The Round Table’s work soon caught the attention of the New York Times. In the summer of 1951, the newspaper dispatched one of its most famous reporters to investigate. Arthur Krock, a Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist and the former Washington bureau chief, was impressed by what he saw at Puharich’s foundation. “General Foods seeks Puharich’s assistance in discovering the physiology of taste and the Guggenheim foundation has its eye on other projects,” Krock wrote, lending an air of credibility and intrigue to the secretive organization. Dr. Andrija Puharich was a “pragmatic dreamer,” Krock wrote, a true American public servant, whose “devotion to ideals [could be] the salvation of Governments as well as of men. The secrets he pursues concern extrasensory perception—the tangibles felt by man and beast that cannot be traced to any one of the five senses.” It was the fall of 1951, and ESP was being written about in the New York Times without contempt. Even more remarkable, Krock compared Puharich’s quest to that of Louis Pasteur, the French chemist and microbiologist whose contributions to germ theory changed medicine and who discovered the principle of vaccination. Krock was also the first person on record to reveal that Puharich was working with the U.S. government, specifically with the Navy.
At the Pentagon, interest in Dr. Puharich’s esoteric work was on the rise. In the summer of 1952, Lieutenant Colonel John B. “Jack” Stanley of the Army’s Office of the Chief of Psychological Warfare traveled to Maine to meet with Puharich. The government’s new psyops organization, created only months before, had been designed to counter psychological warfare threats from communist forces working in the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea. Declassified records reveal that Stanley also served as the Army liaison to the CIA. While Puharich may have been antiestablishment in his scientific theories, he was conservative when it came to honoring security agreements with the federal government. All he ever publicly stated about this meeting was that Colonel Stanley was “quite interested in a device which we had been developing in order to increase the power of extrasensory perception.” Nothing more.
But so much more was going on behind closed doors, in black programs and classified projects that would take decades to see the light of day. Three months later, on November 24, 1952, Puharich traveled to Washington, D.C., to deliver a classified briefing to the members of the Office of the Chief of Psychological Warfare. Then, just two weeks after his return to Maine, Puharich received a letter from the Army calling him back into military service. This was a major turning point in the life of Dr. Andrija Puharich. Many of his pursuits at the Round Table Foundation were esoteric and nonconformist, existing far outside the bounds of scientific oversight or stringent laboratory controls. “Beware the Establishment!” Paul De Kruif had warned. And yet here, now, Puharich was being called back into government service, and there was nothing he or any of his wealthy benefactors could do.
The very next week, a strange event occurred, one that Puharich would later attribute to fate, to some kind of a supernatural force beyond his control. With hindsight it was in this timeframe that Dr. Puharich’s life took a dangerous turn, one many ESP proponents fall victim to. Cognitive scientists and psychologists call it confirmation bias, or myside bias, the tendency to search for, interpret, or favor data that confirms a deeply held, preexisting belief.
As Puharich prepared to depart the Round Table Foundation on Army sabbatical, he traveled to New York City to attend a party for the Irish psychic Eileen Garrett. There, he met a Hindu scholar and mystic named Dr. D. G. Vinod, who was visiting America as part of a lecture series for the Rotary Club. “At that time, [Vinod] surprised me by asking permission to hold my right ring finger at the middle joint with his right thumb and index finger,” wrote Puharich. “He said that he used this form of contact with a person to read his past and his future.” Intrigued, Puharich listened. Dr. Vinod held Puharich’s finger this way for about a minute, “whistling between his teeth as though he were trying to find a pitch. He leaned back in his chair and for an hour, told my life story with utter precision, as though he were reading out of a book. His accuracy about the past was extraordinary,” Puharich wrote. Puharich was transfixed, smitten by one of the oldest forms of divination, chiromancy. (Whereas knowledge of the future is precognition, knowledge of the past that could not have been learned by normal means is called retrocognition.)
Puharich vowed to bring Dr. Vinod to the Round Table Foundation before he returned to the U.S. Army. On December 31, 1952, the two men flew in a small airplane from New York to Maine. They landed in Augusta, where Puharich’s administrator, a man named Henry Jackson, picked them up. “We drove over the country roads in the snow,” Puharich recalled, “chatting all the way.” When they arrived at the Warrenton estate, Dr. Vinod entered the great hall of the laboratory without saying a word or even taking off his winter coat. “Hank and I followed him,” Puharich later wrote, and when he sat down, “we realized he had gone into a trance.”
It was New Year’s Eve, and the estate’s main house was empty. Puharich and Jackson stared at Dr. Vinod, who remained silent, seated, and still. “At exactly 9:00 p.m. a deep sonorous voice came out of Vinod’s mouth, totally unlike his own high-pitched, soft voice with its distinctly Indian accent,” wrote Puharich. Jackson and Puharich scribbled notes, eager to create a record of what Vinod said. After ninety minutes of speech, Vinod emerged from his purported trance state, claiming to have no memory of what had just happened. Setting objectivity aside, Puharich decided that Dr. Vinod had channeled a supernatural force. When pressed for a name, Vinod identified the force as a group of entities called “the Nine Principles and Forces.”
Dr. Puharich summoned his wealthy benefactors and asked Dr. Vinod to again lead the group in a séance. Participants included Alice Bouverie, Marcella du Pont, and Ruth Forbes and Arthur M. Young (mathematician, philosopher, and the inventor of the Bell helicopter). During this session, the supernatural force allegedly reappeared to discuss a wide array of mystical concepts, Puharich wrote, from ESP and psychokinesis to the possibilities of teleportation and alchemy. The nine entities also referred to Einstein, Jesus, atomic weapons, and cosmic rays. In letters housed at the Library of Congress, Marcella du Pont refers to having participated in this séance with Dr. Vinod.
If Puharich’s wealthy benefactors saw the Hindu scholar’s performance as perhaps something mystical or metaphorical, Puharich took what Dr. Vinod said literally. The experience would begin to obsess him and to shape his research ideas. When Puharich started the Round Table Foundation in 1949, the premise of the Puharich Theory was that a mysterious, unknown energy force existed inside the human nervous system. Now, three years later, on the eve of his return to the Army, Puharich had convinced himself that this energy force was something outside the human body, some kind of extraterrestrial intelligence. Puharich had taken the concept of confirmation bias to an irrational extreme. If he were not about to begin two decades of work with the Department of Defense and the CIA, Dr. Andrija Puharich could easily be written off as a man of eccentric, illogical ideas. Instead he was headed on a lecture tour in service of the Pentagon, discussing his hypothesis in a series of classified military and intelligence community briefings throughout America, from Maryland to Texas.
He would pursue this hypothesis to the gates of death.
CHAPTER THREE
Skeptics, Charlatans, and the U.S. Army
In 1952, with the publication of the book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, science writer Martin Gardner single-handedly jump-started the modern scientific skepticism movement. The skeptics’ goal, Gardner declared, was to expose cranks, crackpots, and charlatans in the modern age. “Since the bomb exploded over Hiroshima, the prestige of science in the United States has mushroomed like an atomic cloud,” Gardner wrote in praise of science. “More students than ever before are choosing some branch of science for their careers. Military budgets earmarked for scientific research have never been so fantastically huge.” On the downside, he lamented, the “less i
nformed general public” and “untold numbers of middle-aged housewives” were falling for pseudoscience, “sensational discoveries and quick panaceas. German quasi science paralleled the rise of Hitler,” Gardner warned.
Gardner did not mention Dr. Puharich in his book; he had no way of knowing that the Defense Department had hired the neurobiologist to deliver classified lectures on ESP to high-ranking officials at the Pentagon. Instead, the book surveyed a group of popular beliefs parading as science, including the Flat Earth Doctrine of Wilber Glenn Voliva, the World Ice Theory of Hanns Hörbiger, and Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard. The book reintroduced readers to the eighteenth-century term “pseudoscience” (originally used to describe alchemy, the magic-based, medieval forerunner of chemistry), which Gardner said aptly described a collection of beliefs not based on the scientific method, and therefore not science.
Since the seventeenth century the scientific method has remained a pillar of research science, a body of techniques used and relied upon for investigating phenomena. There are five basic steps in the scientific method: observation, hypothesis, prediction, experimentation, and conclusion. In the scientific method, if an experiment is not repeatable, then the original hypothesis must be refined, altered, expanded, or rejected. Herein lies the central organizing claim against ESP experiments, a claim that would continue to plague military scientists working in the milieu for decades to come. Repeatability of an experiment is central to the scientific method. Skeptics reject claims that ESP and PK are so-called fickle phenomena.
James Bank “J.B.” Rhine, the father of modern American ESP experiments, first popularized ESP in the 1920s. Inside his Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory, Rhine and his wife, Louisa, conducted tens of thousands of ESP tests, mostly using Zener cards and dice. The study of ESP became so fashionable that by the 1940s, Rhine’s work was included in the Psychology 101 course at Harvard University. But in 1952, Martin Gardner devoted the last chapter of Fads and Fallacies to debunking Rhine’s work, which he concluded was the product of “an enormous self-deception.”
Important to this story are three claims Gardner leveled against Rhine’s research and ESP research in general. They were 1) loose laboratory controls; 2) the skewing of data; and 3) the premise that the attitude of the scientist conducting the experiment can negatively influence the subject or psychic. Claim three, Gardner noted, always seemed to be used by psychic researchers to bolster an argument for the mercurial nature of the phenomena. To borrow from Dr. Gertrude Schmeidler’s concept of sheep and goats, psychic researchers often claimed that psychics were negatively impacted by the presence of goats (nonbelievers). Gardner quoted J. B. Rhine to make his point. “The subtlest influences seem to disturb the operation of these [psychic] abilities,” Rhine wrote in a research paper published in 1949. “If the scientist is a disbeliever it will upset the delicate operation of the subject’s [psychic] abilities.” In the scientific method, there was no room for this interpretation. Instead, Gardner concluded, “ESP and PK can be found only when the experiments are relatively careless, and supervised by experimenters who are firm believers.” This is not science, he said. It is merely a scientist convincing himself of a deeply held, quasi-science belief.
What Martin Gardner did not know was that J. B. Rhine, like Puharich, was working on numerous classified ESP research programs with the Department of Defense at the very time the public was reading Gardner’s book. Declassified documents reveal that in 1952 the Army initiated a secret program with Rhine’s Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory involving ESP and animals. Army commanders wondered, “Could dogs locate land mines buried underwater, under conditions that gave no normal sensory clues?” After forty-eight tests carried out on a beach in Northern California, scientists at the Engineering Research & Development Laboratories at Fort Belvoir initially expressed surprise. “There is [presently] no known way in which the dogs could have located the under-water mines except by extrasensory perception,” the Army’s scientists concluded. But a second set of eighty-seven trials delivered results shown to be “explainable by chance.” And a three-day follow-on program proved “an utter failure,” with a “rather conspicuous refusal of the dogs to alert.”
Still, the mixed results of the dog program led to additional Army research programs, also overseen by Rhine. In an effort to study “The Phenomenon of Homing in Pigeons,” Rhine led a joint pilot experiment with the world’s leading ornithologist, Dr. Gustav Kramer of the Max Planck Institute in Germany. The client was the U.S. Army Signal Corps Pigeon Center at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. Declassified documents indicate that the central question being asked in this program was “How does the homing pigeon do it?” How does the bird find its way home over extremely long distances? And “Why do some pigeons get lost?” Kramer, Rhine, and a team of researchers spent two months working on the problem, only to conclude that “it is not known how the pigeon does it.” The Army’s response was patience and more experimentation: “cracking Mother Nature’s mysteries, which evolved over millions of years,” would take time, Army scientists wrote. (In 2017, the mystery of homing in pigeons remains unsolved. There is still no general theory agreed upon by ornithologists.)
Rhine’s third animal ESP research program with the Defense Department involved domestic cats. This study was conducted by Dr. Karlis Osis, a Latvian-born PhD whose area of expertise was deathbed visions. In the 1940s, Dr. Osis spent four years traveling across America and northern India interviewing thousands of doctors and nurses whose patients said they’d experienced apparitions shortly before they died. After completing his study, Osis hypothesized that the Indian patients, whose belief system allows for reincarnation, were far more likely to experience visions before death than the American patients, whose belief system more likely did not support this doctrine.
The cat experiment was designed to determine whether man could communicate telepathically with a cat. Two dishes of food were set down, the goal being an attempt to mentally direct a cat to a specific dish. “In the first [experiment] the effort was made by the experimenter to influence the cat,” reads the report. After two hundred trials, Rhine determined that Dr. Osis’s results were “very elusive and delicate… not spectacular.” Still, Rhine encouraged his Defense Department partners not to give up on ESP. “There is a wide range of military uses of basic [research] programs,” Rhine wrote, “not only in intelligence but in other applications [and] capacities in men and animals under the heading of extrasensory perception.”
As for Dr. Andrija Puharich, removed from the utopian conditions at the Round Table Foundation in Maine, Defense Department work was a shock. In late January 1953, he traveled to San Antonio to deliver a classified briefing on extrasensory perception to officers with the Medical Field Service School of the U.S. Air Force. In February, he traveled to Washington, D.C., to the Pentagon, where he delivered a second briefing to the Advisory Group on Psychological Warfare and Unconventional Warfare. Declassified CIA and Defense Department documents confirm that these meetings took place, though further details remain lost or classified. In March 1953, Dr. Puharich arrived at the Army Chemical Center in Edgewood, Maryland, where he would remain for the next two years.
What is known is that at Edgewood, Puharich ran the post dispensary, overseeing soldiers’ general heath. In nearby laboratories, Army scientists worked on a variety of classified efforts to weaponize chemical agents that could degrade or alter human behavior and perception. Puharich was cleared for at least one of these programs. Declassified documents indicate that he worked on a research project described as an effort “to locate a drug that might enhance ESP.” Like the CIA’s quest for a truth serum to make captured enemy spies talk, the Army wanted a drug to turn ESP on and off like a light switch.
In program discussions with Army supervisors, Puharich was challenged “to find [a] drug that could bring out this [ESP] ability, to allow normal people to turn it on and off at will.” It is not known whether or not he was privy to the CIA’s
ESP programs. Declassified documents indicate that it was around this time that the CIA gave its hallucinogenic mushroom program a new code name. From now on it would be called MKULTRA Subproject 58.
One thing is clear from Andrija Puharich’s journals. It did not take long for him to become discontented with Army life. He missed the Round Table Foundation, its esoteric work, its camaraderie, and its spirit of nonconformism. The Army was rigid and conventional, always following the chain of command. Puharich missed his wealthy, eccentric friends, whose lives were unfettered by financial restraint. Adding turmoil to his situation, Puharich had a personal secret to conceal. His wife suffered from severe depression, and her symptoms were getting worse. Puharich feared that Jinny was mentally ill. Then, on June 17, 1954, fifteen months into his Army contract, Puharich received a telephone call from Alice Bouverie that would soon offer him a way out of Army life. An incident had happened the night before, Bouverie said, during a dinner party at her New York City residence. She’d found a channeler with powers similar to those of Dr. Vinod. The man’s name was Harry Stump, and he was a sculptor from Holland. Puharich had met him at a dinner party at Alice Bouverie’s house a few months before and remembered him; he’d demonstrated mental telepathy and other forms of extrasensory perception for the guests.
“He and his [girlfriend] were here for dinner last night,” Bouverie told Puharich. “Being a sculptor, I thought he’d be interested in some of my pieces.” Bouverie was referring to the collection of museum-quality jewelry she’d inherited from her late father. When handed a 3,400-year-old scarab-shaped necklace engraved with Egyptian hieroglyphs, Stump had “staggered around the room a bit, and fell into a chair.” Worried that the sculptor was having an epileptic fit, Bouverie told Puharich she had rushed to the kitchen to get Stump a glass of water while the other dinner party guests tended to him. “When I got back he was sitting rigidly upright in the chair and staring wildly into the distance,” she said. “He asked for a paper and pencil, and began to draw Egyptian hieroglyphs.”