In a guttural voice Stump alternated between English and an unrecognizable foreign language, as if channeling an entity from ancient Egypt, Bouverie said, and in this trance state he spoke of “a drug that would stimulate one’s psychic faculties.” Puharich asked to see the drawings. Bouverie concurred and, even better, she said, revealed that one of her guests had transcribed what Stump said during the spontaneous séance. Bouverie agreed to send Puharich the documents right away.
At Edgewood, Puharich made his doctor’s rounds, all the while thinking about the telephone call. At day’s end he walked across the base to his Army-issue apartment. Edgewood was ugly and uninspiring, the antithesis of the Warrenton Estate. He hated being here, a cog in the Army’s Cold War military machine. He collected Jinny and their three young daughters and headed over to the Edgewood pool for an evening swim. Back at their apartment after dinner, the doorbell rang. It was a courier from New York City carrying a special-delivery package for Captain Puharich from Alice Bouverie.
Puharich opened the large envelope and settled down into an easy chair to read. He told Jinny to go to bed without him. Flipping through the pages, he marveled at the strange symbols the Dutch sculptor had produced in his trance. Harry Stump had spoken of stone temples, dog-headed statues, and an ancient medical procedure involving “termites with pincers on their heads.” And he drew a picture of the drug he said could stimulate psychic functioning. It was a simple mushroom rendered with spots on the cap and the word “mushroom” written neatly underneath.
It was wildly serendipitous, if not suspicious. Puharich had been asked by his superiors to locate a drug that turned ESP on and off; at a dinner party hosted by a wealthy friend, a guest delivered instructions about this mysterious drug while in a somnambulistic trance. But it’s important to note that in 1954 the hallucinogenic mushroom had not yet been identified by American botanists nor the CIA scientists who were actively searching for it. Given Puharich’s propensity to interpret any and all events as the work of a supernatural force, it would be easy to discount the story as apocryphal—except for the fact that the Dutch sculptor had just provided the CIA with a key lead in its yearlong, unsuccessful quest to locate the drug teonanáctl.
The more Puharich learned about Harry Stump’s channeling abilities, the more his fixation with Stump grew. And so did his obsession with the hallucinogenic mushroom. Puharich wrote to the Boston Mycological Society, in Massachusetts, and learned that the mushroom Stump referred to was the Amanita muscaria, first identified by Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus in 1753. This was the poisonous mushroom so often referred to in Nordic and Germanic fairy tales, and likely the reason for its association with magical potions, witches, goblins, and trolls. Puharich vowed to find out more about this mushroom. When his case was solid, he would bring the story of the Dutch telepath to his Army Chemical Center bosses, he later wrote. He enlisted Alice Bouverie to help.
Bouverie journeyed to the rare book collection at the New York Public Library, where she netted a serendipitous lead. While she was searching the botanical section in the Arents Tobacco Collection room, a librarian recognized Bouverie as one of the city’s major philanthropists and asked whether she needed help. Bouverie said she was interested in a certain type of field mushroom; the librarian told her that there was another person in New York City who apparently shared this same interest and who had recently visited the collection with the same request. That person was R. Gordon Wasson, the librarian said, vice president of the J.P. Morgan & Company bank.
Puharich and Alice Bouverie arranged to meet Gordon Wasson at Bouverie’s home. Wasson and his wife, Valentina, a pediatrician, had been investigating a mushroom cult in Mexico, Wasson explained. The mushrooms were difficult to locate but he was determined to find them. He’d traveled to Mexico twice and was planning a third expedition. Perhaps Dr. Puharich wanted to come along? The Mexicans believed that the mushroom was a pathway to the supernatural, Wasson said. These were not just hallucinogenic mushrooms, they were alleged to have divinatory powers. Numerous shamanistic tribes around the world believed in the mushroom’s supernatural qualities, he explained, allowing human consciousness to separate from the physical body and for a brief time operate independently of the body. This out-of-body experience, sometimes called traveling clairvoyance, had been written about in mystical literature since the dawn of recorded history, he added. He confirmed that the mushroom he was talking about was called teonanáctl, God’s flesh.
Where Wasson saw shamanistic ritual, Puharich saw opportunity. “The idea that a human could [psychically] travel to a remote location, obtain information, and return with this intelligence” had profound implications for the Army, he wrote. In a series of extraordinary coincidences, Puharich had found exactly what the Army and the CIA were searching for. Now confident that he could make a solid case to his military superiors, Puharich asked Wasson if he would share this information. Citing patriotism, Wasson agreed. In August 1954, Captain Puharich briefed his Army superiors on the teonanáctl mushroom, emphasizing how rare this information was. “Mr. Wasson assured [me] that to the best of his knowledge, which had been world-wide and covered many years, the Mexican sacred-mushroom ritual had not with certainty been known to exist before his discovery,” Puharich said he told his supervisors. “It is true that there were some scattered references to its existence in obscure journals [and] ancient manuscripts, but no one had ever proven that there was substantial fact behind the legend” of the sacred mushroom.
The Army was interested, and Puharich was given a higher security clearance for a classified “psycho-chemical research program.” He was told there was another research program going on, also involving mushrooms, but he would have to wait for an even higher clearance to be granted in order to learn more. The program Puharich’s superior was likely referring to was the CIA’s MKULTRA Subproject 58, Morse Allen’s unsuccessful effort to locate teonanáctl.
By 1954, the CIA’s two-year effort was still floundering. Allen had assigned a young chemist named James Moore the job of infiltrating East Coast mycology groups with the goal of finding out where in Mexico the elusive teonanáctl mushroom grew. As shown in surviving MKULTRA documents, Dr. Moore, posing as a deep-pocketed professor, was in fact backed by funding from the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, in Washington, D.C., a principal funding source for the CIA’s brain warfare program. Moore told the various mycology groups he wanted to fund private mushroom-hunting expeditions to locate the legendary teonanáctl. Dr. Moore “maintains the fiction that the botanical specimens he collects are for his own use since his field interest is natural-product chemistry,” wrote the CIA’s chief of the Technical Services Division, Sidney Gottlieb. Excited to be posted to a classified ESP project on which he’d already invested so much personal time, Puharich waited patiently for his security clearance to be granted, but his expectations were misplaced. When the CIA learned from the Army Chemical Center about Puharich’s meeting with Gordon Wasson, the Agency chose to bypass Puharich and approach Wasson directly through their shill, Dr. James Moore. Andrija Puharich was no longer needed, and his security clearance never came.
Privy to none of this, Puharich remained obsessed with Harry Stump and what he believed were the sculptor’s supernatural powers. Puharich spent his weekdays working with patients at the Army Chemical Center in Edgewood, and on weekends he traveled to Alice Bouverie’s home in New York City to conduct ESP experiments on the Dutch psychic. Privately, at his own home, Puharich’s personal life was spiraling out of control. Jinny’s mental illness was getting worse, and, according to his journals, in 1954 she was sent to an unnamed hospital for psychiatric treatment. During this low point in American medical history for the treatment of the mentally ill, Jinny Puharich was given insulin shock therapy, a cruel procedure whereby the patient is injected daily with large doses of insulin to induce comas over a period of several weeks and sometimes for up to two months. Save for a few references in Puharich’s notes and journals, lit
tle else is known about this hospitalization.
In his professional life, Puharich saw himself as a man at a crossroads. His two-year Army commission was coming up for review and he was being recommended for a promotion. Puharich told his superiors he was interested only in pursuing “medical work and research in extrasensory perception.” The Army was equally candid with him, he recalled, and “explained to me that it was very difficult for the military to engage in the kind of research we had been discussing [because] anyone who was interested in this subject was automatically branded as a crackpot.”
Puharich presented Alice Bouverie with a proposal. What if Harry Stump agreed to work at the Round Table Foundation, full-time? Stump could live on the Warrenton estate, be tested in the laboratory, and still have plenty of time to sculpt and paint. Bouverie thought the idea was brilliant, and told Puharich she was willing to finance it.
At the Army Chemical Center, Puharich met with his superior officer. “I spoke to my commanding general and informed him that I was no longer interested in the Army proposal made earlier,” Puharich wrote. “I felt I could pursue my studies with greater ease in Maine than I could with restrictions of Army military life. Such studies were incompatible with the demand for conformity imposed upon government personnel.” On April 1, 1955, Puharich signed separation papers, officially parting ways with the U.S. Army. With funds in hand from Alice Bouverie, he packed up Jinny, now released from the hospital, their three daughters, and their cat. The family set out on a weeklong drive from Edgewood, Maryland, to Glen Cove, Maine.
Puharich was thrilled. He could finally refocus his research efforts on ESP experiments full-time. He could continue his search for the unknown energy force he believed powered extrasensory perception. Harry Stump, the Dutch sculptor, would follow just a few weeks later.
* * *
Written accounts of individuals who claim to channel disincarnate spirits, or communicate with the dead, can be found across recorded history. Not all mediums are charlatans or intentional deceivers; many believe in what they do. In the late nineteenth century automatic writing as a by-product of channeling became a popular conceit. One of the most famous cases involved a Frenchwoman named Catherine-Elise Müller, who went by the pseudonym Hélène Smith. Examination of her story reveals more about Andrija Puharich than he was willing to admit in his private journals or published memoirs. From 1894 to 1898, a psychology professor named Théodore Flournoy studied Hélène Smith at the University of Geneva, in Switzerland. In a self-imposed trance, or autohypnotic state, Smith would describe to him in great detail events from the lives of historical figures, including the poet Victor Hugo and Marie Antoinette. Hélène Smith spoke in Italian, French, Hindi, and other languages that were unidentifiable. Even more colorfully, Smith claimed to be able to psychically travel to Mars, whose landscapes she painted and whose language she said she could speak and write. The odd Martian glyphs she penned were reproduced in Flournoy’s book, From India to the Planet Mars, a 447-page account of his exhaustive study of Smith, one of the most famous mediums of that age.
The professor’s conclusion was that she exhibited cryptomnesia, a word he invented that has since been recognized by legal scholars, skeptics, and the American Psychological Association. Flournoy believed that the content produced during Hélène Smith’s séances came from her “subliminal imagination, derived largely from forgotten sources, for example books read as a child.” The brain was capable of astonishing feats, Professor Flournoy said, including knowledge of foreign languages heard only briefly, sometimes decades before. As for the Martian-speak, Flournoy attributed it to an age-old condition called glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, a concept discussed by Paul in First Corinthians to describe divinely inspired speech: “For if you have the ability to speak in tongues, you will be talking only to God, since people won’t be able to understand you.” Of his findings, Professor Flournoy declared, “Science has disclosed a hidden subliminal work within each individual being.” His popular book sold more than 100,000 copies, a significant number in 1899.
In the years that followed, cryptomnesia was used as a defense in two high-profile plagiarism cases, whereby the plagiarist was said to have unconsciously taken intellectual property from another author and subliminally “remembered” it as their own. The most famous case involved Helen Keller, who in 1892, at the age of twelve, was accused of plagiarizing a short story she’d written in braille called “The Frost King.” In what became a very public investigation, Keller was accused of stealing parts of Margaret T. Canby’s “The Frost Fairies,” published earlier in a book of stories called Birdie and His Friends. Passages in Helen Keller’s story were indeed identical to ones in Canby’s story. Mark Twain leapt to Keller’s defense. “She was subconsciously retelling a story that had somehow successfully embedded its plot into her being and, in the retelling, she came too close to the original,” said Twain. “How a deaf-blind child could so closely replicate the intricate plot details of a story and make it her own is a marvel in itself.” Margaret Canby agreed. “Under the circumstances, I do not see how any one can be so unkind as to call it a plagiarism; it is a wonderful feat of memory.”
In 1903, a similar case was discovered and described by Carl Jung in his paper “Cryptomnesia.” This time the accused was the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. While reading Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which famously deals with the mystical concept of eternal recurrence, Jung recognized a four-page section lifted verbatim from a book published fifty years before. He wrote to Nietzsche’s sister, Dr. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche (Nietzsche had already gone mad and died), who remembered reading the passage with her brother, she told Jung, when they were children. This, Jung wrote, “shows how the unconscious layers of the mind work,” and propelled him to develop his own ideas about man’s collective unconscious.
Thirty years before Puharich published writings about Dr. Vinod channeling a group of supernatural entities called the Nine Principles and Forces, a British adventure writer named Talbot Mundy had published a novel called The Nine Unknown. Originally serialized in Adventure magazine in 1922, Mundy’s fictional story, set in ancient India in 270 BC, tells the tale of a group called the Nine Unknown who make up a secret society during the reign of the Emperor Ashoka, a historical figure of the Mauryan dynasty. Mundy’s nine fictitious characters are contacted by a supernatural force and told it is their job to act as guardians of a book containing secret and powerful knowledge. The mission of the Nine Unknown is to preserve and develop this secret knowledge and to keep it from evil forces that are actively trying to destroy it.
Was Puharich a deceiver? Delusional? Had he plagiarized another man’s work and claimed it as his own? Was he suffering from cryptomnesia? It is impossible to know. What is known is that, now released from Army obligations, Dr. Andrija Puharich was free to do as he pleased. His wealthy benefactors encouraged and supported his hypothesis that a supernatural force was responsible for all things related to anomalous mental phenomena.
If things had been different, Puharich might have exited the narrative here, having earned an anecdotal place in the annals of the U.S. government’s ESP and PK research. But this is not what happened. Instead, as indicated in his declassified FBI file, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was assigned to observe and keep track of Puharich’s ongoing ESP experiments at the Round Table Foundation in Maine.
CHAPTER FOUR
Quasi Science
With his return to the Round Table Foundation in Maine in April 1955, life on the breezy, sea-swept coast offered idyllic work conditions for Dr. Andrija Puharich. “The pungency of pine and spruce, the damp salt smell of the sea, the boom of Owl’s Head foghorn” were inspiring, he wrote. During the coldest winter months the foundation had briefly closed its doors, but now, after a few weeks of spring cleanup, the laboratory was up and running again. Jinny Puharich appeared to be doing well in the new environs, and Puharich began spending time with his family again. They enjoyed
picnics in the blueberry fields and took hikes along the old Mohawk Indian trails. The birch and hemlock forests were filled with porcupines, woodchucks, and deer; the rocks covered with bright green moss. There was an air of majesty and mystery to things.
At the CIA, Dr. James Moore was still posing as a professor, still trying to ingratiate himself with R. Gordon Wasson, still without success. Puharich, however, remained in close contact with Wasson as the banker-turned-ethnomycologist prepared for his third expedition to Mexico in search of the sacred mushroom called God’s flesh. On June 29, 1955, Wasson, accompanied by a New York society photographer named Allan Richardson, arrived in the remote village of Huautla de Jiménez, in Oaxaca. A local guide took them to a deep ravine awash in teonanáctl mushrooms after a spring season of heavy rain. “Allan and I were the first white men in recorded history to eat the divine mushrooms,” Wasson later wrote. Wasson reported hallucinating intensely, but stated that no divinatory powers were revealed. After the mystical experience was over the two New Yorkers packed up a cardboard box full of fungi and returned to the United States. Upon arrival, Wasson sent a cache of mushrooms to Puharich at his laboratory in Maine.
Inside the Round Table laboratory, Puharich performed a chemical analysis of the mushrooms’ toxicity. Three chemicals produced the hallucinogenic effects, he learned: muscarine, atropine, and bufotenin. Armed with this information, he set out to create an antidote. Puharich’s plan was to drug Harry Stump to learn whether the legend was true, whether God’s flesh could produce divinatory powers in certain men. But first Puharich decided to try the hallucinogenic mushroom himself. So, apparently, did Alice Bouverie and a few other “individuals” from the lab. There is no record of how these personal drug experiments turned out. Puharich was not the first scientist to experiment on himself. Isaac Newton test-tasted arsenic, Nikola Tesla allowed 250,000-volt electrical shocks to course through his own body, Sigmund Freud took copious amounts of cocaine. In Puharich’s case, whatever laboratory controls that might have been in place at the Round Table Foundation before drugs entered the mix were now likely thrown to the winds.
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