Villeneuve told me a nice story about the Devil who, strolling along with a companion, saw an excited crowd arguing in a village square. The young man went ahead to get some information and came back alarmed: “Master,” he said, “the news is bad. These folks have found part of the answer.” “Don’t worry,” answered the Devil with laughter, “I will make them believe that it is the whole answer.” -Jacques Vallée. Forbidden Science. vol 3.
Could you measure the tidal flow of Sydney’s harbour mouth in your kitchen sink? With the right (expensive) equipment, you could potentially measure the Moon’s impact on gravity influencing a tiny rise in your water and then blow those numbers up to an estimated volume of the harbour that evening and subtract the difference between your high and low estimates.
Sound fucking horrible, right? Welcome to psi research.
What you should actually do is have a team at the harbour mouth with some far cheaper equipment. It is an in field experiment. The tide happens to a harbour, not a sink. And anyone wishing to criticise your results will say so.
In the following old presentation -only recently uploaded- Dr Braude talks about this very limitation in parapsychology. His example is how useless it would be to test a quarterback’s defensive game in a gym or a lab… you may measure his strength, speed, lung capacity and so on but you can only know how he blocks in/on the field.
The whole thing is worth watching (until the Q&A which is execrable).
I mention this in the context of the previous post because what is the Stargate Programme but a multi-decade in field psi experiment? What is Dr Brenner’s story from Stranger Things but the very same?
One of the open questions around whether the show is a limited hang-out/out-of-school-tale hinges around how much of these experiments were going on subsequent to the Church Committee. And more specifically how much of that is frequency/radio/radar/waveform-related… given that most of the (at least slightly) credible people emerging from that world landed on a frequency explanation of UFOs, psi, etc.
So I want to pick that up with some large chunks from the late, lamented Phil Coppens in his lengthy correction to some of the ‘conclusions’ in The Stargate Conspiracy. They concern the notorious Andrija Puharich -he of the sacred mushrooms and the alien channelling and all sorts of military-funded adventures.
In all, some forty scientists were involved in these “world changing experiments”. Did this team of esteemed scientists find anything? Officially, the answer is no. Except… well, there always is something, isn’t there? Puharich had this to say: “When you’re inside [a Faraday cage], a psychic, for example, has their performance increased by a thousand fold. A Faraday cage shields you from the electromagnetic radio waves, allowing only extremely low frequency (E.L.F.) magnetic waves to get through. I don’t think there’s a psychic warfare research lab that doesn’t make use of them today.” This observation of the Faraday was supported by [Edgar] Mitchell. Mitchell also stated that “the brain waves of two individuals separated and isolated by a Faraday cage could be synchronised […] Somehow there seemed to be some sort of communication occurring between the two that we didn’t know was possible.” In short, this is proof positive of some new phenomenon, which in short proves the case that telepathy – to the extent that our thoughts can in some conditions be picked up by others – exists. Which really means the project did prove “something”… I think. Not? In fact, what is stated was this: once a brain is no longer bathed in electromagnetic radio waves, but isolate it from that “dirt”, the brain becomes “psychic”. That’s quite something, not?
* * *
That was not the only trick. Another was an “ideascope”. Once again Puharich offers an explanation: “It’s an ordinary strobe light, but very high-powered. You look into this strobe light, a single point source, and you adjust the frequency of the strobe to your own alpha-waves. When that happens, instead of seeing one point, you suddenly see two. It splits. What it does is separate the two halves of the brain functionally. And, what you then see is two circles, one on each point. When you see two circles move together, they form a vesica-pisces. In other words, a fish-like figure with a dark and light space. We’ve tried this out on successful businessmen who never heard of E.S.P., tested them, and they scored greatly! After five or ten experiences, you’re ready for the next stage which involves a video tape with instructions that help you develop concentration levels that lead to out of body experiences at will.” Right. Techniques which can separate the mind from the body… in conditioned environments… which is officially “nothing important”?
Then, there is the occasional world premiere. Puharich: “It took me about 10 years until I was able to measure the energy coming out of Uri’s hands – which is 7 Hz instead of the usual eight. Now we know more about the nature of electron flow which, in matter, causes metal to bend. This is what I am most interested in right now. [..] All the magnetic energy, the magnetism inside any matter can be expelled, which is probably the way UFOs work. It requires no energy once you get it going.” So we have a free source of energy – oh, and a scientific explanation of how the spoon-bending phenomenon may work.
“I have a company called E.L.F. (Extremely Low Frequency) Cocoon Corp. I designed this very sensitive piece of equipment. It gives off an 8 Hz frequency. The watch was a ten-year project. I began to understand that there is a frequency vibration emitted by all these healers. So I developed some unique equipment that could measure this. When healers lay their hands, or energy, on someone, they put out exactly 8 Hz magnetic frequency – the same vibration emitted by crystals. This is universal.” He continues: “I was concerned about the E.L.F. warfare that the Russians had started using in 1976. They’re bombarding everything and everybody. E.L.F. can be real bad for you as it can affect DNA at the right vibration.” Magnetism, involving genetic effects. Interesting. “I spent three years trying to convince the American, British, and Canadian Intelligence communities that the Soviet E.L.F. signal does, indeed, affect the DNA. At first they thought I was smoking some weird stuff but eventually they understood and acknowledged my ideas. So I developed something that would protect the individual from the E.L.F. – The Teslar. I named it after Nicola Tesla, whom I consider one of my most important teachers. The watch also dramatically lowers high blood pressure and prevents jet lag if you fly with it on. I have been battling with the C.I.A. for the past two years [1986-1988] because they have tried everything to suppress this invention. They don’t want anyone to believe that E.L.F. exists and has adverse affects. Of course, now they’re using it in covert warfare with the U.S.S.R.” The amazing thing was that this guy was not a lone nutcase. He was the father of such technology – the man who had given the first such inventions to the CIA. And despite the fact that he was officially retired and working on his own, he somehow could not stop but continue to go to the CIA, and try to convince them of his latest discoveries. And it seems that they continued to listen to him… as he kept coming up with the goods.
On the downside, it was obvious that Puharich still suffer from the same problem: he wanted to take some things out into the field, make some money from it, give something to Mankind, not just to a group of possibly not very interested generals in the government who would read the reports, then archive them. Or use them in some manner that no longer suited Puharich. Puharich in the 1970s was relatively young, but by the late 1980s, he knew everything he did was about leaving a legacy.
So when Puharich tried that make yet another step into the open world, the government came down on him, as we already mentioned. There was the CIA incident with the watch. And some more, as Puharich stated that when his house burnt down, it was no accident, but orchestrated to halt his new enterprises – orchestrated by the US government, that is. Or as Puharich had identified the culprits: the CIA. To anyone on the outside, Puharich would indeed look like a nutcase… but for anyone who knew where he was coming from… it was not at all the case.
Faraday cages. At least one military team running remote viewing at the same time as Stargate. Weaponised ELF radiation. And spanning the mid 70s to mid-80s. (Vallée mentions that Reagan’s White House had no ELF shielding, incidentally.) But there’s more to the Puharich story. Before burning his house down, the CIA offered him a job.
Perhaps as a reward for his silence, in 1982, Puharich was offered the post of ELF (Extremely Low Frequencies) research director for the CIA. In the words of his biographer, “supposedly two CIA men came to his house in Delaplane, Virginia apologizing that the CIA gave him such a hard time.” Puharich declined the position. He had got the message: do what you want, but keep quiet about it. And so he did. In 1980, Richard Joshua Reynolds invited Puharich to live at his estate and study ELF at his own convenience.
Let me be clear. They offered this job to a guy who had spent thirty years surrounded by channellers and researching the use of entheogens for spirit contact. What an unusual overlap of ‘interests’.
Speaking of overlaps, in Pieces of Eight I suggest that the waveform model underpinning Martin Armstrong’s, Terence McKenna’s and W.B Yeats’s work (to name a few) implies there is probably something to it all that we have only but scratched the surface of. If the overlap between radar (which allegedly brought down whatever the Roswell Crash was), ELF and psi suggests that the UFO phenomenon is one of transduction then this assertion is only strengthened.
One of the more coherent self-made metaphysics -and we must all make our own- is Dr Farrell’s topological metaphor. And this recent interview is his best public explanation of it to date. Certainly worth a listen. You’ll work out why.
It occurs to me that the elevation of evidence for the external reality of spirit phenomena in the last twenty years puts something very valuable at risk. Our battle has always been with psychology… not the human Mind. As we begin to fold all the data that have arisen in the internet age supporting a separate ontology for the spirit world back into our worldviews, it is important we do not slide back into a spirit model.
Dr Braude notes that whilst the nineteenth century spiritualists and spiritists generated impressive phenomena, their model for these phenomena was crude. For instance, a failure to achieve results in a séance were chalked up to a ‘weak’ medium or a failure to achieve a telegraph-style ‘link’ with the spirit world. The sheer unpredictability of human psi phenomena -and unpredictability is a baked-in hallmark of them- rarely warranted a mention.
Similarly, psychology in its gutless twentieth century manifestation (listen to Ramsey Dukes and myself discuss it) decided a Mind model could explain the entirety of the phenomena. And once again magic -persistently disappointing in its metaphysical ambition- has largely decided that it is a binary choice and that the line in the sand is drawn here.
It isn’t. Try this on for size.
I will go all-in on the psychology model when psychology grows up and admits the reality of the spirits.
Seriously, think about it. Readmitting the spirits gives us tremendous flexibility in improved modelling. Dr Braude observes “taking mediumship seriously is something that is unusually conducive to the study of large scale phenomena.” Ie if you are open to the notion that what the people are contacting is real then you get better results in your study of its effects… even if those effects are sometimes/often apparently generated by the Mind. (Whatever that is.)
We have been cutting our sandwiches on the horizontal when we should have been cutting them on the diagonal.
Now… who wants to help me build a Faraday Cage this weekend?