Nina Kulagina, Ninel Sergeyevna Kulagina (, born Ninel Mikhaylova) (30 July 192611 April 1990) was a Russian woman who claimed to have psychic powers, particularly in psychokinesis. Academic research of her phenomenon was conducted in the USSR for the last 20 years of her life. Kulagina was suspected of utilizing hidden magnets and threads to perform her feats. She was caught cheating on more than one occasion, according to British authors Joel Levy and Mike Dash and American science writer Martin Gardner. In 1987, Kulagina sued and won a partial victory in a defamation case brought against a Soviet government magazine that had accused her of fraud. Biography Kulagina, who was born in 1926, joined the Red Army at age fourteen, entering its tank regiment during World War II, but she was a housewife at the time that her alleged psychic abilities were studied and she entered international discourse in the 1960s. During the Cold War, silent black-and-white films were produced, in which she appeared to move objects on a table in front of her without touching them. These films were allegedly made under controlled conditions for Soviet authorities and caused excitement for many psychic researchers around the world, some of whom believed that they represented clear evidence for the existence of psychic phenomena. According to reports from the Soviet Union, 40 scientists, two of whom were Nobel laureates, studied Kulagina. In Investigating Psychics, Larry Kettlekamp claims that Kulagina was filmed separating broken eggs that had been submerged in water, moving apart the whites and yolks, during which event such physical changes were recorded as accelerated and altered: heartbeat, brain waves and electromagnetic field. To ensure that external electromagnetic impulses did not interfere, she was placed inside of a metal cage while she supposedly demonstrated an ability to remove a marked matchstick from a pile of matchsticks under a glass dome. Kulagina claimed that she first recognized her ability, which she believed she had inherited from her mother, when she realized that items spontaneously moved around her when she was angry. Kulagina said that in order to manifest the effect, she required a period of meditation to clear her mind of all thoughts. When she had obtained the focus required, she reported a sharp pain in her spine and the blurring of her eyesight. Reportedly, storms interfered with her ability to perform psychokinetic acts. One of Kulagina's most celebrated experiments