help from a magicianusing cleverly hidden (or disguised) wires and small pieces of magnetic metal and mirrors.
Martin Gardnerauthor of Science, publicly claimed that the scientists knew that Kulagina was deceiving, but that they chose to remain silent. But why would scientists lie? The Cold War-era Soviet Union had a valid reason to fake and exaggerate experiments, trying to overtake the American enemy as quickly as possible just as it did regarding Space or the arms race.
In any case, the accusation of fraud did not take long to arrive in the 1960s, through an article by the Russian journalist Vladimir Lviv in Pravda which claimed that Kulagina hid magnets on her body during some experiments. A few years later, in 1986, the magazine “Man and Law” (published by the Soviet Ministry of Justice) accused Kulagina of fraud, which however won the case a year later because the court ruled there was no evidence of fraud to go on. The Russian Skeptic Society, however, said the court’s decision says nothing about whether Kulagina has paranormal abilities.
