The Stargate Conundrum
The US Government’s secret pursuit of the psychic drug

“There are two ways to be fooled.
One is to believe what isn’t true;
the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

Introduction

In 1997, two British authors, Clive Prince and Lynn Picknett, were searching for new material that would hold the promise of a new scoop. Clive Prince had always been interested in a little-known episode in the history of, yes, what? UFOlogy? Para-psychological research? Government black budgets? The episode involved the so-called Council of Nine, allegedly a group of nine extraterrestrial beings that claimed to be the original Nine Creator Gods of Egypt, reporting into the Creator God Atum. Extra-terrestrials posing as gods – or perceived as gods by us, earthlings. This was the same premise as that of the movie Stargate and hence the title of the publication was called The Stargate Conspiracy. In the end, the authors concluded that from 1950-ish onwards, a small group of people had been working on an agenda to persuade Western civilisation that the Council of Nine were genuine extra-terrestrial beings, which had been responsible for the creation of the Egyptian civilisation, and which were still “out there” now. The goal of this agenda? To cultivate us into believing this “myth”.
The research for this book was largely done by Clive Prince and I, with interpretations of the uncovered material largely in the domain of the two authors. In the end, this meant that the book was dedicated to me. Though the premise of the book was and is sustainable, certain key ingredients suggested – or hinted – that it was not the full story. Because of time restraints and consistency of the book, those areas were not further explored. Subsequent publications took Clive Prince and Lynn Picknett towards the mystery of Rudolph Hess and other political intrigues of the 20th century, but the inconsistencies kept nagging away in the back of my mind, whenever I chanced upon an episode of Stargate-SG1 on television, or other circumstances. I realised that there were both gaps in our understanding – hinted at by inconsistencies that had fallen by the wayside of that book – and our research.

What was the problem?
At a high level, it was this: if the government wanted to create a false belief in extra-terrestrials, several government projects that we know existed, were not required. The government did not have to spend twenty years of research on the remote viewing project to feign belief in ET. If anything, the project’s longevity softened the case for “the Nine”. In the case of Andrija Puharich, who had been instrumental in launching the belief in these nine entities, there would have been no genuine interest, passion or belief in what he did. But he did care. Rather, if it was a campaign “to make us believe” and nothing more, it would only take a small group of people, operating from behind the scenes, propagating material either directly in the press, or via other channels. Also, this clique would not have directly involved Puharich in the manner Puharich had been involved. Though there was evidence that this was going on with the UFO-subject, the evidence uncovered during the research stage of The Stargate Conspiracy, had not unearthed such material. Though “the Nine” were being created as a modern myth, this was note the original goal of the original players, but something that developed along the way, by people with a different agenda, abusing the original research… which we know happens all too often in life.

At a more detailed level, the origins of the conspiracy could be traced back to the late 1940s and early 1950s. A small group of highly influential people, including Arthur Young, who was responsible for the “economisation” of the helicopter, held experiments in trying to contact “intelligences” of a “higher realm”. One person instrumental in this was our Andrija Puharich, a doctor working for the American government. In fact, the experiments seemed to have the full backing of the military. This suspicion became accepted fact in the following decades, when Puharich played a key role in the so-called “remote viewing” projects of the American military community, which started in the 1970s. Puharich roamed the world in search of potential psychics who would participate in the endeavour to try and uncover information only accessible via “paranormal”, psychic means, a technique they labelled “remote viewing”. It was clear that the new label was merely a selling point, as the words “paranormal” and “psychic” had received a negative connotation – one the military wanted to do without. At the same time, the new spin also allowed for a quiet bland name, which could mean anything, such as viewing via satellite (often labelled remote sensing). In the end, Puharich uncovered at least one such “remote viewer”, Uri Geller, who would after his co-operation in the project become famous for his spoon-bending exploits. To this day, Geller has remained a celebrity, who ranks American pop star Michael Jackson amongst his closest friends – at least until Geller told Jackson that an interview with Martin Bashir would be beneficial for the pop star’s career...

Until the early 1990s, the remote viewing project would continue at the heart of the American intelligence industry, during one of its phases using the project name “Stargate”. One question remained. Why did it last? Officially, the project was a reaction to rumours that the Soviet Union had a similar project underway and hence the Americans needed to start immediately so as not to be outdone by the opposition.
“Tests,” CIA big wig Helms had stated, “were necessary to keep up with the Soviets.” However, Helms reversed his own position in 1964 when testifying before the Warren Commission, which was investigating the JFK assassination. There he claimed that “Soviet research has consistently lagged five years behind Western research.”
But using the Soviets as the scapegoat why such research was occurring in the 1960s did not apply to the early origins of the endeavour. Why, in 1952, with no such rumours of Soviet involvement floating around, did a military doctor, a powerful aeroplane developer and other influential people receive the backing of the American government in their endeavours to contact a “higher intelligence” on a “higher plane”? One nagging thought kept lingering in my mind, and this was a disturbing one: did the US government somehow know that such intelligences existed? That they could be contacted? The idea seemed to belong in a bad “B science fiction movie”, but the strangeness of the question is merely because we all “know” that there are – of course – no such denizens of a hyper-dimension. Much later, in the 1980s and 1990s, when people described encounters that in medieval times would have been labelled as “witches’ experiences of being taken on a ride with the devil to his world”, these encounters were labelled “UFO abductions”, i.e. abductions by extra-terrestrial beings of humans to spaceships orbiting our planet. Even though science was progressing with quantum physics and required many more dimensions than we experience, those same scientists apparently could not accept that there were intelligences existing in those higher dimensions. Furthermore, many of the best and earliest quantum physicists were part of the small circle that hung around Puharich. Coincidence?

But even if these denizens of another world existed, how could they be contacted? One quite simple scenario came to mind. The word “American intelligence” at that time was personified by Allen Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence, veteran of the OSS, the CIA’s predecessor. He was also brother to the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. During World War II, Allen Dulles was based in Switzerland and in what is known but seldom highlighted, was a close friend of psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. Jung, together with Sigmund Freud, the most famous psychologists of the 20th century, had created a psychological philosophy that stressed the existence of “archetypes”. These archetypes were somehow external forces, “principles”, present inside the collective unconsciousness, the sum of all our individual brains – or souls? – that somehow was bigger than the sum of the individual parts and hence was a force that worked both on another dimension, but whose effects were also visible on our plane of existence, i.e. our everyday reality. In short: it is like the computer code and the Artificial Intelligence that operates in the The Matrix movies. Jung’s theory was furthermore in line with the thinking of many religions, including the Australian Aboriginals, who believe that our reality is like a dream, with the soul living a “real existence” on a higher plane of existence, or to use modern parlance, dimension.
Because Jung and Dulles were close friends, Dulles was fully aware of Jung’s ideas, if only because that was Jung’s prime interest. Rather than Freud, who tried to create a psychology for our everyday reality, Jung’s primary interest, which he tried to share with his friends, was to map a connection between our everyday realm and the realm of the soul. As such, Jung was interested in many things, including UFOs, mandalas, in short: anything to do with a possible higher dimension and the soul. He himself claimed to have been in contact with such higher dimensional entities and it may even be argued that these experiences were at the basis of his theory of the collective unconscious.

That was the situation as it stood in 1945, when the Second World War ended. Then the American government, including Allen Dulles as its prima donna, decided to lift Nazi Germany’s knowledge and incorporate it in America, so that it was equipped in the upcoming struggle with communism. This transfer of knowledge also meant a transfer of people, some of these occurring in the utmost secrecy, in an operation now known as “Paperclip”. Some transfers were slightly more visible, as in the case of Werner von Braun, who would become instrumental in America’s race into space.
The atom bomb had been another fruit of this transfer, with some rumours that Nazi Germany had even developed the bomb. More recently, British aerospace consultant and writer for Jane’s Defence Weekly Nick Cook has posited that experiments with “anti-gravity” (another pejoratively charged word) in Nazi Germany had also been replanted inside the black budgets of the American government – resulting in some of this technology being used in modern aircrafts. At the same time, it was known that Nazi “doctors” had been experimenting with genetic modification programmes, to create the “Master Race”. And I often wondered why amongst the scientists that were transferred to America there were so many psychologists and psychiatrists, and doctors? What could they do for the American government? Either they had been paid by the American government to do nothing, either they had all left to work in the private industry (begging the question why the government had gone to the lengths it had to get them to America) or they had been employed by the American government on projects that had so far not seen the light of day. I could not help but wonder in the latter case whether I had landed in the world of Fox Mulder and Dana Scully and their “X Files”.

From a logical point of view, several things did not match. Specifically, apart from Puharich, two anomalous characters came to mind: Hal Puthoff and John Alexander. Hal Puthoff was a physicist. He had set up, in the early 1970s, the first visible (or should that be official) – though at the time secret – “remote viewing” project. People’s careers often take strange leaps, and why a physicist ended up working with psychics was somewhat bizarre, but not beyond the realm of the possible. What was stranger was what Puthoff did next. When he left the project after roughly 15 years, he began to study so-called “zero point energy”, another “newspeak” word that had become the substitute for anti-gravity. From “normal” physicist, Puthoff had become what would have been deemed an alchemist in medieval times. To remove its newspeak wrapping, “zero point energy” is nothing more than an energy from another dimension, if not the energy from “the” source – God – which brings us back to the nine entities, who seem to be from that same source.
Was there, somewhere in Nature, a force that produced unlimited amounts of energy? Physics suggested the answer was a theoretical “yes” and that this force was the so-called “zero point”, but it was deemed to be beyond “human intervention” – out there, but not somewhere where we could even boldly go.
Physicist David Bohm had defined zero point as how the “wave particle” of gravity has a zero point energy. “As we keep adding excitations corresponding to shorter and shorter wavelengths to the gravitational field, we come to a certain length at which the measurement of space and time becomes totally indefinable. Beyond this, the whole notion of space and time as we know it fade out, into something that is at present unspecifiable.” So zero-point meant no space, no time boundaries. As our reality is based upon neatly ordered space and time, zero-point was going beyond this… to a point in which there would be an enormous release of energy: “free energy.” It was felt that if this door was opened into the “zero point”, energy would somehow continue to roll out of it.
At the time Puthoff endeavoured to uncover its mystery, however, academics believed harnessing its energy was a waste of energy. No-one would ever pull it off. So why was Puthoff so persistent, thinking he might make money out of it? A sceptic might have thought that Puthoff was a loony-tune anyway: “from psychic stuff to anti-gravity stuff. The guy is just a geek. No real potential there.” But such labelling was the easy way out. And it seldom was the right answer.
I wondered. Remote viewing revolved around techniques of accessing another dimension from this dimension. Say beyond the barriers of time and/or space. “Mental time travel.”
The instrument for doing this was the brain. How it happened, no-one seemed to know – though there were some pointers in the work of Puharich… pointers seldom if ever taken seriously, but which I felt I had to investigate. Anyway, could there be a link between the brain and this zero point energy? Was this Puthoff’s thinking? As a physicist, Puthoff must have been thinking about the physics of it all. And whereas that did not seem to fall within the scope of the remote viewing project, it could very well be that as soon as he was liberated from that limited scope, he wanted to explore that possibility. Hence his choice.

The second anomalous character was John Alexander. Alexander was interested in weapons, particularly non-lethal and electronic warfare. Alexander worked for the US government, but wanted a new type of warfare, one more in line with our modern times than with medieval methods of war, which are still used, whereby only the tools have become more sophisticated. Non-lethal warfare seemed to include bombarding “the enemy” with sound, electro-magnetism and more… and it also suggested some form of mind control, another project the CIA had been playing with in the 1950s and 1960s. Again, officially, such research had been stopped many decades before, without resulting in any specific applications. But it was known that even in the 1950s, Puharich had been working on a “tooth transmitter”, in which a radio could be implanted in a tooth, used either for communication with soldiers or to create “religious ecstasy” in people who did not know such a device had been implanted in them, and who suddenly heard voices – which brings the bailiwick of religious experiences into an entirely new light of day.
At the same time, Alexander was interested in UFOs, an interest he shared with his second wife, Victoria, who had written about the subject in various UFO publications. Their main focus was on UFO abductions, where there was talk of “missing time” – oh so similar to electronic warfare – and cloned, strange babies – oh so similar to what was happening in the white world with the cloning of sheep and other animals – but perhaps also with the black world of some American-exported Nazi scientists fifty years earlier.

Puthoff and Alexander. Both had been high-profile American government officials who had ended up leading strange careers. Careers that made little sense. But it should be pointed out that in both cases, their “weird interest” had not resulted in their career going less smooth. Whereas everyone might suspect such bizarre interests would harm their career, in these two cases, it did not. And when we add to that the bizarre life of Puharich, even less made sense. So I had to go back to basics, which was the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the exploits of Andrija Puharich, to find out whether there was anything to my initial observations.