Tag: Mediums

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Book Review: The Nine: Briefing from Deep Space

By Stuart Holroyd

My travels as an editor have led me to this book from the latest book to be released by White Crow Books in the series from New Thinking Allowed. Since the New York Times release of Naval video footage and a story by Leslie Kean, the discussion around UFOs (or UAPs now) has gone from fringe woo-woo to “Hey, there must be something to this after all.” As a result, the book I’m editing has come from transcripts by people Dr. Mishlove has interviewed over the years who know about “alien encounters”. Only one has to do with the physical close encounters of the name-your-number. The rest are about the experiences of the victims or, as we say in parapsychology “the experiencers”.

I am not a believer in the “alien visitor” hypothesis considering that we have so little data about the origins of these phenomena but I do think something is going on, and has since we branched off from our ape ancestors to begin the genus “Homo”. If I’m starting to sound like the ancient astronaut theorists from the History Channel, please continue reading so I may disavow this idea and explain further what I mean.

One of the interviewees brought up this book called The Nine during their discussion with Dr. Mishlove and I thought it would be worth checking into. This is the book blurb:

Stuart Holroyd, skeptical, open-minded, and well-informed, became 

Observer to a remarkable U.S. group of psychics headed by a famous American scientist and an English aristocrat. They claimed that they had made contact with galactic intelligences and their “evidence” was astounding…

– Did three “selected” minds help to avert world disaster?

-Was the group in constant communication with extraterrestrials?

-Was it possible for these alien intelligences to effect a landing on Earth?

-Had they, in fact, already visited Earth in previous centuries?

-Did the group’s meditations avert Kissinger’s assassination and a Middle East holocaust?

from the book’s back cover

This is a pretty good summary of what I read. You’re probably wondering why Henry Kissinger is involved. This book was written in 1977 after the Middle East was having fits about Israel. Yes, I read this book just before Hamas invaded Israel in October 2023 taking prisoners, killing Jews and anyone else they came across which included Americans. The synchronicity is not lost on me.

The writer, Stuart Holroyd, is a British author famous for being one of the original “Angry Young Men” in the 1950s before it gained popularity in the 1960s. He went from being angry to looking into the paranormal and esoteric. The American scientist was Andrija Puharich who had over fifty patents, primarily medical, one of which involved hearing aids. He studied several very powerful mediums, healers, and Uri Geller, the Israeli famous for spoon-bending and other psychokinetic feats. The aristocrat was Sir John Whitmore, a racecar driver who had a near-death experience, which caused him to sell his pile in England and use his fortune to bankroll Puharich’s work for a while. The third was a trance medium named Phyllis Schlemmer, the Transceiver of the Nine. Several other people were tangentially involved with the project including a young man named Bobby who was to be an important addition to the group but opted not to stay.

Andrija Puharic and Uri Geller (1972)
Phyllis Schlemmer
Sir John Whitmore

The Council of Nine, as they called themselves, spoke through Phyllis while Whitmore and Puharich listened, sometimes using a tape recorder to capture what the Nine said. The author treats these events in chronological order and determines, from the many interactions the three principles had with The Nine, those communications he deemed were coherent and important. Interspersed throughout are reality checks. Holroyd pulls the reader through the fourth wall to say, “Hey, yeah, this reads like fiction, but I promise you, this stuff happened.” And, “Yeah, I bet you’re thinking ‘pull the other one’ right now, but if you look at it, it could just be nine super powerful dudes talking to these three humans.”

Puharich took these communications in stride since this wasn’t his first rodeo. He had worked with a transceiver and a healer and had received similar messages. However, the three principles frequently squabbled and their egos interfered with the plan on occasion. It is fun to read The Nine rebuking three accomplished adults over their issues with one another, but that’s where the fun ends and the explosions go off in your mind as you continue to read. Taking what The Nine say at face value as the author recommends, a series of messages peeking into their reality unfolds that would make Philip K. Dick freak. Like the President of the United States has several members of the White House Press Corp, The Nine used several spokes-entities as liaisons to speak through Phyllis, primarily one named Tom. 

The primary reason The Nine were in contact with the three was to avert a devastating possible World War III with Israel as the center of the conflict. Whitmore, Puharic, and Schlemmer together apparently made a perfect “human” to work through and with to achieve these goals. Bobby would have been a better transceiver but, according to Tom, he forgot what he came here to do. When asked why they didn’t force him, manipulate him, or use other tactics to convince him of the importance of his task, they replied that we humans have free will and The Nine cannot interfere, even if humans made the choice before coming to this planet. The message here is that we come to this life on planet Earth with a plan for our lives, but our memories get wiped and we may not achieve our goals. We also have free will to do with our lives as we want. It’s not all candy on Halloween though. If we don’t achieve our goals here, we get to go through remedial school when we leave our lives here and before we can progress to higher planes. 

Other messages and information include:

  • “…more advanced technologies would help ensure the survival of the planet”
  • Bioengineering. Both Phyllis and Bobby were re-engineered to be better transceivers.
  • “…dark forces that try to prevent all this happening, and one of their ways is to insinuate false teachings in the communications. It is not so difficult for them for they are sly and under the guise of something fine, they can be misleading.”
  • They had different forms as if they were from different planets
  • Many different types of craft would land over nine days leaving teachers behind to help Earth evolve (this is a future event).
  • “To raise the vibration of the souls, to bring them out of darkness – and when we say darkness, we do not mean negativity but true darkness – for they do not see and do not understand the cosmic, and they also do not understand that when they hate and when they are angry, this creates a problem for the universe. Only by raising the level of the consciousness of this planet, and perfecting the love and the core that is inside each human being, can we go on then to perfect other planets in the galaxies. This planet is one of the lowest that the soul comes to learn a lesson. The tragedy of this planet is its density. It is like a mire; it is sticky, and these beings get trapped in this stickiness…we are going to raise the level of this planet, make it a lighter planet. The energy then coming from it will be sent into the universe and will help raise the levels of consciousness and the levels of other planets…”
  • “…this planet has lagged behind, it hasn’t progressed like it’s supposed to…beneath this planet…are other beings, other civilizations, that there are other people with more technology that can help raise it, but this planet is so bogged down in pure ego, and without harmony and out of balance, that it’s upsetting the master plan.”
  • The Nine are equivalent to the top cosmic governing council
  • There is no other planet like Earth and every being that exists in the Universe must take a turn here. If this planet fails, then all the souls that haven’t had a turn here will not obtain the necessary growth.
  • UFOs come from many places, including the place The Nine inhabit, but many are not physical, just appear to be.
  • “…[The Nine] are not God. All of you and all of us make God…Many of your physical beings deify other physical beings, when it is truly them.”
  • “Many souls when they die are trapped in the atmosphere and are evolved over and over on this planet, and seem to be going nowhere. This planet was originally created to teach a being balance between the spiritual and the physical world, and so these beings never evolve beyond the belt of this planet. Their desires hold them to this planet.”
  • The emissary, Tom said, “The difficulty we have in understanding the problems you have in this gross heavy density world that as physical beings you must exist upon…”

Dr. Puharich had worked with another transceiver prior to Phyllis named D.G. Vinod who had achieved contact with The Nine. He had also worked with, and wrote a book about, Uri Geller who, Puharich claimed, had abilities given to him from superhuman entities which he said were The Nine. 

This can be taken at face value and be applied to the unknown experiences that humans have had even before the Roswell event’s flying saucers. This could also be a misinformation campaign if you are to believe those who think that Puharic was using mind control to test CIA tactics. Those people skeptical of Puharic tend to have a Christian philosophy and are against The Nine because they have been quoted as saying that Christianity is based on a false premise. Tom called Jesus of Nazareth the “Nazarene” and claimed he was simply human but given many superhuman abilities to guide humanity forward. Instead, we deified Jesus and created another religion. I guess you can see why Christians would be miffed and would want to debunk The Nine.

There is the issue of veridical data. None of the tapes that Puharic made exist and much of the experimental data has not been shared by the Stanford Research Institute researchers who looked at Uri Geller’s ability. Over and over in this book and the book “Uri”, Puharic claims that the tapes were wiped and the documentation disappeared. One has to wonder why that happened or even if it did. Why was a book about The Nine written but no proof provided? Is this another trick like the Scientology philosophy? Was it a CIA brainwashing program? Why were so many influential people involved? Why is The Nine still so pervasive today, especially amongst the wealthy and powerful? And, what happened to Puharic when he returned to the U.S.?

Without proof, we can only speculate.

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Could Dark Matter be the Stuff of the Other Side?

I have been listening to the Yale philosopher Christopher Noёl on the New Thinking Allowed YouTube channel and have had my mind blown away. With all the years of research I’ve been doing, I had pretty much ignored where our souls/spirit selves go when leaving this mortal realm. It’s kinda over there in the corner somewhere and then in another dimension, perhaps. Or, it’s a pocket universe that makes it hard for people of that realm to communicate with us, or we’re simply downloaded into an information field. 

Rather, I have become more excited about the latest Journal of Parapsychology paper about how parapsychologists could create an overarching theory of psi as those early biologists did the theory of evolution (“Toward a “Parapsychological Synthesis”: Proposals for Integrating Theories of Psi” by Michael Nahm). It goes into detail about the sundry and various hypotheses that were finally wrangled into a cohesive and coherent theory that could be accepted by science at large. When parapsychology as a science does this with the theory of psi, it will be one step closer to an accepted scientific endeavor. What Christopher Noël says about dark matter might be another option.

When I saw Christopher Noël’s interview on his most current book There Is No Veil: At Play in the Vast Here and Now, I was intrigued. He is a philosopher, which means he looks at life from unusual perspectives, pushing us out of the boundaries of our current modes of thought. I am an autodidact philosopher and can respect that trait in others even if it can be frustrating for the paradigm-thinkers. He begins with a story almost typical in American teenage society pre-social media: with an Ouija board. I cringe inwardly at this because it isn’t a particularly safe tool to use. It’s akin to leaving the front door of your house wide open after having sent invitations to strangers to come on in. Of course, that’s what happened to young Christopher and his companions, a low spirit who felt too guilty to move on to the next realm came into the house for a little tête-a-tête. They were lucky that this weighty soul had no ill intent toward them, he simply needed them to get married and have a girl child to replace the daughter he’d killed. You can’t make this stuff up guys. Of course, Christopher didn’t marry his friend and have the child, which frustrated the dead guy no end, but it did open up a mental door in Christopher’s mind. He, like I, did not have a cultural impediment preventing him from contemplating what this visitation meant. 

Later, he read Vera Rubin’s hypothesis about why galaxies behave as they do, that the speed of the outer solar systems within those galaxies was the same as those closer to the galactic center. This shouldn’t happen unless there is invisible matter using gravity to move them along to the tune of ten times more invisible matter than visible. What did this mean to Christopher Noël? That we’re swimming in dark matter, it’s all around us and more pervasive than the matter we can perceive. Imagine going down to the bottom of a deep ocean trench with movie director/producer James Cameron and you photograph a fish. That fish has spent its entire life miles below the surface in pitch-dark, cold, high-pressure seawater. That fish never goes to the surface and only knows this environment. To us, it appears to be the harshest and loneliest place on earth, but this creature knows no different. Not to mention, this fish does not perceive James Cameron in his high-tech bathysphere as he tries to get its attention for a photo op.

Christopher takes a leap of logic and hypothesizes that this dark matter may be the stuff of our next life evolution. Let me take you along the trajectory of that leap so you might understand better what he’s thinking. Dark matter and dark energy are not visible to us nor to our measuring devices. We can only see their effects on the matter in the universe. This is akin to circumstances before the invention of the microscope where instead of bacteria, viruses, and fungi causing disease, something called “bad humors” was the culprit and leeches were the cure. We can frequently see effects before we understand the cause in science which pushes us to make better devices for perception and measurement. Now, through the use of microscopes, we know that it’s single-celled organisms causing us so much trouble. 

Why is dark matter currently impossible to perceive even with our advanced telescopes and spectrophotometers? It may be that it exists at a different frequency than our visible matter does. It may be less dense with its atoms having more space between nucleus and electrons. Perhaps the only perception device able to handle the presence of dark matter is the human brain. Every once in a while, something made of dark matter may be able to consciously lower its frequency to our level of visible matter and voila: ghost.

At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, a number of physical mediums were given credit for creating a mysterious substance that was later called ectoplasm. Noises, shapes, the sudden appearance of objects (apports), movements, all of these things were attributed to the medium. Perhaps the truth is that the spirits could condense their atoms, attune their frequencies to match our own, and create matter from what appeared to be thin air. They could manipulate our matter from their realm to make things happen for us to perceive. It may explain, Christopher states, why it tends to feel cold around ghost events because of the rapid deflation necessary for the ghost to manipulate our environment (e.g. dry ice or liquid nitrogen) or apported items feel hot to the touch when they first appear (rapid increase in density).

I had the pleasure to listen to Laura Lynn Jackson who has a cameo appearance in my first book (under a different name). She is one seriously talented psychic medium who has the infectious joy of a saint. When asked where the other side might be, she said, “It’s right here” pointing directly in front of her. She told us that our spirit guides and soul family are present all around us all the time. They are trying to make contact with us but it’s difficult because we’re not paying attention. She said that they find it easier to manipulate things that have energy flowing through them or are affected by electromagnetism. They may cause lights to flicker or they may change the T.V. channel while you’re watching a show. All of those little glitches we tend to put down to mechanical failure. It sure does sound like something an entity from a higher frequency realm might do to get our attention.

Christopher mentions that Fredrick Meyers, founder of the Society for Psychical Research (1882), visited famous medium Geraldine Cummins thirty years after his death. He described his new home to her: 

It is a structure so fine, it is invisible to the mortal eye and the finest  instruments of the scientists. Ether is a bad term, but I cannot find another word to define it. This is a kind of air or as I would like to say, a fluid or an emanation. It is the ancestor of matter as we know it.

Noël states further that the etheric body that inhabits our physical body may be why we have evidence of out-of-body and near-death experiences. The etheric body just goes on a walkabout and then reinhabits the corporeal body once more. It could also be why psychokinesis works. People may have the ability to manipulate the dark matter/visible matter ratio within an object to make it move the way they want (e.g. table levitation). Or spirit knocks which are measurably different from rapping on an object with a knuckle or tool. They have a noise spike like pressure has built up in an object and then is suddenly released.

This is where my mind went blewy. I’ve been spending time considering that our matter was being controlled by a complex set of software, that or we’re living in a holographic universe as avatars. His hypothesis never even computed before, but makes so much sense. Not only that, but it means that with the advent of better measuring and perception devices, we humans might be able to bridge the gap between our perceived universe and that of the spirits.

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J.B. and Louisa Rhine

J.B. and Louisa Rhine

Curious people become scientists. Some people find their original path of inquiry will make a giant curve toward an unexpected journey simply because they had one experience. Dr. Julie Beischel had intended to become one of a plethora of biochemists looking at potential new drugs but an incident with a spiritual medium derailed that idea. She and her husband now run the Windbridge Institute in California where they study mediums’ abilities.

J.B. Rhine and his wife Louisa were botanists having both received their degrees at the University of Chicago when they attended a lecture by the author Arthur Conan Doyle. Not only did Doyle write the wildly popular stories about Sherlock Holmes, but he was also an avid believer in the afterlife and the abilities of spiritual mediums to have access to those who had passed on. At that time, in 1922, the Society for Psychical Research studied spiritual and physical mediums, but not using lab-oriented, blinded, and reproducible experimentation. Botanists of the early twentieth century utilized the most robust statistical methods of the time and Rhines decided to apply these to study supernatural abilities. 

Since the SPR was a relatively new organization and focused mainly in the United Kingdom, it was difficult for J.B. Rhine to find an academic position studying anomalous abilities in the United States. He continued to teach botany and Louisa to teach Latin until, when they had nearly given up hope, J.B. found a home in the newly formed Psychology department at Duke University with like-minded chairman William McDougall — a past president of both the American and British SPR. By 1935, Rhine presided over the Parapsychology Laboratory and worked tirelessly to create rigorous experiments to show the statistical existence of extrasensory perception, a term he made famous in his book “Extrasensory Perception” published in 1934.

Along with developing experiments with her husband, Louisa Rhine became the unofficial curator of the numerous letters sent to the Rhine after J.B.’s bestseller gave those who had experienced anomalous events hope that they were not alone. She published several books about the anecdotal events explained in the thousands of correspondence they received. By 1980, Louisa became president of the SPR, the same year J.B. passed away.

The Rhine Research Center is the oldest parapsychology laboratory in the United States and the Rhines’ methodologies and experiments have been utilized and replicated in labs around the world. It holds the Alex Tanous library filled with hundreds of books on the various subjects parapsychology encompasses. Though it has not been associated with Duke University for many decades, it is located near the campus and attracts many academics from the University.

Sally Rhine Feather

I have had the distinct pleasure to have met and befriended their daughter, Sally Rhine Feather who, in her nineties, is still very active at the Center and who inspired me to write the Calliope O’Callahan novels. The Psy Syndicate is an amalgam of several parapsychology research centers like the Rhine, but I consider the Rhine my classroom filled with very smart, lovely people. 

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Mentalism versus Telepathy

Calliope (the main character in my series) grew up among a special group of entertainers in unusual venues such as local State Fairs or Renaissance Faires. In North Carolina the State Fair can have over a million people attend during the week it’s open in October and the Carolina Ren Faire can have even more. Clair, Callie’s mother, is like the Carnival Medium in a semi-darkened tent surrounded by symbols of the mystical. She might have a small table with two or three small chairs or stools surrounding it. If she were a Tarot reader, her deck of cards would be arrayed over the surface of a tie-dyed cloth in a pattern well known to Tarot experts everywhere. There might even be the smoke of patchouli incense wafting through the close quarters as you sit in rapt attention awaiting news of your fate. The question in your mind is whether this Carnival Medium, Palmist or Tarot card reader truly has the Second Sight or if they are just really good at observing human behavior. Continue reading “Mentalism versus Telepathy”

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Mediums

Mediums are considered to be the conduits for those spirits that have “shuffled on from this mortal coil” and Hamlet, who had a lengthy conversation with his deceased father, might have been one. I talked with Dr. Julie Beischel of the Windbridge Research Center about her experiences with Mediums. She is a Parapsychologist who has written several books on the subject. ” Among Mediums: A Scientist’s Quest for Answers” has a concise description of her quintuple blind study confirming that “certain Mediums can make accurate statements about dead people that they couldn’t reasonably know”.  Dr. Beischel discusses the experiences of thirteen of the certified Mediums she has worked with in her book “From the Mouths of Mediums”asking how they experience information from the “other side”. Basically, each Medium experiences this phenomenon differently. Continue reading “Mediums”