The Stargate Conspiracy (26 page)

In deep trance, Uri described being three years old, seeing a light in the sky and encountering a shining being. Then a voice spoke through him (in English), telling the researchers that Geller had been ‘programmed’ on that occasion, and that Puharich was to take care of him. The voice also warned of a serious threat of war between Israel and Egypt, which – if it took place – would escalate and ultimately lead to a Third World War.
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Further hypnosis sessions followed. The entities explained that Geller had been programmed for a special mission to Earth – ’He is the only one for the next fifty years to come‘
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and announced that they were a form of conscious computer, living aboard a spacecraft called Spectra. After a few sessions, Puharich asked: ‘Are you of the Nine Principles that once spoke through Dr Vinod?’ The reply was: ‘Yes.’
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Puharich had another subject in mind, one that would assume a much wider appeal – virtually becoming a new religion – as the twentieth century draws towards its close. He asked the communicating entities: ‘Are you behind the UFO sightings that started in the United States when Kenneth Arnold saw nine flying saucers on June 24, 1947?’
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Again, the answer was affirmative.

Puharich wrote: ‘Now I was totally convinced that Uri and I had been contacted by such a local cosmic being; by this I mean some representative or extension of the Nine Principles.’
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On his second trip, Puharich stayed in Israel for almost three months, in daily contact with Geller and bombarded with demonstrations of paranormal phenomena nearly every day. Messages from Spectra/the Nine continued, either channelled through the hypnotised Geller or appearing spontaneously on audio tapes, but in every case the tapes either erased themselves or vanished before their eyes. Unfortunately, that means that only Puharich’s written transcripts survive as records of the events.

It was undoubtedly a weird time. Puharich and Geller saw several UFOs, and witnessed the teleportation of objects from one place to another, often through solid walls, besides experiencing a series of bizarre synchronicities. This, however, was merely window-dressing. Their mission was to pray and meditate to prevent the predicted Israel — Egypt war, as tension between the two countries increased over Christmas 1971. Eventually, President Sadat of Egypt made an astonishing climbdown, and the war was averted in the nick of time. (Two years later an Israeli-Egyptian conflict occurred with the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, but when Puharich queried this with the Nine he was told this was fine; there was no risk of the conflict escalating and ‘the war will be fought just like an ordinary war’.
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When Puharich returned to the United States in February 1972, determined to have Geller’s wild talents evaluated scientifically, he contacted SRI International. Significantly, although SRI supremos Targ and Puthoff were in charge of the testing, the key figure in this scenario was former lunar astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the ‘funding and contracting agent’.
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Significantly, the Geller experiments at SRI coincided exactly with the first CIA involvement with psychic experiments there, specifically their sponsorship of research into Ingo Swann’s extraordinary talent for remote viewing. And in Uri Geller they had the golden child of the Israeli secret service, Mossad.
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Is it too unlikely that Geller, also, was being investigated by the CIA? Geller has gone on record as admitting he worked for them.
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And, as we shall see, Puharich himself was on their payroll, at least from time to time. And a further connection with intelligence agencies lay in Hal Puthoffs former employment by the National Security Agency (NSA), an even more secretive organisation than the CIA, and with powers at least as great.
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In an interview in 1996, Geller made the telling comment: ‘And probably, I believe, the whole thing with Andrija was financed by the American Defense Department.’
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When Geller arrived in the United States in August 1972, the Nine recommenced their antics with more messages on instantly wiped tapes and teleportations. Significantly, Geller himself was not a convert to the Nine, even at this stage. He found their pranks childish and ultimately unimpressive. He was to say of them in August 1972: ‘I think somebody is playing games with us. Perhaps they are a civilization of clowns.’
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At the time that Geller began his SRI tests, in November 1972, the Nine — through their representative Spectra in those early days - started to describe their plans for an imminent mass landing of spaceships, claiming that Puharich and Geller’s roles were to prepare mankind for this momentous event. The Nine described the ‘Knowledge Book’ that they had left hidden in Egypt some 6,000 years ago, during one of their previous visits to Earth. They then began to talk about another extraterrestrial race, called - somewhat unfortunately - Hoova, who had come to Earth 20,000 years ago, specifically to the area now called Israel, where they had encountered Abraham, claiming that this meeting was the origin of the Biblical story of the ladder joining Heaven and Earth.

On 27 February 1973, Puharich took Geller to meet Arthur M. Young at his house in Philadelphia, thus completing a circle that had begun twenty years before with the channelling of Dr Vinod. Sadly there are no accessible records of what happened at this meeting.

Unfortunately for the Nine, their carefully laid plans for Geller never came to fruition. In October 1973 he appeared on
The David Dambleby Show
on British television and was launched into overnight psychic superstardom. Geller and Puharich went their separate ways soon afterwards, and the former has distanced himself from the Nine ever since. Although he admits that extraterrestrial intelligences might be responsible for his powers, he — very sensibly — points out that he cannot vouch for what the Nine said through him, as he was always in a hypnotic trance at the time.
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He thinks that his own subconscious fantasising may have played a large part in the communications - which is often the case during hypnosis - although he does corroborate some of the other events related by Puharich, such as their shared UFO sightings in Israel and Sinai.

The Nine, it transpired, did not really need Geller, despite having told him that he was to be ‘the only one for the next fifty years to come’. They continued seamlessly after Geller’s departure, with other channellers and a new group of devotees. The key people who now entered the story were Sir John Whitmore and Phyllis Schlemmer. The new group formed an organisation called Lab Nine, based at Puharich’s estate at Ossining in New York State.

Puharich and Lab Nine had many wealthy and influential backers, including members of Canada’s richest family, the Bronfmans (the owners of the Seagram liquor business) and an Italian nobleman called Baron DiPauli. It is portrayed as an almost hippy-style commune — with a loose band of hangers-on moving around the central nucleus of Puharich, Whitmore and Schlemmer - but what hippy commune attracts quite so many rich people or such a sprinkling of members of the intelligence agencies? And what other community could boast a fully qualified kahuna shaman and master hypnotist like Puharich - with none other than James Hurtak as his de facto second-in-command?

It was at this time that Puharich also carried out a series of experiments with the so-called ‘Geller Kids’ or ‘Space Kids’, children with pronounced psychic gifts. Ostensibly, this was to investigate the extent of their powers — such as metalbending - but significantly, Puharich soon had them remote viewing and hypnotised them to tell him where their powers originated.
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One of the most useful and colourful characters with whom Puharich surrounded himself at Ossining was Phyllis Schlemmer (née Virtue). Born of Italian and Irish ancestry in Pennsylvania, from an early age she was aware of her gifts as a medium. At her Catholic college the priests often asked her to accompany them on exorcisms, as she could ‘see’ possessing spirits leaving the victims. As she grew older, she regularly channelled a number of spirit guides. After the break-up of her first marriage, she moved to Florida where she developed her career as a psychic, working for the police and mining companies, and even broadcasting her own television show. She founded the Psychic Center of Florida in Orlando, a school for developing psychics, in 1969. Her main spirit guide was an entity called ‘Dr Fiske‘, but in 1970 a new control simply named ‘Tom’ ‘came through’. She assumed it must be her grandfather Thomas, who died when she was just five.

Phyllis Schlemmer met Puharich at a conference in the late 1960s, and the two were in regular contact thereafter. In January 1974, a cook from Daytona Beach, who is referred to in Nine-related literature only by the pseudonym ‘Bobby Home’, enrolled at Schlemmer’s Psychic Center, developing healing talents so remarkable that she recommended him to Puharich as a potential subject for further study. It was not to be a fortuitous recommendation for poor Bobby.

Puharich travelled to Miami to meet Home in March 1974. On their first meeting — as was Puharich’s habit, as we have seen — he hypnotised the young man, who began to channel an extraterrestrial entity called Corean. Puharich was delighted, believing he had found a worthy successor to Geller in his quest to establish regular contact with the Nine. He went on to have several channelled ‘interviews’ with Corean, but refused to let Home himself hear the tapes of these sessions, claiming that this specifically followed Corean’s own instructions.
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It was decreed that Home should be told neither the identity of the entity nor the content of its communications. Puharich behaved in a highly unethical way for a hypnotist, asking obviously leading questions of Corean, such as if he was connected with Hoova, the civilisation supposedly in contact with Uri Geller. In fact Corean had not mentioned Hoova, but afterwards this became a regular subject of discussion for him. Then, amazingly, Puharich compounded his already extraordinarily unethical behaviour by implanting a posthypnotic suggestion in Horne’s subconscious mind to enable Schlemmer to continue to put him into trance in his, Puharich’s, absence
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Turning her back on her origins as a ‘traditional’ spiritualist medium communicating with the spirits of the dead, Schlemmer had begun to channel only extraterrestrials since the spring of 1974, when Puharich took her to meet a friend of his, an adventurer and explorer named Count Pino Turolla.
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At his Florida house Schlemmer went into a trance and again channelled Tom, to be told that he was not, as she had believed, her deceased grandfather, but an extraterrestrial. Tom was to become the main communicator of the Nine later, when Schlemmer assumed Horne’s role. (Interestingly, Count Turolla was one of the people involved in the supposed confirmation of Edgar Cayce’s prophecies about Atlantis with the discovery of the Bimini Road in 1968.
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With Home replacing Geller as the new ‘Chosen One’, a circle formed around him, with a nucleus consisting of Puharich, Schlemmer and Sir John Whitmore, the heir to an aristocratic British family. Educated at public school and the elite military academy of Sandhurst, he later became a successful racing driver. At the time of the Lab Nine operation he owned houses in England and the Bahamas. He had first become seriously involved with this bizarre set-up in April 1974; the previous year he had spent some time with James Hurtak in California as one of his inner circle of ‘disciples’. As Stuart Holroyd wrote:

Tom had also identified the Tarim Basin as the site of the first arrival of an extraterrestrial civilisation on Earth, during the same period - 34,000 years ago - identified by Hurtak.

Shortly after first sitting at Hurtak’s feet, Whitmore met Puharich in New York to discuss the promotion of Uri Geller’s powers shortly before Geller dropped out of the scene and Bobby Horne became the focus of the group’s attention. The Nine, speaking as Corean, told the trio that they had been chosen for a special mission to bring the news of the imminent return of extraterrestrials to Earth. This central message attracted others to the sitter group, and formed the basis of all future Nine communications.

Puharich, Whitmore, Schlemmer and an increasingly reluctant Bobby Home began to proselytise in both the United States and Britain in the spring and summer of 1974, although they kept the group small and intimate, not intending it to explode into a mass movement, at least in the immediate future. Meanwhile Bobby Home was suffering from increasing pressure from the Nine, being expected to drop all other activities to follow the group around the world to channel at any time of the day or night and produce phenomena almost constantly. He began to make excuses or fail to show up, and even became suicidal as the demands of the exhausting business spiralled out of control.
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(Later, Whitmore was to airily dismiss Home as showing ‘signs of instability’.
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) The Nine eventually decided to let him go — their second failure, after Geller - and announced that from then on Schlemmer would be their ‘transceiver’, with Tom as their spokesman.

Closely involved with these events then was writer Lyall Watson, who had become the star of the alternative culture after the runaway success of his book
Supernature
(1973). He was a sitter at many of the Nine’s channelling sessions, and they announced that they wanted him to be - as it were - their official biographer, as well as become joint channeller with Schlemmer. Watson had grave reservations about what was happening, though, and declined either to write the book or become more involved. Clearly, the Nine were keen to exploit Watson’s fame, as they had been with Geller.