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

How does Mikhailova manage to live with events like these happening around her all the time?

"I didn't know until a few years ago that I could move things at a distance," she says. "I was very upset and angry that day. I was walking toward a cupboard in my apartment when suddenly a pitcher in the cupboard moved to the edge of the shelf, fell, and smashed to bits.

"After that, all kinds of changes began to take place in my apartment," she says. Objects seemed somehow to be "attracted" to her, as if the inanimate had become animate. It was almost like having a poltergeist in her home.

Usually, scientists say, poltergeist activities are caused unconsciously by a young person in a house-hold-generally at the age of puberty. Objects seem to move of their own volition-doors open and close, lights go on and off by themselves, the laws of gravity seem to be reversed.

But unlike most people plagued by a poltergeist, Nelya suddenly realized the "force" was coming from her. She discovered she could control this energy. She could make it happen by wanting it to. She could summon and focus this extraordinary energy at will. At home with her family, holding her grandchild in her arms, she made a distant toy move closer.  While a friend gave her a manicure, she made a bottle of nail polish move without touching it with her polish-wet hands.

The family dog, too, watched with bewilderment as objects near his mistress began to gyrate. Her fascinated husband made a home movie of her strange powers of PK.

"I think I inherited this telekinetic ability from my mother," says Mikhailova. "I also passed it on to my son."

Often as we sat waiting in Soviet restaurants, we thought longingly of Mikhailova's purported ability to sit down at a table and have "dinner" jump toward her.