Unit 10003

Good evening. I'm calling from Moscow. For 14 years, I served in a unit that officially didn't exist. I was supposed to be an ordinary signals officer, that was my training, but they had other plans. Our designation was Military Unit 10003, but among the General Staff, we had another name. The Expert Analytical Department. What we analyzed wasn't conventional intelligence. It was the human mind itself, and its capacity to perceive things that shouldn't be possible. I need to be careful what I say. Some details remain classified. But enough has become public that I can finally speak. It's all documented. My name is Mikhail. I served under Lieutenant General Ivan Volkov, though that's not his real name. The real commander's name is still protected. I'll call him General Volkov. But everything I'm about to tell you is documented. You can verify it. Unit 10003 was created in the last years of the Soviet Union, during perestroika. The year was 1989. The Chief of the General Staff himself signed the order. Ten personnel initially. All military officers. And all of us were about to enter a world where the rules of physics didn't seem to apply.

You need to understand the context. In the United States, the Pentagon and CIA were running a program they called Stargate. They'd been running it since 1972. Remote viewing, they called it. The ability to perceive distant locations using nothing but the mind. Their viewers would sit in a room at Fort Meade, Maryland, be given coordinates, and describe Soviet military installations they'd never seen. We learned this through intelligence channels in the mid-1980s. One of their psychics, a man whose name I won't mention, described a new class of submarine we were building. Details about the hull design. He was describing a Typhoon-class missile carrier. The program was so classified that even acknowledging it existed was treason. The Americans repositioned a satellite based on his coordinates and found it. After that, the Soviet leadership stopped laughing at parapsychology research. They realized the Americans were ahead of us in the psychic arms race. So the General Staff authorized our creation. We reported directly to the Chief. The Defense Minister knew we existed, but not what we did. Our funding came through a secret program designed by the Minister of Finance himself. About four million dollars per year, channeled through accounts that couldn't be traced back to psychic research. The program was so well hidden it survived the collapse of the Soviet Union. We kept working straight through 1991 when everything else was falling apart. $4 million budget from 1989 to 2003 stands out - Eden'

Our mission had three parts. First, analyze the American and NATO psychic warfare programs. What were their capabilities? How did they train their remote viewers? Second, develop our own methods of what we called energy-information impact on adversaries. And third, protect Soviet leadership from psychic attacks. Yes, you heard that correctly. We were defending against mind warfare. The unit operated from an unremarkable building in Moscow. Nothing that would attract attention. Inside the General Staff, some people joked about us. They called us 'a thousand and three nights,' like we were living in some fairy tale. But the joke stopped after we started producing results. General Volkov believed something revolutionary. He believed these abilities weren't limited to rare, gifted psychics. He believed any normal person could be trained to develop them. And he proved it. By the early 1990s, we'd developed standardized training methodologies. We created special courses in military academies. Hundreds of cadets went through them. The goal wasn't mystical nonsense. It was practical. We taught them to memorize vast amounts of information. To operate their minds with large data flows and complex calculations. To develop extraordinary physical performance that would let them withstand mechanical stress and extreme conditions. These officers graduated with abilities that seemed impossible. Most of them ended up unclaimed by the regular military. But then Chechnya happened.