Phenomena Page 3
Over the next few weeks, the two men exchanged a series of letters. In addition to his support, De Kruif issued a prescient warning. “All creation, including science, is a war against precedent. Science, to be vital, must grow out of competition between individual brains, foils one to the other, each man mad for his own idea.” Conformity was a scientist’s death knell, said De Kruif. “Beware the Establishment!” he warned.
On the advice of his new friend, Puharich traveled east, lecturing on the Puharich Theory to colleagues at Harvard and Yale. From the podium he spoke freely about his ideas, which merged philosophy, mysticism, and science. “What is the nature of the process that enables man to reflect, and to reflect upon, the universe in a range that now encompasses the phenomena that lie between God on the one hand, and nuclear energy on the other?” he asked. Did inspiration, imagination, and Einstein-like thinking come from within, or was initiative an external force? He urged his colleagues to go out into nature and to observe. “Watch long trails of birds in migration, the unerring return of the homing pigeon, the struggle of the fish going upstream to spawn, the orderly movement of armies of ants, the pecuniary nature of the bee,” he said, for in nature, the mysteries of the universe are revealed. As for man, “The answer to these many questions, I am convinced, lie in the nature of the nervous system,” Puharich declared, “a sensitivity to forces, some of which we already know, and most of which are unknown.” Puharich’s ideas were a merging of medicine and mysticism. “I have wondered at the clairvoyance of the mind that can break loose from the shackles of conformity and ‘facts’ and can give us the philosophy of Plato, the universe of Newton, the spirit of Christ, and the psychological insight of Henry Thoreau, Walt Whitman, William James and Khalil Gibran. The deep study of this problem is my life’s work.”
Among those in attendance who were enchanted by Puharich’s Theory and ideas were two wealthy benefactors, Joyce Borden Balokovic and Zlatko Balokovic. Joyce was a primary shareholder of the Borden dairy fortune; Zlatko was a world-renowned Yugoslavian-born virtuoso violinist who owned one of the world’s largest collections of Guarnerius and Stradivarius instruments. The Balokovics took an immediate interest in Puharich and suggested they work together on a future project. “After the Harvard lecture, [I] accepted an invitation to visit friends in Camden, Maine,” Puharich wrote in his journal. The new friends were the Balokovics.
Camden was a place unlike anything Andrija Puharich—a boy raised in the Chicago slums and then on a farm—had ever experienced. This magnificent coastal community was a summer colony for an elite group of America’s ruling class, children of Golden Age industrialists who earned their money the old-fashioned way, by inheriting it. Here in Maine the summer cottages were 10,000-square-foot homes with gatehouses, carriage houses, boathouses, and stables. Days were spent yachting. Evenings were passed in wicker chairs on wooden verandas, sipping cocktails and admiring the environs. Nights were spent in the salon or library discussing ideas: great works of literature, national security, world religions—and in the case of Joyce Borden Balokovic, extrasensory perception. She suggested Puharich create a research laboratory in Maine dedicated to the study of the Puharich Theory. She and Zlatko would be happy to donate, she said, and so would many of their friends. To demonstrate, Joyce introduced Puharich to a friend she was certain would also want to become a benefactor, Alice Astor Bouverie.
Alice Astor Bouverie was an heiress, a philanthropist, and the only daughter of John Jacob Astor IV, of the Astor dynasty. Alice was just ten years old when her father, one of the richest men in the world, died in the sinking of the RMS Titanic. Astor left his daughter $5 million, roughly $120 million in 2017. Like Joyce Borden, Alice was interested in ESP, and in mental telepathy in particular, a notion she learned about from her father. John Jacob Astor IV was a world-class businessman, investor, and real estate tycoon, but he also wrote science fiction novels about ESP. In A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future, published in 1884, Astor’s space-traveling protagonists communicated telepathically with one another. “Do tell me how you were able to answer my thought,” one character says to another. “I see the vibrations of the grey matter of your brain as plainly as the movements of your lips; in fact, I see the thoughts in the embryonic state taking shape,” comes the reply. In 1948, Alice Bouverie became the first among many wealthy individuals to personally finance Dr. Puharich’s work. Bouverie’s initial check was for $106,000, more than $1 million in 2017. With this investment, Puharich started his first research foundation.
A third female patron was introduced to the growing circle: Marcella Miller du Pont, of the chemical and weapons production conglomerate. Like Joyce Borden and Alice Astor, Marcella du Pont was passionate about ESP and willing to finance Puharich’s research efforts in this area. The three wealthy women helped Puharich come up with the name for his new foundation. In homage to the legend of King Arthur, Merlin the Magician, a sword, a stone, and the Holy Grail, it would be called the Round Table Foundation. At Puharich’s Round Table, there was no chivalric order; men and women were equals. It was not as much an antiestablishment foundation as it was a secret society of elites. Alice Bouverie became the organization’s first vice president. Joyce Borden Balokovic served as treasurer. Marcella du Pont went by the honorary title “mother of magic.”
Documents from the Library of Congress, previously unreported, reveal that it was du Pont who first brought the attention of top-tier government officials to the Round Table Foundation, including Admiral John E. Gingrich, the powerful director of security and intelligence for the Atomic Energy Commission. In a letter to her brother du Pont wrote, “my great friend Admiral John Gingrich [is] interested in using some of the significant facts for the Navy that [will] come out of these [Round Table] experiments.” Gingrich served as the chief of Naval Material Command from 1953 to 1954 and was responsible for all Navy procurement activities. Another Navy man, Rexford Daniels, a Yale PhD, former lieutenant commander in Navy intelligence, and current member of the U.S. Navy Reserve, would stop by for drinks on the porch at the Round Table Foundation. Daniels, who had a summer home in neighboring Camden, advised military officials on radio frequency and microwave technology, which was still in its infancy in the late 1940s. He was interested in ESP as a possible means of long-distance communication in submarines. As a member of both the military establishment and the East Coast aristocracy, Daniels would soon become a liaison for Dr. Puharich between these worlds.
Money poured in. One wealthy benefactor after the next joined the Round Table Foundation, including Ruth Forbes Young, of the Forbes family of bankers, and her husband, Arthur Middleton Young, the Princeton University mathematician-philosopher, cosmologist, and astrologer who famously designed Bell Corporation’s first helicopter, the Model 30, in 1942. Congresswoman Frances Payne Bolton, granddaughter of oilman Henry B. Payne and the first woman elected to Congress from Ohio, was a supporter and patron. Henry Belk of the Belk department store fortune came on board, flying up to Maine in his private jet for foundation meetings. Henry Cabot Paine, a Boston Brahmin, became involved, and so did John “Jack” Hays Hammond Jr., son of the diplomat and mining magnet John Hays Hammond Sr., and himself the inventor of the Navy’s first torpedo, the Hammond torpedo.
In this way, the members of the Round Table Foundation were a unique mixture of old-money philosophers and scientists, diplomats and weapons designers, poets and mystics. They all had deep pockets and nonconformist ideas. But their common bond began via an interest in extrasensory perception. Was it elemental to human consciousness? A product of nerve conduction? Or some other unknown energy force? The quest of the Round Table Foundation was to conduct experiments to find out and to fund the research that would allow the Puharich Theory to advance from conjecture to hypothesis to scientific theory.
With the remarkable influx of cash from his new friends and associates, Dr. Andrija Puharich moved his family from California to Maine, into a seaside mansion in Glen Cove. Jinn
y, Puharich’s wife, had just given birth to their first child. It was here, starting in 1949, that work began in earnest. Meanwhile, six hundred miles to the south, in Washington, D.C., the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949 was passed, broadening the Agency’s authority and power. Soon the civilian pursuits at the Round Table Foundation and the national security goals of the CIA would entwine.
The opulence of Puharich’s new home and laboratory facility, called Warrenton Estate, was part of its mystique. The main house was designed by the famous Beaux-Arts architect Stanford White. Warrenton had forty-five rooms, eight fireplaces, and twelve baths. There were wraparound porches, a soaring three-story entrance, a library, a salon, and a billiard room. From third-floor turrets guests enjoyed sweeping views of Owl’s Head Bay, of seagulls and swans and sailboats on the sea. The sixty-five-acre property featured manicured lawns, boxwood hedges, vegetable and flower gardens. There was a footpath leading from the main house down to a private beach on Penobscot Bay. The adjacent two-story steepled barn would become home to Puharich’s impressive laboratory, where a staff of research assistants worked on experiments relating to the five known senses and a quest for the elusive sixth sense. The plan of action at the Round Table Foundation was to establish itself as a trailblazer in ESP and related research, then garner blue-sky research grants from national science foundations, corporations, and the government.
Dr. Puharich began conducting experiments involving audio waves and human hearing. The normal threshold for hearing in humans is 20 Hz to 20 kHz, but Puharich knew of cases in which certain individuals could hear well beyond that range. Puharich wondered, was there an analogy in ESP? To assist him in this quest, the foundation hired an ear surgeon from New York named Samuel Rosen. Dr. Rosen had a theory that hereditary deafness might be curable if only he could figure out how to redirect certain sound waves in the ear canal. In New York City, Rosen conducted traditional surgeries related to human hearing and the ear canal. During his fellowship at the Round Table Foundation, he performed experimental surgeries on goats and dogs with Puharich acting as his assistant. The work was informative, but soon it was time for Dr. Rosen to return to his medical practice in New York.
Some months later, during a routine operation on a patient who was legally deaf, Rosen accidentally hit a tiny, stirrup-shaped object called the stapes bone, located in the middle ear. When the surgery was over, a most remarkable thing had happened: the deaf patient could now hear. An accident had changed medical history. To Puharich’s eye, this was serendipity at work. This groundbreaking surgical procedure, now called the “Rosen stapes” operation, has since restored hearing to tens of millions of deaf people around the world. For the foundation to be affiliated with Dr. Rosen was a fortuitous milestone. Puharich, though not directly responsible, took credit. Grants from major donors flowed in to the Round Table Foundation, including ones from General Foods Corporation and the Kettering Foundation. The monies, earmarked for traditional research, kept the foundation afloat. Meanwhile, Dr. Puharich’s mystical and supernatural beliefs began to deepen.
One of the more influential people in his life during this period was Jack Hammond Jr., the wealthy American inventor and ESP advocate, who was twenty years Puharich’s senior. Hammond held more U.S. patents than any other living American at the time, including a lucrative one for his eponymous torpedo, the first radio-controlled underwater missile in use by the U.S. Navy. The concept was based not on an original idea of Hammond’s but on one from his mentor, the futurist, physicist, and inventor Nikola Tesla. Equally noteworthy was that Tesla had been but one of Jack Hammond’s influential mentors decades before. Born into a wealthy family of industrialists and diplomats, and owing to these powerful family connections, Hammond had been mentored by three of the most famous inventors of the nineteenth century: Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Tesla.
Jack Hammond was rich, well respected, and confident in his mystical and supernatural convictions. He lived in a medieval-style seaside castle in Gloucester, Massachusetts, filled with ancient artifacts collected from around the world. He practiced astrology and mental telepathy and believed in ghosts. And he seamlessly balanced success as a scientific inventor with numerous unorthodox ideas. Over discussions at the Warrenton estate, the bond between the men grew. “Jack became my mentor, teaching me more subtleties of life than any book can capture,” Puharich wrote in his journal. “He taught me the art of invention, how all his ideas came to him in dreams, in reveries.”
Jack Hammond, like Nikola Tesla before him, believed scientific inspiration could come to a man from an unknown energy force, in the form of a dream. There was precedent for this idea, including personal accounts from two Nobel Laureates and a founding father of modern organic chemistry, August Kekulé. At a science symposium in Germany in 1890, Kekulé, who discovered benzene, revealed that the idea had come to him in a dream in which he imagined a snake eating its own tail, like the ancient symbol of the ouroboros. In 1920, Frederick G. Banting, an unknown Canadian surgeon at the time, woke up from a dream telling him to “surgically ligate [tie up] the pancreas of a diabetic dog in order to stop the flow of nourishment,” he later said. The discovery, that diabetes could be treated with insulin injections, won him the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1923. Otto Loewi, the German pharmacologist who discovered acetylcholine (a neurotransmitter involved in dreaming) woke up in the middle of a dream, jotted down a few notes on paper, and went back to sleep. Loewi’s dream led to the discovery that nerve cell communication is chemical, not electrical, and for this he won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1936.
At Warrenton in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Puharich and Hammond spent many nights in front of a roaring fire discussing Tesla’s theories. Science was about searching and researching, the two men agreed, which is why it was called research. One of Hammond’s research ideas was to try to determine whether ESP worked on a kind of mental radio channel, transmitted between individuals like radio waves. Tesla, who wrote in his memoirs that he’d experienced extrasensory perception as a child, had originally shared this idea with Hammond, wondering whether ESP might travel on extremely low frequency (ELF) waves. ELF waves were extraordinarily long, as in thousands of miles long. In nature, ELF waves are generated by thunderstorms, lightning, and natural disturbances in Earth’s magnetic field.
In an effort to expand on Tesla’s ideas and test them scientifically, Hammond and Puharich built a floor-to-ceiling box, made entirely of metal and lined with copper mesh, called a Faraday Cage. The cage shielded anyone seated inside from all electrostatic and electromagnetic waves except ELF waves. Puharich and Hammond then hired world-famous psychics and tested them inside the cage at Warrenton. They called their psychic experiments Project I.
The first psychic hired was Eileen Garrett, an Irish medium famous among the New York City parapsychology set. Garrett came to live at the Round Table Foundation, and for weeks at a time Puharich’s researchers tested her psychic abilities in and out of the Faraday Cage using a set of five traditional ESP test cards called Zener cards, each with one of five basic symbols (circle, square, wavy lines, cross, star) printed on one side. When inside the cage, Puharich wrote, Ms. Garrett’s extrasensory perception “was increased by a healthy margin over those scores obtained under ordinary conditions,” suggesting electronic shielding had a positive impact on psychic functioning. These results encouraged the scientists to expand their tests at the foundation to include a wide array of psychic phenomena, such as mental telepathy, map dowsing, astrological predictions, and palm reading.
Meanwhile, Puharich continued his laboratory experiments with audio waves. He was fascinated by audio aberrations in sane individuals: people who claimed to “hear things” inside their minds but who did not otherwise test for psychosis. In search of one of these individuals to use as a test subject, Puharich reached out to his friend and colleague Warren S. McCulloch, who worked with doctors and patients at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in New York City. As one of th
e founders of the cybernetics movement (defined as the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine), McCulloch was a powerful establishment scientist and CIA asset. He served as chairman of numerous conferences of the Macy Foundation, a secret funding conduit for the CIA’s MKULTRA program. It is likely that this work with McCulloch regarding audio aberrations placed Puharich on the CIA’s radar.
Puharich asked McCulloch to find him a patient at Bellevue who’d been committed for the first time to the psychiatric ward for hearing voices. McCulloch located a machinist whose psychiatric medical profile was completely normal other than a sudden audio aberration. Before the voices appeared, the machinist had displayed no symptoms of insanity. Whereas many a 1950s doctor would have written the man off as crazy, Puharich and his foundation had another theory to pursue. They believed the man might be hearing voices that were traveling on a radio wave, that the machinist was somehow “tuned in” to a specific radio frequency that other individuals could not hear. “We found out that his job was the key to the diagnosis,” Puharich wrote.
In the machine shop where the man worked, the machinist’s daily routine was “grind[ing] metal casings against carborundum wheels” for hours at a time. At the foundation facility, Puharich’s research team gave the man a dental examination, “which showed that his metal fillings were coated with carborundum dust,” or silicon carbide, a semiconductor. The carborundum “behaved like the crystal rectifier in the old crystal radio sets of the 1920s,” wrote Puharich. When the subject was placed inside the Faraday Cage, all electrical and radio signals were eliminated. “We found that his voices ceased,” Puharich confirmed. “His teeth were cleaned and he was cured of the ‘psychiatric’ problem.” The man was never crazy to begin with. “Rather, we found that he was precisely tuned to radio station WOR in New York City.” It was another medical breakthrough for the Round Table Foundation.