Information about hallucinogens was of great interest to both the Army and the CIA, for reasons that would make
The X-Files
seem comparatively tame. The Army Chemical Center at Edgewood — where Puharich was stationed - collaborated with a special programme within the CIA’s MKULTRA project that aimed to find ways ‘to program new memories into the minds of an amnesiac subject’.
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John Marks learned about this from a participant in the late 1950s, and wonders how their techniques may have ‘improved’ since then. Another key figure in the MKULTRA experiments was Dr Sidney Gottlieb, head of the CIA’s Technical Services Division, who personally supervised experiments in conjunction with the Army Chemical Center in 1953, when Puharich was working there.
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Gottlieb was still head of this division in 1972, when it gave Hal Puthoff of SRI the funds for his preliminary research into remote viewing.
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During the 1950s and 1960s, Puharich belonged to an organisation of scientists and businessmen called Essentia Research Associates in New York. It undertook research into psychic abilities on behalf of government agencies such as the Pentagon, NASA and the Atomic Energy. Commission. Perhaps understandably, information about Essentia is hard to come by, but we do know that Puharich presented a paper on their behalf to the Pentagon as early as November 1952, entitled ‘An Evaluation of the Possible Usefulness of Extrasensory Perception in Psychological Warfare’.
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This is very strange, for according to the official account, the Pentagon’s interest in psychic abilities only began in the early 1970s, with the remote-viewing experiments at SRI, yet Puharich and Essentia were doing similar work for them at least twenty years earlier.
Curiously Puharich’s work with the Brazilian healer Arigó in the 1960s seems to have been part of an Essentia Research Associates project that was sponsored by NASA.
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Puharich and a wealthy businessman - and former US Navy intelligence officer — named Henry Belk, were called to Brazil in 1963 to take a look at Arigó by one John Laurance, an engineer working for RCA on NASA satellite projects. He had, in fact, been part of the committee that originally established the space agency in 1958.
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Puharich’s connections with Essentia continued until at least 1977, when they published the proceedings of a parapsychological conference in Iceland, where he is listed as their president.
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But the 1960s present Puharich’s life at its most elusive, although it is known that between 1958 and 1971 he was research director for the Intelectron Corporation, a company he founded to develop medical devices. It is known that he worked at the US Army hospital at Fort Ord, California, though what he did there is not recorded. He made several visits to Brazil to study Arigó and was also engaged in some (undefined) work for the Atomic Energy Commission in 1968, although it is known that he was working for the head of biophysics, Paul Henshaw, who led the American team that studied the effects of the Hiroshima atom bomb.
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But although there are only tantalising fragments of information about him during this period, mentioned in passing in his own writings or in isolated references by others, it is clear that Puharich’s status within official circles was very high. It has even been claimed that he was on the medical staff of the White House during this period. Only with his involvement with Geller from 1971 did his career become more high-profile in the public mind and therefore more easily charted. But even then the available titbits do not always give the full picture.
With its close connections to the Army’s psychological warfare programme, the Round Table Foundation itself was not quite the independent paranormal research centre that Puharich implied. It also received support from some very interesting and influential people. Top of the list was Henry Wallace (1888-1965), the former Vice-President of the United States, who gave substantial grants to the Foundation through the Wallace Fund.
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One of America’s most controversial and highly individual politicians, the Democrat Wallace was second-in-command to Roosevelt from 1940 to 1944 and was narrowly defeated by Truman for the Vice-Presidential nomination in 1944. He was forced to resign from office as Secretary of Commerce in 1946 because of his opposition to US policies regarding Russia and the atomic bomb. He coined the slogan the ‘People’s Century’, which many believe is an accurate description of this era of democracy and uneasy egalitarianism.
A devout, fundamentalist Christian, Wallace believed that God had chosen America to be the leader of the world and that his own place in the scheme of things was hardly that of a humble footsoldier for Christ. As Dwight MacDonald wrote in his 1948 biography of Wallace: ‘Just as he thinks of America as the nation destined by God to lead the world, so Wallace thinks of himself as a Messiah, an instrument through whom God will guide America onward and upward.’
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Wallace was also deeply interested in mysticism and spiritualism and was a prominent Freemason. He wrote in 1934:
It will take a more definite recognition of the Grand Architect of the Universe before the apex stone [the capstone of the pyramid on the US Great Seal] is finally fitted into place and this nation in the full strength of its power is in position to assume leadership among the nations in inaugurating ‘the new order of the ages’.
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In fact, Wallace, as Secretary of State for Agriculture in the 1930s, was responsible for the Great Seal (the Masonic symbol of the eye in the pyramid) being incorporated into the design of American dollar bills.
Wallace was a follower of the mystic Nicholas Roerich, whom he sent on special missions to Tibet and Outer Mongolia, it is said because he was convinced that some kind of evidence of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ was to be found there.
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Perhaps not surprisingly, his political opponents, especially J. Edgar Hoover - the all powerful head of the FBI — made great capital out of leaked letters from Wallace to Roerich that began ‘Dear Guru’.
In the 1930s, Wallace - along with other more or less fundamentalist politicians and wealthy people — had an idea to convert China to Christianity, and it is thought he involved Roerich in this plan as an emissary to Chinese leaders.
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Perhaps this is the reason for Edgar Cayce’s ‘prophecies’ — which sound so ridiculous now — about the imminent Christianisation of China. Might not Cayce have been using his influence as a ‘prophet’ to whip up financial support for Wallace’s rather ambitious plans? And the similarities between Cayce and Wallace’s resounding words about the noble part of Freemasonry in the future of America add another dimension to their shared ideals, and go some way towards explaining why Cayce’s pronouncements seem to covertly promote the politician’s interests.
Henry Wallace was certainly one of the key figures who lurked behind the scenes of Puharich’s Round Table Foundation, as witnessed by, among others, medium Eileen Garrett. In her autobiography she recalls that Wallace visited them while experiments were being carried out around 1949 or 1950.
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American researcher Terry L. Milner has also found provocative connections between those funding the Round Table Foundation and a joint military body called the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, primarily concerned with atomic weapons - and that some of the medical research on the effects of radiation was ‘subcontracted’ to the Round Table Foundation.
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This is the background against which the initial contact with the Nine took place through Dr Vinod. As more is known about Puharich the more complex — and murkier — the picture becomes. His talent and expertise in certain fields appeared to know few bounds: in parapsychological research, psychological manipulation using hypnosis and drugs (both chemical and plant-derived) and neurology. Puharich had also achieved great expertise in another area directly relevant to the Nine contacts. This was the field of electronics.
As early as 1947 Puharich, according to investigative journalist Steven Levy, became interested in the study of paranormal abilities, ‘specifically ... in ways he could document them, and perhaps enhance them, by electronic means’.
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But he had another, long-abiding interest in the use of electronic devices. Almost from the start of his career, he had been fascinated with the idea of using radio waves as a means of communicating directly with an individual, essentially by beaming thoughts straight into their brains. Soon after qualifying as a doctor, he became interested in the phenomenon by which an individual accidentally picks up radio transmissions, hearing them in their head, for example, through the fillings in their teeth. One of Puharich’s close colleagues in this work was Warren S. McCulloch, the pioneer of cybernetics, whose work was funded in part by the Josiah Macy Jr Foundation, a known CIA conduit.
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In the late 1950s and 1960s, Puharich worked on various electrical and electronic techniques, ostensibly to enable the deaf or hearing-impaired to hear again. Stuart Holroyd wrote that Puharich had devised an electrical deaf aid that conveyed radio waves directly to the skin.
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Several of these admirable devices were patented by Puharich, and have been successfully used in the treatment of deafness. More suggestive, however, is his invention of a miniaturised radio transmitter that could be hidden inside a tooth,
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which explains at least the reasoning behind the rather bizarre accusation that Uri Geller had such a device implanted in a tooth to somehow help in the creation of his ‘paranormal’ phenomena.
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When Puharich’s electronic work is considered as a whole, it can be seen to be geared to the same end: to find ways to make people hear voices in their heads. This would have been particularly useful if trying to create a belief system based on ‘mystical’ encounters with other worldly beings in the form of auditory hallucinations.
From the accounts of contact with the Nine, it is obvious that Puharich steered his ‘contactees’ very much in the direction that he wanted them to go. When he first hypnotised Uri Geller, who then began to speak of extraterrestrials, it was Puharich who asked whether or not they were the ‘Nine Principles’ spoken of by Dr Vinod twenty years before. Perhaps not surprisingly, the answer was yes.
Hypnosis is a state of extreme suggestibility, in which the subject has a desire to tell the hypnotist whatever he or she wants to hear. The dangers of asking leading questions, and of unconscious confabulation by the subjects, have been recognised for some time, so great care must be taken when, for example, the police use hypnosis to try to improve a witness’s memory of something he or she saw. Several recent scandals involving the use of hypnosis to ‘recover’ memories of satanic ritual abuse have only too graphically demonstrated the serious consequences that can result from uncontrolled use of the technique. Similarly, when Puharich put Bobby Home into a hypnotic trance and he began to speak the words of an extraterrestrial intelligence called Corean, Puharich suggested to him that it was really the Nine, and the ‘entity’ immediately agreed. In fact, one of Puharich’s close colleagues during this time, Ira Einhorn — who has his own part to play in this story - confirmed Puharich’s determination to turn all psychic communication into contact with the Nine, and that he was ‘humanly directing’ the pattern of the channelling.
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Many people, when in trance, spontaneously channel spirits or other entities. In fact, thousands of people today claim to channel great historical figures - such as Mahatma Gandhi - or a variety of extraterrestrial beings. Whether they are pure hokum, or dramatisations welling up from the subject’s own unconscious mind, or real independent entities is, as far as this discussion is concerned, largely irrelevant. It is the content of the channelled material that is important. (That most intelligent of mediums, Eileen Garrett, never doubted the reality of her clairvoyance nor the information it gave her, but at the same time she considered it entirely possible that her spirit guide, Uvani, was simply the product of her own subconscious.
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) Puharich seems to have shaped his subjects’ communications to conform to a consistent pattern, fitting a preconceived plan. Perhaps this was a deliberate, calculating experiment to see whether the resulting material would be consistent if his subjects could be made to channel the same source.
Interestingly, another example of this phenomenon is found in other work connected with the Nine. Don Elkins and Carla Rueckert of L/L Research had (through Carla) made contact with Ra, one of the Nine, though significantly only after meeting Puharich. Don Elkins himself had earlier experimented with methods of ‘fabricating’ contactees.
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He took over a hundred subjects, who had no prior knowledge of UFOs, and under hypnosis made them channel extraterrestrials, then compared the results with the words of those who claimed to be genuinely in touch with such entities. He found that the ‘fabricated’ messages were very similar to the ‘real’ ones. Elkins then leaped to the rather unscientific conclusion that this proved the reality of extra-terrestrial contact, and that contactees were not ‘chosen‘, but that anybody could do it if in the right altered and receptive state of consciousness. (Of course, it could be argued that his data proved the opposite, demonstrating that extraterrestrial channelling is a pathological phenomenon, and that it is never ‘real’.) Interestingly, several of Elkins’s ‘fabricated’ contactees subsequently claimed UFO experiences. This seems very similar to Puharich’s own research.
At the very least, Puharich’s use of hypnosis was unethical and dangerous, for example, implanting hypnotic suggestions in Bobby Horne’s subconscious so that Phyllis Schlemmer (not a trained hypnotist) could continue to hypnotise Horne in his absence. There is no excuse for Puharich: as a medical doctor and a trained hypnotist he knew the professional code of conduct. Clearly, however, he ignored it. Perhaps he thought of his work as being too important or too essential to bother about such
petit bourgeois
considerations.