Three months later the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the U.S. declared war on Japan. On December 11, Hitler declared war on the United States. America had entered World War II, and it was time for Louis de Wohl to head home to England.
For the next few years, de Wohl was used by the Allies as a countermeasure to Heinrich Himmler’s use of astrology and the occult. Under the direction of master propagandist Sefton Delmer, de Wohl wrote seemingly authentic astrology charts that predicted the demise of certain Nazi admirals and generals, and stated that Hitler would be betrayed by his inner circle. These fake star charts and horoscopes were included in near-perfect replicas of a banned German astrological magazine called Zenit, to be smuggled into Germany for underground distribution. The idea was to make it look as if Zenit was being secretly published in Germany by German occultists working in defiance of the astrology ban. Instead, the counterfeit magazines were seized by the Gestapo in the port city of Stettin, as detailed by Wilhelm Wulff in his postwar memoir Zodiac and Swastika.
Occult interests in the public domain are for the most part a leisure pursuit. When entwined with the Nazis’ national security apparatus, they became potent and consequential. As Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler promoted quasi-science projects that helped foster the myth of the superior German Übermensch, or Superman. Himmler had been fascinated with the occult since his college days, and when he became a Nazi Party district leader, in 1925, he hired a sixty-six-year-old retired army colonel named Karl Maria Wiligut to advise him on these matters. Wiligut, an expert in runes and Teutonic symbols (he designed the SS death’s-head ring, Totenkopfring) was a seer, or medium, who claimed to be able to channel a tribe of ancient Aryans from AD 1200. Elevated to the position of SS-Brigadeführer, Wiligut remained on Himmler’s personal staff until SS intelligence officers discovered that between the wars, in 1923, Wiligut had been committed to a mental institution and declared legally insane. In 1936 he was removed from the SS command structure, but Himmler continued to meet with him privately until at least 1941, as indicated in Himmler’s diaries, which were captured by the Allies after the war.
By the time Wiligut was removed Himmler had already created a vast Nazi science academy called Das Ahnenerbe, or the Institute for Research and Study of Heredity, of which he was president and overlord. The mission of Ahnenerbe, according to Allied intelligence, was “to prove that the Nazi ideology was directly descended from ancient Teutonic culture and was therefore superior to all others.” To demonstrate this link, Himmler leaned on the mystical and the occult.
Ahnenerbe scientists were dispatched across the continents to excavate prehistoric sites attached to mystical and supernatural ideas. From Istanbul to Iraq, they searched the globe for lost lands like Atlantis and fabled items like the Holy Grail and the Lance of Destiny, the spear said to have pierced Christ in the ribs as he hung on the Cross. On Himmler’s orders, SS officers scoured Germany’s occupied territories, raiding libraries of the occult and looting artifacts related to magic. Entire museum collections of mystical texts in Poland, Ukraine, and Crimea were crated up for Ahnenerbe possession. Among the items said to be most coveted by Himmler were artifacts of ancient Germanic magic that had miraculously survived three centuries of witch hunts.
The Ahnenerbe was vast and well funded. It had fifty subsidiary branches covering broad natural science fields such as archeology, geology, and astronomy. But it also operated highly specialized divisions, like one for geochronology, the dating of rock formations and geological events, and speleology, the study and exploration of caves. One branch, called Survey of the So-called Occult Sciences (Überprüfung der Sogenannten Geheimwissenschaften), was where research on extrasensory perception, astrology, map dowsing, spirit channeling, and other forms of anomalous mental phenomena and divination was pursued. And it was from the official Ahnenerbe documentation on these unusual subjects, captured separately by the United States and the Red Army, that the psychic arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States first got under way.
Now it was July 1945, and World War II was over in Europe. The Nazis had been defeated, their ideas vanquished. Some fifty million people were dead. But between the Americans and the Soviets—former allies—the competition over the spoils of war had only just begun. The end of World War II marked the beginning of a new war, called the Cold War, and with it would come an arms race of colossal proportions. During World War II, the Nazis had managed to create some of the most technologically advanced weapons in the world. That they mixed magic and the supernatural with science and technology was, in 1945, only vaguely understood. But the Reich’s supernatural secrets would soon become part of the Cold War arms race.
For ten weeks now the Russians had ruled Berlin. Members of an elite U.S. scientific intelligence effort, called Operation Alsos, had been trying to gain access to a bombed-out villa in Dahlem, a formerly affluent suburb where numerous Nazi science institutes once stood. The villa in question was located at 16 Pücklerstrasse, and “The Gestapo scientists had all cleared out before our arrival,” recalled Samuel Goudsmit, a nuclear physicist and the leader of the group, “some of them leaving sufficient clues in their deserted homes for us to track them down later.” This villa was not a home but the former headquarters of Himmler’s Ahnenerbe Institute.
The Alsos group was only vaguely familiar with the Ahnenerbe’s research. Only weeks before had it come to light that through a division called Applied War Research, the Ahnenerbe had supplied the Luftwaffe and other military services with living victims from the concentration camps to be used in human experiments. How Heinrich Himmler used the supernatural and the occult as part of the Nazi war effort was not yet understood by Alsos. “Because the activities of this strange academy were shrouded in [a] mystery that just might have concealed something really important, we [needed] to make a thorough investigation of the organization,” Goudsmit later explained in discussing the Ahnenerbe.
Goudsmit made his way down into the basement of the villa, where he came across a small cache of Ahnenerbe relics. “Remnants of weird Teutonic symbols and rites,” he recalled. “Strange dummies which at first looked like bodies of victims, a corner with a pit of ashes in which I found the skull of an infant.” Had Heinrich Himmler been a practitioner of black magic, Goudsmit wondered? What had been going on here?
As macabre and mysterious as these Nazi artifacts were, they did not pose an immediate threat. Alsos was on the move, with more pressing matters to deal with. Huge Nazi weapons caches, including V-2 rockets and chemical weapons like sarin and tabun gas, were being secreted out of the country by the Americans for exploitation back home.
For Goudsmit and the Alsos team, the most critical aspect in dealing with a mystery like Ahnenerbe science was to make sure that the information did not fall into Soviet hands. For what would soon become evident was that as much as the Allies were gathering scientific intelligence, so too were the Soviets. By war’s end, the Reich’s most treasured and most promising weapons programs had been carted up and transported east into occupied territories like Poland, where they remained out of range of the Allied bombing campaigns. This new competition between Russia and the United States—between east and west, between communism and capitalism—was a contest of one-upmanship, the technique or practice of gaining a feeling of superiority over another. The absolute goal in this Cold War began as a relative one: simply to stay ahead of the new enemy in rank, knowledge, and weapons technology. In 1945, the long-term goal to outperform the Soviets in every action had not yet come to pass. And so, the Ahnenerbe relics were crated up and sent to U.S. Army headquarters in Frankfurt. Alsos moved on.
Immediately after World War II, the governments of both the United States and the USSR began investigating new ways to influence and control human behavior. And here was where Ahnenerbe science first appeared outside Nazi Germany. Leading the charge in the United States was the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency. One of the CIA’s early programs sought to develop a
truth serum, an age-old quest that touched upon ideas of magic potions and sorcerers’ spells. In consort with U.S. Army scientists at the Army Chemical Center in Edgewood, Maryland, this classified program was first called Bluebird, then Artichoke, and finally MKULTRA. For these and other programs like them the CIA hired magicians, hypnotists, and even Sybil Leek, Britain’s famous white witch.
One of the men running these controversial programs for the CIA was Morse Allen, a deception and polygraph expert promoted to serve as the director of Project Artichoke in 1952. It was Morse Allen’s job to search the globe for the most potent drugs in existence so that the Agency could exploit them for intelligence use. The Nazis’ Ahnenerbe Institute had begun this kind of research in the concentration camps, pushing human physiology to extremes in order to allow Nazi scientists to measure and monitor results. Now the CIA and the KGB would conduct similar experiments, each side arguing that the other side’s programs required countermeasures to defend against them.
In October 1952, Morse Allen learned about a Mexican field mushroom that put humans in an altered state. The fungal growth, called teonanáctl—God’s flesh—gave certain “sensitive” or psychic people supernatural abilities, at least according to ancient Aztec legend. “Very early accounts of the ceremonies of some tribes of Mexican Indians show that mushrooms are used to produce hallucinations and to create intoxication in connection with religious festivals,” Morse Allen told his program officers in a rare surviving Project Artichoke memo. In some cases, teonanáctl apparently endowed man with the power of divination, the ability to access information about the future or the unknown. In other men, the mushroom acted like a truth serum and made them confess to things against their better judgment or free will. “The literature shows that witch doctors, or ‘divinators,’ used some types of mushrooms to produce confessions or to locate stolen objects or to predict the future,” Morse Allen wrote.
In early 1953 the CIA dispatched one of its scientists to Mexico on a hunt to gather samples. But God’s flesh was elusive. The mushroom grew in remote canyons, and only in the hot summer months after it had rained. The scientist came back empty-handed, but Morse Allen was confident the CIA would ultimately prevail. He instructed his agents to keep searching while he personally traveled to the mushroom capital of America, a farming town in Pennsylvania called Toughkenamon, where he secured a contract with the town’s top mushroom grower. Once the CIA had located teonanáctl samples, it planned to mass-produce the hallucinogenic mushroom for classified intelligence agency use.
The quest for God’s flesh was renamed MKULTRA Subproject 58. Two years passed without success. Then, in the late summer of 1954, Morse Allen learned that an Army captain at the Army Chemical Center, one of the CIA’s military partners in MKULTRA, was also on the hunt for the hallucinogenic mushroom said to endow men with divinatory powers. His name was Henry Karel “Andrija” Puharich, and in addition to being an Army captain, Puharich was a research scientist, a medical doctor, and a trance-state specialist.
Since 1947, Dr. Puharich and a well-funded, prizewinning staff of scientists, doctors, and technicians had been conducting a wide range of unusual research at a privately funded facility called the Round Table Foundation, located in rural Maine. Puharich was also a longtime believer in mental phenomena, even claiming a personal childhood experience with telepathy. When Captain Puharich was called in for a briefing, it came to light that he knew more about magic, mystical, supernatural, and occult research than just about any other scientist living in the United States at the time. Dr. Puharich was granted a higher security clearance and briefed on classified Army Chemical Center efforts to locate drugs that could produce altered states and enhance psychic functioning.
Now, with government interest piqued in multiple agencies and the potential of a game-changing drug seemingly close at hand, the real race could begin.
CHAPTER TWO
The Puharich Theory
Henry Karel “Andrija” Puharich was born in Chicago on February 19, 1918, the son of poor Yugoslavian immigrants. His brutal, violent father had come to America as a stowaway. His mother, a housewife, nurtured and protected her only son as best she could. Growing up in the Chicago slums, Andrija worked as a milk delivery boy for Borden’s Dairy Farms, and it was in this context that he had his first experience with what he would call extrasensory perception, the ability to perceive things by means other than the five senses. One day on a milk run a vicious guard dog cornered him. Fearing that the animal was about to tear him to shreds, Puharich panicked, but there was nowhere to run. “So I sent out feelings of calmness and peace,” Puharich later recalled. Remarkably, the dog calmed down, then sat, leading him to believe that mind-to-mind telepathy had “stopped the attack.” Entranced and empowered by this experience, Puharich vowed to become a medical doctor and solve the biological circumstances behind this mysterious force of nature called ESP.
When Puharich was a teenager, his parents divorced and he and his mother went to live on a farm in Garter, Illinois. There, he worked nights and weekends in the farmer’s orchards, driving a mule team and tending to the fruit trees. Puharich was a bright, curious boy, unusually observant, and the natural world cast a spell over him. In plants and animals he saw deep meaning. Like so many research scientists before him, the natural world was his first laboratory.
In high school, Puharich excelled. He served as president of the student council, sang in the glee club, and played quarterback on the varsity football team. When it came time for college, Northwestern University College of the Liberal Arts offered him three scholarships to attend. As an undergraduate he majored in philosophy and premedical studies, then went on to Northwestern’s medical school. To earn money, Puharich worked for the university as a tree surgeon, trimming dead branches and plugging holes made by insects. He saw the human nervous system as similar to the root system of a tree, he later wrote. He scoured the works of medieval physicians like Alessandro Benedetti, a pioneer of postmortem examination, gathering a historical understanding about the science of the brain. And he began developing his own ideas about the biology of the human mind. Why does man think certain thoughts? What is consciousness? What is the difference between the brain and the mind?
“I would venture to say that nobody really knows another’s mind thoroughly,” he wrote in his journal in 1942, “and I would further venture that very few people really know their own mind.” What makes man think certain thoughts, he wondered, from a biological point of view? How does perception work? Does consciousness come from within or from without? And how to explain energy between people? “We all know that there are people who can thrill and exhilarate one, and that there are others who simply bore and fatigue one.” What, he wondered, was this intangible force?
Puharich combed through great works of medicine, literature, and science seeking answers. He could find nothing that satisfied him. “It would certainly be a great step forward for [mankind] if we could sit down and untangle the jungle that is our mind,” he wrote. In medical school, he began to explore the biological processes by which a man thinks. “Understanding the nature of man’s consciousness,” declared Puharich, “is my lifelong quest.”
Like so many young men of his generation, World War II introduced Puharich to military life. In 1943, while still in medical school, Puharich was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. A chronic middle ear infection exempted him from being sent overseas to the war. He met and married Virginia “Jinny” Jackson, a War Department secretary and the daughter of a prominent Wisconsin physician. In 1947 he finished his medical degree and began working alongside some of the top medical men in Chicago. His mentor, Dr. Andrew C. Ivy, was one of the most famous physicians in America, having riveted the nation with searing testimony at the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial in Germany.
Puharich did his residency at the Permanente Research Foundation in Oakland, California, publishing numerous papers on the effect of various drugs on the brain.
He formulated his first major theory, on nerve conduction and an unknown energy force, which he called the Puharich Theory. “The brain and the nervous system [are] linked to cells, and instructions [in the form of] energy flows between them,” Puharich wrote. “The point that I am trying to establish is that the brain is an area wherein is localized the cell energy of the body. I shall label this cell energy ‘dynamics.’” Puharich believed this energy force, present in all animals and insects, radiated somewhere on the electromagnetic spectrum but that man had not yet invented technology to measure or record it. The Puharich Theory was embraced by the nation’s top doctors, “heartily received and critically reviewed.” When, a few months later, two Yale University scientists, Lloyd H. Beck and Walter S. Miles, first reported that the olfactory nerve of the bee radiated energy in the infrared spectrum, one of Puharich’s theories was proved right. And the medical community wanted to hear more of what he had to say.
Puharich’s own energy was boundless. He was strikingly handsome and charismatic, by all accounts easy to talk to. With his close-cropped black hair and deep-set blue eyes, he looked like Gary Cooper in a lab coat. Women adored him, and men did too. He could engage in conversation the shyest person in the room as easily as he could command the attention of a Nobel Laureate. This was elemental to his character and his charm, said his friends.
One night at a party, on December 9, 1947, he met Dr. Paul De Kruif, the legendary microbiologist and author of Microbe Hunters, one of the most popular science books of the day. De Kruif told Puharich he was “keenly interested in the important implications of the [Puharich] theory,” and suggested Puharich travel east and deliver it as a lecture to the nation’s top physicians and scientists.
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