It’s 1978 in the Philippines, and something weird is going on at a chess match.

Anatoly Karpov, “the golden boy of the Soviet Union,” is playing Viktor Korchnoi, another Soviet who is hated by the regime.

As the match drags on, Korchnoi is tormented by a voice in his head commanding him to lose. It screams at him to stop fighting. It accuses him of being a traitor to the Soviet Union.

During breaks in the match, the tormented player performs headstands in a futile attempt to shake the voice from his brain.

Weirdest of all, Korchnoi knows exactly where the voice is coming from. It’s seemingly being beamed into his head from an immaculately dressed man sitting in the front row whose eyes are boring into him.

This man is Dr. Vladimir Zoukhar, the country’s top mind-control expert. And he has been sent to ensure that Korchnoi loses by any means necessary — natural or otherwise.

After his defeat, Korchnoi would say, “I expected to play one against one. Instead, the whole Red Army, led by Zoukhar, was against me.”

As we know from the baseball steroid scandals and Tonya Harding, competitors will do almost anything to gain an advantage in sports. But what of the competitors whose advantage is seemingly not of this world?

Over the years, athletes, coaches — and, yes, governments — have spent hundreds of hours researching supernatural means to get a win, whether through mind-control, fringe psychology or bizarre rituals.

Much of this history is revealed in “The Men on Magic Carpets: Searching for the Superhuman Sports Star” (Bloomsbury Sport) by British sports journalist Ed Hawkins. The investigation sent Hawkins on a three-year journey through the mystical underbelly of sports to those who try to unlock the power of the human mind.

Hawkins says he’s more of a believer now. “I do have some inclination that there’s something out there, an energy that people are able to connect better than others,” he tells The Post.

Much of the author’s journey focuses on wacky-but-earthbound methods of motivating athletes — psychology that helps an athlete quiet the mind and focus on performing at peak.

Here are three examples Hawkins references in his book, out now.

Voodoo curses

At a 1964 San Francisco Giants game, New Age guru Mike Murphy became determined to put a curse on the visiting LA Dodgers. Sitting in Section 17, he worked out a particular set of cries and hand signals, adapted from shamans, that he believed would transmit negative energy to the Dodgers.

He enlisted other fans around him to join in, and soon some 200 rabid Giants faithful were gesturing and howling at the opposition.

At one point, the juju was so powerful, it literally knocked St. Louis pitcher Bob Gibson to the ground. (Or so Murphy claims.)

The cries continued and helped the Giants come from behind for victory.

“People have a little bit of a chuckle about it, but he’s adamant he was able to knock that guy over,” Hawkins says. “He’s done similar things other times, and he says the only reason he doesn’t do it anymore is he’s too old.”

Whatever you think of Murphy’s story, crowds can be powerful forces.

In 1995, Princeton researcher Dean Radin set out to measure the influence of crowd energy on a random event, like ball bearings falling inside a custom-built pinball-like machine. He found that during heightened times of crowd involvement, the ball bearings fell in a pattern that was “a significant deviation from chance.”

“Music, movement and heartfelt affection — those are strong enough to affect the quantum level of reality,” the researcher concluded.

Seeing the future

The night before a 1947 fight against Jimmy Doyle, boxer Sugar Ray Robinson dreamed he would kill his opponent. The image so disturbed him, he wanted to call off the fight but was persuaded to get into the ring. Doyle died shortly after the bout.

“I’ve had many experiences like that,” Robinson said of his prophecy.

Other athletes have reported seeing plays before they happen, and Muhammad Ali had a knack for predicting in which round he’d win a fight.

The answer may lie in the brain’s inability to distinguish between what’s real and what’s imagined. A Swedish psychologist once taught swimmer Pär Arvidsson to meditate every day, visualizing winning gold at the upcoming 1980 Olympics — a feat he accomplished. “I did program my brain and body every week for two years to swim at a specific time,” Arvidsson told the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis in 2018. “At the Olympics, my body just did it.”

Slowing down time

Athletes in different sports have reported that when they’re in the zone, the game seems to move in slow-motion.

A researcher at California’s crunchy HeartMath Institute found that a person receiving good vibes from a crowd could elevate into an “optimal state.” And while in that optimal state, a person’s reaction time became 37 milliseconds faster, which would make a 90 mph fastball in baseball seem like it’s only traveling at 80 mph.

Whether you believe in superhuman powers or not, Hawkins says the mind has the ability to do incredible things. But the most important way to channel this innate potential is to relax.

“Don’t try too hard,” the author says. “As soon as you try too hard, you’ll shank the golf ball and then you’ll get furious, and it’s a downward spiral.

“And you might even start levitating.”