He goes on to stress Einhorn’s role in bringing about major changes through the acceptance of the unexplained:
Through his relationship with Andrija Puharich and others, in what he jokingly called a ‘psychic mafia’, the Unicorn assumed a key role in the task of alerting our people about the implications of this revolution ... in Einhorn’s universe, those factors included the undeniability of UFOs, the startling discoveries in quantum physics, and the inevitability of the new world order - shaken loose by the Aquarian Transformation.
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Such apocalyptic beliefs were shared by others on the Puharich — Einhorn scene. Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Bearden, Einhorn’s close friend and former ‘war games’ analyst at the Pentagon, appeared - along with Puharich - at a conference organised by Einhorn on ‘Mind over Matter’ at Penn State University in 1977. (Bearden wrote the obituary for Puharich in the Newsletter of PACE, the Planetary Association for Clean Energy, in 1995.) Since retiring from the Army, Bearden has dedicated himself to researching alternative energy sources. He has written:
I believe that the accelerated time schedule for the ‘New World Order’ — now set for the year 2000 - is as the result of the imminent advent of (1) superluminal [faster-than-light] communication ... and (2) overunity electrical energy systems.
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Bearden was on the board of the Astron Corporation, a communications research and development company contracted to the Defense Department and NASA.
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The vice-president (and president at the time of Bearden’s involvement) is Dr Joseph Jahoda, who has been involved in the ARE/Schor Foundation excavations at Giza since 1978.
Einhorn’s strange career puts the events surrounding the Nine in the 1970s into a much wider context, unfolding against the emergence of radical new developments in the fields of psychology, parapsychology and quantum physics. A new generation of scientists was beginning to explore subjects previously considered as smacking too much of the lunatic fringe even to be worthy of consideration. At the heart of this new wave was an impulse to understand more about the nature — and limits — of human consciousness and its relationship to the physical universe. This work encompassed research into such areas as the subconscious mind and altered states of consciousness, including the effects of hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD, exploring new discoveries in the weird realms of quantum physics, potential new sources of energy, and parapsychology. From this family of brave new ideas came such classic and influential studies as Fritjof Capra’s
The
Too of Physics, which explored the relationship between quantum physics and Eastern mysticism; David Bohm’s
Wholeness and
the
Implicate Order;
Joseph Campbell’s
The Masks of God
on the psychology of myth; Stanislav Grof’s
Realms of the Human Unconscious,
on LSD research; and many others.
Much of this ground-breaking work took place in California within a closely knit network of research institutes and foundations among which was a great sharing of ideas and much overlapping membership. Among these establishments was, of course, SRI at Menlo Park, where Targ and Puthoff’s pioneering work into remote viewing was conducted, at the same time that SRI were also active at Giza.
The Esalen Institute at Big Sur, which had another establishment in San Francisco, was a prime mover in this scene. Dubbed ‘the California capital of the self-realization movement’,
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it was founded in 1964 by Michael Murphy and Richard Price on land formerly inhabited by the Esselen Indians, with the aim of holding seminars on psychology, religion, parapsychology, quantum physics and related subjects. In the late 1960s and early 1970s it regularly sparked controversy, not always for the intended reasons. Naked students often claimed the lion’s share of local headlines, rather than the pioneering seminars of the great thinkers of the day. Also a centre for research into psychedelic drugs, it became a focus for the counterculture of the day. More surprisingly, it has been enormously influential beyond its time and place.
Ira Einhorn led seminars at Esalen, and it was there that the Nine, channelled by Jenny O‘Connor, were listed as members of staff. According to Einhorn, ‘she took over running Esalen through the Nine‘,
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and such was the influence of the Nine that they ordered the sacking of its chief financial officer and reorganised the entire management structure.
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In the late 1970s the Esalen Soviet Exchange programme was developed, initially to share parapsychological research, in which rising Soviet stars of academia and politics were invited to the United States. This was to have enormous, far-reaching influence on world politics, as many of the Soviets who went to Esalen in the 1980s were to become instrumental in the shake-ups that would end the Cold War and bring about the fall of communism. It is reasonable to assume that an organisation whose members made regular trips to Moscow in the days of the Cold War
must
have been made use of by US intelligence, or at least have been monitored. Almost incredibly, several Soviet officials who would later rise to high office in the Gorbachev regime attended Jenny O’Connor’s Nine seminars, together with psi enthusiasts Congressman Charlie Rose and Ira Einhorn.
The Esalen Institute now runs the Gorbachev Foundation/ USA, created by the former Soviet President in 1992 to facilitate a smooth transition from the Cold War days to a better future for all the world. One of its objectives is to work with the development of the emerging political and religious paradigms. The Institute sponsored and funded visits to the United States by Boris Yeltsin before he became Russian President, and members of the Esalen Soviet Exchange programme were the go-betweens for Richard Hoagland and Soviet Mars researchers in the mid-1980s.
The story moves in one quantum leap from a tale of dubious channelling and its disciples to another level. The Nine, through their channellers and hangers-on, have a more or less direct line to some of the world’s most important men, whose decisions affect millions of lives. This is an astonishing scenario.
Another ‘sister’ school in this movement was, if anything, more controversial than the Esalen Institute. This was est (Erhard Sensitivity Training), the organisation founded in 1971 by Werner Erhard, a former Scientologist - and used car salesman — who decided to exploit and adapt some of Scientology’s concepts and techniques for his own self-improvement system. The now notorious est held seminars that attracted such celebrities as Buzz Aldrin, Yoko Ono, John Denver and the future UFO abduction researcher John Mack, but it wasn’t long before est became a dirty word. Attendees were disturbed by the fascistic regime and zombielike demeanour of the members, as well as Erhard’s own dictatorial control of the organisation. Media disapproval was intense, and soon est was relegated to the scrapheap of dangerous cults. Erhard himself fled from the United States after press revelations about his private life and financial affairs. He is now believed to be somewhere in Russia.
Tellingly, Erhard’s real name was John Rosenberg, but it is said that he changed his name ‘to replace Jewish weakness with German strength’.
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(His father was Jewish, but had converted to Episcopal Christianity.) Erhard had close links with the Esalen Institute and gave funds to SRI’s remote-viewing project.
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More disturbingly, Jenny O’Connor had been introduced to est in 1977, by Sir John Whitmore, before she moved on to Esalen.
A further integral part of this movement was the Institute of Noetic Sciences at Palo Alto, which was founded by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell in March 1973, and is ‘dedicated to research and education in the processes of human consciousness to help achieve a new understanding and expanded awareness among all people’.
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(‘Noetics’ comes from the Greek for ‘mind’.) They were heavily involved in the psi testing of the 1970s, partly funding the Geller experiments at SRI and, until the CIA came clean about their involvement in the remote-viewing experiments in the mid-1990s, it was the Institute of Noetic Sciences that claimed to have funded the initial programme.
126
At the very least, this shows that the Institute allowed itself to be used as a cover for the CIA, and perhaps even as a conduit for the funding of the agency’s more controversial experiments.
Arthur M. Young’s highly influential Institute for the Study of Consciousness at Berkeley, founded in 1972, also provided a forum for some of the most daring thinkers of the day. It was here that Richard Hoagland had his meeting with Paul Shay of SRI, and also where he gave his first lecture about Cydonia in 1984. Later he was to acknowledge Arthur Young’s personal influence.
127
(Young, present at the Nine’s debut at the Round Table Foundation in 1953, was in fact more heavily involved in the running of the Foundation than he wanted to be known, serving as Puharich’s ‘second-in-command’ there.
128
Young also kept secret his presence at the meeting of Puharich, Hurkos and the Laugheads in Mexico in 1956, although shortly before his death in 1995 he admitted to researcher Terry Milner that he had been present.
129
)
Institutions and foundations only succeed because of the individuals who breathe life into them. One of the key figures on this scene was avant-garde physicist Jack Sarfatti, the first director of the Physics/Consciousness Research Group at the Esalen Institute, which was funded by Werner Erhard and money covertly channelled through from the Pentagon.
130
His seminars were attended by Stanislas Grof, Russell Targ, Timothy Leary, physicist Saul Paul Sirag (who became director after Sarfatti), Robert Anton Wilson, Fritjof Capra and Ira Einhorn, who was Sarfatti’s literary agent.
The work carried out by this interlinked network of organisations was imaginative and innovative, presenting a serious challenge to the previous arrogant certainties of the scientific world. It was undertaken in a genuine pioneering spirit, largely born of the idealism of the youth culture of the 1960s and a desire to change the world for the better. However, a dark shadow was cast over this early idyllic promise by the involvement of the Pentagon, CIA and other security and intelligence agencies, who soon realised that the breakthroughs of these idealists had great potential in their own spheres, such as remote viewing. And they did not fail to note that research into altered states of consciousness, including the use of LSD and other drugs, also had darker applications in the various techniques of mind control. So often this research was encouraged and funded - although often covertly, through other channels — by organisations such as the CIA and the Pentagon. One of the pioneers of LSD and consciousness research, John C. Lilly, worked at the Esalen Institute for several years, as well as for the CIA, but only on the condition that his research remained unclassified. This made things difficult for him professionally, because nearly all other researchers in the field were also working on classified projects, so he was unable to share data with them or vice versa.
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Another case of behind-the-scenes agendas in this milieu involved Dr Brendan O‘Regan, research director of Edgar Mitchell’s Institute of Noetic Sciences and a consultant for SRI, as well as research director for the scientist-philosopher R. Buckminster Fuller. O’Regan arranged the experiments into the strange talents of Uri Geller at Birkbeck College, London, in 1975 and was also closely involved with the Puharich — Whitmore circle surrounding the Nine. And, since O’Regan’s death in 1992, Jack Sarfatti has claimed that he was also working with the CIA at this time, writing:
I was then [1973] simply a young inexperienced ‘naive idiot’ in a very very sophisticated and successful covert psychological warfare operation run by the late Brendan O’Regan of the Institute of Noetic Sciences and the late Harold Chipman who was the CIA station chief responsible for all mind-control research in the Bay Area in the 70s.
132
As with the Nine’s communications - which were intimately connected with the extraordinary cutting-edge research taking place primarily in California — the shadów of the intelligence agencies looms large.
Who spins the web?
The messages of the Nine’s communications are particularly intriguing in this context because they extended over such a long time, apart from any other considerations. But what would be the point of such an exhaustive experiment by the intelligence agencies?
One plausible motive, as we have seen, is the testing of the extent that such beliefs can be created and manipulated. In the hands of such a supremely skilled puppetmaster as Puharich, this would have been worth watching closely. But perhaps it was not merely an exercise in observation and always had a definite end in mind? Perhaps the belief system was being used for some purpose that had been clearly defined from the outset.
In both of these scenarios the Nine have to be a fabrication - a hoax - but this fails to account for certain key aspects of the story. For example, the Nine’s communications have continued since Puharich bowed out at the end of the 1970s. Is the experiment continuing, but under the control of someone else? Or has the belief system built up such a momentum - essentially, creating a life of its own - that it has become self-perpetuating? A few who claim contact with the Nine appear to have done so independently of each other, including Carla Rueckert and James Hurtak, but, apart from David Myers (as far as we know), most of them had some contact with Puharich.
Where Puharich’s work is concerned, the big question is whether he was actually fabricating extraterrestrial contact, or experimenting with various methods of inducing it. British parapsychologist Kenneth J. Batcheldor demonstrated that genuine paranormal effects can be induced in a group simply by what he called ‘artefact induction’, in effect, kickstarting real paranormal phenomena simply by
cheating
.
133
He discovered that, in groups researching psychokinesis, if someone deliberately tilts the table and the group as a whole believes it to have been caused paranormally, this opens the floodgates for genuinely supernatural events to happen. Significantly, not only was Puharich certainly aware of Batcheldor’s findings, but Don Elkins believed that his experiments in fabricating contactees through hypnosis actually resulted in real contact.