The Stargate Conspiracy (31 page)

There is another possible explanation for the phenomenon of the Nine: the events of their story were somehow orchestrated and manipulated, quite deliberately, by very human agencies. Colin Wilson had theorised that, because of the consistency of the communications, from Dr Vinod in the early 1950s through to Uri Geller, Bobby Home and Phyllis Schlemmer in the 1970s, it was Puharich himself who was the psychic, the real magnet for the phenomena, though perhaps only at a subconscious level. Wilson actually put this directly to Puharich during one of the latter’s visits to London, although Puharich disagreed.
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But what if Wilson was right, up to a point? What if Puharich had created the Nine - not subconsciously, but deliberately ... ?

A major consideration is that we are entirely dependent on Puharich’s own account of the first twenty years of the Nine’s communications. The only record of what happened with Dr Vinod comes from him, and he is also the primary source for the Geller phase, when the Nine’s words came through the hypnotised Geller and were written down later by Puharich from memory. The tape recordings either erased themselves or disappeared into thin air, after only Puharich had had a chance to listen to them. When Stuart Holroyd entered the picture in 1976 the first objective voice was heard, and this was largely based on tapes of Schlemmer’s channelling sessions and what the trio chose to tell him.

Perhaps it is significant that Andrija Puharich was described by his close associate Ira Einhorn as ‘the great psychic circus manager of this century’.
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He was certainly not averse to media attention, although he kept much of his work secret. In the 1960s he played himself in an episode of
Perry Mason,
appearing as an expert witness on psychic phenomena, yet much of his career remains sketchy, and he happily compounded the mystery by introducing inconsistencies and obvious evasions into his own account of his life and work. In a real sense, he lived a double life, much of his most influential work being carried out under conditions of highest secrecy — perhaps not surprisingly, considering for whom he often worked ...

Puharich had qualified as a doctor and neurologist at Northwestern University in 1947 under a US Army training scheme, but was then discharged from the Army on medical grounds. He set up the Round Table Foundation in Glen Cove, Maine, in 1948, and ran it until 1958, working with psychics including Eileen Garrett and Peter Hurkos, as well as first making contact with the Nine through Dr Vinod, and with Rahotep through Harry Stone. In addition Puharich was also carrying out secret research for the defence and intelligence establishments into two main areas: techniques of psychological manipulation, including the use of hallucinogenic drugs; and the military and intelligence capabilities of psychic skills. His own account records that his work with Vinod was interrupted for several months in 1953 because (despite his medical discharge) he returned to Army service.
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According to Jack Sarfatti, a physicist on the fringes of the Puharich — Geller — Whitmore events of the mid-1970s, Puharich ‘worked for Army Intelligence in the early fifties’
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— which perhaps implies that his ‘discharge’ was a cover for continuing to operate in an apparently civilian capacity. It also appears that some of Puharich’s medical inventions were originally developed as part of classified Army projects.
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In 1987, Puharich himself claimed that he had been part of a US Navy investigation called Project Penguin that researched psychic abilities back in 1948.
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He named the head of this project as Rexford Daniels, who lived close to his home in Glen Cove in the 1950s. According to writers Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, Daniels — who studied the effects of electromagnetic waves on human beings — became convinced, in the 1970s, of the existence of some kind of intelligent force in the universe that operated through electromagnetic frequencies and that ‘human beings can mentally interact with it’.
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Ira Einhorn, Puharich’s close associate in the 1970s, told us recently that, although Puharich had worked for the CIA during the 1950s, he was no longer doing so twenty years later.
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However, the evidence points very much in the other direction. Puharich’s relationship with intelligence agencies almost certainly did not end in the 1950s. Uri Geller told us at a meeting in his home near Reading in England in 1998 that: ‘The CIA brought Puharich in to come and get me out of Israel.’
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Jack Sarfatti goes further, claiming: ‘Puharich was Geller’s case officer in America with money provided by Sir John Whitmore.’
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And according to James Hurtak, via his Academy For Future Sciences, Puharich ‘worked with the US intelligence community.’
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By implication this was during the early 1970s when he, Hurtak, was also working with him.

We know Puharich was working with the CIA on experiments with various techniques for inducing altered states of consciousness, which is another way of saying he worked on the potential of mind control. We also know, at least up to a point, that Geller worked for them — they wanted to know how he could use his mind to influence inanimate objects and see distant locations - in other words, to test his remote-influencing abilities. Were the Nine somehow part of a CIA mind-control experiment?

After the Second World War, as the West moved into the Cold War, the US military (like that of many other countries) began to take seriously the psychological aspects of warfare, and undertook or sponsored research into this area. It covered anything from techniques to make soldiers more efficient, through truth drugs and methods of resisting interrogation, to the more sinister brainwashing techniques and creation of ‘Manchurian Candidate’ assassins. The military were not alone in this research. Intelligence agencies - primarily the CIA - became heavily involved with what it summed up as the ’search to control human behaviour’.
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This included exploring the possible uses of drugs, hypnosis, electric shocks and radiation, as well as psychological, psychiatric and sociological techniques. They were particularly interested in investigating the effects of various chemicals and drugs, including hallucinogens such as LSD. As Thomas Powers wrote in his introduction to John Marks’s
The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’:

The first experiments were authorised by the CIA in 1950, code-named BLUEBIRD, later renamed ARTICHOKE and then, in 1953, MKULTRA. The US Navy had a similar research program, Project CHATTER (beginning in 1947), which pooled its resources with the CIA projects, and the US Army had its own version called Project OFTEN, which ran between 1968 and 1973.
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ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA included the investigation of narcotic plants found in Latin America and, as we have seen, Puharich had spent much of the 1950s investigating the mind-altering properties of hallucinogenic plants and fungi. And the US Army has admitted to testing LSD on nearly 7,000 servicemen — 1,500 of whom were
not
volunteers - in the late 1950s.
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It was this type of research in which Puharich was involved for defence and intelligence departments.

In the 1970s, after many questions raised about the CIA’s abuses of human rights, President Gerald Ford appointed an investigative commission under Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller. The commission’s references to ‘behavioural control research’ attracted the interest of writer John Marks, who obtained 16,000 pages of previously unclassified documents relating to MKULTRA under the Freedom of Information Act, though many of the key documents had already been destroyed on the orders of the CIA’s director in 1973.

Not everyone applauded Marks’s revelations. In his book about the ‘uses and abuses’ of hypnosis,
Open to Suggestion
(1989), Robert Temple declared bluntly that he refused even to read Marks’s book on the grounds that it was ‘irresponsible’ and ‘not commensurate with national security considerations’
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— which is manifestly untrue, as Marks had found his material using the Freedom of Information Act. Temple admits that ‘the CIA has been very naughty on many occasions’,
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but this does not, in his view, excuse Marks for ‘throwing mud’ at them. While Temple appears to think that a mild slap on the wrist is enough for the CIA, it is worth remembering that their ’naughtiness’ included mindbending experiments on US servicemen (at least 1,500 of whom were not volunteers), the inmates of jails and mental patients, which resulted in several deaths and turned many strong, healthy Americans into shambling wrecks. Very naughty.

What was Puharich’s role? There is no doubt that he was very deeply committed to much of the mind control experimentation of the military/CIA. He was certainly no mere Army doctor, whose work was confined to handing out pills and potions. In fact, even the Round Table Foundation - as Puharich himself implies in
The Sacred Mushroom
— was a front for the Army’s parapsychological experiments.

When he was redrafted in February 1953 it was as a captain at the Army Chemical Center in Edgewood, Maryland, the Army’s facility for research into chemical and psychological warfare and neurophysical research, where he served until April 1955, when he returned to the Round Table Foundation.
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Certain groups within the US Army were interested in Puharich’s parapsychological work. In
The Sacred Mushroom,
he records the visit to the Round Table Foundation of an unnamed colonel, who was in charge of research for the office of the chief of psychological warfare, in August 1952.
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He also notes that the order for his redrafting into the Army was issued the day after he briefed the Pentagon on the military uses of parapsychology in November 1952.
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It also seems that, from Puharich’s account, only some people within the military command were interested in parapsychology. Although he was encouraged by certain of his superiors - who had clearly arranged for him to be drafted back into the Army - they also expressed concern about possible ‘adverse political reaction’.
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The Army’s interest in the Round Table Foundation continued even after Puharich had left active service in April 1955. In
The Sacred Mushroom
he describes a planned visit to the Foundation by an Army general and his staff in September 1957, which was cancelled at the last minute because ‘there was some compelling security reason unknown to him [the General] which made it undesirable for military officials to express an interest in our kind of research’.
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This was an odd choice of words - not that it was politically unwise to be associated with such controversial work, but that they cancelled for a ‘security reason’. Such factionalism within the military and political establishments was also a factor in the remote-viewing research of the 1970s. While it had enthusiastic advocates in the Pentagon, intelligence community and political hierarchy, others believed such things were a waste of time or, worse, that such ‘dabbling in the occult’ was a work of the Devil.

From Puharich’s account, it appears that his role at the Army Chemical Center was simply that of an ordinary medical doctor, basically a GP for the base. This was absolutely untrue. The Army’s real interest, the reason why they re-employed Puharich, was not just in the development of the military potential of ESP, but also the possibility of finding a drug that would stimulate psychic abilities. This is the task they set Puharich, although in
The Sacred Mushroom
he suggests that it was just a vague arrangement that never really went anywhere. It did launch his research into shamanism, though.

Significantly, against this background the first communications with the Nine were established through Dr Vinod and Harry Stone between 1953 and 1955. Even more remarkable, given the specific nature of the Army’s interest in Puharich, the Harry Stone communications about the ancient Egyptian drug that stimulated psychic functioning also happened at this time.

The CIA’s interest in hallucinogens was escalating rapidly in the early 1950s. They approached R. Gordon Wasson, who had identified the use of psychoactive mushrooms in Mexico (known locally as ‘God’s flesh’), to invite him to work for them and their MKULTRA project, but he refused. This did not stop them from using him: when he planned an expedition to Mexico in 1956, he was approached by a man called James Moore, who arranged funding from the Geshickter Foundation for Medical Research. Wasson later discovered that Moore was a CIA agent, and it is now established that the Geshickter Foundation was a standard ‘conduit’ for CIA funds. The money for Wasson’s expedition actually came from MKULTRA’s Subproject 58.
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Puharich met Wasson to discuss his research in February 1955, recording that he drew up a report on Wasson’s work for the US Army.
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Either the CIA had actually commissioned this report, or it drew their attention to Wasson in the first place. (The Army’s Chemical Center at Edgewood, where Puharich was stationed, is known to have conducted joint experiments with the CIA’s MKULTRA team.)
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Although a banker by profession, Wasson was a highly respected amateur mycologist. His article in
Life
magazine in 1957 about his own experience of the Mexican ‘sacred mushroom’ caused a sensation, and was largely responsible for the psychedelic craze of the next decade. As a direct result of reading this article Timothy Leary went to Mexico to find the mushrooms and had his first hallucinogenic experience.
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The psychedelic movement can pinpoint the moment of its birth to 29 June 1955, the night that Wasson himself partook of ‘God’s flesh’, the experience described in the
Life
article. On that very night, Wasson had arranged to conduct the remote-viewing experiment with Puharich, but as his mind was elsewhere at the time, he was not much use.
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