The very famous character Eleven from Stranger Things may have been inspired by the Russian Nina Kulagina, a figure known in the 1960s for her alleged telekinesis abilities. In addition to being able to move objects with her mind, Kulagina was said to have telepathy and the ability to see at a distance, and for all these reasons she was 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 science and the exploration of psychic experiments, in 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 joined the Red Army at 14, serving on the front lines on the T-34 tank as a radio operator and rising to the rank of 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 abilities spread, around forty Russian scientists (including two Nobel Prize winners) decided to test and study her, and several black-and-white silent films were produced in the 1960s in which Kulagina appeared to move objects on the table in front of her without touching them.
Nina would also have been able, with very intense concentration, to separate broken eggs that had been immersed in water, separating the yolks from the whites, and in doing so she underwent accelerated physical changes recorded by scientists: heart rate, brain waves and magnetic field.
To ensure that external electromagnetic pulses did not interfere, she was placed inside a metal cage a few times while she removed a specific match from a stack of matches under a glass dome.
Perhaps the best-known experiment was the one conducted in the Leningrad laboratory in March 1970, when scientists placed 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: stopping the beating 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 (such as hotel rooms) in which the experiments took place left room for deception.
Some even hypothesized that Kulagina enlisted the help of a magician, using cleverly hidden (or disguised) wires and small pieces of magnetic metal and mirrors.
Martin Gardner, author of Science, publicly claimed that scientists knew that Kulagina was deceiving, but 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 as early as the 1960s, through an article by the Russian journalist Vladimir Lvov 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) also accused Kulagina of fraud, but he won the case a year later because the court ruled that there was no evidence of fraud to rely on. The Russian Skeptic Society, however, said the court’s decision says nothing about whether Kulagina has paranormal abilities.
