The Stargate Conspiracy

by Lynn Picknett

  It is known that the security services have long taken an interest in such cults, as Jacques Vallée has frequently testified, seeking explanations for how such beliefs originate and spread, for reasons that are entirely understandable. For example, quasireligious cults and small but subversive political groups have the potential for great social unrest and worse — the Nazis started small, after all — and they are often used for criminal and anti-social purposes, such as drug trafficking or gun-running. The sinister potential of cults occasionally surfaces: Swiss and French authorities have been alert to such dangers since the mass suicides of the Order of the Solar Temple, whose beliefs included the existence of extraterrestrials from Sirius, and the similar suicides of members of the Star Trek-influenced Heaven’s Gate cult in 1996. A number of the earliest UFO contactee cults that emerged soon after the flying saucer craze of the late 1940s were centred on individuals who were members of American fascist organisations. For example, William Dudley Pelley, prewar supporter of Hitler, founded a fascist group called the Silver Shirts of America in 1932 and was interned for the duration of the Second World War. Fascinated with mystical and esoteric ideas, in the late 1940s Pelley claimed to be in telepathic contact with extraterrestrials, writing a book about his experiences called Star Guests (1950).96

  Another reason for official interest in such belief systems is their possible use in psychological warfare. One can imagine, for example, the wealth of possibilities in introducing cult beliefs into an enemy country in order to seriously destabilise it or to ensnare and covertly influence susceptible politicians. One of the main purposes of the intelligence community is specifically to investigate the origins, structure and spread of belief systems.

  Another episode illustrates the idea that US government agencies have indulged in ‘cult creation’ experiments. After his first contact with the Nine through Dr Vinod, Puharich’s next reported contact was through his letter from Charles Laughead, after their meeting in Mexico in 1956. Two years before, Laughead had been involved in another contactee group — with some very significant results. Their alleged extraterrestrial communications were the subject of a classic academic study into cult belief by three sociologists at the University of Minnesota, later published as When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festiger, Henry W. Riecken and Stanley Schachter (1956).

  The contact centred on a Chicago housewife called Dorothy Martin, pseudonymously identified as ‘Marion Keech’ in the book. It follows an only too familiar pattern. In 1953 she had begun to develop mediumistic abilities, receiving messages via automatic writing. At first, these were ‘traditional’ spiritualistic communications — from her dead father and other deceased people — but a year later messages began to come through from what claimed to be extraterrestrial sources, originating from several planets, but mainly from one called Clarion. She called these beings the ‘Guardians’.

  A group — largely consisting of other housewives, but including a few from other walks of life, including a research scientist — gathered around her to study the content of the communications. Enthusiastic members of this curious circle were Dr Charles and Lillian Laughead (who appear as Thomas and Daisy Armstrong in When Prophecy Fails). The Laugheads had been Protestant missionaries in Egypt before and just after the Second World War. On a postwar visit, Lillian suffered a mental breakdown and, when prayer failed to resolve her problems, the couple came to doubt their faith, beginning a quest through other religious and esoteric systems, finally becoming particularly interested in William Dudley Pelley’s writings. After a meeting with seminal UFO contactee George Adamski, they became convinced of the reality and spiritual significance of UFOs. They joined the Dorothy Martin circle and Charles became its organiser and spokesman.

  On 27 August 1954, Dorothy received a warning from the Guardians of a wave of imminent catastrophes, which would include the disappearance of the east coast of the United States — as well as Britain and France — under the sea on 21 December. The Laugheads took the lead in publicising these warnings, taking the story to the press.

  At this stage the group of sociologists from the University of Minnesota decided to infiltrate the group in order to make a hands-on study of the behaviour of such cults and, in particular, to see at first-hand the reactions of true believers when the prophecies failed to materialise. As we know, the east coast of the United States did not find itself in a watery grave on 21 December 1954, and neither did Britain or France. The Minnesota study charted the gradual break-up of the group and its members’ struggle to come to terms with the failure, and the resulting sense of loss and bereavement that such cruel disillusionment brings in its wake. Only one or two members admitted losing their faith in the Guardians, the majority coming up with a variety of more or less plausible rationalisations — or perhaps ‘irrationalisations’ — to explain the failure. Some said it had been a test of faith, or that the strength of their belief had actually averted the catastrophe. Quaintly, under the circumstances, the real tension in the group was caused by arguments about which of these excuses was the right one! The circle finally collapsed under the intense weight of public humiliation and ridicule. Dorothy Martin left to join a Dianetics centre in Arizona, having been a follower of Dianetics for some time, and the rest carried on with their lives. Only the Laugheads seemed to take something lasting away from the experience. According to When Prophecy Fails:

  In the next two weeks the Armstrongs [Laugheads] sold their home and wound up their affairs ... and Thomas [Charles] prepared for the role he was assuming - that of itinerant proselyter, spreading the teachings of the Guardians across the land.97

  The Laugheads began working with other channellers, one result of which was their meeting with Puharich two years later, which was to have a profound effect on his own acceptance of the reality of the Nine.

  The story of the Guardians cult may seem an all too familiar tale of a group of people obsessed with a false, quasireligious belief built up around a deluded channeller. That is certainly how the team from Minnesota University treated it. Another aspect of the story suggests something else was going on - that the events were indeed being manipulated by outside forces, but by very terrestrial agencies.

  Dorothy Martin sometimes returned to her locked home to find letters from ‘Clarion’ left inside, and she would receive telephone calls direct from the Guardians when the sociologists were present, which at least indicates that they were not figments of her imagination. As a climax, when the group gathered at Dorothy’s house on 18 December to await the coming cataclysm three days later, she received a long call from the leader of the Guardians, a being called Sananda, after which five young men arrived at the house, the leader of whom claimed to be Sananda himself. The group went into another room with Laughead for half an hour, followed by an hour with Dorothy Martin (from which she emerged very emotional and moved). Then the five mystery callers left. Again, all this was witnessed by the researchers.98

  These were real events, so it is difficult to reconcile them with the Minnesota team’s conclusion that it was all a collective delusion, although clearly there was scope for other interpretations, such as mistaken identity, or, more probably, a hoax. Yet if the latter, it was very carefully and painstakingly organised: the letters, telephone calls and the visit all served to reinforce the group’s belief in the prophecies received by automatic writing. Obviously, another group of people existed beyond the immediate circle of true believers and were orchestrating both the events and the phenomenon of escalating belief. Why?

  The most likely answer is that this shadowy but all important group were conducting their own experiment, and it is likely that they were an official but secret agency investigating the behaviour of circles based around channelled extraterrestrial communications. We know that the group was being used as an unwitting experimental subject by the Minnesota University researchers, and it may be significant that there was a local newspaper called The Minnesota Clarion.

  In that case, where did Dorothy
Martin’s original automatic scripts originate? If she and the Laugheads were part of the plot, all she had to do was sit down and make them up. Interestingly, the story almost exactly parallels that of the Nine - although of course on a much smaller scale - and the two series of events are linked by the meeting of Laughead with Puharich two years later. Was the Guardians scenario a dry run for the Nine?

  There was a sequel to the story of the Guardian group. Dorothy Martin continued to receive messages from the Guardians, who told her to change her name to ‘Sister Thedra’ and to travel to Lake Titicaca in Peru. Once there, she established - along with the Laugheads and the seminal mystic and contactee George Hunt Williamson — the Abbey of the Seven Rays. From this base Dorothy Martin began to prophesy the coming of the ‘Time of Awakening’ when Atlantis would rise from the deep and a new Saviour would rescue the righteous. In 1961 she returned to the United States, where she continued to preach her message until her death in 1988.99

  A sinister experiment?

  The hypothesis that the events surrounding the Nine were deliberately orchestrated makes sense of some otherwise puzzling aspects of the story, such as the failure of the promised mass landings of 1978. Why would the Nine risk the disillusionment of their followers when not even one alien craft, let alone fleets of spaceships, landed? On the ‘experimental’ hypothesis, this would be the perfect benchmark by which to test the degree of belief in the circle. If, unlike Dorothy Martin’s group twenty-five years before, they could accept and rationalise such a failure - and potential humiliation - then surely the experiment would be judged a success?

  The intimate involvement of Puharich in this scenario causes alarm bells to ring. Given his background, and the way in which he clearly manipulated the development of Nine communications in the 1970s, such a scenario — despite its X-Files overtones - makes much sense. It is not difficult to discern the presence of some shadowy military or intelligence agency behind the events surrounding the Nine.

  Consider, for example, Puharich’s Geller Kids or Space Kids, whom he tested and trained during the 1970s. There were twenty of them, the youngest nine and the oldest in their late teens, culled from seven different countries and taken to what became jokingly known as Puharich’s ‘Turkey Farm’ at Ossining in order to develop their psychic potential. As we have seen, Puharich trained them in remote viewing, but the target locations he set them were significant: they were of military or intelligence interest and included the Pentagon, the Kremlin and even the White House.100 It seems clear that there was an official element to these experiments, as they were being carried out at exactly the same time (1975 — 8) that defence and intelligence agencies were studying remote viewing in adults. We can speculate that the Ossining establishment was chosen for the children’s project because it was a conveniently ‘civilian’ location: questions would certainly have been asked if youngsters had been experimented on inside military facilities.

  The Ossining programme had even more disturbing elements: Puharich experimented on the children in order to contact extra-terrestrial intelligences. As with Geller and Bobby Home, he regularly hypnotised his young subjects, apparently in the belief that their powers did indeed come from ‘aliens’. As Steven Levy wrote: ‘The Kids describe strange cities with science-fiction trappings and claim to be messengers from these distant civilisations.’101

  Given Puharich’s obsession with extraterrestrial influence, not to mention his indiscriminate use of the most powerful sort of hypnosis, it would be strange if the Space Kids had not come up with such descriptions. But was Puharich simply releasing memories of real events, or was he in fact implanting them? In either case, his use of hypnosis, in what were clearly uncontrolled conditions, on children as young as nine, is extremely disquieting. (Ira Einhorn, a close associate of Puharich at this time, admitted to us that he found these experiments very disturbing.102)

  In August 1978, after the Turkey Farm was burned down in the arson attack, Puharich disappeared to Mexico, blaming the fire on the CIA, claiming that they were trying to stop his experiments with the Geller Kids.103 He later accused the CIA of making three attempts on his life, which is particularly strange because Puharich himself was, of course, known to have worked for them. Had he somehow doublecrossed them, or in some way made enemies within the agency? And if the CIA had really tried, and failed, to kill Puharich three times, it is hardly a good advertisement for their efficiency. Perhaps they were only trying to frighten him. Whatever the truth of the matter, Puharich was not the only one who suffered at the demise of the Turkey Farm. Several of the Space Kids were severely traumatised at being so brusquely abandoned, especially after living pretty much as a family in a close, ‘hothouse’ atmosphere for three years.104

  The destruction of the Turkey Farm was only part of a series of setbacks that afflicted the Puharich group in the late 1970s - which even included murder - throwing an even more sinister web of intrigue around the already tainted central figures.

  The Unicorn

  Another key player linking the Nine to the emerging counterculture of the 1970s was Ira Einhorn, known to his circle as ‘the Unicorn’, the meaning of his surname in English. He was a leading light in the world that emerged from the hippie scene to embrace a multitude of interleaved ‘alternative’ movements, such as ecology, new energy sources, exploration of the nature and limits of consciousness and mysticism.

  Ira Einhorn became a highly sought-after industrial guru, a professional networker who put key people in touch with others, acting as a catalyst for change and improvement. He had close connections with — and was financed by - many leading industrialists, including the Canadian Bronfman family and the Rockefellers, and companies such as AT&T and McDonnell Douglas, the military aircraft manufacturer. He was also known to be in contact with leading NASA officials.105

  A significant point in Einhorn’s career was his meeting with Puharich in 1968, at a time when the latter was working for the Atomic Energy Commission. Puharich has been described as Einhorn’s ‘mentor’ (a term often used of him), and the two men became close colleagues during the 1970s, when he was also busy with Lab Nine: Einhorn was a frequent visitor to the Turkey Farm when the Space Kids experiments were being carried out. He was Puharich’s stepping stone to other ground-breaking events taking place in the fields of psychology and physics at the time. Einhorn referred to the group of scientists of which he and Puharich were part as his ‘psychic mafia’.106 Einhorn arranged for Puharich’s 1962 book Beyond Telepathy to be reissued by Anchor Books in 1973 (contributing his own poem as a foreword), and he also edited Puharich’s account of his time with Uri Geller, Uri (1974), which was, in fact, less a biography of the superstar metalbender than a paean of praise for the Nine.

  Einhorn’s most significant contribution was, in the 1970s, the establishment of a worldwide network of scientists, industrialists, writers and philosophers at the cutting edge of new developments in physics, parapsychology, psychology and other fields. This new network consisted of 350 experts from twenty countries, with Einhorn himself acting as what he called ‘planetary catalyst’, circulating information to all the members. This network was funded by the Bell Telephone Company (of which Arthur M. Young was a major shareholder at that time), Einhorn always living entirely on the patronage of wealthy backers and business sponsors.107

  Einhorn’s network was the subject of a study by the Diebold Corporation in 1978, with the grandiose and somewhat impenetrable title of ‘The Emergence of Personal Communication Networks Among People Sharing the New Values and Their Possible Use in Sensitizing Operating Management’, which compared it to the ‘Invisible College’ of seventeenth-century Britain, an informal group of scientists - and, perhaps significantly, esotericists - that became the Royal Society.108

  Einhorn’s reputation took a dramatic nosedive, though. He and former cheerleader Holly Maddux had been involved in a stormy relationship since they met in October 1972, moving in together two months later. In the summer of 1
977 the couple went to London, where — with Puharich — they stayed at the home of a wealthy backer, Joyce Petschek. After one of their frequent fights, Holly returned to Philadelphia alone at the end of July, apparently determined, this time, to make a final break with Einhorn. In August she stayed at one of Joyce Petschek’s houses, on Fire Island in New York State, where she met a wealthy businessman called Saul Lapidus (a former executive of Puharich’s Intelectron Corporation). Meanwhile, Einhorn left London to visit other contacts in Europe, returning to the United States on 21 August, where he stayed for a few days at Puharich’s Turkey Farm before going back to Philadelphia. At the time Holly Maddux was staying with Lapidus, but she returned to Philadelphia on 9 September after an angry phone call from Einhorn. She was never seen alive again.

  Eighteen months later, after investigations by private detectives employed by Maddux’s parents, the Philadelphia police searched Einhorn’s apartment and found a very badly decomposed Maddux in a trunk inside a locked cupboard on the back porch. Einhorn was arrested. The autopsy revealed she had been killed by violent blows to the head.

  During the investigation into Maddux’s disappearance — initially by private detectives, then by the police - there is no doubt that those involved in the Puharich set-up closed ranks around Einhorn. Saul Lapidus had been concerned when Maddux failed to return from her last meeting with Einhorn, and had asked Puharich to call him and find out what had happened. Puharich was satisfied with Einhorn’s reassurance that everything was fine, which was understandable at the time, but Puharich seemed to continue to believe in Einhorn’s innocence, even when he was arrested. Puharich seemed to have been more concerned about recovering papers about the Geller Kids experiments he had lent Maddux shortly before she disappeared.109 (These were later found at Lapidus’s house and returned to Puharich.)