Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (82 page)

“He’s
complicated
…” Lloyd replies. “Puharich knew R. Gordon Wasson–the mushroom expert. Together, in June of 1955, they attempted the first remote viewing experiment–almost twenty years before Ingo Swann’s successful efforts at the Stanford Research Institute. Of course, they weren’t calling it remote viewing then. In their minds it was a long-distance test of ‘Extrasensory Perception Projection.’ Wasson was traveling to Mexico to research the mushroom cult he was writing about for
Life
magazine (a trip funded by MKULTRA’s Subproject 58, by the way…). He’d promised Puharich that while he was in Mexico he’d try to find a mushroom-munching
curandero
who would project his astral body to Puharich’s parapsychological laboratory in Glen Cove, Maine and report on the goings-on there. Wasson had met Puharich in Manhattan and had never been to the lab in Maine–a suspected CIA cut-out operation called the Round Table Foundation–so if the
curandero
proved able to describe anything in the lab at all, he wouldn’t be getting any help from Wasson, telepathic or otherwise.”

Twinker asks, “So did the
curandero
pass the test?”

“Wasson chose to eat the
teonanacatl
mushroom himself and was so addled by the resulting visions that he couldn’t do anything useful. The experiment was considered a failure. But Puharich had better luck a few months later with a telepathy demonstration he’d arranged for Aldous Huxley.”

“Jesus, the guy knew everybody!” Gordon says. “You’re talking about Huxley the writer…
Brave New World, The Doors of Perception,
and
Eyeless in Gaza
, right?”

“The same,” Lloyd confirms.

“Jim Morrison named The Doors after
The Doors of Perception
, which was about Huxley tripping on mescaline,” D.H. fills in.

“Everyone knows
that
,” Jimmy scoffs.

“What most people
don’t
know is that it was Puharich who’d supplied Huxley with the mescaline in the first place,” Lloyd says with authority. “He was a man with many strange connections. Around the same time that Huxley was writing
The Doors of Perception
and
Heaven and Hell
, Puharich was working with a reluctant psychic named Harry Stone who sometimes unknowingly fell into trances and became possessed by an Egyptian entity called Rahotep. The interesting thing about Rahotep was that he–or
it
–could speak and draw hieroglyphs in an archaic form of the Egyptian language from around 2700 BC. During one such trance, fortuitously in front of Huxley, the Rahotep entity requested an
Amanita muscaria
mushroom that Puharich had found not far from his lab in a location that he’d been told about during a previous channeling session. (
Amanita
mushrooms are quite rare in Maine, but there was Puharich, skipping about with a wicker basket, picking them like daisies.) Once the Rahotep entity had the
Amanita
muscaria
in its hot little borrowed hands, it ritualistically applied the mushroom cap to the tip of Harry Stone’s tongue and then to the top of his skull. Harry woke up a few moments later feeling quite drunk. Despite his obvious inebriation, Puharich insisted that Harry perform a simple but fraud-proof ESP test. Harry aced the test–made a perfect score at million-to-one odds–while Huxley looked on in astonishment. Puharich surmised that the ritual use of
Amanita muscaria
could temporarily dissociate the soul from the body, resulting in a dramatic increase in psychic powers. You’ll find all of this detailed in Puharich’s book,
The Sacred Mushroom: Key to the Door of Eternity
, which he published in 1959.”

“So if some book has the word
Mushroom
in its title, you buy it–no matter what. Right?” D.H. asks Lloyd.

“Like
Sacred Mushrooms and the National Security State
,” riffs Gordon. “There’s no way you’d pass that one up.”

“Even in jest you hew closer to the truth than you know,” Lloyd smirks. “In 1952, Puharich briefed Pentagon officials on the military uses of enhanced psychic abilities in a lecture entitled, ‘An Evaluation of the Possible Usefulness of Extrasensory Perception in Psychological Warfare.’ In case you think I’m just making that up, you’ll find that same information was also published in the
Washington Post
during the summer of 1977, when new revelations about MKULTRA seemed to be coming out every day–in a large part due to Jimmy Carter’s antipathy toward the CIA.”

“Right on, Jimmy!” says Jimmy.

“There’s more, of course. The connections just keep getting stranger. Puharich was drafted not long after he gave his Pentagon lecture. He served as a medical officer at the Army Chemical Center at Edgewood, Maryland from 1953 to 1955. During that time, the Chief of the US Chemical Warfare Division–Puharich’s boss–was Doctor Laurence J. Layton, whose namesake son would end up, twenty-five years later, as the only person to be tried and convicted for his role in the Jonestown massacre.”

“You’re kidding!” Skip exclaims.

“I’m deadly serious… and I’m only getting started,” replies Lloyd. “One of the major backers for Puharich’s Round Table Foundation was former Vice President Henry Wallace–the man responsible for getting the pyramid with the floating eye on the back of our dollar bills. Two other friends and financial backers were the inventor of the Bell helicopter, Arthur M. Young, and his wife, Ruth Forbes Paine. Ruth happened to be the great-granddaughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson and an heiress to the
Boston Forbes
family fortune–very old money, and lots of it. Arthur and Ruth have an odd connection to more recent history as well: their daughter-in-law in Dallas, who was also named Ruth Paine, happened to be a close friend of a young Russian émigré named Marina Oswald. In 1963, Marina and her children moved in with Ruth, while Marina’s semi-estranged husband,
Lee Harvey Oswald
, kept his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle stored in Ruth’s garage.”

“Holy crap!” Skip comments.

Gordon has something to contribute: “Did you guys know that Aldous Huxley took a massive dose of LSD and died on the same day that JFK was shot?”

“You couldn’t make this shit up if you tried!” says Skip, at once credulous and vulgar.

“‘One must always try to be as radical as reality itself,’”
says Lloyd, quoting Lenin.

“So this Puharich guy is connected to Jonestown, the JFK assassination, Aldous Huxley, and the pyramid on the back of the dollar bill,” D.H. sums up.

“Let’s not forget Uri Geller, the CIA, and the Stanford Research Institute,” Lloyd says. “And it gets even stranger. Back in 1952–the same year that our friend Jack Sarfatti was getting those cold, mechanical-sounding phone calls–Andrija Puharich was working at the Round Table Foundation with an Indian mystic known as Doctor D.G. Vinod. Doctor Vinod had been making his way through the states by giving lectures at Rotary Club luncheons. He was a trance channeller who claimed he was in touch with a sort of collective intelligence, or a group entity, that referred to itself as God’s ‘Nine Principles and Forces’–or more simply,
The Nine
.”

“I guess you were right about those Rotarians being open-minded,” says Twinker. “The guy sounds
muy loco
, if you ask me.”

“Yeah–
The Nine
…” Jimmy makes it sound like he’s doing voice-over narration for a drive-in horror movie trailer. “I mean, how dumb can you get?”

“Dumb though it may seem, the influence of The Nine has been felt in some very rarified circles,” says Lloyd. “Puharich arranged for Doctor Vinod’s trance sessions to take place among a group of nine people, which included Arthur Young and Ruth Forbes Paine, along with members of the DuPont and Astor families. During those sessions, The Nine claimed they were directing mankind’s evolution toward a new age of human consciousness. The nine people assembled there had been chosen to promote The Nine’s earthly agenda. Speaking through Vinod, The Nine told them: ‘There is no God other than what we are together.’”

“They sound kinda conceited,” slurs Twinker–as if The Nine was just another stuck-up high school clique.

“I should remind you that 1952 was also the year that nine disc-shaped UFOs were famously seen over Washington D.C., buzzing Capitol Hill and the White House,” Lloyd says.

“So you’re saying The Nine flew around in UFOs?”

“That was the conclusion that Puharich eventually reached. After Doctor Vinod returned to India, Puharich mistakenly believed his communications with The Nine were over. But just a few years later, while he was down in Mexico looking to have some shamanic fun with his psychic pal, Peter Hurkos, Puharich bumped into an American couple called the Laugheads, from Whipple, Arizona. The Laugheads had been Protestant missionaries in Egypt before they became involved with a group of American UFO contactees. One young man of their acquaintance claimed to be in telepathic contact with a variety of alien races on a regular basis, including a group of extraterrestrials calling themselves–”

“–
The Nine
,” says everyone in the backseat with a collective roll of their eyes.

“Small world,” Gordon says. “And what’s with that name–
The Laugheads
? And
Whipple
, Arizona?”

“Yes, it sounds like someone’s whipping up an inside joke, doesn’t it?” Lloyd muses. “But the Laugheads proved their sincerity a month later by sending Puharich a letter full of undisclosed details about his sessions with Doctor Vinod, details that had been channeled directly from The Nine–or so they claimed. Included were the exact dates when the sessions took place and some information about the Lorentz-Einstein Transformation formula that had been bandied about. For Puharich, that letter served as independent confirmation of The Nine’s existence. It also proved they were able to make contact with other mediums besides Doctor Vinod. From that point on, Puharich became obsessed with The Nine. He started seeing evidence of their hidden hand everywhere, guiding him through life.”

Channeling the Beatles (specifically Ringo), D.H. sings:
“I get by with a little help from my friends –”

“– Gonna try with a little help from my friends,”
everyone else joins in.

“So what’s all this have to do with Esalen?” Gordon asks Lloyd.

“I’m getting to that,” he answers, “but the short answer is that The Nine is listed on the Esalen Institute’s staff.”

“What the fuck?”

“It’s best if I explain how the situation evolved naturally.”

“There’s nothing natural about nine superior, stuck-up aliens on the staff of some whacked-out New Age mind control camp,” says Twinker, speaking for all of them. “Why are you taking us there, Lloyd?
Really
–what’s your plan?”

“Yeah! Who’re you working for?” D.H. demands to know, making it sound like a joke.

“I’m not aligned with Puharich and I don’t trust The Nine, if that’s what you’re concerned about,” Lloyd says. “I’d promised to tell you about Esalen’s shadow side, and there it is: full disclosure.”

“Full disclosure, my butt,” says Jimmy. “Tell ‘em about the Space Kids and Project MONARCH.”

“Those topics aren’t specific to Esalen, but I was getting to them before you all so rudely decided to jump down my throat. Trust me,” says Lloyd, “everything will make more sense if you allow me to explain it in my own good time.”

“Trusting you is starting to seem like a bad idea,” Twinker says.

“Although thanks for the sandwiches–
and the beer
…” says Gordon.

“Yeah, that was cool,” Skip chips in.

Gordon is suddenly sporting a hard-on that seems determined to swashbuckle its way right out of his pants. But at the same time, he feels vaguely depressed.
Weird.

Up ahead, in the dimming twilight, the big wooden sign for the Esalen Institute looms on their left. Lloyd switches on the Bentley’s headlights and deliberately drives right past it.

“Hey, you just passed Esalen!” Jimmy complains from the backseat.

“Right,” Lloyd says with a determined jut of his double chin. “I want this choice to be made of your own free volition. I’m not taking anyone there if they don’t want to go.”

“Turn the car around. Let’s just get there already,” Gordon says. He intuitively knows it’s the right decision.

“No,” says Twinker, suddenly sounding very sober. “I want to know more about The Nine first. Keep driving.”

The Bentley continues heading north. “I’ll try to make this as brief as possible,” Lloyd says, “since we’re already running late. As I was telling you, Andrija Puharich came to believe The Nine were invisibly directing the course of his life. With their assistance he started patenting and marketing inventions through a company he’d set up called the Intelectron Corporation, modeling himself after another eccentric but far more famous Serbian-American, the brilliant inventor, Nikola Tesla. Puharich’s life for the next twenty years became a strange mixture of science and shamanism. He traveled to Hawaii and became the first white man to be admitted into the Kahuna priesthood. He invented a tooth implant that could transmit radio waves along a person’s facial nerves, allowing deaf people to hear–as well as providing a method for ethereal voices to be received by fake clairvoyants and gullible mediums, if you catch my meaning…. He led expeditions to Brazil to study a celebrated psychic surgeon named Arigó who operated on his patients with a rusty knife–even removing brain tumors that way. He became deeply involved in researching Extremely Low Frequency (or ELF) waves that could affect our minds and behavioral patterns (at 8-hertz he believed we could ‘tune in to the sun’ and dematerialize nuclear bombs). Somewhere along the way, he also became a master hypnotist. And then he met Uri Geller.”

“And the CIA picked up the tab for all this crazy shit?” asks Gordon.

“More likely than not,” Lloyd replies. “You can see how it all could be filed under the general category of Mind Control, can’t you?”

“I guess so, yeah.”

“You’re still not telling us how The Nine took over Esalen,” Twinker gripes.

“The Nine ‘took over’ exactly
nada
,” says Lloyd, irked. “But with the passing of time, more and more of Puharich’s acquaintances began channeling The Nine–including Uri Geller. It went something like this: Puharich hypnotized Geller to ostensibly discover the source of his psychic abilities. Geller obligingly began to channel SPECTRA–the aforementioned conscious computer aboard a spaceship orbiting Earth. But then Puharich suggested there might be a connection between SPECTRA and The Nine. Lo and behold, under the influence of hypnosis, SPECTRA readily agreed with him! The Nine then came online and ‘confessed’ that they’d programmed Uri with his psychic abilities as a child, when he’d stumbled across their spaceship in a deserted Arabic garden in Tel Aviv.”