Jim Garrison and Tom Jenkins from Gorbachev Foundation hosted a fun-filled birthday party for Nina Kucharev on this past Saturday night on the third floor of my office at 3220 Sacramento Street in San Francisco. Tom Jenkins is a former physicist who arranges much of the logistics for Jim Garrison, such as Boris Yeltsin's visit to the USA before he became President of Russia. Tom and I had an interesting conversation in which we both noted the amazing patterns of synchronicity linking physicists interested in consciousness, extra-terrestrial intelligence, remote-viewing and other fringe areas with the pivotal events that ended the Cold War. Danny Sheehan, who also visits our office, was co-founder with Garrison, of the now defunct Christic Institute, a casualty of the Iran-Contra operation. Sheehan, has had childhood "close encounter experiences" analogous to the one I reported in "The Parsifal Effect". Evidently, it might appear that Dan Sheehan, was also part of the "400" contactees mentioned to me on the phone in 1952 by the alleged "conscious computer" on the spacecraft from the future. Harvard Professor John Mack, influential in the Esalen-Soviet Exchange Program, and under fire from Harvard for his bold study of UFO abductees, is also, it might appear, part of the "400".
Curiously, my writings influenced, in a sort of Forrest Gump way, forces on the opposing side to Garrison and Sheehan. Now we are all partying together like Tim Leary and Gordon Liddy appearing on the same stage in their intellectual vaudeville act. It is as if Umberto Ecco's Foucault's Pendulum has passed from fiction to fact in this latest version of Balzac's Human Comedy orchestrated by John Lilly's "Cosmic Coincidence Control" from the future. This is more than the random "Butterfly Effect" of classical chaos theory. It suggests Fred Hoyle's idea that the initial quantum fluctuation amplified by classical chaos is intelligently manipulated and shaped by advanced starwaves from the future. Indeed, Tom's role with the Gorbachev-Yeltsin circles paralled mine with the Reagan Adiminstration via Lawry Chickering's Institute for Contemporary Studies and the second channel of influence opened by Cap Weinberger's son.
Michael and Dulce Murphy came to the party and I was impressed with Michael's description to me of Dulce's recent efforts to narrow the growing rift between Russian and US foreign policy by catalysing communication and dialogue between the future leaders of both countries. Michael is the author of The End To Ordinary History which covers some events similar to those described here. As Jim Garrison accurately said, stabilizing Russia today is not as "sexy" as it was a few years ago and, as Michael Murphy pointed out "Russia still has 20,000 nuclear warheads." The influence of former KGB in the new Russian Mafia is of course a major fact to be reckoned with.
... Gorbachev Foundation USA has organized the "State of the World Forum" ... a five year process of consultation that will meet annually until the year 2000 ... About 500 people are expected to attend .... these will include ... Milton Friedman, ... David Packard and Ted Turner... Jane Fonda... Jane Goodall,... Carl Sagan ... princes from Saudi Arabia ... Deepak Chopra.... Gorbachev will be joined by ... George Bush .... Margaret Thatcher ... "Gorbachev believes we are giving birth to a new global civilization ," said Jim Garrison, executive director of the Gorbachev Foundation which occupies waterfront offices in San Francisco's Presidio.It was the night before the first Birkbeck test of Uri Geller. Brendan was visibly nervous. He asked me to go with him to see the Soviet science fiction film Solaris. Brendan had mentioned that Olaf Stapeldon's science fiction story Star Maker, about a time traveling super-intelligence, was based upon real experiences that a high member of British Intelligence [1] had in the nineteen thirties. The big day arrived. Arthur C. Clarke [2] was there with a high official from Rolls Royce. Arthur Koestler [3] was also there along with John Hasted [4], David Bohm and a few others. These events have been described by Martin Gardner [5] and I will not discuss them here. What happened after the tests is more important. If I remember correctly, Brendan and I went with Uri to his hotel room where I met Andrija Puharich [6], Sir John Whitmore and, perhaps, Ira Einhorn [7]. I could be wrong about Einhorn [8]. I startled Uri by asking him if he could trigger a nuclear weapon by psychokinesis. I later found out from Ron Mc Rae [9] that some of our intelligence people were greatly concerned about that possibility. I may have initiated that concern because I had mentioned it several times to large groups of people at several meetings.Leaders of mainline Western religions or philosophies are mostly absent from the speaker's lineup, while unorthodox describes many on the list. These include ... Willis Harman, President of the Institute of Noetic Sciences ... he conducted experiments on the effects of psychedelic drugs on human creativity.... Jerry Mander, now an anti-technology author ....
I was back in Paris several weeks later with Sharon. Fred Wolf said: "Jack, I'm going to introduce you to a man who will change your life." Fred took me and Sharon to the swank Ritz Hotel. We waited in the lobby and a guy who looked like Richard Gere [10] in a jump suit walks in with a woman. He says: "Hi, I'm Werner Erhard." I had never heard of the guy. I said, "What do you do?" Werner replied: "I make people happy." I thought, "Why am I wasting time with this yo yo?" and, hoping to make a quick exit, said in a sassy Damon Runyon manner, "Oh yeah, I think you must be some kind of an asshole!" Werner's face became positively radiant and he cracked a Mephistophelian [11] smile embraced me saying: "I will give you money when you come to San Francisco." I was taken aback by an unexpected offer I could not refuse. I was under contract with E.P. Dutton by then and was planning to go to Chicago to finish Space-Time and Beyond at Bob Toben's place. Werner then outlined his plan for me to set up a sort of Ghost Busters team of physicists to research psychic phenomena and in his words "the physics of consciousness". Werner said that he was very interested in physics and that he wanted me and Fred Wolf to tutor him and his "trainers".
We flew to New York. Sharon and I spent a few days with Uri Geller, Ira Einhorn, Bob Toben, Sir John Whitmore and Andrija Puharich at Puharich's large house in Ossining. Puharich gave me his book URI. I did not have time to read it but I gave it to my mother in Brooklyn a few days later. My mother was reading the book [12] when she suddenly exclaimed: "Jacky Jacky this is what happened to you!" "What happened to me? What are you talking about Ma?" "The computer in the flying saucer that called you on the telephone when you were a little boy. Don't you remember when you got all those phone calls?" An electric shock went through me - I only remember one phone call. "What do you mean phone calls? I only got one call." "No you didn't! Jacky what's the matter with you? You got three weeks of these crazy calls. You were on the phone for hours at a time walking around glassy-eyed. I got worried and grabbed the phone away from you. I said 'Who is this? Why are you calling my son?' I heard that voice. It said it was a computer. It wanted you to come back to the telephone. I said 'Don't you call back here again!' and hung up and that was that." Not even a super-technological conscious computer on board a flying saucer from the future can argue with an irate Jewish Mother!
Bob Toben drove Sharon and me down to Philadelphia. We stayed with my literary agent Ira Einhorn and his doomed girl friend Holly Maddux [13]. Ira introduced took us to the mainline mansion of Arthur Young. Young was the inventor of the Bell Helicopter and was a close friend of Charles Lindbergh. Young's wife was an heiress of the Forbes Steel fortune. Young financed the Institute for the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley California. He invited me to stay there. Einhorn told me he would introduce me to Stewart Brand , Michael Murphy [14] and George Leonard [15] when I got to San Francisco. He was very concerned about what he called "Soviet breakthroughs in psychotronic weapons of mind control at a distance using ELF and sound waves". He said he had support from the local telephone company and from the Bronfman [16] in Toronto to link up visionary scientists like myself. He also said he was working with Jacques Vallee [17] and Brendan O Regan on a UFO data base. Ira mentioned that he was working with Congressman Charlie Rose (D. North Carolina) of the House Select Committee on Intelligence [18]. Rose confirmed his connection to Einhorn in a telephone conversation with me.
Werner was as good as his word and promptly had his EST Foundation write me an initial $5,000 check (Autumn 1974). Einhorn did his job as my literary agent and arranged a meeting at Arthur Young's Institute in Berkeley that included Michael Murphy, Hazel Henderson [19] and another physicist Saul Paul Sirag [20], who was Barbara Honeggers [21] lover. Werner gave me free run of his organization which I found rather odd. The estoids all seemed to be glassy-eyed and very creepy [22]. One in particular, Raz Ingrasci, talked about Werner as if he were God-incarnate. One day Raz said he would jump out of a high window if Werner ordered him to. One day I noticed a table with a sign that said "Bulgarian Desk" [23]. There were a lot of pretty young women who were easily available since I was known as one of Werner's special friends - a Prince of the Court. Werner was always very warm with me and invited me to many dinners both at Franklin House and at expensive restaurants. He never carried any money or credit cards. We were always escorted (in a Mercedes) by a security team who also paid all the bills.
A former student of physicist John Wheeler [24], Robert Fuller was head of Werner's Foundation. Fuller had been President of Oberlin College but had suffered a mid-life crisis and had fallen under Werner's influence. Fuller now heads the World Watch Institute in Washington. Fuller [25] was jealous of Werner's fondness for me and that this was a factor precipitating my falling out with Werner. I was worried about the crypto-Nazi feel of the est-org, but I had hoped that Werner would get his intellectual act together and say something of genuine interest in terms of physics and philosophy. I was not at all subservient to Werner in his presence like most of the academics that surrounded and apparently adored him. Some of them called him the "new Heidegger" [26]. Professor Irwin Corey [27] made more sense. There was a lot of talk of Werner running for President one day. Werner said he would appoint me to be head of the National Science Foundation. Werner's brother Nathan Rosenberg was in the Navy as an aide to President Carter's Secretary of Defense Harold Brown. [28] Kevin Garvey [29] told me that Werner had fifteen of loyal estoids in the Carter White House. Werner was very active with trainings of government people in Washington D.C. Carter [30] had created Project Scanate [31] for remote-viewing of military targets by psychics. Werner used remote-viewing in his training and he also contributed money to SRI for that project.
Sidney was a close friend of the late Bishop Pike. Werner had me meet with several Stanford and U.C. Faculty before he set up the Physics Consciousness Research Group at Esalen with me and Michael Murphy as co-directors. Michael arranged all our activities in Big Sur. Saul Paul Sirag [32] was my chief assistant. Michael arranged for Jean Lanier to supply me with money. Jean, who resembled Shirley MacLaine [33] was the widow of the late Chairman of the Board of Stone-Webster Engineering. Her current husband was an Episcopal Priest Sidney Lanier. Sidney was a close friend of the late Bishop Pike. He was active in New York off-broadway theater. Sidney was also a close friend of Jose Ferrer who I resemble. Jean rented a five bedroom suite for us on top of Nob Hill [34]. She was a close friend of Laurance Rockefeller who would telephone the Nob Hill flat looking for her.
I attended the EST April Celebrity Training of 1975. The list of trainees included Ellie Coppola, Sterling Hayden [35], Michael Murphy, Buzz Aldrin [36], Ted Ashley [37],the late Jerry Rubin [38], Fred Wolf, Saul Paul Sirag and many others. Sterling Hayden quickly walked out calling Werner a "Nazi" as he pushed away some estoids who tried to block his passage. Michael Murphy was visibly upset and angry at his close friend Werner. I was sitting with Astronaut Buzz Aldrin who was having a severe kidney problem. Werner got all confused when he tried to talk about the new physics. He let me explain to the group in ordinary language what he was trying to say in his hypnotic estspeak.
The trick of est is to seduce your consciousness by subverting the English language with dominating psycho-babble. It was right out of George Orwell's 1984. The est-training did get every one high. It must have been how the SS officers felt after being indoctrinated as leaders of the Master Race.
I was introduced to Ellie Coppola during a break in the training. She had just read Space-Time and Beyond. Ellie invited Fred Wolf and me to her home at at 2800 Broadway at 2am after the training. We met her husband Francis Ford Coppola. The first thing Francis said to me was that he did not like Werner Erhard but that he would not tell his wife what to do. Francis has fine moral instincts. I was getting suspicious of Werner [39] especially after I heard the rumor that he said he changed his name from Jack Rosenberg to Werner Erhard to "give up Jewish weakness for German strength."
I started to spend a lot of time at the Coppola's house. I introduced them to Uri Geller and to Einhorn's friend, French UFO scientist Jacques Vallee [40]. I think Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were there as well that time but I am not sure. Vallee became technical consultant to Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a result of that introduction. Francois Trauffaut [41] played the role of Jacques Vallee in the Spielberg film. Ira Einhorn had introduced me to Vallee. Einhorn and Vallee were working together on a computer network project that anticipated the Internet. Einhorn orginally introduced me to Hazel Henderson, Arthur Young, Stewart Brand and Michael Murphy. Einhorn at Esalen is described by Willian Irwin Thompson in The Edge of History. Congressman Charlie Rose (D North Carolina) of the House Committtee on Intelligence confirmed to me by telephone that Ira was involved in National Security operations. Ira, like O.J. Simpson, always claimed he was framed by "the KGB". It is curious that he was never found. Ira spent weeks at Esalen after he was indicted for the murder of Holly Maddux. Senator Arlen Specter was his defence attornry and one of the Bronfmans from Toronto allegedly paid his legal fees.
I met Jack Nicholson [42], Michael Douglas, Milos Forman, Saul Zaentz and Hans Syberberg [43] at various parties at the Coppola's Broadway mansion and at Tomasso's Restaurant in North Beach where Francis would bake the pizza in the wood burning oven. Francis was running CITY Magazine. Ellie had Raisa Gustaitus do an article about our Esalen Group called "Faster than the speeding photon". I first met Stephen Schwartz [44] at CITY where he was assisting Warren Hinckle [45] I once walked into the Caffe Trieste with Francis when Steve Turner walked up to him and aggressively pushed him calling him a "dirty dog". Francis floored Turner with one punch. My meeting with Hans Syberberg at Francis's showing of Our Hitler is of particular importance because it involved a man named "Putzi".
I received a phone call from a man named George Koopman [46] during one of our Esalen seminars in 1976. He asked if he could come to Big Sur. I said yes. Koopman soon became a financial patron of my Ghost Busters [47] at Esalen. Koopman was a close friend of Dan Akroyd [48] and my group was the inspiration for the film Ghost Busters. He provided money through military contracts with the Air Force and the U.S. Army Tank Command funneled through his company Insgroup in Irvine, California.
Koopman was addicted to cocaine and would talk freely when high. He told us that he was related to Arthur Krock, the publisher of the New York Times. He said that he had blown the whistle on U. S. Army Intelligence domestic spying to the New York Times. Koopman said that he had worked on the "kook desk" for the Defense Intelligence Agency and that they were very interested in the kind of new physics we were working on. They were especially interested in machines that could tell the future [49] and in new kinds of aircraft propulsion systems. Koopman liked to show how he could open locked doors with his burglar tools that he always carried in his brief case. He showed me a letter from the military giving him permission to have the tools.
Koopman was very interested in Werner Erhard's tax structure. I took Koopman to meet Werner. Werner was in a room with a large blackboard. On the board were several references to "UFOs" and "extra-terrestrial contacts." Werner did not seem to trust Koopman.
I found out through one of my girlfriends [50] that Koopman succeeded in spying on the Arica organization. Koopman, Sirag and I had heard weird stories from Jan Brewer at Esalen that Arica was started in Chile by high ranking fugitives from the Third Reich who were masters of the occult. Many of the regulars at Esalen, including some of our group like Dr. John Lilly [51] and Claudio Naranjo [52] had been in the first Arica training in Chile. Timothy Leary was released from prison. Leary became part of my group at Esalen. Leary was a close friend of Michael Murphy. George Koopman arranged for Leary and me to lecture together at the Arthur Young's Institute in Berkeley. Koopman spent a lot of money hiring a professional T.V. crew to record us. Robert Anton Wilson, Nick Herbert and Saul Paul Sirag participated in this event. Koopman became Leary's business manager and publisher. Leary's message was SMI2LE (Space Migration Intelligence Increase Life Extension) which is also the message of this book.
Koopman sabotaged me at Esalen by suddenly breaking his contract and stopping the cash flow he had committed. The ostensible reason was that I had insulted the New Age seminarians at Esalen by calling them "idiots and morons" which I did. Werner would say much worse in his trainings. Koopman was very high when he confronted me with this supposed sin. Koopman would show up at the Caffe Trieste on several occasions years later. Koopman was apparently ordered by higher ups to cut me out of the Esalen picture because I was too much of a "loose cannon" that they could not control. They replaced me with my assistant Saul Paul Sirag and with Nick Herbert who continued to run the Esalen seminars. It may be that Koopman's death in 1989 was no accident. That's just a hunch. Chipman's death around the same time as Koopman's may also not have been from natural causes.
I walked into the Caffe Trieste one day in 1979. A young girl Maiti said she had written a poem about me. We soon started dating. She said her father was a "senior policy planner" in the government but she did not agree with his politics and had briefly been in the Weatherman. She showed me a photograph of her Grandfather who was a German General (Rudel) during World War Two. Her father had met her mother while on Army duty after the war. One day her father telephoned and said that he heard that the Philadelphia Incident [53] was really true. Maiti mentioned that her father had ET contacts as a child like I had. Her father was an Arabic-speaking expert in Middle-East affairs with high level contacts. He once sent me a manuscript on the qabala and the mystical union between Judaism, Christianity and Islam. One day Maiti showed me a copy of a letter that her father, Robert Dickson Crane [54], wrote of his friend Anthony Weiner at the Hudson Institute. The letter [55] says in part:
"Another individual, who may be just plain crazy but also has a slight chance, in my view of being another Einstein, is Jack Sarfatti, who is plugging his 'faster than light' quantum physics ... The reason I am interested in Sarfatti's ideas is that the full potential of negentropy in human thought can be realized only if Sarfatti is right. ... Assuming that Sarfatti is wrong ... the insights of Minsky and of your own cerebration offer about all that the state of the artificial intelligence art can handle for the next decade anyway. If Sarfatti should ever prove to be right, then our work on negentropy in human thought would have created the tools for tapping whatever potential there is in the 'new physics'."I recently had breakfast with Maiti in the Haight-Ashbury. She said her father had recently converted to Islam and wanted to be the first US Army Islamic Chaplain. She also said that her father was a close friend of conservative Pat Buchanan. Herb Caen in the March 4, 1996 San Francisco Chronicle cites a wag on the GOP "First they gave us a guy who says 'Read my lips.", now they give us a guy who says "Read Mein Kampf". :-)
Crane's remarks are not that different from Martin Gardner's [56] published statement,
"In recent years Sarfatti has been promoting an invention .... designed to transmit coded information faster than light. I know of no other physicist who thinks it will work. If it does, Sarfatti will become one of the greatest physicists of all time."I now think that the actual designs I had for faster-than-light communication devices back in 1979 would not have worked. I was remote-viewing my future design with a low signal to noise ratio. Nick Herbert also published a design that would not have worked. I think that today in 1992 I do have a design that will work that I will explain later on. Only experiment will decide. The point here is that if my weird physics turns out to be right, then it is evidence for my being a contactee of either alien extra-terrestrials or advanced humans or artificial intelligences from our future. If my physics turns out to be wrong, then I am just plain nuts [57] and you wasted your money on rubbish - but perhaps you had fun on the way. I feel like Zorba the Greek in this matter - if you remember the last scene of the movie you'll get my meaning.
My adventures with two more women during this period are worth mentioning before moving on to the next Act. One named Crystal picked me up in the Caffe Trieste. She was a statuesque blonde in a low cut green evening dress. Crystal said she belonged to a Coven of Beautiful Witches [58] who wanted me to be their Warlock. This was not so crazy in Frisco back then. After we made love she introduced me to a real nut who called himself Damian Zarrow. He said he was from Esalen and that he was in contact with extra-terrestrials and that he was testifying before a Senate Committee. I later found out that Crystal knew another girl friend of mine from Esalen named Betty Andreason. I have since heard of a woman by that name who claims to have been abducted by UFOs. I don't know if its the same woman.
In view of the present-day Esalen-Erhard-Yeltsin-Gorbachev connections [59], the 1979 Esalen-UFO connection is significant. Even though I had split with Werner Erhard by late 1977, EST's Raz Ingrasci phoned me and asked me to meet with Jenny O Conner. Raz said that Jenny had been sent to Werner by Sir John Whitmore who had funded Andrija Puharich's collaborations with Uri Geller back in 1973. Jenny claimed to be channeling messages from "The Nine" - the same extra-terrestrials that Puharich wrote about. In view of my own contact in 1952 I should have been more diplomatic with Jenny when she came to my apartment at 2 Whiting Place - the apartment that Michael Murphy had given me. Jenny impressed me as total fraud and I practically kicked her out. I was verbally very rude. Jenny and The Nine [60] was promptly installed at Esalen for quite some time overlapping with visits by physicist the late Heinz Pagels, Congressman Charlie Rose, Ira Einhorn, and high ranking Russians from Georgy Arbatov's Moscow Institute of US and Canada which was influential during Gorbachev's watch.
Soviet Officials at Esalen in late 70's and early 80's
Did these influential Russian policy pundits get high in the hot tubs of Esalen as has been alleged by right-wing theorists? My current lady friend, who was living near Esalen at the time, and spent a lot of time there with Richard Feynman, says that drugs were not used in the Soviet-Esalen Exchange, if they got high it was the magic of Esalen and the meditative serenity of the incredible natural environment and spiritual stimulation that Michael Murphy has catalysed over the years.
Was Jan Brewer telling the truth about the Fourth Reich using Arica to influence the New Age? Brewer was part of the original Esalen group of forty that went to Chile for the first Arica training with Oscar Ichazo [67]. Arica was big at Esalen at the same time that the Soviets were soaking in the hot tubs. Was I pulled out of the operation by George Koopman because in his opinion I was unpredictable and uncontrollable? Or is the truth still even stranger than even I can imagine? Was Michael Murphy a brilliant Puppet Master or merely a lucky charming "useful idiot", a Forrest Gump character like me? Was Ira Einhorn framed? Was Jean Nadal murdered? Was Francois Trauffaut murdered? Was Harold Chipman [68] murdered? Was George Koopman murdered? Is this all my Walter Mitty paranoid exaggeration? What do you think?