Carter Roy

So the troops are moving quickly.

They're not being very discerning, just kind of grabbing things supermarket sweep style as they go.

Later on, both countries will realize they've gone home with the work and personal writings of Heinrich Himmler, one of Hitler's first followers.

Himmler was commander of the SS and the architect of the Third Reich's plan to murder Jewish people.

He was also really into the occult.

Himmler founded the Anna Nerba, the Nazi research organization with a focus on the supernatural.

They sought out the island of Atlantis, the Holy Grail.

They dabbled in channeling spirits, astrology, even ESP, or extra-sensory perception, including mind reading and psychokinesis.

Years later, the US and the Soviet Union are sifting through all of these papers, and while they're lacking context, they can plainly see the Nazis were putting copious resources into, well, a bunch of pseudoscience.

There is some wacky stuff in there, to put it very mildly, but they don't throw Himmler's ideas out.

They hang on to them.

After all, the U.S.

is busy hiring a bunch of German scientists around this time, even if they had ties to the Third Reich.

They're willing to look the other way if it means scooping up scientists who are advanced in their fields, like rocketry.

I suppose they also leave room for the possibility that maybe the Nazis were onto something with all of this weird science.

At any rate, the psychic research gets put on the back burner for now, but it isn't forgotten.

Fast forward to the early 1970s, and now we're deep in the Cold War and there's some troubling news.

The Soviets have been researching psychoenergetics, an umbrella term for a bunch of different psychic abilities, and they appear to be making headway.

There's this woman named Nina Kulagina.

Reportedly, she has the power of psychokinesis.