Most of what this dossier knows about Robert Pavlita comes from other people: a Hungarian laboratory preprint, a visitor's narrative and a US intelligence assessment. The proceedings of the First Conference on Psychotronic Research, held in Prague in 1973, are a different kind of record. Their contents list names Pavlita as an author, alongside dozens of other contributors to a conference led by Zdenek Rejdák, with papers in several languages.
What the document is
The item is a JPRS translation volume, catalogued as JPRS L/5022-2 and dated 6 September 1974, and it carries the CSO number 8344/1998. It is Part II of the conference proceedings. According to the archive description, the original 401-page Prague collection mixed papers written in four languages: Czech, Russian, French and English. A copyright line printed with one of the papers credits "Zdenek Rejdak, Prague, 1973". The scan was uploaded to the Internet Archive on 8 July 2017 by a user named MM2000, in the open-source collection.
The volume is a translation of what speakers submitted. Inclusion in a conference collection shows that a paper was printed under a contributor's name. It does not show that the paper was refereed, that anyone checked its experiments, or that whoever produced the translation accepted its claims. For the wider Cold War interest in this material, see Pavlita in the Cold War record.
Pavlita's entry
The contents list includes "Inductive Effect of the Human Organism on Matter", credited to Robert Pavlita and Jana Pavlitova-Zapadlova. The title alone suggests a claim that a living person can act on inanimate material, which would fit the generators and sondes described in Pavlita’s psychotronic generators: objects, claims and experiments. That connection is an inference from the title only; the paper's content is not established by the listing. The contents list also names Jana Pavlitova-Zapadlova as co-author.
The contents list does not establish what the paper argues, what devices it describes, or what experiments, if any, it reports. On its own, the listing cannot be cited as Pavlita's account of any particular demonstration.
How the term and the field were framed
The archive description says that Rejdák, who led the conference, introduced the term in 1967 to take the place of "parapsychology". In that description, the new field's purpose was to check and examine claims of telepathy, clairvoyance and psychokinesis. The volume itself opens with a paper by Rejdák, and he returns later with one linking psychotronics to cybernetics; contributions from Frantisek Kahuda on mental time and John A. Jungerman's nuclear physicist's view of psychotronics also appear near the front.
The archive description also notes that the word was later applied to something quite different: supposed machines for transmitting hostile mental influence or for causing illness and incapacity. That is the uploader's comment on later usage, not something the 1973 speakers are shown to have claimed, and the description does not say when or how the second meaning arose.
The company Pavlita's paper kept
The neighbouring papers show how broadly the conference drew its boundaries. Pavlita's entry sits directly between a paper on "Distant Energy Myotransfer" and one by Semen and Valentina Kirlian on high-frequency photography. Elsewhere the list includes:
- several papers on Kirlian or "radiation field" photography, including work by Thelma Moss and a paper by William A. Tiller on where the light in high-voltage photography comes from;
- Cleve Backster on claimed primary perception in plant and animal cells, and Viktor Inyushin on "bioplasma";
- a large group on dowsing and the "biophysical effect", including mineral surveying and the restoration of historical monuments;
- papers on electrical properties of acupuncture points;
- Yuriy Kholodov on the direct effect of magnetic fields on the central nervous system;
- a paper by W. Edward Mann on experiments with orgone energy blankets;
- an abstract by Ingo Swann presenting Scientology techniques as a paradigm for exploring consciousness.
Stanley Krippner also appears, with a paper on inducing paranormal effects in dreams and altered states. The narrative attributed to Krippner elsewhere in the dossier describes meetings with Pavlita in 1973 and January 1974. The proceedings do not cover those meetings or any demonstration; they show only that both men are listed as contributors to the 1973 collection.
An incomplete contribution in the same volume
According to the uploader's note, the text printed under Swann's name is his abstract, not the paper he gave, and the full paper is still missing. The abstract itself says the full paper would describe processes and data that it does not include. Readers should therefore not assume that every entry in the volume is a complete paper.
What this adds to the dossier
The proceedings add a record in which Pavlita appears as a named author rather than as someone described by others. They show that a paper under his name, with a co-author, was included in the 1973 Prague collection and is listed in a JPRS translation volume dated 6 September 1974. They do not independently show that he delivered the paper in person. The proceedings are not evidence that an inductive effect exists. For how this record fits beside the measurements and witness accounts, see Pavlita: claims versus evidence.
Source notes & attribution
- https://archive.org/details/JPRSL502226September1974ProceedingsOfTheFirstConferenceOnPsychotronicResearchPartII