The Stargate Conspiracy (36 page)

Puharich himself undoubtedly believed absolutely in psychic abilities. Significantly, it appears that from quite early in his career — as described in his book
The Sacred Mushroom
— he was fascinated by the ancient Egyptian religion of Heliopolis and the possibility of contacting the gods of the Great Ennead directly. On balance, it would seem that Puharich
did
believe that such communication was at least possible, although the means of reaching extraterrestrial gods were fraught with problems. The message could become scrambled by inner ‘noise’ or contaminated by the medium’s personal hopes and fears. But it seems that Puharich believed that it was possible to open the stargate, allowing the extraterrestrial gods to enter our dimension, as demonstrated in his use of the Space Kids to explore the idea of contact. Ira Einhorn told us that Puharich was obsessed with the space gods, because he thought that the world was in a mess and that its only hope was help from outside, from higher intelligences. Einhorn himself has no doubt that the Nine are real, objective entities, but he does not believe they are who they claim to be. He often argued with Puharich about his eagerness to take orders from them; it was their major point of disagreement.
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Was it Puharich’s own idea to try to contact the space gods, or did it come from his superiors in the intelligence community? Senior CIA (and other) operatives may well have taken the possibility of extraterrestrial contact seriously enough to explore ways of opening a stargate. Certainly, intelligence agencies around the world were aware of the potential of psychic abilities and were in possession of abundant data that suggested strongly that shamanic-style skills successfully invite contactee-type experiences.

An example of this involved a spate of weird phenomena that erupted after a series of not particularly successful experiments with Uri Geller at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California - one of the leading US nuclear weapons research centres — in 1974 and 1975.
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The Lawrence Livermore researchers were concerned that if his abilities were genuine they could potentially threaten the operation of nuclear missiles - could he somehow trigger a warhead, for example, or interfere with a missile’s guidance system? The researchers wanted to establish whether psychokinesis really existed, and if so, how effective it was, and what could be done to protect against it.

A series of tests were carried out with Geller (while keeping him well away from the main research centre, just in case). According to Jim Schnabel, they convinced them that psychokinesis was not powerful or controllable enough to pose a serious risk to their nuclear arsenal. But even so, the experiments seemed to act as an ‘Open Sesame’ to a startling show of spin-off phenomena. On one occasion, a metallic voice appeared on an audiotape during one of the tests, apparently speaking a sequence of random words. CIA analyst Christopher ‘Kit’ Green - who appears under the pseudonym ‘Richard Kennett’ in Schnabel’s book — was then working on the CIA remote-viewing project at SRI and also monitoring their experiments with Geller. He subsequently realised that the voice was actually giving the code name of a top-secret CIA project totally unconnected with the Geller experiments.

More disturbingly, over the weeks that followed the tests, the physicists began to experience strange apparitions, both at home and in the laboratory, including miniature ‘flying saucers’ and strange animals such as huge, ravenlike birds — ‘fantastic animals from the ecstatic lore of shamans’, as Jim Schnabel calls them.
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These were also seen by members of the physicists’ families. It is as if Lawrence Livermore Laboratories had suddenly become haunted: one physicist even received a telephone call from the metallic voice. Eventually these weird events stopped, as if a temporary rip in the veil between dimensions had been abruptly zipped up again. In addition, several participants in the Pentagon/CIA’s remote-viewing programmes experienced paranormal events outside of office hours, and also had apparent extraterrestrial contact, especially in connection with Mars.

These events, together with Puharich’s belief in the reality of extraterrestrial contact, raise the serious possibility that the CIA and other agencies were fully aware of the ‘otherworldly’ element attached to their psychic spying programmes, in which apparently nonhuman entities ‘came through’. After all, when a top nuclear weapons facility becomes ‘haunted’ and its hard-headed and sceptical scientists are so harassed by the weirdness that several of them come close to a nervous breakdown, such bizarre phenomena have to be taken seriously. They would want to know more about such things - if only to eliminate them from their psi-spy research, but, given the entities’ inside knowledge of top-secret code names, they would also want to know if a more controlled kind of contact could be made with such useful intelligences and if some kind of mutually beneficial dialogue could be set up. It would make sense: if the Nine really were space gods, it is not hard to imagine the advantages of having them on the side of the United States during the Cold War, for example, or as allies during any period of history.

An article by researcher Alex Constantine quotes Rod Lewis of the American Federation of Scientists on the remote viewers ‘dealing with the demonic realm’, explaining: ‘It’s a Greek word for “disembodied intelligence”. Apparently it’s something they take very seriously, and unfortunately they’re trying to use it for military purposes.’
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Many of the people involved with the Nine seem predisposed towards the idea of extraterrestrial contact, often because of their own prior experiences, for example, as mediums. And one objective of the Nine experiment appears to have been to test the possibility and controllability of such contact.

It is clear that the belief in extraterrestrial contact was a major thread running through the avant-garde work of various organisations discussed above - and that it was taken very seriously by certain key figures, one of whom was Stanislav Grof, the Czechoslovakian psychiatrist who had researched the effects of LSD in Prague, before being invited to the United States to continue his work in 1965. Grof worked at several clinics and medical research centres, and wrote
Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observataons from LSD Research.
It was written at, and published by, the Esalen Institute in 1975.

Grof studied the whole range of experiences under the influence of LSD, including a number of ‘paranormal’ effects reported by his subjects such as apparent memories of past lives, precognition, clairvoyance and mystical experiences. Significantly, they also included out-of-body experiences and what used to be known as ‘travelling clairvoyance’, but which is now called remote viewing. He also discovered many experiences of ‘spirit guides’ or other helpful and apparently superior entities, including those claiming to be extraterrestrials.
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This often extended beyond mere academic interest. Many of these researchers claimed personal contact themselves. For example, Jack Sarfatti says that in 1952, when he was fourteen, he received a telephone call in which a machinelike voice announced that it was a conscious computer located on a spaceship from the future. It went on to say that Sarfatti had been chosen as ‘one of four hundred bright receptive minds’, and that he would begin to ‘link up’ with the others in twenty years’ time.
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As prophesied by the voice, Sarfatti did indeed go on to become a gifted - if maverick — theoretical physicist. He has always been fascinated by the far reaches of scientific thinking and the more exotic aspects of quantum physics, such as the nature of time (he is a co-author of a major work called
Space-Time and Beyond
), the possibilities of faster-than-light travel and communication, and the relationship of human consciousness to quantum-level physics. He was the director of the Physics/Consciousness Research Group at the Esalen Institute and is currently developing the concept of ‘post-quantum physics’, which, he claims, can explain phenomena such as remote viewing. In a recent email to us he said:

Sarfatti’s interest in matters such as the nature of time is a direct result of the bizarre telephone call back in 1952. He believes he is to some extent still guided by his extraterrestrial contact. Could it be that nonhuman intelligences really are trying to influence the human race through individuals chosen during childhood? How else could ‘they’ know that Sarfatti would grow up to be an eminent physicist?

On the other hand, Sarfatti’s potential was also recognised by human agencies around the same time. According to his own account, around the time of the mysterious phone call he was selected for ‘an afternoon school of gifted kids’ tutored by one Walter Breen.
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This extra tuition included lectures on patriotism and ‘anti-communism’ by visitors from the Sandia Corporation, a major player in the US nuclear weapons research programme at that time. Breen arranged for Sarfatti to have a scholarship to Cornell University when he was just seventeen, writing a profile in which he said Sarfatti would make ‘revolutionary discoveries in the foundations of physics’.
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Breen echoed the futuristic computer’s assessment of Sarfatti’s vocation as a cutting-edge scientist.

Twenty years later, strange things did begin to happen around Sarfatti, but only after he had entered the heady world of the research organisations we have discussed. In 1973, he went to SRI to meet Brendan O‘Regan, with whom he had an intense seventeen-hour conversation, as a result of which he began to recall the full weirdness of his telephone experience of twenty-one years before for the first time. He subsequently became director of the Physics/Consciousness Research Group at Esalen (with funding from Werner Erhard and the Pentagon), spending time with a somewhat surreal assortment of gurus, psychics and catalysts, including Puharich, Whitmore, Geller and Einhorn, at the Turkey Farm at Ossining. Sarfatti was also called upon by Brendan O’Regan to organise the experiments into Geller’s abilities at Birkbeck College, London in 1975, when a huge range of startling paranormal phenomena were recorded. During this time, he was given a copy of Puharich’s
Uri,
and when his mother read its account of Geller and the Nine, she was reminded of the weird telephone phenomenon, except that, to Sarfatti’s great surprise, she remembered not one call, but a series of them over a period of three weeks.

Given this background, it is tempting to speculate that Sarfatti was part of a sinister,
X-Files-
type experiment in ‘programming’ children as part of some long-term government project. Sarfatti himself acknowledges the possibility, but thinks too much remains unexplained by this scenario. Tellingly, in a question-and-answer session on the Internet in March 1998 with one Mark Thornally, when asked whether Walter Breen could have stage-managed the phone call and computer voice, Sarfatti admitted that he could, then volunteered: ‘Andrija Puharich, who was in the Army at that time I think, would have been able to do it.’

Although acknowledging that Army scientists could have contrived the phone call, Sarfatti doubts that Breen or Puharich could have planned and organised the subsequent events that only began to unfold twenty years later. It is difficult to disagree. This is one of the most puzzling aspects of the whole story, also true of events surrounding the Nine. They could have been directed by intelligences from outer space or from the future - but involvement by government agencies invites suspicion. Yet again, certain elements simply cannot be explained if they were just psychological experiments by clandestine human agencies.

Other similarities between Sarfatti’s experience and the events surrounding the Nine are, of course, the dates. Both first occurred in 1952, but neither bore fruit until the early 1970s. (Sarfatti had no idea the Nine went back so far until we pointed it out.)

Many people have been impressed by the paranormal phenomena associated with the Nine, which often converts them to the cause. Another example of this happened to Saul Paul Sirag, the physicist who took over the Physics/Consciousness Research Group at Esalen after Sarfatti. He visited Ossining during the Geller communications, and was later present at Jenny O’Connor’s sessions at Esalen. Sirag records a hauntingly surreal story in which he asked Geller if it was possible for him to see Spectra. Geller replied that he only had to look into his eyes. He did so — and saw the Israeli’s head turn into a hawk’s.
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This story has a particular resonance because another person involved with the Puharich-Geller group at that time was Ray Stanford, who claimed extraterrestrial contact since 1954, and the beings he saw were also hawk-like.
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(In the 1950s Stanford was an associate of another controversial contactee, George Hunt Williamson, who was, in turn, a close colleague of the fascist channeller William Dudley Pelley.)

Hawks run through the Puharich story like wine through water: he himself claims to have been told by the Nine that he was the reincarnation of the hawk god Horus, and he often described how hawks regularly appeared around him and Geller during their travels in Israel and the United States, which he took as a sign of the Nine’s protection. (Incidentally, the Turkey Farm was in Hawkes Avenue, Ossining.)