Andrija Puharich was a physician and research scientist who became one of the most enigmatic figures at the intersection of CIA mind control programs, parapsychology, and UFO contactee culture from the late 1940s through the mid-1990s. He founded the Round Table Foundation in Maine, ran a biomedical front company called Intelectron Corporation, and later operated “Lab Nine” in Ossining, New York, where he gathered psychically gifted teenagers he called “the space kids.” He is the subject of the documentary Mind Traveler, directed by Greg Malatzi, who spent nearly a decade researching Puharich’s life and archives. The episode explores whether Puharich was a genuine believer in extraterrestrial contact, a willing participant in MK Ultra-style mind control experiments, or both.
Puharich’s Early Career and the Round Table Foundation
Puharich was recruited into the Army Specialized Training Program as a medical student at Northwestern University in 1947, a program that also included figures like Henry Kissinger and Kurt Vonnegut, suggesting early military-intelligence interest in him.
He was mentored by Warren S. McCulloch, a researcher into ESP and psychedelic drugs, who introduced him to fringe science and had connections to the CIA and Navy. McCulloch actively recommended Puharich to intelligence agencies.
In 1948, Puharich founded the Round Table Foundation in Rockland, Maine, a large laboratory and residence funded by the CIA, Army, Navy, and the Armor Foundation, as well as wealthy benefactors including heirs to the Astor and DuPont families.
At the Round Table, Puharich conducted ESP experiments years before the official SRI remote viewing program of the 1970s, including card-guessing tests and remote viewing, often using a Faraday cage to isolate subjects.
He researched the Amanita muscaria mushroom as a potential enhancer of psychic abilities, publishing The Sacred Mushroom, which drew connections to ancient mystery rituals and was praised by Aldous Huxley, a close friend who frequented the lab.
The Nine: Channeled Entities and Their Messages
In 1952, an Indian psychic named Dr. Vinod unexpectedly fell into a trance at the Round Table Foundation and began channeling beings called “the Nine,” who described themselves not as personalities but as universal laws or principles. This launched Puharich’s decades-long obsession with the Nine.
The Nine claimed to be monitoring humanity and wanting to prevent self-destruction, particularly from nuclear war. They delivered philosophical messages, complex equations, and specific technical instructions.
The Nine gave precise instructions for building Faraday cages using specific metals (especially copper) and dimensions to improve channeling quality, and the transmissions did become noticeably clearer when their instructions were followed.
The Nine also instructed subjects to wear copper touching their skin (such as bracelets) to improve transmission quality, a practice that continued with the space kids decades later.
A seance was held on New Year’s Eve 1952–53 involving nine elite participants, including members of the Forbes, Astor, and DuPont families, as well as Arthur Young (inventor of the Bell helicopter). This group believed themselves to be agents of the Nine.
Connections to the JFK Assassination
Ruth Forbes Payne Young, who attended the seance, was connected to Mary Bancroft, mistress of CIA Director Allen Dulles. Ruth Payne’s daughter (also named Ruth Payne) later took in Lee Harvey Oswald in Texas and got him a job at the Texas School Book Depository.
Puharich’s assistant at Intelectron Corporation reported that men in suits came into the office on the day JFK was assassinated and spoke seriously with Puharich, after which he was visibly disturbed for the rest of the day.
Puharich was researching the ability to send messages directly into people’s minds via radio frequencies at Intelectron in 1962–63, the same period Oswald was in Texas. The episode raises the possibility that Oswald may have been a mind control subject, similar to Sirhan Sirhan (who shot RFK and had no memory of doing so).
Jack Ruby, who killed Oswald, was evaluated by MK Ultra psychiatrist Jolly West and exhibited signs consistent with mind control programming.
Intelectron Corporation and Mind Control Technology
After the Round Table Foundation closed in 1957, Puharich moved to Ossining, New York, and founded Intelectron Corporation, a biomedical research company funded by a $300,000 grant from the Atomic Energy Commission.
Intelectron was almost certainly a front company. No records of its existence could be found despite extensive research, and it was equipped with expensive electronic equipment and staffed by people with intelligence connections.
Puharich invented the TD-100 (Transdermal 100), a device that could send a specific radio frequency to a person’s head, allowing them to hear messages that no one else could hear. This was demonstrated on a woman in another room, and footage exists of the experiment.
He also developed a tooth implant concept: a radio receiver placed in a dental filling or cap that could receive signals and transmit them through facial nerves to the brain’s hearing center. A Pentagon demonstration reportedly succeeded.
The tooth implant concept was inspired by a mental patient who was hearing voices caused by metal dust on his teeth acting as a radio antenna tuned to a New York station. When placed in a Faraday cage, the voices stopped.
Puharich was close friends with Jose Delgado, the Spanish researcher who famously implanted radio receivers in bulls and could remotely control their movements, raising the question of whether similar experiments were conducted on humans at Intelectron.
Uri Geller as a Mind Control Subject
Puharich traveled to Israel in 1970–71 to investigate Uri Geller, the famous psychic who could allegedly bend spoons and read minds. Multiple sources (including Geller himself) say Puharich was sent by the CIA or intelligence agencies, though Puharich publicly claimed a parapsychology foundation funded the trip.
Puharich hypnotized Geller in Israel, and the Nine began channeling through him, marking the return of the Nine after nearly two decades. The hypnosis sessions involved leading questions, suggesting Puharich may have implanted the idea of the Nine.
Geller later claimed Puharich experimented on him with mushrooms and extensive hypnosis, and that he became afraid and wanted to distance himself from Puharich.
Geller allegedly teleported from New York City to Ossining in 1973, crashing through Puharich’s screen porch. Puharich filmed the damaged porch as “proof” and attributed the teleportation to the Nine. The episode suggests this may have been a staged experiment to test how far someone’s beliefs could be manipulated.
Geller also claimed to have encountered a UFO in the Sinai Desert with Puharich, boarding the craft while in a trance and returning with a pen as proof. Again, the episode raises the possibility this was a mind manipulation experiment.
Geller met Wernher von Braun, who allegedly showed him a piece of metal from a UFO crash and claimed Geller had a telepathic reaction to it. Von Braun was a close associate of Puharich in the 1960s.
The Israeli Connection
Puharich had extensive ties to Israel and may have been a double agent for Mossad. He made frequent trips to Israel, was monitored by the FBI there, and on tape jokingly referred to himself as a double agent. Multiple people close to him claimed he was Mossad.
In a letter to a close confidante, Puharich admitted involvement in a joint US-Israeli mind control program at Aberdeen Proving Grounds.
On channeling tapes from the 1970s, Puharich referred by name to Israeli generals, including Aharon Yariv, head of Israeli army intelligence.
Puharich was close friends with Itzhak Bentov, an Israeli scientist and inventor who worked for Israeli intelligence and shared Puharich’s interests in consciousness. Bentov died in a mysterious plane crash.
Puharich’s house burned down in 1978 in a confirmed arson, and Bentov was also being monitored around that time. Some speculated an Israeli connection to the fire.
The Space Kids and Lab Nine
In the mid-1970s, Puharich gathered a group of teenagers and young adults (the “space kids”) who had spontaneously developed psychic abilities, often after seeing Uri Geller on television. They could bend spoons, cause electrical disturbances, and some claimed UFO encounters.
Puharich brought them to his Ossining home, which he called Lab Nine, and conducted psychic research, including remote viewing sessions. A pay stub found in his archives shows SRI (Stanford Research Institute) paid Lab Nine in 1973, proving a direct connection to the official remote viewing program.
The Nine would come through the space kids during hypnosis sessions, even though most of the kids had never heard of the Nine before. Some sessions involved leading questions from Puharich; others were open-ended, with the Nine appearing spontaneously.
The space kids’ sessions included both benign channeling (messages about saving humanity) and operational intelligence questions (code names, locations of military targets), suggesting the Nine framework may have been a cover for intelligence-gathering.
One space kid admitted off-camera that the Nine was “a sandbox” for them to play in, implying awareness that the framework was a construct.
Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ of SRI visited Puharich’s house, and footage exists of them sitting on the front steps. Puthoff confirmed the visit but was otherwise closed-lipped about Puharich’s connections.
Puharich’s Mysterious Death
Puharich died in January 1995 after falling down the stairs at his home. He was found at the bottom of the stairs, and no one else was present in the house that day, though psychic associates usually lived there.
In the months before his death, Puharich had been giving lectures openly discussing his involvement in CIA mind control programs, including his ability to create false alien abduction experiences using flashing lights and other techniques.
His assistant, in a recorded interview with researcher Dick Russell, confirmed that Puharich had created artificial UFO experiences as part of his research.
Puharich left behind a legal pad documenting his belief that he was being monitored and targeted, including claims that an ELF (extremely low frequency) emitter had been installed in his television set to harm him.
He had refused a CIA request in the late 1970s to head an ELF weapons research department. The CIA representative who approached him was Bob Beck, who was present at Lab Nine during the space kid experiments.
In February 1995, less than a month after Puharich’s death, Mexican scientist Jacobo Grinberg (who had met Puharich when Puharich was in exile in Mexico after his house burned) disappeared and has never been found.
The US government’s Stargate remote viewing program was officially terminated in 1995, with public announcements that it had produced no useful results.
Valerie Ransone: The Elusive Enigma
Valerie Ransone was a woman who worked in the Nixon White House (running a social benefits program) and claimed to be a psychic channeler in contact with extraterrestrials. She became deeply involved in UFO research and Tesla/ELF technology.
She was closely associated with astronaut Gordon Cooper (who visited Puharich’s Lab Nine and wrote about it) and appeared at Lab Nine in 1978. She brought Cooper to Puharich’s facility.
She served on the boards of mysterious energy companies and was involved in advanced technology research. Jacques Vallée met her in Houston and wrote about her in his Forbidden Science books.
She allegedly predicted a rocket launch failure in the late 1970s that actually occurred, and claimed to receive advanced information from UFOs.
She has completely disappeared from public life. Multiple researchers have tried to find her without success. Everyone who knew her reacts with alarm when her name is mentioned and refuses to discuss her.
A video appeared on YouTube (on the Eyes on Cinema channel) allegedly showing Ransone describing a UFO experience, but every person who knew her personally insists it is not her, despite the voice sounding similar and the details matching known facts about her life.
Kit Green, a CIA psychiatrist deeply involved in UFO-related research, knew Ransone in the late 1970s and refused to discuss her, telling the filmmaker to stop pursuing the topic.
A man claiming to be in contact with Ransone reached out to the filmmaker, provided an email address, and then disappeared. Years later he reappeared, but the filmmaker stopped responding. The man’s Facebook profile appeared to be fake.
Broader Implications
Puharich’s story suggests that some UFO contact experiences, channeling sessions, and abduction narratives may have been deliberately fabricated using mind control techniques (hypnosis, drugs, radio frequency stimulation, flashing lights) as part of MK Ultra-style programs.
At the same time, Puharich appears to have been a genuine believer in paranormal phenomena, and some events in his life (such as a UFO sighting witnessed by his family in North Carolina in the late 1980s) are difficult to explain as staged experiments.
The episode raises the possibility that gifted children with psychic abilities were systematically identified and recruited into secret programs, potentially connected to the Atomic Energy Commission and federally funded research centers. Puharich himself claimed to have helped the UK locate such children.
The connection between UFO phenomena and nuclear weapons is longstanding and well-documented (UFOs appearing at nuclear bases since the 1940s), and the Atomic Energy Commission’s funding of Puharich’s research adds another layer to this connection.
The documentary Mind Traveler is available for purchase on iTunes and YouTube, with potential streaming deals in development. It is being released in connection with Age of Disclosure.
