10 Weirdest Cold War Stories You Probably Haven't Heard

You may recognise the title from the 2009 movie starring George Clooney and Ewan McGregor, but the events depicted in the film are actually based in reality. The US and Russians, over the course of the Cold War spent many millions on the development of ‘psychic super soldiers’ with the ability to see into the future (No, really!)

The goal for both sides was to deploy units of remote viewers to gather intelligence on each other. Remote viewing is the ability to determine unknowable information about distant events, which is actually a real thing. Most documented cases of remote viewing involve current events, but this would not be enough. The Russians and Americans wanted to see what each other was going to do (Obviously!) The US continued to fund this research until a report by the CIA in 1995 determined that no viable intelligence could be acquired this way and the program was shut down and declassified.

Probably the funniest thing is the fact that the reason both the US and the Russians started to fund such an initiative was following an article published in Science En Vie, a French scientific magazine. The article was later proved to be a hoax.