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Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, April 2019



Consciousness, Orbs, and Weird Science


by: Brent Raynes






On Friday evening, March 15th, Luis Elizondo, the former director of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Identification Program, described as a UFO/UAP investigative operation, was a keynote speaker at the Anomalous Aerospace Phenomena Conference in Huntsville, Alabama. At one point in his talk, he wanted to acknowledge some of the “real heroes of this scenario,” a mere “handful of people” who he explained “at the end of the day, they were the ones doing the hard work.” He mentioned Hal Puthoff, who was present at this event, as well as Kit Green.

Green, of course, has been prominently mentioned in my two previous columns here concerning his background as a CIA analyst going back to 1972 when he was a handler for Uri Geller and other psychics being studied by the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a project for which Hal Puthoff, a laser physicist, was deeply involved, and of course Green’s ongoing research and investigations today with Dr. Garry Nolan that came to light in a recent presentation at the Harvard Medical School on November 30th of last year.

The following week, on Saturday, March 23rd, I was in Huntsville to give a brief presentation for a small monthly meeting of the Open Inquiry Group on what we know at this time regarding the research being undertaken by Nolan and Green who are studying in-depth what appear to be very credible UAP/orb “experiencers,” seriously looking for correlations, studying medical histories, doing medical testing and MRI brain scans, and looking seriously into UAP injury cases, even getting with Jacques Vallee to discuss the granddaddy of injury case scenarios down on the island of Colares, in Brazil, at the mouth of the Amazon, back in 1977 and 1978, that involved some three dozen people – two of whom died mere hours after being examined by a local medical doctor. Vallee years ago had been down to Brazil and looked into this situation personally and Dr. Nolan admitted in an email to me that he, Vallee and Kit Green had “discussed the Colares cases extensively together and separately.”

Beginning back in 1971, Vallee was asked to assist the Parapsychology Research Group in Palo Alto, before they joined with SRI (Stanford Research Institute). “When it turned out that many of their subjects had experienced UFOs, they brought me into the project on a strictly confidential basis to document that aspect of the problem,” Vallee admitted to me in an interview. [This interview is still included on his website, with others, at: www.jacquesvallee.net/media/#interviews]

Uri Geller had to be the better known psychic from those early “remote viewing” and PK studies who was most associated with UFOs. As a young boy, he had that noted incident in Israel. “I was hit by a beam – almost like a laser beam in a way,” Geller told me. “It came out from a ball of light in an Arabic garden, in Tel Aviv. It actually had a force and it knocked me down into the grass. I laid there for about 10-15, maybe even 20 minutes. When I ran home to tell my mother she didn’t believe me. She said I was making it up and I wasn’t.”

“There was a book written about me by Dr. Andrija Puharich, which I urge you to read if you haven’t,” Geller continued. “All of those stories in the book are real. Maybe his interpretation was quite far out and that damaged my credibility, but we had seen UFOs in the Sinai Desert. I’ve seen lights. I’ve photographed UFOs. I’ve never seen an alien, but I have on many, many occasions seen craft in the sky that I certainly could not put down to some man-made object. It must have been extraterrestrial in source and nature because they were traveling so fast, zig-zagging in the sky. That is impossible to do with our current technology.” “It is possible – I can’t prove it – but it is possible that maybe my abilities do emanate not from me but from some higher source,” Geller said. “Maybe it is an extraterrestrial source in nature. I don’t know, and I am still on a journey to discover where my abilities come from.”

Whatever their apparent origin, many reputable scientists have been quite puzzled by what they had seen Geller do. Naval scientist Eldon Byrd was one of them. It was the early 1970s. Geller was visiting George Washington University in Silver Spring, Maryland, where Byrd lived, and so he arranged to meet with the celebrity metal bending psychic and do a unique experiment with him. He told me in an interview that he was working with something new back then – a “memory alloy called nitinol, which was a combination of nickel and titanium, and it had some very strange characteristics. It had a memory. You could form it at a certain temperature and then distort it at any other temperature and then when you brought it back to the temperature it was formed at it would remember what shape it was and go back to that shape.”



Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff at SRI in the early days

So how did the experiment go? “I held both ends of the wires and he gently stroked them and a kink would form in the wires and when I checked the memory at the temperature it was formed he had altered the memory. Instead of being straight the wires would go at a right angle.” Byrd shared another odd thing that happened at this time. “What he does, when he meets a person, he tries telepathy with them. It’s just a thing he does. I think he does it to try and get in their head to see where they’re really coming from. But he tries to do a drawing of some kind. He did that with me, and it worked both ways. I could send him a picture and he would send me a picture, and this was all happening in my head.”

“It was so freaky that I went home – I was all excited. I was married at the time and I was telling my wife about it, and I said, ‘Let’s try it.’ She was a little reluctant, but we did it and it worked fine. I mean, we started with numbers and letters and finally got ‘send me a picture’ – anything in the world – anything – and we got so we could get it, and the next morning I wanted to try it again and we tried it and it didn’t work.”

“When he was sending me a picture or a letter it always turned out to be green. When my wife and I were doing it the images in my mind were mostly green when I would receive. Now when I was sending I was sending in full color, but the reception seemed to be an outline of an object or a scene in green.”



Luis Elizondo (L) Rich Hoffman (M), and Hal Puthoff (R), Huntsville UFO/UAP Conference March 2019

I later wrote to Geller myself about this green mental imagery that Byrd described. “Yes, when I receive images they are usually green on an imaginary screen,” he replied in an email. British author Jonathan Margolis interviewed Byrd for his book “Uri Geller: Magician or Mystic?” (1998) and Byrd shared this story: “I got a call a couple of years after I met Uri, from someone in the CIA. They wanted me to come over. I went down to Virginia, and they said, ‘So you say it was a green R that came in your head?’ I said yes, and they looked at each other. I asked if there was something significant about the color and they said yes.” I’ve recently asked Geller and Dr. Nolan if they knew why that would have been significant, but neither knew. I’ll continue to ask others who may know.

“There’s something about – you know, he tuned me up,” Byrd told me with a chuckle. “For just a few hours.” He put the wires away for a number of years in a sealed envelope and placed them in a secure place. When he checked on them years later they had returned to their original shape. He noticed how some Geller effects will last a few hours or maybe even a few years. I asked about the silverware and he said that those seem to remain permanent.

Byrd and Geller became very close it seemed and Geller shared with this American scientist how he felt intelligence people were watching him and using him. “Uri had told me on several occasions things that had happened,” Byrd stated. “He kind of swore me to secrecy, and then I chided him (because) he actually leaked all of that out in a book called “The Geller Effect” by Guy Lyon Playfair, and I asked him, ‘You made me not tell anybody and you told the whole world.’ He said, ‘Yes, I wanted it all to be out in the open now, because I don’t want my family to be afraid. I don’t want to work with them anymore and this will make sure they don’t ever work with me again since I told.’”

“But he always had been telling me these things before they happened. For example, he told me that he had had someone call, said it was an Israeli that wanted to have dinner with him, that it was very important, so he kind of tuned in and said, ‘Yes, I guess it is important.’ So he went to have dinner with this guy, and all the guy would tell him is he gave him some latitudes and longitudes. He said, ‘Now think on these numbers at a certain time.’ He gave him a window of time. He said, ‘During this half hour period don’t do anything else. Just sit and concentrate on this position on the planet and think break, break, break.’ So Uri says, ‘Isn’t that funny? Isn’t that strange?’ I said, ‘Yeah, this guy obviously was some kind of Israeli intelligence guy. But what are those coordinates?’ He said, ‘I don’t know. I haven’t looked them up.’ He gave them to me and I looked them up and it was out in the middle of the desert somewhere in Africa. I didn’t think too much about it, and then the day after this date that he was given in time to do this, he called me all excited and he says, ‘Have you heard the news?’ I said, ‘What news?’ He said, ‘There was a raid on Entebbe,’ and he said those coordinates ‘I checked them and they were on the way, between Israel and Entebbe. They wanted me to think break, break, break, break probably because of radars. Do you have any way of determining whether or not the radars were operational?’”

“So I checked with the CIA because I was feeding them information. Once and awhile they would do something for me if I asked, and I asked them to check. ‘Were the radars operational?’ They said, ‘We don’t know.’ I said, ‘Is there any way of checking?’ They said, ‘Well we’ll try but probably can’t find out.’ They checked and came back and said, ‘We don’t know if the radars were working or not, but it didn’t make any difference because the plane came in under the radar horizon anyway.’”

“He told me about another time when they whisked him out of the country without going through customs. He told me how they did that, and then while he was in Israel they flew him over some places – I think it was either Iraq or Iran. They had him fly over some places and said, ‘We’re looking for an atomic power plant, but we think they’re making nuclear weapons in it.’ He pointed out where he thought they were doing this, and then a day after this they bombed that exact spot. He would share these things with me before they would actually happen. So I knew that when the event occurred that this wasn’t something that he made up after the fact.” Byrd shared with me how one time he and Geller decided to stop and eat at an Italian restaurant one time in London, England. One of the waiters recognized Geller and soon other staff had gathered, so Geller told them to bring him something to bend. It was a knife, and so Geller put his finger on the blade and very gently touched it three times, and then took his hand away. “We all stood there and watched the knife curl up, almost to a right angle (for) maybe 10 seconds, all by itself.”

Excited by what he saw, Byrd told Geller if he could get somebody like Billy Graham to come on international television with him with say a knife like what he just bent and repeat the impressive demonstration he and the others had just witnessed, then nobody would any longer be able to deny his psychokinetic abilities. However, Byrd said Geller exclaimed, “Are you kidding? If the whole world knows what I do is for real, my life won’t be worth a plug nickel.” Margolis described in his book how the CIA’s own version of the “Scully of the X-Files” [which from his description was none other than Kit Green] had [he said he had the tape] been caught cheating once, but then “it didn’t make much difference because they’d seen him make spoons and forks bend on their own, so they were convinced that he was real.” Margolis reported that he was furthermore told that the way Geller had cheated was “so naïve that a magician wouldn’t have thought he could get away with it.”



Ingo Swann

I can’t help but wonder if there were times Geller may have deliberately cheated because, as he had told Byrd, he didn’t want the whole world to know the core truth of the matter.

Kit Green early on had two very impressive long distance “remote viewing” experiences with Geller. The first one happened in late 1972. Kit Green received a phone call from Hal Puthoff. Green was at his CIA desk in Virginia and Puthoff was calling from SRI in California. Puthoff was explaining to Green how he believed Geller had genuine ESP and PK abilities and that “he can see things at a distance.” Green recalls his response was something like, “No, he can’t.” Then Puthoff told Green that Geller was with him and asked him to speak to Geller. Geller got on the phone and asked Green to take a book in his office and put it in front of him on his desk. Green opened a book to a page where he had written “Architecture of a viral infection” in bold, black letters at the top of the page where below it was a picture showing the cross-section of a human brain. He concentrated on the page as Geller had instructed. Geller started sketching on a sheet of paper and then after awhile said he got the word “architecture.” Geller had drawn a pan of scrambled eggs. “I was baffled,” Green admitted. “How could Geller have ‘seen’ what I was working on?” In a second experiment Green was at his home in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, with sealed envelopes containing numbers to test Geller with. He had Geller on the phone when suddenly, Geller in California, informs Green that something has happened in his home involving shards of glass over a smooth green surface and a dog with a square face. Green was unaware of anything happening. He walks into his den and discovers that his white bulldog had just knocked over a lamp with a glass dome, and there were glass splinters lying across a bright green carpet.

While Ingo Swann was the psychic who was instrumental in putting together the “remote viewing” program, Swann was also a strong believer in an ET presence here on earth. In fact, he believed that they walked among us.

Nancy Du Tertre, a securities litigation attorney in New York, a magna cum laude graduate of Princeton University and the author of “How to Talk to an Alien,” was also a good friend of Swann’s. She told me about how they used to sit out on a stoop at his place on the lower east side of Manhattan and watch people walking by. “He was extremely good at seeing auras,” she said. Years earlier, he was in a supermarket out in California and encountered a very stunning, beautiful, scantily dressed woman, but instead of admiring her feminine attributes he noticed that something was wrong. “She didn’t seem to have a human type of an aura or biosignature,” Du Tertre recalled Swann explaining. The woman therefore appeared to him as “non-human and therefore alien.” ‘ In 1978, paranormal author Alan Vaughn wrote me about a researcher who had hypnotized Swann and instructed him to project his consciousness into the future. Vaughn wrote: “Speaking with a mechanical voice, Ingo said the beings of the future were like machines. When he asked what they looked like, Ingo told him to close his eyes. He saw a red dot or disk that slowly turned yellow. Immediately after he saw that, Ingo said, ‘When the red light becomes yellow you will have seen us.’ He was shaken by the experience.” Swann was angry to learn that the hypnotist had done this without his explicit authorization. He made the man promise not to tell anyone.

Du Tertre shared with me a story she had learned of how one time Swann was meditating in an apartment in New York City back around 1973 and how, with three witnesses present, an “orb of light” temporarily emerged from his body.

This reminds me of the mysterious “orbs” and such associated with the scientists working with Geller at the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Laboratory, including the metallic voice caught on a tape recorder, described in my March column. There were a lot of incidents connected too with Geller and Puharich involving these mechanic, metallic voices. Vaughn had also described to me how he had learned how back in January 1973, as Geller was walking down 57th Street in New York City, in the company of two other people, that he “heard in his mind a mechanical sounding voice, saying, ‘Now for the first time you will see us.’ Then a ‘red disk’ appeared on the sidewalk nearby. “He identified it with the Spectra or computerized beings in the future,” Vaughn noted. This Spectra business was first described in Puharich’s book Uri (1973), going back to the mysterious voice that would come out of Puharich’s tape recorder beginning back in late 1971. Talk about high strangeness, this book has it in spades. A message would be given, soon it was worked out where Puharich would be given time to transcribe the contents, and then the cassette would vanish into thin air. “I suspected Puharich of tricking me, of planting a secret tape recorder within a tape recorder, but it wasn’t,” Geller confessed to me back around December 2003. “It was real!”

“I believe today that the voices were either some kind of paranormal effect, maybe even our minds created them, but tangibly,” Geller told me. “But I gravitate more to the theory that indeed they were some sort of an outside intelligence trying to communicate with us. Actually not trying but communicating with us. My puzzlement – my surprise is that they ceased. They stopped. For years and years, I have tried on many occasions to put on a tape recorder, stick in a new tape, and wait for something, but it never happens.”

In my interview with Du Tertre she mentioned noted theoretical physicist Jack Sarfatti who had claimed how back around 1952 or 1953, around the age of 12 or 13, the phone rang at his home and he answered it and was told by a mysterious metallic voice that he was communicating with a computer onboard a UFO. He said he was told by this “metallic voice” that he was “one of 400 bright receptive minds” who would, if he agreed to cooperate with them, begin to hook up with others in 20 years. He agreed. 20 years later, he was invited to SRI and met Puthoff and astronaut Edgar Mitchell. Soon he was courted by intelligence operatives and received a full scholarship from Cornell University, studying with scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project.

Oddly, after that initial phone call, Sarfatti’s mother claimed that these strange calls continued for some three weeks but he didn’t remember them. “She remembers the quantity but not the context and he remembers some of the early content but not the quantity,” Du Tertre told me. Du Tertre found this aspect interesting too as I had described to her a story a woman in Ohio had told me with similar implications. There was a mother with her children who were walking up a steep driveway to their home and something strange was in the sky. “Their mother said for them to keep on moving, don’t look up.” Then they suddenly found themselves laying across their beds with no memory of how they had gotten there; their last memory of being outside. “Then for a week or two they were getting a phone call,” I continued. “The mother was always very protective of the kids. Anybody called on the phone she’d want to monitor that, but she didn’t seem to care that this person would call about the same time every night.” It was someone with an unfamiliar accent. “It was always it seems a wrong number call and “yet he would engage them in a conversation. She’s talked with her sisters and brothers since and they can’t remember what they talked to him about. They remember this guy called, they talked and talked. Mom was there – she knew about it – but didn’t intercede. And none of them can really remember.”

“It’s a similar thing between the parents and the kids,” De Tertre noted with interest. “There is a strange kind of disconnect, an inability to remember what the conversations were truly about.”

In her book, Du Tertre describes interviewing Sarfatti and how he described the voice on the phone as having been “cold metallic very much the way Stephen Hawking’s voice sounds today.” She asked him what he thought this voice had expected of him. “Working on the physics of consciousness, warp drive, time travel – that is, the stuff needed to bring the machine into existence,” he answered. Thus like a sci fi flick [hopefully not Terminator with Arnold Schwarzenegger] as Sarfatti is describing how he spoke as a young boy to a computer from the future that called him on a telephone and that he himself, Sarfatti, helped create sometime in the future!


Thursday, March 28, 2024