For the teonanáctl mushroom experiment with Harry Stump, Puharich sought out a special witness, someone he believed would understand what it was that he was trying to accomplish. The person he chose was his friend Aldous Huxley, the famous author of the dystopian classic Brave New World. Like Puharich, Huxley was interested in the trance state as a means of gathering unseen information about the natural world. Huxley had studied and written extensively about shamanistic people, and he had also conducted a drug-induced trance experiment on himself, at his home in Los Angeles in 1953. Under the supervision of British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, Huxley had ingested four-tenths of a gram of mescaline, the principal hallucinogenic agent in peyote, and recorded the eight-hour experience on paper. The result was The Doors of Perception, published in 1954. A mere sixty-three pages long, the book met controversy and criticism, most notably from Huxley’s literary friends. Thomas Mann called it escapism. Christopher Isherwood labeled it a “deadly heresy.” Philosopher Martin Buber called Huxley’s taking drugs and writing about it an “illegitimate… fugitive flight” from reality. Jim Morrison named his band The Doors after reading it. The book has sold hundreds of thousands of copies and has never gone out of print.
Huxley arrived at the Round Table Foundation in August 1955. As a child in turn-of-the-century England, he suffered from an eye infection that left him practically blind for nearly three years. For the rest of his life, he was half-blind in one eye. Having been deprived of one of the five known senses made Aldous Huxley keenly interested in the idea of a sixth sense, he said. During his three-week visit, he wrote several letters. To his brother Julian he noted that he was staying at “a most beautiful place, where my young friend Dr. Puharich heads this foundation for research into ESP and the physical, chemical, and psychological means whereby the psi [psychic] faculties may be intensified.”
Huxley was intrigued by the odd mix of people present, whom he referred to as “the strange household assembled by Puharich [with] various psychics doing telepathic guessing remarkably well.” He wrote about “Mr. Narodny, the cockroach man, who is preparing experiments to test the effects of human telepathy on insects,” and he noted discord between “Alice Bouverie and Mrs. Puharich, behaving to one another in a conspicuously friendly way.” The foundation member he best related to, Huxley wrote, was Harry Stump, “the Dutch sculptor, who goes into trances in the Faraday cage and produces automatic scripts in Egyptian hieroglyphics.” The feeling was mutual between the two men. In an unpublished memoir, Harry Stump wrote that he and Huxley enjoyed “walking around the property, communicating without sound.”
According to Puharich’s notes, on August 7, 1955, Harry Stump was in the middle of a telepathy demonstration for Puharich and Huxley when he “slipped into a deep trance.” The “Egyptian persona” emerged, and Puharich decided it was time to drug Stump with the teonanáctl mushroom. The results were nothing close to what Puharich had hoped for. “Harry fell asleep briefly, then woke up abruptly,” noted Puharich. “He looked at Aldous and myself and weakly asked if I had given him some alcohol.” Stump appeared drunk and confused. The symptoms became alarming, with Stump “staggering around as though he were heavily intoxicated with alcohol.” Huxley called out for Puharich to give Stump the antidote. “While I busied myself with drawing some atropine into a syringe, Aldous watched him closely,” Puharich wrote. But by the time the antidote was ready Stump had calmed down, and Puharich decided to go ahead and test him to see whether enhanced psychic functioning could be achieved.
Puharich started with an experiment he called sightless reading. He placed a small, suitcase-sized box draped in fabric on the table between Huxley and Stump. Inside the box numerous items were concealed. According to Puharich, Stump correctly identified the hidden items in record time. But if Puharich was hoping for contact with the supernatural, none came. Huxley now insisted to Puharich that drugging Stump without his knowledge was unethical and that it was time to give Stump a shot of the antidote. When Puharich did, Stump’s trance state quickly wore off. Upon returning to a normal state of consciousness, Stump appeared not to remember being in the hypnotic state.
Huxley returned to California. Harry Stump’s psychic powers began to wane. The Egyptian persona rarely appeared. The following month, on September 8, 1955, according to Puharich, Stump went down to the seashore to fish and went into a trance for the last time on record. A foundation member found him sitting on the beach, staring out at the sea. He’d apparently located a piece of charcoal and scrawled Egyptian hieroglyphics on the coastal rocks. Puharich said he had the message translated by a professor of Egyptology at Brown University, and that it read: “Eternity is Watching. The Doors are opened for the soul. All is well.” The accuracy of this is anyone’s guess; Puharich is the only source.
But all was not well at the Round Table Foundation. Jinny Puharich’s mental health was on a downward spiral again. Puharich accepted an invitation from his benefactors Joyce and Zlatko Balokovic to move Jinny into their private guesthouse, hoping that the solitude might do her some good. But her condition worsened, and in March 1956 she was sent to live with her parents in Madison, Wisconsin, where her father was a chief of staff at a local hospital. Alice Bouverie arranged for a twenty-two-year-old Dutch au pair named Bep Hermans to come take care of the Puharichs’ three young children, who remained at Warrenton. Hermans arrived in late March 1955, and almost immediately Puharich began having an affair with her. Meanwhile, Harry Stump became depressed. His trance powers now vanished. He tried drawing hieroglyphs in a waking state but could not. His traditional sculpture and painting work suffered under his gloomy mood.
During a visit around this time, one of Puharich’s investors, the department store tycoon Henry Belk, happened upon a Paris Match magazine article that gave him an idea. The article profiled a forty-seven-year-old former house painter and World War II concentration camp survivor named Peter Hurkos who was taking Europe by storm with his psychic abilities. Hurkos had recently solved cases for Scotland Yard and the Paris metro police, wrote Paris Match. Fifteen years before, in July 1941, Hurkos had been painting a building in The Hague when he fell off a third-floor balcony and suffered a traumatic brain injury. For three days Hurkos lay in the hospital in a coma; when he woke up, he possessed extrasensory perception, he said. Hurkos’s specialty was psychometry, the act of divining information from an object through touch. Belk’s idea was to bring Hurkos to the Round Table Foundation and test him in the lab. In the fall of 1956 Peter Hurkos arrived at the Warrenton estate.
“Hurkos gave Harry [Stump] a confidence he never had before,” the former au pair, Bep Hermans, recalled. “Whereas Harry was quiet in nature, Peter was loud and rambunctious.” Hurkos was a huge man, six-foot-three and full of vitality. “He was always good-humored, loved to tell jokes, especially dirty ones. In spite of their conflicting natures, Peter and Harry got along famously and forged a great telepathic team,” Hermans remembered. She witnessed Hurkos’s psychometric talents and was amazed by them. While blindfolded, “when given an object, like a watch or a ring, he could tell in great detail about the person to whom the object belonged.”
Despite the personnel challenges, work at the Round Table Foundation was on the upswing. Money flowed into the foundation’s treasury. A second Faraday cage was built. Puharich’s ESP experiments with Hurkos and Stump delivered “groundbreaking results,” wrote a visiting reporter from Parade magazine. The foundation hired two new scientists and a researcher. An administrative assistant wrote quarterly progress reports. Then—betrayal. In the spring of 1956 Puharich learned that the CIA had bypassed him and contacted the banker and mushroom hunter Gordon Wasson directly, and had infiltrated his group. Puharich was furious and became paranoid, Bep Hermans recalls. “He felt the CIA was after his research.”
Since Puharich’s departure from the Army Chemical Center, the CIA had not let up in its quest to locate an ESP-enhancing drug. Still posing as a professor, and with $2,000 in financial inc
entive, James Moore had finally managed to persuade Gordon Wasson to take him along on a mushroom-hunting expedition. An official CIA invoice for MKULTRA Subproject 58, dated March 21, 1956, indicated payment “in support of an expedition… for the purpose of studying and collecting hallucinogenic species of mushrooms of interest.” The expedition to the secret ravine in Oaxaca where the teonanáctl mushrooms grow “will take place between June and July 1956.” By the time Puharich found out about the CIA’s involvement, the expedition was well under way.
Ironically, the mission proved to be a traumatic experience for the CIA’s Dr. Moore. “He was like a landlubber at sea,” Gordon Wasson later recalled. “He got sick to his stomach and hated it all.” At one point, the group’s small airplane was deemed too heavy for flight and had to make an unscheduled stop in order to lighten its load. The pilot decided to leave Moore roadside, in the care of a group of local Indians, promising to come back for him. The pilot did eventually return, but by then Moore had developed diarrhea and a bad case of nerves. “Our relationship deteriorated,” Wasson recalled. Moore managed to fulfill his CIA mandate and returned from Mexico with a bag of teonanáctl mushrooms for the Agency to analyze in its lab. The Director of MKULTRA, Sidney Gottlieb, expressed approval. From these mushrooms, Gottlieb wrote, the Agency could conceivably create “a completely new chemical agent,” provided the hallucinogen could “remain an Agency secret.”
This was wishful thinking on the part of the CIA. After Wasson returned from the expedition, he struck a publishing deal with Life magazine and authored a twelve-page account of the experience under the heading “Seeking the Magic Mushroom.” Wasson left out any mention of the CIA’s involvement but highlighted the part about the mushroom’s alleged ability to access and enhance ESP. “The Indians believe that the mushroom holds the key to what we call extrasensory perception,” Wasson wrote. Like an oracle, the mushroom could answer questions about the future and the unknown. “One may consult the mushroom about a stolen donkey and learn where it will be found and who took it,” Wasson asserted, and if a person’s loved one had disappeared, the mushroom eater “will report if [that person] still lives or is dead, whether he is in jail, married, in trouble or prosperous.” Seeing as how this was the first mushroom trip recounted by a white man, someone who just happened to be a vice president at the J.P. Morgan & Co. investment bank, the article caused a sensation, rendering null and void the CIA’s desire to keep the drug a secret psychic weapon under military intelligence control. Pleasure seekers flocked to Mexico to eat God’s flesh.
At the Round Table Foundation in Maine, things had taken a dark turn as drugs began to take hold. When Wasson returned from his expedition, he sent Puharich another package of hallucinogenic mushrooms. Puharich began regularly dosing Peter Hurkos with the drug, using himself as the so-called control. Hurkos became fixated on outer space and took to roaming around the estate late at night, scanning the sky. One night, he said he saw a flying saucer touch down on Owl’s Head beach. It did not take long for the extraterrestrials to appear, described by Hurkos as “very small [and] very old, with young bodies… No word was spoken… They just looked at me.” Then Hurkos started seeing ghosts and having premonitions.
According to a journal entry dated July 17, 1956, Hurkos had ventured down to the Warrenton kitchen to make himself a sandwich and a pot of coffee, and was returning to his room upstairs when he saw a poltergeist. “As it went by me, I could feel a cold breeze on my face,” Hurkos said. “I was so frightened, I spilled the coffee all over the tray.” The following morning, the telephone rang. It was Alice Bouverie’s son calling with tragic news. His mother had unexpectedly died the night before, in her sleep.
Puharich fell apart. Alice Astor Bouverie was dead, his financial lifeline severed. He was now convinced that ghosts were real. “He became paranoid about who he could trust,” Bep Hermans recalls. “He took up drinking and smoking and had outbursts of anger and distrust.” Harry Stump quit, and Puharich and Hurkos packed their bags and left for Mexico, determined to locate more of God’s flesh.
Puharich was like a cat with nine lives. He and Hurkos returned from Mexico with more tales and more mushrooms. And yet through all of it, Puharich somehow managed to keep the foundation’s coffers full. By spring 1957, the Round Table Foundation was again bustling with activity, with more than a dozen scientists and psychics in residence at the Warrenton estate. Experiments included telepathy, map dowsing, palmistry, and eyeless sight.
Then, on August 27, 1957, yet another remarkable event occurred, this one grounded in reality. Two Pentagon employees arrived at the foundation for a visit, and the shadowy life of Dr. Andrija Puharich took a perplexing new turn. Documents from Puharich’s FBI file reveal that the government agents were from the Department of Defense. One was Dr. Harvey E. Savely, director of the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). The second man, William J. Frye, was head of biophysics research at the Army Laboratory at the University of Illinois. The men stayed at Warrenton for two nights and three days, holding private discussions with Puharich. One month later, the Round Table Foundation abruptly shut down.
Puharich and Bep Hermans, now officially a couple, moved briefly to New York City, then to California. A Freedom of Information Act request, granted in 2015, reveals that Puharich was hired by the U.S. Army to work as a “consultant on mushroom toxicology” at the Fort Ord Station Hospital Laboratory in Monterey, California. Jinny Puharich remained in Wisconsin, her mental health in steep decline. In late 1957 she agreed to a divorce. On December 20, 1958, Andrija and Bep were married in Las Vegas, en route to Fort Ord. The following month, on January 24, 1959, Virginia Jackson Puharich walked out onto the roof of the seven-story Methodist Hospital where her father served as chief and leapt to her death.
Andrija Puharich grew his hair long and put on fifty pounds. He located a wealthy new benefactor to finance his ongoing ESP research on a private ranch located ten miles south of the Army base in Carmel Valley. He started taking more drugs. Whereas in Maine he had been a maverick among East Coast conservatives, with their straitlaced social mores, in California there were no such societal bounds. Bep Hermans recalls what life was like in Carmel during those strange days. “One time, when Andrija and Paul [his benefactor] had organized a mushroom binge for a select group of people, I was invited to participate as an observer and to take notes. Entering the room where they had gathered, I saw that the party was already in full swing. I was startled. Without any shame, a middle-aged couple—both psychiatrists—was copulating wildly. The woman’s legs thrashed in the air while she shouted that love would save the world from destruction. Paul was violently ill, throwing up all over the place. Another man, whom I had never seen before, was singing an aria from the opera Aida.” Hermans, now pregnant with their first child, threatened to leave if Puharich didn’t pull it together.
Puharich ignored his wife’s wishes and embarked on another mushroom hunting trip, this time to the remote village of Juquila, Oaxaca, two hundred miles south of Mexico City. The original expedition was made up of nine people, but after four weeks of violent illness everyone but Puharich returned. Puharich had pushed on alone, his wife was told, determined to find a witch doctor to test for divinatory powers. A Freedom of Information Act request granted in 2015 reveals that the trip was sponsored by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps. A second trip, the following year, was financed by the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Washington. For that effort, Puharich led a fourteen-man scientific expedition back to Juquila, this time with an ABC camera crew filming the journey for the paranormal-based television show One Step Beyond.
By 1961, Bep, now pregnant with their second child, gave her husband an ultimatum: he had three months to figure out a way to settle down or else she’d leave him and take the couple’s children back to Europe with her. “It was a complete surprise when he announced one evening in May [1961] that a group of New York businessmen had invested $300,000 in [some] hearing aid r
esearch” he was working on, she said. Declassified documents reveal that the financiers were not businessmen but officials from the Atomic Energy Commission, Medical Research Department. Puharich had sold them on an ESP research project he called “skin reading” but which the AEC identified as “skin as an organ of sensory communication beyond the tactile.”
With a new influx of cash, Puharich purchased a large house at 87 Hawkes Avenue in Ossining, Westchester County, and moved his family back to New York. With its ten bedrooms, multiple fireplaces, wraparound porch, and beautifully landscaped property, the Ossining home was a mini version of the Round Table Foundation. But gone were the wealthy benefactors dedicated to esoteric research unfettered by financial constraints. The U.S. government was a different kind of patron.
Puharich’s handler on the classified AEC contract was Paul S. Henshaw, a medical doctor who’d been involved with U.S. atomic weapons and nuclear energy programs since the Manhattan Project. Dr. Henshaw was interested in numerous aspects of Puharich’s ESP work related to unexplored areas of human biological potential. “If biologic memory involving information is stored at molecular levels in cells, then perhaps biologic communication can be transmitted and received by living things, through skin,” Henshaw wrote, citing Puharich’s proposal.