If You're Going to San Francisco ...

Among the many curious stories that came out of the voyage of the Nautilus, perhaps the most unusual was an article in the February 1960 issue of the French magazine Science et Vie (Science and Life). The anonymous author made the outlandish claim that the U.S. government had used telepaths to communicate with the Nautilus during her under-ice journey.

In 1937 Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had terminated his nation's once-aggressive experiments into parapsychology as contrary to the Marxist doctrine of materialism. The article's electrifying military implications quickly overrode political doctrine and jumpstarted Soviet research into extrasensory perception. When American intelligence agencies learned of the studies, they began their own investigations, including surreptitiously underwriting Harvard Professor Timothy Leary's research into the mind-expanding effects of LSD.

So in a roundabout way, the voyage of the Nautilus led from the Cold War all the way to the Summer of Love.

Caption: It was a long strange trip, but one of the unintended consequences of the polar voyage was growing interest in mind-expanding chemicals, such as the research done by Timothy Leary, shown here speaking at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1967. Library of Congress photo.