BLACK TERROR WHITE SOLDIER PART 32

Esalen, the CIA & Ancient Aliens Part 1

Murphy and Price’s goal was to assist in the coming transformation by exploring work in the humanities and sciences, in order to fully realize what Aldous Huxley had called the “human potentialities.” Esalen thus represented a fruition of The Human Potential Movement (HPM), whose founding has often been attributed to Gurdjieff, and which arose in the 1960s around the concept of cultivating the extraordinary potential that its advocates believed to lie largely untapped in all people. The movement took as its premise the belief that through the development of this “human potential” humans could experience an exceptional quality of fulfillment. According to Kripal, Hux the “nonverbal humanities” and the development of the “human potentialities” functioned as the working mission statement of early Esalen, and Huxley offered lectures on the “Human Potential” at Esalen in the early 1960s.⁵

However, although packaged as “alternative spirituality,” the teachings at Esalen represented the age-old menagerie of practices from the esoteric traditions of the world that formed the core of the occult tradition. Esalen soon became known for its blend of Eastern and Western philosophies, and over the years hosted an influx of ph and religious thinkers. Esalen’s intellectual framework contained, among much

else, the philosophical and psychological ideas of Mesmer, Swedenborg, Freud, Christianity and Eastern mysticism of various kinds, including Buddhism and Sufism,  not  to  mention  parapsychology

At Esalen, Murphy and Price hosted speakers such as Arnold Toynbee, B. F. Skinner, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Gregory Bateson and Carlos Castaneda. The more famous guests of Esalen would include mystically inclined scholars like Carl Sagan, Joseph Campbell and Fritjof Capra, author of The Tao of Physics; as well as astronauts and Apple executives, Christie Brinkley and Billy Joel, Robert Anton Wilson, Uri Geller, as well as numerous countercultural icons including Joan Baez, Hunter S. Thompson and Timothy Leary. Also associated with Esalen was EST (Erhard Sensitivity Training), founded in 1971 by Werner Erhard, a close friend of Alan Watts, and a former Scientologist. Erhard had become involved in Mind Dynamics seminars, which included teachings based on Rosicrucianism and Theosophy, as well as the methods of psychic Edgar Cayce.⁶ Though EST attracted celebrities such as Yoko Ono, Buzz Aldrin and John Denver, the program later achieved some notoriety for its rigidity and abusiveness.

Closely connected with sexual experimentation was the use of drugs. Kripal also points out that, in addition to his discussions of Tantra, Huxley’s writings and lectures on the mystical possibilities of psychedelics and on what he called the “perennial philosophy” were foundational at Esalen. Refl e this interest in both subjects, Timothy Leary, a regular at Esalen, believed he discovered the sexual potential of LSD “to realize that God and Sex are one, that God for a man is woman, that the direct path to God is through the divine union of male -female.”⁷ Huxley explained to Leary that Tantra is the highest ideal possible, linking it to Zen Buddhism, and interpreting it in terms of psychotherapy and gestalt therapy, and said that “LSD and the mushrooms should be used, it seems to me, in the context of this basis Tantrik idea of the yoga of total awareness, leading to enlightenment within the world of everyday experience—which of course becomes the world of miracle and beauty and divine mystery when experience is what it always ought to be.”⁸

It was through their enduring interest in neo-Vedanta of Vivekananda that Huxley, Heard, and Isherwood passed on their Hindu perennialism to Esalen and in turn to American culture. Vivekananda had achieved a wide network of influence Jung, that Joseph Campbell included and Henry Miller,Carl who was also associated with Esalen. Throughout his memoir, The Air Conditioned Nightmare, Miller refers to Vivekananda as the great sage of the modern age and the most able messenger to rescue the West from spiritual bankruptcy. Heard had also become a guide and mentor to numerous well-known Americans, including Clare Boothe Luce (wife of Skull and Bonesman Henry Luce of Time, Life and Fortune), and Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. In 1962, a month after he had introduced Timothy Leary to “the ultimate yoga” of Tantra, and just two months after he met Michael Murphy and Richard Price in Big Sur, Huxley published his very last novel, Island, a celebration of Tantric eroticism.⁹

When Leary inquired about Tantra from Huxley, he recommended to him the works of Sir John Wooddroffe (aka Arthur Avalon), Heinrich Zimmer’s chapter on Tantra in Philosophies of India, ghostwritten by Joseph Campbell, and the works of Mircea Eliade.¹⁰ Joseph Campbell, also famous for his work in comparative religion, was another Esalen regular. In 1924, Campbell met and befriended Jiddu Krishnamurti, with whom he discussed Asian philosophy, sparking his lifelong interest in Hindu and Indian thought. Campbell’s independent studies also led him to explore the ideas of Carl Jung. Campbell edited the fiJung’s rstannual Eranos papers conferences, from where he was an attendee, and helped Mary Mellon found Bollingen Series of books on psychology, anthropology and myth. The series was sponsored by the Bollingen Foundation, established by Paul Mellon of Gulf Oil. Although the Bollingen Series was not a Traditionalist organization, it published the works of central figures in Traditionalism, like R and Romanian scholar Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), who was also a regular participant at Jung’s Eranos conferencesTheosohy. El and the works of Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, and in 1927 was a distant follower of Evola’s and Arturo Reghini’s Ur group and was introduced to the work of Guénon by Reghini, as Evola himself had been.¹¹

Campbell, like Eliade, was also promotion of Yoga and Kundalini, an interest they were both preceded in by Carl

Jung, whose seminars on Kundalini are compiled in The Psycholog y of Kundalini Yoga. Jung’s research on Kundalini is considered a milestone in the bridging of Western psychology with the Eastern model of Kundalini . Mircea Eliade in his classic Yoga, Immortality, and Freedom, attempted to bring to the West some understanding of the relationship between yoga, the awakening of kundalini, and mystical states of consciousness.¹² Campbell regarded Kundalini as “India’s greatest gift to us,” and praised Ramakrishna as a “a virtuoso in the experience of the Kundalini transformations.”¹³

Although not himself a Traditionalist, Campbell’s studies of religions Traditionalis refltected inspiration. Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), which discusses his theory of the journey of the hero found in world mythologies, is an expansion of James Frazer’s theory of a dying-god, but also drawing on Freud’s Oedipus complex, Carl Jung archetypal figure collective unconscious, and Arnold Van Gennep’s the three stages of The Rites of Passage (1909), translated by Campbell into Separation, Initiation and Return. Campbell called the journey of the hero the monomyth, borrowed from James

Joyce, whose Ulysses  was  also  highly  influential

The classic examples of the monomyth Campbell relies most heavily upon are the stories of Osiris, Prometheus, the Buddha, Moses, and Christ.

The Hero with a Thousand Faces has infl uenced a number poets, and fi lmmakers, including Bob Mickey Hart, Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead had mentioned

Campbell’s infl uence and agreed to pa entitled From Ritual to Rapture. On the DVD release of the famous conversations between Campbell and Bill Moyers, fi broadcast in 1988 on PBS as The Power of Myth, Campbell and Moyers discussed

Lucas’s use of The Hero with a Thousand Faces  in  making  his  films

Leary “turned on” another Esalen regular, religious scholar Huston Smith, whose World’s Religions (originally titled The Religions of Man) has sold over two million copies, and remains a popular introduction to comparative religion. During his career, Smith studied Vedanta, Zen Buddhism having developed an interest in the Traditionalism of René Guénon and Coomaraswamy, which shaped his study of world religions. As a young man, Smith was infl uenced Gerald Heard and by Aldous the Huxley,  writings it was Heard who arranged for him to meet Aldous Huxley who introduced him to Vedanta. Though, Smith tried meditating for years without success, to the point of doubting that Westerners could access the same mystical experiences as Asians, until Huxley referred him to Leary. Leary introduced Smith to LSD on New Years Day in 1961, at the Center for Personality Research at Harvard, an experience Smith described in his book Cleansing the Doors of Perception. Smith later became the host of two series from the National Educational Television (the forerunner of PBS): “The Religions of Man and Search for America.” Bill Moyers devoted a 5-part PBS special to Smith’s life and work, “The Wisdom of Faith with Huston Smith.” Smith has produced three series for public television: “The Religions of Man”, “The Search for America”, and “Science and Human Responsibility Hinduism, Tibetan. Buddhism,”His and films Sufism have all won awards at internal

Included in the heady mix of Esalen’s philosophical and psychological interests were ideas at the farthest fringe of mystical experimentation, even space aliens. As the Ascended Masters of Theosophy had become “space brothers,” now too at Esalen,  under  the CIA’s MK-influence Ultra project and  of inspired by the teachings of Gurdjieff, shamanism came to be seen as the source of the “perennial philosophy,” where the beings in the spirit world contacted through the use of entheogens also came to be regarded as extra-terrestrials.

Sometimes referred to as a “witch doctor,” “shaman” is an umbrella term referring to a variety of spiritual practices that typically involve reaching altered states of consciousness in order to encounter and interact with the “spirit world.” Gurdjieff, Through shamanism  the came to bein uflseen as the primitive origin of not only Sufism, Sarmoung such Brotherhood, as the but of all the Ancient Mysteries. This notion was popularized by Mircea Eliade, who brought much attention to the subject of shamanism in writing Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. According to Mircea Eliade, a shaman is “…believed to cure, like all doctors, and to perform miracles of the fakir type, like all magicians [...] But beyond this, he is a psychopomp, and he may also be a priest, mystic, and poet.¹⁴ And Eliade argued that the word shaman should not apply to just any magic practitioners of the ancient religion of the Turks and Mongols of Central Asia. The pre-Buddhist Bön culture was the national form of shamanism in Tibet, which was part of Tantric Buddhism, another area of interest to Eliade, who praised Tantra as the highest form of yoga, and therefore whose works were criticized in Romania for their eroticism.

Linking Shamanism to the ancient practices of the dying- god cult, according to Eliade, “the shaman specializes in a trance during which his soul is believed to leave the body and ascend to the sky or descend to the underworld.”¹⁵ As exemplifi ed by the Ancient Myster communion with spirits to acquire revelations of hidden knowledge. Typically, these mysteries employed intoxicants or drugs to induce such trance states, a method which was known to the modern psychological establishment and the intelligence industry, who sought to make use of them for their own nefarious plans. As Coppens suggests, it was likely through his familiarity with Carl Jung and his theory of “archetypes,” as a euphemism for disembodied spirits, that would have led Dulles, as head of the CIA, to sponsor these experiments.¹⁶

Thus, through its association with Esalen, the CIA’s MK-Ultra and Stargate projects contributed to the evolution of what is known as the “entheogen thesis,” which suggested that the use of drugs could not only help “expand consciousness,” but, like the shamans of the ancient world, achieve contact with beings on other spiritual planes of existence, which was put forward ss the basis of the Ancient Mysteries, but also as a means of accessing the Ancient Wisdom.

Extraterrestrials, to the amateur ethnobotanist and Esalen representative Terence McKenna, represented “the human soul exteriorized into three-dimensional space as a religious experience,” as paraphrased by Jeffrey Kripal.¹⁷ In 1963, McKenna, Gordon who Wasson’s was ethnomycology, influence was introduced to the world of psychedelics through The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley and certain issues of The Village Voice. Heavily inflTeilhard deuencedChardinand AlfredbyNorth Whitehead, in Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge - A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution, McKenna presented his “Stoned Ape” theory, which proposed that the transformation from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens was the result of the addition of the magic mushroom to their diet.

The mushroom, according to McKenna, also gave humans experiences and were the basis for the foundation of all religions. He proposed that the biblical Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was actually an entheogenic mushroom.

Terence McKenna observed how “the shamanic faith is that humanity is not without allies. There are forces friendly to our struggle to birth ourselves as an intelligent species. But they are quiet and shy; they are to be sought.” This, explains Philip Coppens, a consultant to the authors of The Stargate Conspiracy, is exactly what Andrija Puharich did in his psychic work for the CIA, “and it was his quest for the Nine, which he never went in search of in the darkness of the space, but in the other dimension that was accessed by the mind.”¹⁸

Through a government-funded project, Esalen became associated with the channeling of messages of a group of “extraterrestrials” calling themselves “The Council of Nine,” who would go on to have a profound impact on the shape of the emerging New Age movement and its associations with Neo-Nazi mythology, and the myth of Ancient Aliens. As the authors of The Stargate Conspiracy, Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, point out, there are numerous occult associations with the number nine. In Greek mythology, when Prometheus gave Fire to mankind, an angered Zeus chained him to a rock and to punish mankind, he and eight other deities gathered to form the Council of Nine. The council members were Aphrodite, Apollo, Athena, Demeter, Hephaestus, Hera, Hermes, Poseidon and Zeus. Together this council created Pandora, and sent her as a gift to Epimetheus who was told never open it. Unable to contain her curiosity she opened the box, releasing all of the misfortunes of mankind.

The number nine also recalls the Enneads, the nine sections of the six books of Plotinus, considered the founder of Neoplatonism. What was distinctive in Plotinus’ system was the unifi ed, hi and the theory of ten divine emanations or spheres, corresponding with the ten sephiroth of Jewish mysticism, and the Pythagorean Decad. For Pythagoras, the number Nine, the Ennead, was considered “the greatest of the numbers within the Decad” for “everything circles around within it.” According to Iamblichus, a key figure in the Mithr the ennead was known as the number that “brings completion.”¹⁹

Louis Jacolliot’s account of Agartha spoke of the Nine Unknown Men who secretly rule the world. Reference to the Ennead, the ancient Egyptian pantheon, as “the Nine Principles,” the same language that the Council of Nine used for themselves, was mentioned by the Synarchist Schwaller de Lubicz, student of sacred geometry known for his study of the architecture of the Temple of Luxor in Egypt and his book The Temple In Man. De Lubicz put forward a Pythagorean system that featured the number nine, and believed that the Ennead of the Egypians was an expression in mythological terms of certain fundamental philosophical principles.

Albert Pike also records a Masonic  legend  that

number nine to a stellar tradition connected with Sirius. The “Nine Elect” are the apprentice Masons who sought to avenge the death of their Master, Hiram Abiff. The Nine Elect are symbolized by the sequential rising of nine bright stars, including those of Orion’s belt, which precedes the rising of Sirius.²⁰ The Elect of Nine are the ninth degree of Scottish Rite Freemasonry.

The Council of Nine was also mentioned as the secret guides of American Rosicrucianism. Clymer claimed that the doctrines of his society, the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis, were endorsed by a secret order that directed it from France, known as the Council of Nine. Clymer also established a society known as the Priesthood after the Order of Melchizedek. Melchizedek was revered by the Sufial Khidrs, asor“the Green One.” The name is also related to the Asiatic Brethren who were known as Melchizedek Lodges, and where the highest degree was that of “the true Brothers of the Rose-Croix.”²¹ And, Guénon equated Melchizedek with the “Lord of the World,” the ruler of Agartha. Clymer claims the order was well established in France and that its secrets originated with a manuscript handed down from the Templars. ²²

Schwaler de Lubicz had also been a member of the Brotherhood of Heliopolis with Eugene Canseliet, who had been instrumental in the founding of the Sovereign Order of the Temple, the precursor to the notorious UFO cult known as the Solar Temple, whose doctrines also emphasized the importance of the secret priesthood of Melchizedek. According to them, Melchizedek was the emissary of a planet called Heliopolis, which orbits Sirius, who returned to his home planet when his mission was completed.²³

Part of Alice Bailey’s work as instructed to her by her Master, the Tibetan Djwhal Khul, was to set up a series of disciples to be known as the Groups of Nine. Djwhal Khul often referred to the two other masters with leading roles as Master R and Master M, while the representatives of The Nine who spoke to Puharich through Dr. Vinod called themselves “R” and “M.”²⁴

The council that governs the Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan also call themselves the Council of Nine. Similarly, Aquino as the off Temple of Set, rules the organization through a council of nine. In the South Park episodes “Imagination land Episode II” and “Imagination land Episode III,” Imaginationland was led by a “Council of Nine” consisting of the nine most revered of all imaginary characters: Aslan, Gandalf, Glinda, Jesus, Luke Skywalker, Morpheus, Popeye, Wonder Woman, and Zeus.

More closely connected is the idea of the Enneagram, an occult glyph resembling Rosicrucian geometrical constructs or the Kabbalistic Tree of life, and which was popularized by Idries Shah, a friend to Wiccans, Gerald

Gardner and Robert Graves, who wrote the foreword to his The . Graves’Sufi s introduction described Shah as being “in the senior male line of descent from the prophet Mohammed” and as having inherited “secret mysteries from the Caliphs, his ancestors. He is, in fact, a Grand Sheikh of the Sufi Tariqa…” Graves confessed, however, that this was “misleading: he is one of

us, not a Moslem personage.”25 The

exploresSufi  the  impact

development of Western civilization from the seventh century onward through the  work  of  such  figures Raymondas Lully,Roger  B Chaucer and others. Although it is disguised Luciferianism, Shah came to be recognized as a spokesman for Sufi sm professor at a number of Western univ in popularizing Sufi sm as a “mystica works have been criticized by Orientalist scholars, he has nevertheless been defended by the famous novelist, Doris Lessing.

In 1960, Shah founded Octagon Press, which was named after the octagram, which Shah believed was related to the Enneagram of Gurdjieff. In June 1962, a couple of years prior to the publication of The Sufi,Shah hads

also established contact with members of the movement that had formed around the mystical teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. He was eventually introduced to noted Gurdjieff student J. B. Bennett, who became convinced that Shah “had a very important mission in the West that we ought to help

him to accomplish.”²⁶  Shah gave Bennett a “Declaration of the People of the Tradition.” Shah declared that the Guardians belonged to an “invisible hierarchy” that had chosen him to transmit “a secret, hidden, special, superior form of knowledge.” It convinced Bennett that Shah was a genuine emissary of Gurdjieff’s “Sarmoung Monastery.”

   In 1953, Bennett had undertaken a long journey to the Middle East, visiting Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Persia, which included a mysterious visit to Abdullah

ad Daghestani (1891-1973), Sheikh of the Naqshbandi Haqqani  Sufi   or Damascus.²⁷ According to Kabbani, Chairman of the Naqshbandi Haqqani Sufi Order The of Naqshbandi America, Sufiin   Way:  Hist Saints of the Golden Chain, ad Daghestani initiated Gurdjieff and allowed him through a dream to “ascend to the knowledge of the power of the nine points,” which became the basis of his Enneagram.²⁸ The enneagram is a nine-pointed figure usually inscribed Gurdjieff is quoted by Ouspenskywithinas a ci claiming that it was an ancient secret and was now being partly revealed for the first time, though hints of the symb has been proposed that it may derive from the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, as used in Renaissance Hermeticism, which used an enneagram of three interlocking triangles, also called a nonagram or medieval philosopher Raymond Lull.²⁹ In The Commanding Self, Idries Shah

contends that the Enneagram is of Sufi origin, known in coded form as an octagram, two superimposed squares with the space in the middle representing the ninth point.

The bizarre story of The Nine, the CIA and Esalen, as reconstructed in The Stargate Conspiracy, begins in a private research laboratory in Maine called the Round Table Foundation. It was set up in 1943 to research the paranormal and run by a medical doctor named Andrija Puharich, “father of the American New Age movement.” Puharich,  who  was  a  US the early 1950s, implied that the Round Table Foundation was a front for the Army’s parapsychological experiments.³⁰ The Round Table Foundation also received support from Puharich’s good friend, former Vice-President Henry Wallace, through substantial grants from his Wallace Fund.³¹ Puharich also later confessed that his experiments with the Round Table Foundation were originally inspired by reading the works of Alice Bailey.

Puharich himself has stated that the Round Table Foundation was a front for the Army. In addition, Puharich was also carrying out secret research into techniques of psychological manipulation, including the use of hallucinogenic drugs, and the military and intelligence capabilities of psychic skills. Picknett and Prince stated that his employment was because the Army was interested in  finding  a  drug  that  would Aldousstim Huxley, one of the earliest members of Puharich’s Round Table and who worked with Puharich in experimenting with hallucinogenics, “…whatever may be said against Puharich, he is certainly very intelligent, extremely well read and highly enterprising. His aim is to reproduce by modem pharmacological, electronic and physical methods the conditions used by the Shamans for getting into a state of travelling clairvoyance.”³²

The Round Table Foundation functioned when Puharich was working for the Army Chemical Center in Edgewood, Maryland, which is just ten miles from MK-Ultra connected Edgewood Arsenal, which cooperated with the CIA’s MK-Ultra program. During that time Puharich met with various high-ranking offi cers and offiCIA andcials,Naval Intelligence. One of the projects being conducted at Edgewood at the time was BLUEBIRD/ARTICHOKE. Ira Einhorn, who led seminars at Esalen, stated that his mentor Puharich “was doing LSD work for the CIA in 1954.” He linked Puharich with Sidney Gottlieb and MK-Ultra and related that Puharich was involved in experiments that resulted in the death of Frank Olson.³³

In December 1952, Puharich had brought into his laboratory an Indian mystic named Dr. D. G. Vinod, who began to channel The Nine or “the Nine Principles.” The Nine also referred to themselves as the Ennead, the nine major gods of the Egyptian pantheon. According to Puharich, The Nine are “directly related to Man’s concept of God,” and that “the controllers of the Universe operate under the direction of the Nine. Between the controllers and the untold numbers of planetary civilizations are the messengers.” The Nine proclaimed themselves to be God, stating “God is nobody else than we together, the Nine Principles of God.”³⁴ Among other pronouncements about the nature of the universe and the history and future of mankind, the Council of Nine, describing themselves as “a circle of universal beings living outside time and space,” would also often recommend the books of Blavatsky and Alice Bailey.

Further séances in 1953 were attended by other members of Puharich’s Round Table Foundation, including Henry and Georgia Jackson, Alice Bouverie, Marcella Du Pont, Carl Betz, Vonnie Beck, Arthur M. Young and his wife Ruth. Marcella Du Pont was a member of the wealthy Du Pont family, and Alice Bouverie, born Ava Alice Muriel Astor, a descendant of John Jacob Astor, was the daughter of Colonel John Jacob Astor IV, who had died aboard the Titanic.

Her  first  husband,  Prince  Serge  Obole Army, and went on to become a major operator in the OSS during WWII.

Arthur M. Young, the designer of Be also an infl uential philosopherspiritual who, evolution of Alfred Noth Whitehead, proposed theories that combined Darwinism with traditional wisdom, Jungian archetypes, Theosophy, astrology, yoga, mythology and other forms of knowledge. Young married artist Ruth Forbes of the Boston Forbes family, a great-granddaughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ruth was also a close personal friend of Mary Bancroft, devoted student of Carl Jung and former mistress to Allen Dulles and later to Henry Luce.  Ruth’s  fi rst  husband,  George  L Trotskyite James Burnham. Burnham was also a friend of E. Howard Hunt, one of the Watergate “plumbers,” and was also suspected of involvement in the JFK assassination. Ruth and Paine were the parents of Michael Paine, who married Ruth Hyde, and who together became notable after the assassination of John F. Kennedy because of his acquaintance with alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. Michael and Ruth Paine met Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife Marina at a party on February 22 1963 being thrown amongst the émigré White Russian community, where they had been invited by George de Mohrenschildt. It was Ruth Paine who helped Lee get his job at the Texas School Book Depository while his wife Marina and child continued to live with her in Irving, Texas. When the assassination occurred it was the Paines who led the police to where Oswald hid his rifle, and provided mu photos of Oswald posing with his rifle.

In 1949, while living in New York, Young and his wife met Mary Benzenberg Mayer and enrolled in her school, the Source Teaching Society. Mayer had trained under Freud and was later associated with Carl Jung and used dreams and the study of earlier religious traditions.³⁵ In 1952, Young and his wife Ruth organized the Foundation for the Study of Consciousness in Philadelphia, the forerunner of the Institute for the Study of Consciousness, founded in Berkeley

in 1972, for the scientifi c investiga Three years later, thera appeared  existence of The Nine, when in Mexico Puharich met Charles and Lillian Laughead who also channeled them. The Lougheads were former Christian missionaries who were by then prominent in the burgeoning UFO contactee movement. After having become disillusioned with Christianity, the couple had become interested in the writings of William Dudley Pelley. After a meeting

with Adamski, they became convinced of t of UFOs. Puharich also knew George Adamksi’s fellow contactee George

Hunt Williamson, who had worked for Pelley’s Valor, and continued to praise Puharich’s work with the Nine right up until the late 1970s.

After disbanding the Round Table Foundation in 1958, Puharich achieved international recognition as an inventor of medical devices and as a parapsychologist and author of The Sacred Mushroom: Key to the Door of Eternity and Beyond Telepathy. In The Sacred Mushroom, Puharich tells how in 1954 he received a transcript of medium Harry Stone became possessed by a persona that they later identifi Rahótep,a man who haded lived as 4600 years ago. What fascinated Puharich was the description Stone had given of a plant that could separate consciousness from the physical body. Stone’s drawings of the plant looked like mushrooms, and the description he gave was that of the amanita muscaria, or fl yGordonagaricWasson’sMexicanof shamans. Over the next three years, Harry spoke Egyptian, wrote hieroglyphics, and disclosed the role of amanita in Egyptian cult and divination.

In 1955, Gordon Wasson mentioned to Puharich the divinatory potential of the mushroom he had discovered in Mexico, and invited him to join that summer’s expedition to Oaxaca, which was later described in the Life magazine article of 1957, but he declined due to other obligations. Though, by the fall of 1955, Puharich had an ample supply of the mushroom to experiment on his own. Another acquaintance of Puharich, New York socialite Alice Bouverie, in a trance experiment involving a Ouija board, contacted telepathically Wasson’s Mexican Shaman, Maria Sabina, who advised them correctly that a specimen of amanita muscaria was to be found nearby in Maine.

Robert Anton Wilson, one of the Esalen Institute teachers, commented on Puharich in his famous Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati, for which Timothy Leary wrote the foreword, and which deals with Wilson’s experiences during a period of “self-induced brain change,” when he communicated telepathically with extraterrestrials from the Sirius star system. According to Wilson:

The cumulative evidence in such books as Dr. Andrija Puharich’s The Sacred Mushroom, John Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, R. Gordon Wasson’s Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, Robert Graves’ revised fourth edition of The White Goddess, Professor Peter Furst’s Flesh of the Gods, Dr. Weston LaBarre’s The Peyote Cult and Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion, Margaret Murray’s The Witch Cult in Western Europe, etc., leaves little doubt that the beginnings of religion (awareness of, or at least belief in, Higher Intelligences) is intimately linked with the fact that shamans—in Europe, in Asia, in the Americas, in Africa—have been dosing their nervous systems with metaprogramming drugs since at least 30,000 B.C.³⁶

Puharich became best known as the person who brought Israeli Uri Geller

to the United States for scientif born Geller, who became famous for his television performances of spoon bending and other supposed psychic stunts, was also at times in the employ of Mossad, the Israeli secret service. Puharich’s study of Geller was supported by the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), and funded directly by US intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA’s Offi ce of Techni Research. Headquartered in Menlo Park, California, one of the world’s largest scientifi c research organizationsSRI“canbe described as one of the ‘jewels’ in Tavistock’s crown in its rule over the United States.”³⁷ Originally founded as a means of attracting commercial business research at Stanford University in California, SRI began taking on military and intelligence contracts,SRIwhich initiatedmany of t what came to be known as the Stargate Project, the umbrella code name of one of several sub-projects established by the US Federal Government to investigate claims of psychic phenomena with potential military and domestic applications, particularly “remote viewing,” referring to the purported ability to psychically “see” events, sites, or information from a remote distance. At least three of the key remote-viewers at SRI were former leaders in Hubbard’s Church of Scientology, Hal Puthoff, Ingo Swann and Pat Price. Price, a former police chief, after being trained as a remote -viewer, went to work for the CIA. Swann, a New York artist, went on to train remote-viewers at the Pentagon.³⁸

At first Geller started to channel a conscious super-computer aboard a spaceship. When Puharich suggested to

him there might be a connection with the Nine Principles, Spectra agreed. The Nine claimed that they had programed Geller with his powers as a young child. Through Geller, The Nine claimed to have been behind the UFO sightings starting with Kenneth Arnold’s in 1947, and alerted Puharich to his life’s mission, which was to use Geller’s talents to alert the world of an imminent mass landing of spaceships that would bring representatives of The Nine. The Nine also described the “Knowledge of the Book” they had hidden in Egypt 6,000 years ago, during a previous visit to Earth. They spoke too of a race of extraterrestrials they referred to as the Hoova, who came to Earth 20,000 years ago to the area now called Israel, and that their contact with Abraham, the forefather of the Jewish people, was the origin of the Biblical story of the ladder joining Heaven and Earth.

However, Geller finally Nine,saying:turned“Ithink his somebody is playing games with us. Perhaps they are a civilization of clowns.”³⁹

When Puharich  had  to  find  other  channel

Whitmore and psychic and healer Phyllis Schlemmer, who had reportedly also done work for Israeli intelligence. Schlemmer became the spokesperson for The Nine. She, Puharich and Whitmore then set up Lab Nine at Puharich’s estate in Ossining, New York. The Nine’s disciples included multi-millionaire businessmen, members of Canada’s Bronfman family, European nobility, scientists from the Stanford Research Institute, Gene Roddenberry the creator of Star Trek and influentialI ra Einhorn,counter culture who referred to the group of scientists of which he and Puharich were part as his “psychic mafi⁴⁰ Einhorna.” later achieved notoriety as “the Unicorn Killer,” after he beat his ex-girlfriend Holly Maddux to death, and then stored her body in a locker in his apartment for more than a year before she was discovered by the police. In his own defense, Einhorn claimed that Maddux was murdered by CIA agents who attempted to frame him due to his investigations on the Cold War and “psychotronics.”⁴¹

A key member of Lab Nine was James Hurtak, director of IONS, who was appointed Puharich’s second-in-command by The Nine. A former professor at California State University, Northridge and California State University, Los Angeles, Hurtak’s educational background includes a PhD from the University of California and a second PhD from the University of Minnesota. In 1975, Hurtak participated in the First Psychic Tournament in 1975 as part of Gnosticon, sometimes called the Gnostica Aquarian Convention. The events, which attracted many of the best-known Witches, Wiccans, Magicians and Neopagans of the time from all around the world, were covered in 1974 in

Playboy Magazine by Mordecai Richler, author of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Hurtak claimed to belong to a group called the Sons of Light of the Order of Melchizedek, “designed to change the destinies of the world by occult means,” and that he and Puharich, along w secret information,” were working to make the public aware that the people of Earth were soon to be contacted by “highly evolved beings.”⁴² Their literature reveals that, to them, Melchizedek has exactly the same role as Alice Bailey’s Lord of the World, as a higher being who descended during the Lemurian epoch to guide the spiritual evolution of mankind. Hurtak also refers to the ultimate authority of the universe as the Great White Brotherhood, which he also refers to as the “Hierarchy.” His The Book of Knowledge: The Keys of Enoch, published originally in 1973, a book of channeled revelations from The Nine which he claims he was chosen to receive, draws on many ideas from Crowley, Blavatsky, Alice Bailey, and Schwaller de Lubicz, and discusses the apparently unusual relationship of the star shafts in the Great Pyramid with the “Belt” of Orion, and where he claims that intelligences to gather information.

Another Nine channeller was an Englishwoman named Jenny O’Connor, who was introduced to the Esalen Institute by Sir John Whitmore. She and The

Nine became so infl uential there enough, listed on the Institute’s staff, even successfully ordering the sacking

of its chief fi nance offi cer and structure.⁴³ Mother Jones commented on the development with the headline: “Esalen Slides off the Cliff.” According to Eric Erickson, who lived and worked at Esalen for more than 25 years, “the Nine were much better known for performing the role of extraterrestrial hatchet men than for giving psychic insight into how Esalen might actually improve operations.”⁴⁴

Puharich and Whitmore commissioned British writer Stuart Holroyd to write an account of their adventures, which appeared in 1977 as Prelude to the Landing on Planet Earth. In this book the Nine confessed to being the Elohim of the Old Testament, and the Aeons of Gnosticism, who visited Earth from the star of Sirius. Their spokesperson was an entity called “Tom” who was revealed as being Atum, the creator -god of the ancient Egyptian religion, and with the other nine composing the Great Ennead of Heliopolis. In ancient Egyptian religion, according to the Ennead system of creation, which was developed and promoted from Heliopolis, there were nine major gods at the head of the Egyptian pantheon. The chief god was Atum, also known as Ra, or Atum-Ra, who was represented and worshiped as the sun. Atum-Ra was also seen as the fi rst being and Ennead,the consisting originat or of and shuTef nut,Geb of the and Nut, Osiris, Set, Isis and Nephthys. Over time, Ra became increasingly identified the Egyptian with version Osiris of the dying-god, and god of the

underworld, in other words, Lucifer.

  Communication with The Nine was an extension of the myths of the Rosicrucian traditions of Scottish Rite and Egyptian Rite Freemasonry, which claimed to follow a Christian Gnostic tradition derived from the Ancient Mysteries of Egypt founded on the worship of Osiris and Sirius. Based on the millennial surrounding these myths and the communications from the Nine, SRI embarked on a number of projects to investigate the Sphinx and the pyramids of Giza, that would shape the evolution of the UFO phenomenon into the myth of Ancient Aliens.

The major components of the Giza complex include the three major pyramids and the massive stone statue known as the Sphinx. The Great

Pyramid, the largest of the three mai the last remaining of the “Seven Wonders” of the ancient world. Contrary to

the authors’ fanciful claims, it is a well- established fact that the Great Pyramid was built by King Khufu (Cheops) of Egypt’s Fourth Dynasty, whose reign began around approximately 2500 BC. When Herodotus reported about the

pyramids in the fi fth century BC, th construction. On the contrary, the only “mystery” was that, as he was told, it

took twenty years for a force of 100,000 oppressed slaves to build them. Because the Great Pyramid of Giza is such an essential symbol of their

tradition, regarded as an emblem of the Hermetic philosophy, and placed on the reverse side of the American dollar bill, the Freemasons assert that Herodotus fabricated the story, and that the truth is the pyramids were built before the great Flood. In other words, by Atlanteans. According to Ignatius Donnelly, the pyramid is patterned after a pre- Flood type of architecture, examples of which are to be found in many parts of the world. As related by Masonic and Theosophical historian Manly P. Hall in The Secret Teachings of All Ages, it was somewhere in the hidden chambers of these pyramids and the Sphinx that the ancient initiations took place, and t would again be revealed, and “the Dying God shall rise again!”⁴⁵

In those ventures, SRI collaborated on a number of projects investigating the Giza Pyramids with the Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE), founded by renowned psychic Edgar Cayce (1877 – 1 to promote his work. Cayce, another movement, became known in the very highest echelons of American society, including a meeting with President Wilson arranged by the Secret Service. According to two biographers, Cayce was consulted on the formation of the League of Nations. One of Cayce’s early promoters was David E. Kahn, who

established numerous high-level conta member of the ruling House of Savoy in Italy.⁴⁶