In 1974, a psychic, a medical doctor, and a race car driver walked into a Faraday cage.
It sounds like the set up to a bad joke, and the punchline is bound to elicit some groans. Under the guidance of an extraterrestrial named Tom, this oddball crew prevented the outbreak of nuclear war in the Middle East.
Andrija Puharich was many things, depending on who you ask. Seance holder for Beltway elites. Collector of psychic children. Consultant on Close Encounters of the Third Kind. An MKULTRA scientist interrogating aliens for classified weapons data.
It would take more than a single article (or ten) to capture the story of the enigmatic Dr. Puharich. Today we’ll narrow our focus to an all-but-forgotten book published in 1977, a tell-all account of his magical mystery tour with Phyllis Schlemmer, a Florida-based channeler, and Sir John Whitmore, British aristocrat and racing legend with a soft spot for the paranormal.
It’s easy to brush aside Briefing for the Landing on Planet Earth as another mediocre exercise in New Age crankery, the kind of book you pick up off the shelf at Goodwill and wish away the bed bugs. You’ll find yourself absentmindedly flipping through page after page of inane channeled messages before leaving it to catch dust with twenty more paperbacks co-authored by some member of some galactic federation.
These are the works I read when I fear my eyes may begin to bleed from scrolling through bad OCRs on the CIA’s reading room site. The Ashtar commands of the world are my palate cleanser after excessive consumption of acronym soup, my psychic shield against the fill-in-the-blank horrors lurking behind the redactions in some obscure FOIA document.
I was expecting more of the same as I cracked open Briefing, eyes half-closed and brain ready to be rocked to sleep to the cadence of transmissions from another dimension.
“Man is confused… The Earth is in great trouble... We come with love to help.” (Yes!)
“There are many who work with many on your planet… You have been contacted… You have done much already.” (Oh, hell yes.)
“...I am sorry, I was in another conference.” (Excuse me?)
The more pages I leafed through, the more I began noticing a peculiar pattern in the communications received by our heroes. Over and over again, the alien intelligence would break from Q&A sessions to consult with a different (and apparently more knowledgeable) unseen force before delivering their response through the medium. At first, the pauses seemed to buy time to answer some of the more esoteric questions posed by the group. A delay to ask permission to reveal the secrets of the Sphinx, an off-mic discussion with a cosmic supervisor to relay that “Blavatsky was true.”
As tensions flared between the trio during their high-pressure journey across the Holy Land, the pauses began following questions with more material stakes. One exchange with Puharich raises questions about who may have been listening on the other side. When the good doctor put in a request for an “emotional companion” to “alleviate some strains” on their adventure to save the world:
Tom professed not to understand the question and Andrija had to spell it out in different terms before Tom said he would consult.
Who exactly was “Tom” consulting on Puharich’s behalf?
It’s jarring behavior to witness from an entity purporting to exist outside of space and time, especially when a human being is being used as their megaphone. I began to suspect that what I was reading was less a quirky briefing from extraterrestrials and more like a case file buried in a secret cache in John Marks’ backyard.
The Management
I’ll rewind here to give the reader a taste of the strange cosmology born out of Puharich’s circle.
The Tom we met above is a representative of The Nine, a collective of nine extraterrestrial “Principles and Forces” whose preferred mode of communication is through human mediums. Puharich was first introduced to the entities in the early 1950s, as they spoke through a Hindu scholar undergoing a spontaneous state of trance. Dialogue with the group was the headlining act at a seance attended by a gang of wealthy (and intelligence-linked) benefactors. They received otherworldly wisdom on topics from atomic bombs to telekinesis, Jesus Christ to Albert Einstein.
In the decades that followed, communication with The Nine became a central focus of Puharich’s life. He cycled through a rotating cast of gifted clairvoyants while old money and government contracts flowed in the background.
At the time of our tale, Phyllis had been anointed the one-and-only receiver for The Nine after the previous channel attempted suicide. The young man had gone AWOL following a psi demonstration that went haywire, one that saw a transformer blown out and reports of electrical shocks sustained by the audience. The story goes that he cracked under the weight of the demands of The Management, as Phyllis liked to call them.
Now, they only spoke through her. Under the direction of The Management, Phyllis, Dr. Puharich, and Sir John were set on a mission to save the nation of Israel from certain annihilation. They would accomplish this by moving as a unit through the Middle East and beyond to locations broadcasted by Tom, meditating for peace at every stop.
Puharich, an electronics whiz, hauled along a mass of wires and gadgets for monitoring and recording whatever the entities beamed in through Phyllis. The excessive gear and extracurricular stops to procure exotic radio parts grated on Sir John, but to Puharich it was all part of his great work to elevate humanity’s consciousness in the face of monumental crisis.
The Cage
Early on in their journey, Puharich’s group had been plagued with “technological difficulties” during their channeling sessions. The Management informed them that an upgrade of sorts was being made to their communications system for their protection. According to Tom, the phones at the Puharich residence had been tapped by “the opposition.” These same shadowy forces had been meddling with their transmissions, but their efforts to interfere could be thwarted if the participants were shielded from electromagnetic radiation.
The very next day, the doctor received a phone call from a company that was going out of business. As luck would have it, they had a Faraday cage that they needed taken off their hands. The 8x12 cage was installed just off his dining room and, now hosted inside its copper-lined walls, the communication experiments began to yield better results than ever before.
Dr. Puharich gleefully remarked on his newfound ability to control the air flow, temperature, and lighting inside the cage, which was kept pitch black with the exception of the flicker of a small candle. He’d sit behind his subject’s head, legs crossed and tape recorder running, and count them down into a hypnotically-induced trance, encouraging their consciousness to exit their physical body. Playing with the electrical charge of the chamber, he found that he could bring on states of mental stress or deep relaxation. When negative ions were introduced to the breathing environment, the telepathic ability of his psychics was boosted, as was the fidelity of any alien transmissions.
Out in the field, however, comms from Tom once again became vulnerable to tampering by the opposition. Tom suggested copper umbrellas and bracelets for the crew as they carried on with their work. These makeshift cages seemed to do the trick.
Get in the Van
Using Phyllis as a mouthpiece, Tom rattled off a list of high-value locations to be targeted in their meditations. When the team plotted the coordinates on a map, they all fell within a 1,500 mile radius of Moscow. Puharich had a hunch, and he speculated to Tom that their mission sounded like a test exercise. If the group could move in and out of foreign countries without friction and with short notice, they could move forward in their work to spread peace to Israel.
Tom interrupted and issued a stern reply to the doctor.
”We have told you many times that your thoughts are not your own, but there is one exception in this: it is not a test,” the entity emphasized. “Your moving is very important, because remember, every time you move, whether it be 500, 100, 50 or 5 of your miles, it then overlays. Do you understand? When you have been in an area, for twenty-eight to forty-eight hours afterwards the trace of you, of the three of you, remains?“
Puharich understood him well. “If we could make a sweep, an arc, around the Soviet capital from the north all the way round to as far south and east as we can get conveniently, this will leave a trace around which will keep radiating.”
Sir John looked up from the map to ask for technical details about this radiation, to which Tom responded that “the intensity was in proportion to the proximity.”
First stop was Helsinki. With important discussions taking place across the Gulf of Finland, orders passed down from The Management directed them to prolong their meditation sessions in order to “bring all the leaders involved into the vibration.” Henry Kissinger, who had been leading the peace talks, was reportedly in a highly disturbed state.
Dr. Puharich, dressed in a denim suit, ran up and down the bustling streets of the Finnish capital inquiring with shopkeepers about a particular type of shortwave radio receiver. Once the component was in hand, it would be tuned to a special frequency which would allow them to be contacted by other members of The Management. This method of communication was highly experimental, Tom advised them.
The doctor slept with the device tucked under his pillow, and in Warsaw the new gear was put to the test. Huddled in their hotel room, Puharich fiddled with the dials as Sir John “interrogated” The Management. The crew had been feeling uncharacteristically drained in Poland and Phyllis, acting as an alien microphone, was finding herself increasingly disoriented following their sessions. Tom assured them that their bodies were still adjusting to the new system and that they had “created many thoughts of peace and suppression of aggression” in the area they were targeting. Comms abruptly ceased when the telephone rang. No one spoke on the other end.
One of the doctor’s suitcases went missing for over an hour en route from Poland to Turkey. It had been spotted being wheeled off the plane in Ankara but was nowhere to be seen at baggage claim. As they waited on the luggage, they had an unsettling feeling that they were being watched. A strange person had been observing them since they had stepped foot into the airport, and the same mystery man showed up at their hotel later that day.
With paranoia running high, they held a session with The Management as they settled into their Turkish accommodations. Tom informed them that communications were cut off in Warsaw because bugging devices had been detected in the room. “If what had transpired had been recorded,” the entity snapped, “you would have great difficulty in explaining.” He chastised the group for being too conspicuous in their work, and warned that there were others who had the ability to decode The Management’s messaging. Tom confirmed that Puharich’s disappearing suitcase had been searched, although thankfully nothing was found.
Between Ankara and Tehran, the trio had a layover in Beirut and decided to fill the time with a communication session. Sir John asked Tom if there was anything they could do to assist Israel while they waited. The Management directed them to move their meditation and recording equipment to the airport’s transit lounge. “The fact that you are in the area creates a blanket,” Tom said. Once in Iran, Tom assured the crew that even though they could not see the results of their work with their own eyes, they had been making a profound impact everywhere they traveled. The signals they had been radiating had an influencing impact on Arab leaders and had even touched the Shah of Iran.
Aboard a sparsely-booked flight from Tehran to Moscow, comms with The Management were fired up once again. Racing above the Russian countryside at 35,000 feet, Tom passed down their next set of orders. An assassination plot aimed at taking out Yasser Arafat was brewing, and they were to prevent it by meditating at precisely 3 o’clock Eastern Standard Time the next day. The session was a success according to Tom, as two nefarious operatives scheduled to attend a press conference with the Israeli leader had been “pulled out.” This had all been their doing, the extraterrestrial informed them.
There was much work to be done in Israel. The Management counseled that they’d have a little more than two weeks to get back stateside before their lives would be put in danger, although they’d make their triumphant return mere months later. Both legs of the journey were filled to the brim with scenes that read like they were ripped out of the pages of a spy thriller penned by an author with LSD visibly seeping from their pores.
The Management prevented the trio’s vehicle from exploding in Ein Kerem by temporarily disabling it; here they made a pit stop to meet a group of telepathically-gifted children. Sabotage was spoiled at a nuclear power station in Yavneh with a half-hour meditation for peace, averting a radioactive catastrophe in nearby Tel Aviv. In a hotel room overlooking Golan Heights, Tom seemed scrambled, and took frequent pauses during their communications as he was eavesdropping on a meeting of Arab officials deliberating missile strikes on Israel. The group held one another and prayed from the edges of their seats as Tom went offline. When comms were reestablished, he gave them a status update.
“Egypt is dismantled… Lebanon is ineffective… and four in Syria are non-functional…” He continued after a nail-bitingly long pause. “We have passed.”
At a beachside resort on the Dead Sea, Tom scolded them in the wake of a sad turn of events. “...today there was another disaster. There was the loss of a dolphin.”
Still at their tourist destination, Sir John heard a phrase repeating over and over in his head while deep in meditation. “I am Dennis Dunsmore. I am a reporter.” Neither Phyllis nor Dr. Puharich picked up on the message.
w-e a-r-e c-o-m-p-u-t-o-r-i-z-e-d-, c-o-m-p-u-t-o-r-i-z-e-d-
“Every one of you has been wired in your left ear,” Tom had informed them back in the states.
The crew had been experiencing odd symptoms even before leaving on their grand tour.
The Management had warned that they all needed to be careful around electrical appliances and, more startingly, that the opposition planned to target the people closest to them. One witness blew off the former bit of advice and, while ironing her clothes, felt the horrifying sensation of an invisible force possessing her body. “It was as if something was trying to suck my consciousness out of my being,” she recalled.
Phyllis’ predecessor had been plagued with puncture marks and scar-like lines on his flesh, and similar issues began manifesting on the trio’s bodies. Dr. Puharich himself had been experiencing skin rashes that gave him a terrible itch. Sometimes he felt wired and agitated, causing him to suffer bouts of insomnia. Other times, like the rest of the crew, he found himself completely devoid of energy.
“This is a new implant in you and we are adjusting,” Tom explained, attempting to put the doctor at ease. “It should be neutralized in a period of your four weeks.”
Management’s nickname for Phyllis was the Being, and the Being seemed to suffer the most severe effects of all. Psychic attacks became a commonplace occurrence. When a nonhuman entity manifested in her office in corporeal form, Tom explained that they had installed a unit above her ceiling that allowed for this to occur.
She emerged from periods of trance feeling like she had been drugged, other times in unbearable physical pain, and in the scariest moments, slumped over and lifeless. She was stricken with the sudden onset of blindness and hospitalized following a heart attack, although she was able to recover swiftly from her ailments. The Management had arranged for her to be removed from the hospital out of fear that the implants would be discovered by her medical team.
“Nobody before has hooked one of our Beings into one of these machines,” Tom marvelled.
The psychic’s beating heart had been “wired with nine sonars” that needed fine tuning by the entities. These alien antennae worked not only as sensors, but as transducers of signals to and from The Management. “Part of it will filter the energy, part of it will be used as a satellite for us, and it filters and purifies the blood,” Tom said of this wonder of biological technology. “Energy can then be dissipated into the ether without a blow-out” on Phyllis’ end, he continued.
Phyllis began to express doubts that they were working with the right people.
Somewhere along the way, she got the terrifying idea in her head that she had been interfacing with a computer. According to Tom, her negative reaction had created great difficulties for The Management, who had been testing their new implant system. He lamented that “we would not be communicating in this manner if our Being had given herself in completeness to a computer.”
Tom revealed a chilling bit of Phyllis’ medical history. “In our miscalculations, we erased part of her memory, and it is very difficult for her to find and choose the proper words.” He explained that the channeler’s relationship with The Management went way back. “Part of the programming we instituted in 1963 involved a device placed in the brain to translate our language into your language. Because of this error, we are now having difficulty translating into your language.”
The closest word to describing Management’s form of language was “tonal”, operating at a frequency of 98.6 megacycles, an old word for megahertz. Dr. Puharich, an audiophile of sorts, perked up with great interest at these technical insights.
“This will pass, as we told you,” Tom reminded them as tensions over Management’s bioengineering reached a boiling point. “We are in a game of war.”
The doctor was a grizzled veteran in this long-running game, and he’d seen his psychic soldiers collapse under pressure before. He and Israeli magician Uri Geller had done a tour together in the Middle East in the early 1970s, meditating for peace under the guidance of extraterrestrials. Dr. Puharich believed that they had protected the nation of Israel from certain destruction.
During one communication session with the psychic, the entities changed their communication style. What had been the words of benevolent discarnate entities took on a more mechanical tone. Talking through Uri, the beings spoke in a synthetic-sounding voice. “You see, the energy in your mind, that is, we must admit, that is the thing—that—we—do—not—have. W-e a-r-e c-o-m-p-u-t-e-r-i-z-e-d c-o-m-p-l-e-t-e-l-y c-o-m-p-u-t-e-r-i-z-e-d b-y m-e-c-h-a-n-i-c-a-l i-n-s-t-r-u-m-e-n-t-s-. A-s y-o-u c-a-n h-e-a-r-, w-e a-r-e c-o-m-p-u-t-o-r-i-z-e-d-, c-o-m-p-u-t-o-r-i-z-e-d-. Y-o-u-r c-o-m-p-u-t-o-r i-s w-r-i-t-i-n-g p-o-w-e-r- f-r-o-m millions—of—light-years—away. We also need your help.”
Like Phyllis, Uri expressed suspicions about the motivations of the entities. He and the doctor eventually stopped speaking to one another, although Uri had a change of heart later. During their no-contact period, the psychic was unable to receive communications from the aliens.
Murdered for Meditating
As 1976 turned into 1977, relations with The Management became strained. Dr. Puharich had been on the receiving end of information that shook him to his core. The enlightened entities that had been in communication with the group were cutting their ties. Despite all that his crew had accomplished, humanity was not prepared to ascend to a higher state of consciousness. Puharich and his psychics were left to their own devices.
The doctor didn’t let this deter him. At his home in New York state, he pulled together a group of young people gifted in psychic matters, the best in the business. They began making preparations for his greatest experiment yet, the Mind-Link.
“We’re preparing for a special meditation/mind travel experience that will link us up with other gifted psychics and meditators around the globe,” the doctor began his briefing. “Joining together with powerful energies from more advanced, peaceful civilizations from non-psychical realms.”
Dr. Puharich continued on with his pitch. “We’ll attempt to merge our energies, enabling us to send a massive powerful ray out into the universe promoting world peace, unity and understanding. Melting and vaporizing the mounting static emanating from earth as it disperses.”
Their training involved a rigorous meditation schedule over an intensive 10-day period, with long spans of silence in between sessions. With the Mind-Link fast approaching, participants were given bracelets made of copper. These would help repel ELF waves, the doctor explained.
The Mind-Link was a success. According to one volunteer’s account, the psychically-linked group mind-traveled to a massive spaceship parked somewhere high above the Puharich residence, where they encountered five small humanoid entities on board. The crew gave them a tour of the engine room, a bizarre location outfitted with four beings appearing like “human dolls.” Each faced a cardinal direction, and an immense amount of some intangible, pulsating energy oscillated between them, powering the ship in silence.
Six remote participants from scattered locations around the world claimed to have participated in this shared visionary experience from afar.
Another event was scheduled in short order, but the group’s momentum was interrupted when Dr. Puharich’s house was set on fire.
As one Mind-Link psychic slept upstairs, rags soaked in a highly-flammable liquid were laid at the bottom of the main staircase and set alight. More rags were left in the kitchen, where the gas on the stove had been turned on and dialed up to full-blast. The Fire Marshall concluded that it had been a professional arson job, one intended to not only destroy the house, but to burn everyone inside alive. No one was ever held accountable for this attempted murder.
The fire was devastating to Puharich, who miraculously hadn’t been on-site at the time (and went into hiding down in Mexico). So much progress had been made in his home laboratory and the idea of his hard work going up in flames was unbearable. He and his colleague Bob Beck had built a magnetic wave generator there and had exciting data in their back pockets.
They had discovered the human brain’s extreme sensitivity to waves of particular frequencies. At 8 Hz, the waves had pleasant effects, comparable to being in a deep meditative trance. When the scientists cranked the frequency down, people became extremely ill. Clicking it up past 8 Hz made subjects restless and put them in a state of agitation.
The doctor was terrified by what he had witnessed, and prepared a scientific briefing document on their findings which he carried by hand to President Jimmy Carter, Margaret Thatcher, and Pierre Trudeau. After his death, his ex-wife found a letter among his papers. Written by a Canadian senator and addressed to Trudeau, it reads:
This raises the very sinister possibility that the Russians may be carrying out experiments aimed at large scale mind control or long distance mass control of human behavior by directional use of the Tesla wave. In this connection I attach herewith a copy of an evaluation by Dr. Puharich and associated scientists in his laboratory in Ossining, New York. Dr. Puharich and his colleagues have perfected a device, which simulates the Russian emissions and demonstrates the effects they produce on the waves of the human brain. He is willing to provide a demonstration to a select group of interested scientists and in view of the implications I would suggest that such a demonstration is organized and Dr. Puharich is invited to Ottawa for that purpose.
The doctor maintained until the end of his life that the CIA was responsible for the arson.
Sound off in the comments if you have any leads on Dennis Dunsmore.