It was a radical idea in 1961, with the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA just eight years old. In sixty years time, this kind of hypothesis would be far more commonplace but in 1971 it was inconceivable to most professionals. Still, Henshaw arranged for the AEC to finance Puharich’s radical research idea, making no up-front claims as to the results. “Because of [the] newness of the claims being made by Puharich, the writer doubts the validity,” Henshaw observed. Yet after working with the eccentric neurobiologist on an experiment, Henshaw became convinced that Puharich’s results were legitimate. Declassified documents indicate the experiment involved two deaf women, one age sixteen and one age thirty-six. Both women could read lips but neither of them could hear sounds. In his laboratory, Puharich played musical notes for the test subjects and, according to physiology tests, neither of them registered hearing sound. But after Puharich attached electrodes to the test subjects’ skin, in a predetermined location near the jaw, when musical notes were sounded, the women could seemingly hear. Indeed, it appeared that biological communication could be transmitted and received by humans, through skin.
There was a hitch. Henshaw advised his AEC colleagues that he had no way to certify the experiments against fraud. “The women could have been cued,” he wrote, “possibly part of some financial scheme.” To solve this issue, Henshaw requested authorization to bring his own deaf person into Puharich’s lab, someone Henshaw knew personally and was certain was deaf. Puharich agreed, the AEC provided funds, and Henshaw brought to Puharich’s lab a deaf man named Robert Case (the son of a colleague who happened to be president of Boston University, he wrote). With Case as Puharich’s test subject, Henshaw became convinced. “Based on demonstration, this doctor is no longer skeptical,” Henshaw wrote. “It is biologically possible for people to hear with their skin.” The AEC then provided Puharich with a new round of funding. America’s nuclear weapons agency was “interested in phenomena of how the skin, under certain conditions, can function like an ear.”
Andrija Puharich was like a sphinx, an enigmatic and inscrutable person. Mysterious, unreadable, impossible to fully comprehend. He was full of inventions and ideas that were far ahead of his time. And yet as fascinating as this concept of skin hearing is, it is equally difficult to discern why the Atomic Energy Commission was pursuing it. Further documentation on Puharich’s work remains classified. In the years that followed, from his laboratory in Ossining, Andrija Puharich continued to work on secret government contracts involving anomalous mental phenomena. These included assignments from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Biotechnology and Human Research Office and from the Air Force Systems Command, Rome Air Development Center. With the Dutch psychic Peter Hurkos, he traveled to the Sixth Naval District Personnel Conference in Charleston, South Carolina, to demonstrate ESP and psychometry (token object reading) to submariners.
But government-sponsored research could hold Puharich’s attention only for so long. He was much more interested in quasi-science pursuits. In early 1963 his longtime financier, Henry Belk, arrived at the Ossining estate with an enticing research proposition, this time centered in the jungles of Brazil. It involved a so-called psychic healer named Arigo who was reportedly able to perform major surgeries with a pocketknife, without anesthesia, without the need for stitches or antibiotics and without causing any pain. Puharich said he was in. Unwilling to tolerate this lifestyle any longer, Bep Hermans packed up the children and left for Europe. Belk and Puharich left for Brazil.
Over the next seven years Puharich shuttled between Ossining and Brazil, sometimes with Belk, sometimes without. Convinced that Arigo’s psychic surgeries were authentic, Puharich studied the controversial faith healer to the point of obsession, documenting his “surgeries” on 8mm film. Determined to get one of his military clients interested in sponsoring his Arigo research, Puharich wrote numerous proposals outlining the potential “for psychic healing on the battlefield.” No government sponsor took the bait, but he persevered. One evening in Ossining in the summer of 1970, Puharich set pen to paper to define his future research goals. There were two. One was to develop a “theoretical basis for all extrasensory perception research.” The second was to search the world for supernatural healers like Arigo and “to test them under laboratory controls.” If only he could get government-sponsored data on these so-called “supernormals” his efforts would be legitimized.
In the fall of 1970 Andrija Puharich participated in a conference in Rye, New York, entitled “Exploring the Energy Fields of Man.” Also present at the conference were several of Puharich’s former colleagues from the Round Table Foundation, including Arthur Young and Charles T. Tart. CIA asset Dr. José Delgado, famous for his research in mind control through electrical stimulations of surgically implanted brain chips, was the featured dinner speaker. During the three-day event Puharich attended a lecture given by Itzhak Bentov, an Israeli rocket scientist, biomedical engineer, and author who wrote about “the mechanics of consciousness.” In his lecture, Bentov spoke of a twenty-three-year-old Israeli man purported to have extraordinary powers of psychokinesis and mental telepathy. During a demonstration at Israel’s University of Technology, this man had stopped and started broken watches, moved the needle on a stationary compass, and bent metal by thought alone, Bentov said.
Puharich was intrigued. After the lecture, he asked Bentov to share more information with him about this young man and his extraordinary powers. Puharich learned that the individual was a former Israeli paratrooper who lived in the port city of Jaffa, outside Tel Aviv. His name was Uri Geller. Now Puharich had a new obsession. If he could figure out a way to meet this man and test him under laboratory conditions, Puharich was confident he could secure a government research contract, he told Bentov. The agency Puharich had in mind for this endeavor was the CIA.
Not only was Puharich’s call taken seriously, it escalated to the top of the command structure, to the office of CIA director Richard Helms.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Soviet Threat
U.S. government military efforts to explore psychic phenomena remained mostly out of the public eye until December 1959, when an article about a secret government ESP program appeared in a French magazine called Constellation. The article, entitled “Thought Transfer, Weapon of War,” was written by journalist and former French resistance spy Jacques Bergier. Bergier had strong ties to the intelligence community and an interest in the supernatural. He was working on a book about prophecy, conspiracy, and the Nazi obsession with the occult.
In his article Bergier reported that ESP tests had been conducted aboard the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus, the year before. The Nautilus was also the first vessel to reach the North Pole, a feat accomplished by sailing under the polar ice cap. The purpose of the experiment, wrote Bergier, was to see whether long-distance telepathic communication could be achieved through barriers that included thousands of miles of seawater, thick polar ice, and the metal walls of a submarine. According to Bergier the ESP experiment involved simple sender-receiver trials using Zener cards. The sender was a sailor onboard the Nautilus, isolated inside a cabin during the experiments; the receiver was a technician on land, at the Westinghouse Friendship Laboratory on America’s East Coast. Bergier identified the man overseeing the joint-service ESP experiment as Air Force Colonel William H. Bowers, director of the Biological Department of the Air Force Research Institute. Bergier’s story stated that starting on July 25, 1958, the sender and the receiver communicated telepathically over a sixteen-day period.
Initially, “Thought Transfer, Weapon of War” garnered little attention outside France. Then, in February 1960, an expanded version of the story was published in France’s top science journal, Science et Vie, under the heading “The Secret of the Nautilus.” There were no authors identified, but editor Gérald Messadié said multiple sources had confirmed the story on condition of anonymity. J. B. Rhine of the Duke University Parapsychology
Laboratory, with whom the Defense Department had conducted ESP and animal experiments in the early 1950s, was identified as the civilian scientist assigned to the project, and it was reported that “about 75% of the telepathic tries are said to have been successful.” The Navy’s response was that the story was a hoax.
Whether the story was true or fabricated remains a debate. But in 1960, real-world consequences were a result. The most significant turn of events was how the Soviets used the news story to their strategic advantage. “In Leningrad the Nautilus reports went off like a depth charge,” states a declassified Defense Department document. “Soviet parapsychology research was actually stimulated by the 1960 French story concerning the US atomic submarine Nautilus.” Years later, the Soviets falsely claimed they had begun their ESP research programs only after they learned of the Nautilus tests from the French science journal. U.S. intelligence analysts monitoring the situation knew this was Soviet propaganda, as indicated in statements made in April 1960 by Dr. Leonid L. Vasilev, Russia’s leading ESP researcher. “We carried out extensive and until now complete unreported investigations under the Stalin regime,” Vasilev told a group of top scientists gathered in Leningrad. “Today the American Navy is testing telepathy on their atomic submarines. Soviet scientists conducted a great many successful telepathy tests over a quarter of a century ago. It’s urgent that we throw off our prejudices. We must plunge into the exploration of this vital field.”
The prejudices to which Vasilev referred could be summed up in the story of one man: Grigori Rasputin. In Soviet Russia, all twentieth-century forays into the mystical, magical, or supernatural were framed by his cautionary tale. Rasputin was a Russian monk said to have swayed men, women, and nations with the power of his eyes. In 1910, Czar Nicholas II took the mysterious faith healer from Siberia into his court after Rasputin allegedly stopped the bleeding in the czar’s hemophiliac son. From there, Rasputin began advising the czar on affairs of state, including battle plans during World War I. Rasputin’s ability to survive assassination attempts added to his mythical status, but eventually he was done away with by a group of unidentified conspirators who poisoned him (twice), shot him, and then drowned him in the icy Neva River as if to make sure he was dead. After the Communist Revolution of 1917, healers and sorcerers were outlawed by the new ruling party, and research into extrasensory perception went underground.
Marxist doctrine considered mysticism, like religion, an opiate of the masses; science and technology were productive forces. Determined to outpace the Americans in the field of ESP research, in a 1963 Kremlin edict the Soviet minister of defense, R. J. Malinosky, declared telepathy to be science-and technology-based, and ordered the creation of the Special Laboratory for Biocommunications Phenomena at the University of Leningrad. The man in charge was Dr. Leonid L. Vasilev. The goals of the laboratory, wrote a Defense Department analyst, were to establish “scientific proof of telepathic communications” and “to identify the nature of brain energy that produces it.” For this, a partnership was established with the Bekhterev Brain Institute in Moscow, in order to study and “to harness the possibilities of telepathic communication.” That the Soviets were looking at the brain as a secret weapon made the Defense Department take note. “The discovery of the energy underlying telepathic communication will be equivalent to the discovery of atomic energy,” proclaimed Vasilev. The prevailing hypothesis put forth by Russian scientists in 1963 was that “telepathic impulses are radiated along the lines of bits of information in a cybernetic system,” according to declassified documents.
It all sounded very scientific, which was the point. As in the 1963 edict, the Soviet nomenclature around ESP was rewritten to sound technical, thereby severing all ties with ESP’s occult past. Mental telepathy was now “long-distance biological signal transmission.” Psychokinesis was “non-ionizing, in particular electromagnetic, emissions from humans.” When the phrase “psychotronic weapons” started appearing under the rubric of biocommunications phenomena, U.S. intelligence analysts were baffled. Psychotronic weapons were described in Soviet science journals as electromagnetic weapons involving “the generation of high-penetrating emission of non-biological origin.”
At first it seemed as if the research was bifurcated, divided into separate disciplines. One branch involved traditional ESP and PK research programs, and another involved a radical new kind of weaponry that truly was high-technology based. Not until 2011 would the reason these two programs were originally entwined be revealed as originating in the Nazi SS Ahnenerbe documents captured by the Soviets at the end of the war. “Both the first and second programs had open [unclassified] and closed [classified] parts,” explains Professor Serge Kernbach, director of Cybertronica Research, Advanced Robotics and Environmental Science at the University of Stuttgart. Both programs stemmed from Ahnenerbe research on the “psycho-physiological effects of microwave emissions [that] were actively investigated during the NS [National Socialist] regime.” In the Soviet laboratories, if ESP and long-distance telepathic communications were proven to be scientific fact, they would be classified as augmented perception and cognition in humans. Electromagnetic weapons, which are designed to degrade or destroy perception and cognition in humans, would be useful countermeasures. To this end, defense minister Malinosky ordered the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, P. N. Demichev, to establish a special commission for “paranormal human abilities and biological radiation studies.” In 1962, one of the lethal Soviet electromagnetic weapons programs appears to have been moved out of the research laboratory and into the battlefield. The target was the U.S. embassy in Moscow.
In 1962, American military engineers were conducting a security sweep of the U.S. embassy in Moscow, searching for listening devices, when they discovered a strange electromagnetic signal. The first analysis by American scientists was that this was some new means of eavesdropping. But further investigation revealed that the Soviets were using multiple frequencies to transmit a series of widely fluctuating and irregularly patterned microwave beams aimed primarily at the upper floors of the central wing of the embassy, where the ambassador and top intelligence officials had their offices. The CIA had reason to believe that the Soviets were developing an electromagnetic weapon designed to adversely affect the behavior of embassy personnel.
Military engineers determined that the microwave beam was coming from a source inside a tenth-floor apartment inside a building located roughly 100 meters to the west, across Tchaikovsky Street; it affected the west facade of the embassy building, with highest intensities between the third and eighth floors. The signal (determined to have a power density between 2.5 and 4.0 GHz) was given the code name MUTS, or Moscow Unidentified Technical Signal, and had apparently been in use since 1956. The Pentagon got to work on a counterstrategy and assigned the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) the job of initiating a classified program to duplicate the effects of the Moscow Signal.
Declassified documents reveal that scientists with Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory were assigned to oversee the research. An elaborate facility was constructed inside the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Forest Glen Section. There, inside an anechoic chamber (an echo-free room designed to completely absorb reflections of either sound or electromagnetic waves), primates were irradiated with microwave beams with a power density similar to that of the Moscow Signal. ARPA’s Richard S. Cesaro was in charge of what was called Project Pandora. Within a few months of beaming the signal at the monkeys, Cesaro became convinced of its harmful nature, deciding that it adversely affected the internal organs of primates, including the brain. “In our experiments we did some remarkable things. And there was no question in my mind that you can get into the brain with microwaves,” Cesaro later said. It was later determined that the microwave beam produced Alzheimer’s disease.
In Moscow, U.S. embassy personnel were not told anything about the mysterious electromagnetic beams. Instead, the State Department
set up a classified endeavor, or “cytogenic testing program,” code-named the Moscow Viral Study, to secretly conduct genetic testing on embassy personnel. The physician in charge was Dr. Cecil Jacobson. By collecting blood samples from individuals exposed to the Moscow Signal, the State Department would have a control group whose white blood cells could be analyzed for chromosomal damage. Employees were told they were being tested for a simple viral infection going around Moscow. Not for two years were senior civilian officials briefed on the Moscow Viral Study. When these individuals expressed serious concerns about the secret testing of employees, the program was terminated. The State Department was told that the best countermeasure it could take was to turn the ten-story embassy building into a giant Faraday cage. In a declassified memo dated April 3, 1965, a consultant suggested a “selection of suitable copper screening and mandatory coverage of all window openings.”
A vicious debate ensued among defense scientists, with accusations of hysteria and malfeasance being hurled back and forth. One of the Navy’s top scientists, Dr. Samuel Koslov, led the charge of those who insisted that the Moscow Signal was harmless. “The actual physical results were nonexistent, but the real psychological trauma (in this case in a group of well-educated and dedicated people) was sad and startling,” Koslov later wrote in the Applied Physics Laboratory alumni digest.
ARPA’s Richard Cesaro and others vehemently disagreed. Based on the evidence that the electromagnetic beam could penetrate the human nervous system, Cesaro argued that it was necessary to determine exactly what kind of weapon this was and “whether the Soviets have special insight into the effects and use of athermal radiation on man.” In 1969, the Defense Department quietly expanded ARPA’s Project Pandora to include “the human.” Highly classified studies code-named Big Boy and Project Bizarre now projected microwave beams at unwitting sailors stationed in the Philadelphia Naval Yard. The experiments would remain secret for seven years.