The Cold War race to find the paranormal sports superman

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The Guardian (April 18) has this article:
Mind control, levitation and no pain: the race to find a superman in sport

The US and Soviet Union both believed people could develop superpowers. And, reveals The Men on Magic Carpets, their psychic experiments played out in the sporting arena
by Ed Hawkins
It's an extract from Hawkins' new book on the topic, The Men on Magic Carpets.

While sitting in the bleachers at Candlestick Park, Murphy asked for assistance from the fellow Giants fans around him to explore his powers, explaining with a straight-face that the gestures had been developed by shamans in the Amazon basin to kill enemies. If they wanted the Giants to win, this would help. And so he exhorted the crowd to close their two middle fingers over the thumb, leaving the index finger and little finger pointing, like devil horns, towards their target. And he told them to shout and wail as they thrust their horns towards the Dodgers players.

That night would prove Murphy’s most successful as a conjuring cheerleader; according to his account, he enlisted almost 200 fans, all their negative energy flowing through him as he stood at the front, like the arrowhead. With several hundred horns pointing towards the tip, he began to feel dizzy. Whenever the wave of gestures and curses was at its strongest, the Dodgers began to make inept plays. The Giants went on to win.
(...)

Both of these stories are true. Murphy, the zany hippy in bell-bottom jeans warbling occult orders, would, in time, have the US government dancing to his tune. And Dr Vladimir Zoukhar, the immaculately dressed communist spook, staring demonically for comrade and country, was considered the KGB’s mind control expert. Both men were protagonists in an extraordinarily paranoid chapter of human history: the cold war.