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Psychic Discoveries behind the iron Curtain – Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder

Right in the middle of a sellout theatrical performance, two green-uniformed Soviet police suddenly stalked onstage.  “We're sorry," they told the audience in the Belorussian city of Gomel, "but the show is over." Then they hustled the star performer, telepathist Wolf Messing, into a waiting car and sped off to an unknown destination. It was 1940, a time when people were often carted off by the police to disappear forever, with no reason given and no questions asked.

"What about my hotel bill and my trunk?" Messing asked.

The trunk wouldn't be needed and the hotel bill was settled, the secret police indicated.

"We arrived somewhere-I didn't know where," says Messing.

"l was led into a room. It seemed to be a hotel. After some time I was led to another room. A man with a mustache came in." The psychic Wolf Messing was face-to-face with Stalin.

What was happening in Poland and what were the plans of Polish leaders? Stalin wanted to know. Stalin wasn't asking for a psychic reading. He was asking for personal information about some of the psychic's influential Polish friends. He would test Messing's psychic gifts later.

……………The first meeting with Stalin led to a series of bizarre but, for Messing, triumphantly successful encounters with the dictator. Stalin knew of Messing's supposed ability to telepathically project his thought into another person's mind, to control or cloud their minds, so to speak. Stalin commanded a straightforward, horrendous trial of Messing's talent. He was to pull off a psychic bank robbery and get 100,000 rubles from the Moscow Gosbank where he was unknown.

"I walked up to the cashier and handed him a blank piece of paper torn from a school notebook," says Messing. He opened an attache case and put it on the counter. Then he mentally willed the cashier to hand over the enormous sum of money.

The elderly cashier looked at the paper. He opened the safe and took out 100,000 rubles. Messing stuffed the banknotes into the case and left. He joined Stalin's two official witnesses in charge of the experiment. After they had attested that the experiment had been satisfactorily performed, Messing returned to the cashier. As he began handing him the packages of banknotes, the cashier looked at him, looked at the blank piece of notepaper on his desk, and fell to the floor with a heart attack.

"Luckily, it wasn't fatal,' ' says Messing.