Theoretical Physicist 

 Thursday, May 20, 2010

Present:  Dr. Jack Sarfatti, Alan Waite (PRAXIS President – interviewer), Ryan Harbert (PRAXIS videographer), Jagdish Mann (guest), Daniel Geller[1] (guest).

ALAN: Jack, would you mind going back in your mind to your undergraduate work or prior to that and talk about how your interest in physics began?

JACK: Probably prior because as I said I was part of a group of super kids, these genius kids that were being studied at the Columbia University Laboratory of William Sheldon, and one of his assistants, a Walter Breen, (we’re talking like 1953).  One member of the group was a guy named Johnny Glogower.  He was a year younger than me.  He was a Westinghouse Science finalist.  He was a Quiz Kid on the radio show “Quiz Kids”.  There was a bunch of them, a guy named Robert Solovay, who became a famous mathematician at Berkeley.  And even Alan Greenspan who became head of the …the…

ALAN: Federal Reserve.

JACK: Yeah. Greenspan is older than I am, but Greenspan became part of this group.  It was all also connected somehow with Ayn Rand.  Somehow Ayn Rand had something to do with it.  It was also connected to the government.  It had something to do with what later became Sandia Labs in New Mexico.  In fact we used to have these guys come up (they looked like FBI guys), and this was the McCarthy era, to get pep talks about being patriotic and anti-communist and all that kind of stuff.  So there were a lot of weird things going on.  But it’s kind of like…there’s a “Twilight Zone” episode that somebody recently told me about, where it turns out the screenplay is a fictionalized version of what was actually happening in real life.  It’s about this government program back in the Fifties with these whiz kids, and apparently there was a similar program at Berkeley  – there’s a friend of mine named Hank Harrison who was a part of it, who’s the father of Courtney Love, actually Courtney Love’s dad.  And he apparently (we’re contemporary actually, about the same age in fact he lives in Sacramento)…you might want to actually talk to him about the program.

ALAN: Hank Harrison?

JACK: Yeah, Hank Harrison.  He has a ranch right outside of Sacramento, horse ranch.  He apparently was in a similar program in Berkeley around this same time, this is like, the early Fifties, and it was tied up with the intelligence community, definitely with the government.  It was kind of like the X-Men.  I mean what they were trying to do…what they were trying to see.  First of all, they were trying to promote an interest in Science.  And this is where his (pointing to Daniel Geller) dad comes in.  And in the paranormal world – Danny, I don’t know if you know Danny – is it all right, can I talk about his dad?

ALAN: Yeah, sure.

JACK: Danny’s father is Uri Geller, the psychic, you know, the famous Israeli scientist and psychic.  That’s his dad, whom I’ve known for many years.  But the thing is that…and this is what’s so interesting about it…because we were tested, they were trying to induce paranormal powers in us…like telepathy, psycho-kinesis, and things like that.

ALAN: How did they do that?

JACK: There were experiments, and they would just sit with the kids, you know, trying to get them to move objects.  We never moved anything, but there was a whole program going on about this.  Also, they talked about aliens and flying saucers, trying to figure out how they fly, and all that kind of stuff, it was a lot of science fiction.  Oh, and I met Isaac Asimov at that time.

ALAN: When you were part of this program?

JACK: Yeah, they used to take us to all these sci-fi conventions.  Walter was very much part of the sci-fi scene then, and also he’s one of the founders of MENSA.  This is in New York in the Fifties.  Walter wanted me to go to the University of Chicago for some reason.  And when I graduated from high school in 1956, the people in this program wrote the recommendations for me for the schools I applied to.  So I applied to MIT, Cornell, and the University of Chicago.  For some reason my mother didn’t want me to go to Chicago; it was too far away.  Also the people in the neo-conservative movement came out of Chicago.  One of the people, I forget the name, but one of the professors there who was an inspiration for neo-cons was in some way connected with this.  So, at this point I wouldn’t go to the University of Chicago.  But I’m actually wondering, where did Greenspan go?  Is he from Chicago?

ALAN: I don’t know.

JACK: That’d be interesting to find out.  Greenspan was part of this experiment.  Or so I’m told.  I never met Greenspan at the time.  He would have been four or five years older.

ALAN: How old were you when all of this was happening?

JACK: I was about thirteen when it started.  So from about thirteen to sixteen.

ALAN: Early to mid Fifties?

JACK: Yeah, this is like Fifty-three to Fifty-six.  And then I graduated high school, I was like sixteen going on seventeen that September.  And it was in, you know, an accelerated program.  So I went to Cornell, and I remember Breen wrote the recommendation that got me into Cornell.  Apparently it was like a ten page recommendation.  One of the things Breen said was something like, “young fine age, emotionally immature”.  I was told this later, as a lot of scientist kids are nerds, you know, and he wrote that I would “probably create a new physics, like Newton.”  My mother didn’t have any money, and my parents were divorced, so I got a full scholarship to Cornell.  My professors were the guys who built the atomic bomb in Los Alamos.  You know, like (Nobel laureate physicist) Hans Bethe?  A lot of them were at Cornell and other Ivy League schools.  I don’t know if you’ve read it, have you seen the movie The Good Shepherd?

ALAN: Oh, yes.

JACK: Well, you remember how the opening scene of The Good Shepherd, Gilbert and Sullivan, the guy who plays Angleton…

ALAN: Jesus Angleton – CIA Counter Intel character…

JACK: Yeah, the character.  The opening scene of The Good Shepherd is where he’s playing in a Gilbert and Sullivan opera at Yale.  And the CIA guys come and recruit him for the…uh…

ALAN: Skull and Bones.

JACK: Yeah, Skull and Bones, and all that kind of thing.  And the ending of the movie also goes back to that scene with Gilbert and Sullivan.  Well, by coincidence, while in Cornell I was the lead tenor of the Gilbert and Sullivan…[everyone laughs]…

JACK: And my voice teacher, who later became Sir Keith Faulkner (became knighted by the Queen of England), became the head of the Royal College of Music…but there’s this very tight relationship between the British and the Americans in the intelligence services.  Of course, this is the Fifties.  I mean, it was very different back then, it was a small world.  The Ivy League was a recruiting ground for the intelligence services.

ALAN: And early on, very early on, then, you were connected with the intelligence community.  And that relationship stuck?

JACK: Well, actually, I should have said even before then, because it turns out my grandfather, even before this Columbia Project, which was definitely some kind of intelligence thing…before that my grandfather worked for the US Army.  He was a veteran, and this is when I was 8 or 9 years old.  I was actually living with the grandparents.  And after school, I would go to meet my grandfather, who was at the Army Quartermaster Corps, in the Garment District of New York.  And that was a very strange situation, maybe I was 10 or 11 years old…but I would hang out there and play.  And they had a laboratory there.  They had the different cold weather uniforms, hot weather, that sort of stuff.  It was like a museum. 

I was given free reign in this place.  My grandfather drove around with these Army officers – my grandfather was driving the car, and I would sit in the back seat, with these colonels…they must have been psychiatrists.   I mean they were always analyzing.  And it’s all kind of consistent.  (because) at time I was, going to build rockets, go to the moon, or all this kind of stuff.  But all of this was encouraging me, I was actually in the company of these Army officers alot.  That’s when I saw this fun colonel named Phil Corso who wrote a book, “The Day After Roswell”, many years later.  I’m pretty sure Col. Corso’s one of those guys, really…though I can’t prove it.  This would’ve been around 1950. 

But it’s a consistent story, and it all makes sense.  Then there were other scientists.  A guy named Hal Puthoff, who’s right now in Texas, about my age, also had similar experiences, and has been involved, I mean he actually was a Naval officer.  He worked for the National Security Agency, and is now one of the active researchers in UFO’s and the paranormal.  In fact it was Hal Puthoff who was involved in a CIA project at Stanford Research Institute back in the 70’s. 

That’s where I first met him.  So this has all been kind of a consistent picture of what looks like a very long term intelligence effort, definitely involving the British, definitely involving the Americans and probably other agencies as well (maybe the Israelis as well) to investigate these kind of fringe areas which are now called UFO’s and the paranormal, and how physics could explain it.  This idea to try to explain consciousness and possible flying saucers, the big thing back then, was part of this project.  So I was involved in that from the very beginning.

ALAN: What did this experience you had starting off…very early on in a field that was obviously of great interest to you, that you were gifted in, and you were surrounded by people who were interested in specific applications – I suppose, weaponizing for intelligence use – what sort of  possibilities did that put into your mind?  Does that make sense?  How did you see the world at that time?

JACK: Well, you’ve got to remember this was, I can still kind of remember World War II.  I mean I was like 5, 6 years old when it ended.  But I remember walking my grandfather down the Hudson River and seeing armadas of airplanes, you know, like hundreds of airplanes I guess going over Europe.  I can remember that.  And I can remember victory gardens, and I remember blackouts.  It wasn’t quite like London, nobody was bombing us.  But I remember the stories of how the V-2’s were going to hit New York and all that kind of stuff. 

My mother’s brother, Arthur, was in the war…in the Pacific.  In fact, he had been in the Army Reserves.  He was supposed to get out in December of ’41, then there was Pearl Harbor.  And so he was on the first, one of the first boats leaving San Francisco to go overseas…he was at Guadalcanal.  This is another interesting thing; he had a reputation for being psychic, you see, because he was in a lot of combat – he was overseas for four and a half years.  And even when he was not in the jungles, they had him teaching, in New Zealand or something, as a jungle warfare instructor.  And I think at one point, they had him working with the Navajo Indians, you know, the Whisperers?

ALAN: The Windtalkers?

JACK: Yeah, the Windtalkers, ‘cause apparently he got this sort of, they used to call him “the Jewish Indian”.  He had this reputation, everybody wanted to be wherever he was because he had a sense in the jungle…the snipers in the tree, he sort had an accurate sense for where they were.  And there was one outfit, I think when he first went over, the 25^th Division or something, it was famous since around 90% of them were killed.  Tremendous casualties.  And he was one of the few that survived without getting shot…I have photographs of him during the war…

So, the military, they were always interested in stuff like that.  I mean the military’s more open to the paranormal.  So one reason that possibly the Army became interested in me was because of my uncle.  That they wanted to see if any of the…if there’s any kind of familial sort of thing in the gene pool  And this is speculation.  I don’t really know for sure.

ALAN: So you’re trained, as you go through school, from a very, I would imagine, traditional set scientific perspective.  This is what Science is; this is how it’s done…

JACK: Oh yeah, at Cornell.  In Cornell, there was never, yeah.

ALAN: None of that was compromised by…

JACK: Well, I mean, that I almost forgotten, it was actually Cornell.  That whole perspective of Science was put in the… my subconscious.  I was not really actively involved with the fringe stuff when I was at Cornell although when I would go to New York I would visit Walter…but, I guess it’s more of something we had to do really.  This actually involves his dad (pointing to Daniel Geller).  When I was thirteen or maybe twelve, I got a very strange set of phone calls in which there was a mechanical voice, and it could have been simulated, but the story is of this mechanical voice that it was a computer onboard a spacecraft in the future!

ALAN: The “Godphone”?[i]

JACK: The Godphone.  And you know, it wanted to teach me things, and I was supposed to meet these “others” in 20 years.  This was 1953 and twenty years would be 1973.  So this kind of whole weird thing happened.  And the odd thing about it was that I only remember one of the phone calls.  But my mother, I only found this out later, my mother remembers weeks of them and hours at a time, which I have no memory of whatsoever.  I was walking around glassy-eyed.  And finally she got worried…finally she grabbed the phone from me and says “who’s this?” and heard this metallic sounding voice.  And it said “this is a computer aboard a spacecraft and it wanted to speak to me.”  She got angry and said “Don’t ever call here again,” and slammed the phone down.  That was her memory of it that she told me about later.

ALAN: So, could the phone calls have been part of a government program?

JACK: Well, I think that maybe it was.  It’s one of two things.  Either it was what it says it was, or a government program, take your choice.  I mean, given everything else, it sounds like it’s a government project.  They’re still playing psychological games on these kids, quite possibly.  So that’s the most likely explanation.

But the uncanny part, and this involves his (indicating Daniel Geller) dad, because I spoke to Uri, right around the same time, I think Uri; he’s what, 63, 64 years old?  There’s seven years difference in age. 

(To Daniel) I’m about seven years older than your father. 

(To Alan) So Uri is walking around Tel Aviv, I think it was Tel Aviv, in a park or something.  And up until that point Uri…was a normal kid.  And apparently this orb of light – this is the story, and there is a witness to this – this orb of light comes down and Uri is seven years old at the time, and shoots a beam, like a laser beam into his head… well you’ve probably heard this story.  Uri runs to his mother, runs from the park to his house.  Years later, there was a young Israeli soldier in the park who witness the actual event, who later became a sort of, correct me if I’m wrong, but became high up in the Israeli military, maybe a general, or a high ranking military officer.  But he came, maybe in the last year or two he went public and said he saw the whole thing…it was actually on Israeli television, wasn’t he?

DANIEL:  I believe so, I believe so.

JACK: So, there’s a corroboration of this story, and the thing is that, this weird incident, we’re talking “Twilight zone” here, a real “X-files”… sort of thing.  Uri’s experience was about the same time as my phone calls were happening.  And whatever was on the other end of that the telephone said I would begin to link up with the others, part of the group, in twenty years.  Twenty years would be around 1973.  I have a book called “Destiny Matrix” where this whole story is told.  A lot of people have written about it.  It’s actually on the web. 

By a very odd co-incidence, I can’t go into it now because it’s too complex, but I wind up at Stanford Research Institute with Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ who was working with the CIA, which was not known publically, but later came out that they were.  And they’re experimenting on remote viewing, ESP, paranormal stuff.  Uri Geller was one of their subjects, as was a guy named Pat Price. 

Very secret official government project dealing with paranormal stuff.  I was a professor of physics at this time at San Diego State, and it happened that I was leaving town.  I was on my way to, in fact, see a Pakistani physicist named Abdus Salam – he had invited me to Europe to the UNESCO Institute of Physics, which is also a part of the International Atomic Energy Agency, you know, the ones who now monitor Iran.  I was invited there as a scientist, and I made it there by a very weird set of circumstances.

I met Edgar Mitchell, the astronaut who was on the moon.  Edgar Mitchell was very into the paranormal as was a guy named Brender Regan, one of the people running the project.  And I was asked at the time because I had been the assistant to a man named David Bohm at the University of London.  And I was asked to help arrange tests of Danny’s father, Uri, at the University of London.  At the time of course, you know, this was a CIA operation, but I didn’t know that.  I was just the academic; I guessed they called me an “asset”.  I must say, before this happened, 1963, right after the Kennedy assassination, I was working, I had like a summer job at this defense contractor in Newport Beach, California at Ford Philco Aeronutronics.  And After Kennedy was killed; it was like 9/11.  I did volunteer for the CIA.  I was actually interviewed by the CIA at their office.

ALAN: In what capacity?

JACK: Well, as an asset, whatever.  I didn’t even know. 

ALAN: You wanted to work for the CIA?

JACK: Well, I even tried to join the Navy, as a physicist.  Yeah, I volunteered for the Navy.  But nothing ever came of it.  I know I was interviewed, they had these tape recording machines, it was several hours up near UCLA, we were pretty patriotic World War II era…the kids…I was fairly patriotic, gung ho…not at all anti-American, left-wing…

ALAN: Wasn’t that in the late Sixties?

JACK: Not late  60’S this was 1963 right after JFK’s murder in Dallas. I could tell you about that as well.  But nothing officially ever happened in terms of the CIA.  All these weird things later were connected.  In the mid ‘80s, I met a guy named Harold Chipman, who’s now dead.  He was the Station Chief of the Central Intelligence Agency in Munich, Germany and he ran MK ULTRA in San Francisco.  Apparently he was one of the guys behind the scenes that set up the SRI experiments.  In the mid Eighties he actually funded some of my work and tried to get a think tank going.  So these connections with the United States government intelligence community have been there almost all my life.

ALAN: How common is that, Jack, for people like you – theoretical physicists – to be connected with intelligence agencies?

JACK: Well, I think it’s common… I think it was fairly common, at least back then because remember it was a much smaller world back then.  There weren’t that many people, not like it is today.  I mean we had compulsory ROTC at Cornell, okay, and I was in the Air Force ROTC.  When we graduated, President Eisenhower reviewed the troops.  The President of the United States came up in front of our class; we’re looking at the President of the United States!  It was a whole different world.  When I first arrived in Ithaca as a freshman in 1956, our counselor was Governor Averell Harriman, U.S. Ambassador to Russia, and I shook hands with him when I was a Cornell sophomore.  I met Harry Truman at the Student Hall. 

ALAN: What was the understanding in the scientific community at that time – about where Science was going?  A brave new world, we’re breaking into new fields, we’re finding out new things, you’re at the cutting edge…?

JACK: Yeah.

ALAN: And you’re intricately connected with intelligence agencies and defense programs, things that people decades later, particularly people on the Left would have significant problems with…

JACK: Yeah.

ALAN: Moral problems… how did that work for you?

JACK: Well, that was not… first of all, back in my generation, it was all taken for granted – you did things for your country.  It was not even questioned until the Sixties.  I was on the periphery; I can tell you what happened.  In the ‘Sixties when I left Cornell, I spent two years at Brandeis  University, the graduate program at Brandeis, I ran out of time at Cambridge.  There, I met Eleanor Roosevelt,  Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis …. and I got involved with a lot of that stuff… I was fairly naive, but I must say my main interest was Science.  I was not political…and there was a natural patriotism in the Fifties.  My uncle was a war hero…. Around Harvard, the Harvard/Cambridge thing, I got involved with John Cage, composer…

ALAN: You could not have been popular with the defense establishment…

JACK: No, I don’t think… I don’t know… I was a National Defense Scholar, but I even did some work, I think, for whoever was the left wing candidate.  My wife was more into it.  I didn’t know what I was doing.  But I was involved with SANE, the people at SANE, S-A-N-E, the Sane Nuclear policy.  I was sort of on the periphery of all that.  Then I wound up at UCSD.  And UCSD back in the mid Sixties.  Now UCSD is part of the Military-Industrial-Complex.  We had Edward Teller would come down there all the time.  Harold Uri, these are all famous, you know… John Wheeler, Keith Brueckner was the head of the JASONS, the JASONS were elite defense department physicists… designing the electronic fences in Vietnam… and San Diego’s a big military town.  So, UCSD on the scientific end was totally enmeshed in the defense industry. 

But the liberal arts department had Herbert Marcuse taken in from Brandeis and Angela Davis.  My wife was more into liberal arts.  So I knew them socially, and got involved with the formation of the Peace and Freedom Party in San Diego… also I must say, before that, at Cornell, a lot of my friends were involved in the freedom movement in Mississippi.

ALAN: These are all things that are even outside the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

JACK: Yes, yeah.   Absolutely.  So I was on the periphery of all this.  By the time I got to San Diego, I was teaching.  One of my co-professors Fred Alan Wolf was pretty well known in those days.  He’s kind of a movie star now.  What was that film, “What the Bleep” or something like that?  In any case, we had the Black Panthers …Huey Newton’s… he used to come to La Jolla… so, I was a sort of Forest Gump and Zelig witness to a lot of these historical things on the Left.

ALAN: where are you going at this time?  Where in your mind are you going in the field of Science?  You’re dealing with the government, and yet you certainly had your own fascination and own interests.  There are a lot of issues that are there from your past dealing with the paranormal and things that are outside the mainstream…taking you where?

JACK: Well, about the paranormal… at the time in San Diego… from the mid 60s until 1971- 72, I was pretty straight and narrow in terms of mainstream science.  I was not thinking very much about the fringe stuff at all.  Then in 1973, 20 years after the phone calls, a whole bunch of weird things started happening.  It’s too complicated to go into, but it’s in my book “Destiny Matrix”.  I wound up at this SRI thing with Geller, and there’s all kinds of weird things happening, so from 73 …I ran into all these weird people…witches and warlocks in London, – just a whole bunch of crazy stuff happening.

ALAN: So it was like an awakening?

JACK: Oh yes…definitely an awakening.  Lots of people who were in the occult.  Okay, it’s 1974, I’m commuting between Trieste, working with Abdus Salam at UNESCO’s – International Center for Theoretical Physics -, very straight science.  But the institute we were at in Trieste was a meeting ground between the Russians and Eastern Europeans; it was still the Cold War. 

That project was definitely an intelligence thing…it was CIA, and we were right in the middle of it, Fred Alan Wolf and I.  Fred, who looked like a real hippie, long hair and all, he’s a character.   Fred was real adventurous, much more adventurous than I am.  I went back to Trieste, I had to work, and Fred was footloose and fancy- free, so Fred was invited to Bulgaria in 1974 and he had an affair with this woman who turned out to be the daughter of the KGB chief – the secret police in Bulgaria. 

Another interesting thing was in the Spring of 1974.  There was a very wealthy woman in London; I think Daniel’s dad knows her… Judith… was that her name?  Anyway, there’s this wealthy American heiress living in London, who was very into the paranormal, and she had this beautiful house in London, I remember it had an Olympic-sized swimming pool in the basement.  Ira Einhorn stayed with her more than once.

So we were staying there with some of the people from the SRI, and we drove up to it, I remember she took us in here white Porsche up to Cambridge University – there was a meeting of the Para-psychological Association there.  That’s where I first met Brian Josephson, who is very into the paranormal.  I also met Steven Hawking’s research assistant named Bernard Carr now professor of physics at the university and later became head of the English Society of Research.  So I met all these people there. 

There was a group of guys from the CIA there too.  One of those people invited me to dinner, his name was Dennis Bardens.  Dennis Bardens, if you look him up on the Internet, well, he’s dead now, but he was definitely with British Intelligence.  He was the biographer of Winston Churchill.  He was also into the paranormal.  Oh, in fact he was a producer… he invented Panorama on the BBC.  He even did something during the war in Czechoslovakia.  You know, we’re talking about the MI6, James Bond, OSS, one of those guys…he was that era, and he looked it.

ALAN: Was he involved with Aleister Crowley and his crew?

JACK: Maybe, Crowley and all that; all kinds of connections to Crowley… we haven’t got into that yet but all kinds of connections there.  In fact even Ayn Rand was connected with Crowley.  Thanks for reminding me.  So, we’re at this meeting and… Dennis Bardens, he’s an older man, and a general very established, a Winston Churchill staff type, very distinguished, and he says “Dr. Sarfatti, I’d like to take you to dinner”.  So we went to the Blue Boar Inn in Cambridge.  I remember I had duck and cherry sauce.  I swear something right out of a James Bond film.  Then we went into the “club” for brandy, and Bardens looks at me and says “Dr. Sarfatti, first” and he winks at me.  (he was a little bit drunk); “I must tell you that I am a Kabbalist.”  Another wink in his eye.  Now, I had just come from Paris, I had just been involved with these Kabbalists, a French guy[2], a whole other story there. Bardens was telling me he knew the people I had been with in Paris.  The people I was with in Paris knew Lawrence Durrell, the author who was a member of the British Intelligence in World War II, very well known…it was cloak-and-dagger stuff.  “I’m a Kabbalist” he says… then he gets serious and says “Dr. Sarfatti, it is my duty to inform you that there is a psychic war raging across the continents between the Soviet Union and your country, and you are to be in the thick of it.”   And I didn’t quite know what he was referring to, so I just said, “Okay.”

ALAN: Straight out of “Smiley’s People.”

JACK: Absolutely.  Absolutely.  And things got even weirder.

ALAN: Well, let me stop you for just a moment, Jack.  His connections with British Intelligence were such that he knew that American Intelligence had plans for you?  Was that it?

JACK: Well, I’m looking back, and remember, at the moment I was still in my early thirties.  Lots of testosterone, some sexy English woman had picked me up and wanted me to spend the night with her.  I didn’t even want to have dinner with him,  I had other things on my mind,  I mean, I was, you know, totally distracted (laughter).

ALAN: Yes, of course.  Quite understandable (laughter).

JACK: Yeah.  But I was a lot younger then.  So I sorta-kinda understood what he was talking about, but I had other things on my mind.  I was just being polite, letting him take me to dinner, even though I knew it was something official,  I had a sense that there was a lot of this stuff going on.,  and he couldn’t be much more explicit than that…but it was just another in a series of weird things that started happening at that time…

ALAN: So, essentially you’ve been groomed throughout your entire life, since the Godphone calls?

JACK: Exactly.

ALAN: By the government… United States government.

JACK: Oh yeah.  Absolutely. 

ALAN: And eventually you were involved in a series of clandestine programs.

JACK: Yeah.

ALAN: And at that point you’re taking an interest in what people call the paranormal, things outside the box, but you’re still a rising star in the establishment science…

JACK: Well, I became kind of a maverick.  Here’s what happened, and this gets back to some of the recent stuff that’s been happening (with the “Tuscan Conference Controversy.”).  At the time with the Uri Geller paranormal tests, the tests at the University of London, I came out, and was a witness to these tests done by Arthur Koestler.  But it was being done under the CIA, and I wrote a little report of what I witnessed at Birkbeck College (University of London) with David Bohm and Arthur Clarke, and Arthur Koestler, and Uri Geller bending the metal…

I just wrote this thing and gave it to Brendan O Regan, who was part of Edgar Mitchell’s Noetics Institute, the SRI people.  Instantly this thing went all over the world as a major press release in every major newspaper.  Now, that normally doesn’t happen.  That’s CIA.  I was being used, in a way.  I wrote this little thing about what I thought, was very positive, judging from what I saw, Uri’s ability to bend metal with his thoughts.  So as a result of that article, immediately, I found that I had powerful enemies in the academic establishment.

I remember when I went back to America, I was up in Boston, and my undergraduate advisor Phil Morrison, who was then a professor at MIT, the book editor for Scientific American, and Morrison warned me.  He said “This is very bad for your academic career; politically it would be hard for you to get a job.”   Not good to come out in favor of inquiring into the paranormal.

ALAN: And the paranormal is not even to this day been something that the “scientific establishment”…

JACK: Well…

ALAN: …considers being “fair game” in terms of study?

JACK:  Wait a minute; it’s very tricky because it has to do with what’s recently happened with Michael Towler, Antony Valentini and the London Times’ controversy that is happening now.  There’s a war going on, warring factions, okay, involving factions within the intelligence community itself.  I don’t claim to… I’m not privy to all it, but at that time, I was put under a lock.  And even the Amazing Randi (world famous magician)[ii] took me to lunch back here in California…and Randi says “Uri’s a fake.  I can do this, bending metals…” and at one point he kind of scared me and I said “Okay, sure, it’s a trick, physicists can be fooled”.  My arm was being twisted not to… apparently I got all this publicity because of the Central Intelligence Agency being involved, right?  I was just a professor… Assistant Professor of Physics at San Diego State.  Why else am I suddenly getting this worldwide coverage?

ALAN: Because if you can be excluded from the regular community, therefore you’d be more inclined to…

JACK: Well, whatever.  But the thing is… that was a turning point in which I became kind of a black sheep in terms of the respectable scientific community. 

ALAN: Were you the only one?

JACK: No, not yet.  Brian Josephson too.

ALAN: Brian Josephson was (a black sheep) at that time?

JACK: Oh, well, he became very quickly because… Josephson was a stubborn guy – “Don’t… don’t mess with the Zohan.”  I mean he doesn’t look like…he looks like Woody Allen, but he’s a tough cookie and he got involved with the Maharishi, got into meditation.  He did the whole Sixties and Seventies thing, Timothy Leary and all of those people, I was part of that circle.  Josephson has basically been ostracized in his own community, Cambridge, even though Josephson is a Nobel Prize winning physicist, a fellow of the Royal Society, and he’s been a guest of Queen Elizabeth many times at Buckingham Palace.  Nobel Prize winner, and all that.  and he was (treated that way)…  I know Brian very well.  He was my guest in San Francisco back in the Seventies.  He has basically been marginalized at Cambridge.  The Physics Mafia Chiefs have not allowed him to get government assistantships for his students. Theoretical physicists have formed a priesthood of death since they created the atomic bomb.

ALAN: Help me understand this: if “string theory” can not be proven, why is the paranormal…why are any of these other “outside the box” investigations not ok?

JACK: Well, that’s a very good question.  I don’t have a good answer, but it’s a great question, and I think it has to be asked, and this has to be made into a political issue.  It is a political issue.  You know, it’s not even a question at this point of believing whether or not, say, Uri has the power (to bend metal with his mind) or doesn’t have the power, I personally think he does, because I have seen other things since then, very many things,… but whether or not you believe it is not the point. The point is intellectual freedom, academic freedom and why the people who are thinking outside the box are being demonized.

ALAN: Which brings us to the whole “Towler Scandal…”

JACK: The whole “Towler/ Valentini Scandal,” where Towler went on the web, and was blaming me, says “Because of you, my wife and Valentini’s wife and children have been threatened by these extremists.”  I mean… I can’t help that, if they’ve created a situation that became… in other words, we were not supposed to respond to this at all.  We were not supposed to make it public what happened.

The point is what Brian Josephson found out – that there are certain powerful people in the physics community who the twisted arms, metaphorically, of Towler and Valentini.  It’s very… it’s so unusual.  Normally, if you don’t want somebody to come to a meeting, you just never invite them.  But since I was one of the creators of the meeting, I mean, to make it so (obvious)… something extraordinary happened there, okay?  Towler and Valentini…they were threatened with their jobs or something.  The question is who pressured Towler and Valentini to actually do this? Who did this?  Who was behind that?  Brian Josephson is trying to find out.  He wants to know.  He’s not going to let go of this.

ALAN: And why would they succumb to that?

JACK: And why would they succumb to that?  I experienced a kind of pressure through Morrison and the Amazing Randi back in the Seventies.  But look, this is the second time this has happened.  There’s another incident that happened in Brazil.  I published a paper about two or three years ago.  It’s very groundbreaking work about the emergence of the gravitational field from a deeper level. But the point is I was learning some new mathematics, I’m sleepwalking[3] by myself, and some of the mathematics was not quite correct, it was work in progress. 

So I published version one, and there’s this guy named Waldyr Rodrigues Jr. who was a friend of mine in Brazil, in fact I was a visiting professor down in UNICAMP, Brazil, which is the MIT of Brazil.  And so, we were friends.  In fact, Waldyr is a consultant for the Brazilian Air Force, Brazilian military, and he’s very into the paranormal.  He’s very much into the reality of UFO’s… we’ve met generals in the army telling us all about this stuff.  By the way, Uri Geller is like a superstar in South America and Brazil, he’s like John Lennon.  I mean… that whole culture, they accept this as part of their reality, you know.

But in any case, when this paper that I wrote came out, and I acknowledged Waldyr in this paper.  I even said in the paper that this should not mean that Waldyr supports my theory in any way.  But Waldyr sent me a letter (that criticized my paper), and he was like, very guilty; he said he felt guilty about it.  He wrote something that corrected the math.  But the math was a minor thing compared to the idea.  The idea is still valid.  But then Waldyr told another guy who’s actually a physicist named Tony Smith that he was put under pressure that money for his graduate students would be taken away if he didn’t try to make me look like idiot, ok?  So…there’s a whole pattern here.  The question is, who is doing this, why are they doing it?  It involves politics.  It involves defense issues, because any of this stuff we’re working on, if it’s real, has immense military weapons implications.  Immense.

ALAN: There were several articles just recently about anti-gravity…

JACK: Immense!  There’s no question about it.  And there’s no question that there’s an international involvement, and the Israelis are definitely involved, the Russians are involved.  We worked with a bunch of Russians.  There’s an international effort going on.  Now, with my new website,  http://stardrive.org, of course I have the latest surveillance software for clicking.  So, we’re able to see who’s downloading information.  We’ve had some from Moscow, from Iran, Tehran, from Saudi Arabia, from Tel Aviv… everybody’s looking at this stuff.

ALAN: But you have not been a critic of these programs.

JACK: Which programs?

ALAN: Any of these programs that the government is involved in.  You haven’t been a critic of the science.  You’ve actually been a leading figure in cutting edge science, so why would any special interest be (attacking you)…

JACK: Well, a lot of people… I’ve been demonized.  I’ve been demonized as a wacko, as a kook, I had a lot of problems with Wikipedia, finally corrected all this stuff, but now they have just decimated it again. It’s no good. I’ve been really demonized for like 30 years.  Since breaking… since you know, getting involved in consciousness.   Roger Penrose, who’s a very respected professor, even though he says some of the same things I’m saying, certain people can say it and nobody attacks them because they have the mainstream credentials.

But I’ve been demonized, and still am demonized, very demonized by certain powerful factions in mainstream physics, and so has… Josephson has to a lesser degree… actually Josephson has been fairly demonized too.  Josephson…they said, Well, he’s mentally ill, something happened to him.”  And even David Bohm himself was demonized to some extent for thinking outside the box.  So this is a real problem, it’s inquisitorial… it’s like the Spanish Inquisition.  But the question is why are they doing it?  Why are they taking active, literally, active measures like the KGB Section 8, active measures, termination…?

ALAN:  Is it just cultural?

JACK: I don’t know…

(JAGDISH MANN, Off-screen): It’s the yellow socks.[iii]

JACK: (Laughs) It’s the yellow socks.

ALAN: that’s the obvious answer.

JACK: But…

ALAN: Is it something akin to the British Medical Board and all the advances that were made in various areas of medicine, in the teens and twenties and thirties of the 20^th century, and doctors like that were thrown out or…

JACK: Yeah… oh you mean like… you mean an actor in some movie?

ALAN: (A.J.Cronin’s) The Citadel?

JACK: Yes, The Citadel.  That… look, I think that serves as a fact… but there’s something else going on and until Brian Josephson discovers the names of those who were at that meeting in Italy in August of who pressured Towler and Valentini to disinvite Josephson, David Peat and myself, even though they kind of re-invited Josephson and Peat because they were so embarrassed by it, and I became the scapegoat.  I’m the Shylock.  But until they find out who’s responsible for that and what their politics are, what their real motives are, who they’re really working for, until that’s uncovered, we’re not going to really know what’s going to happen, but there’s something big behind all this I’ve been working with a scientist from the Central Intelligence Agency, a science and technology directorate that monitors all of this stuff.  I was recently at a JASON meeting, General Dynamics in La Jolla…. military elite scientists were there. I’ve been involved with Russian scientists, and Jean Pierre Vigier, French scientist, who recently died.  So, there’s a lot more to this than meets the eye.  I believe that it’s going to be some really heavy political thing, maybe I’m dramatizing it, I don’t know … the fat lady hasn’t sung yet.  We don’t really know all the forces and why they’re doing this and what their motives are, but remember we’re talking about a technology coming out from this that would render all conventional weaponry impotent and obsolete.  So, there’s a lot at stake here, and of course, Towler and Valentini make me look like a crazy nut for even saying it anymore.

ALAN: Do they believe that there’s potential in these technologies?  Anti-gravity propulsion…

JACK: Well, I don’t know what Towler and Valentini think.  You got to remember Towler and Valentini, first,  I was very friendly with Towler.   His office is a few offices away from Brian Josephson, and everything was very cordial.  And suddenly this April 19, bang, all of this happens like… something happened to have changed.  I mean, they could have just had the meeting (Tuscan Conference) and nothing would happen.  They could have just let go and there would never have been any issue.  So what made them do this?  We have to find out what that was. 

ALAN:  I thought it was really interesting to read Valentini’s response (to public questions as to why Sarfatti was dis-invited), which was really not a response.  I mean, he said nothing.

JACK: Yea, right.

ALAN: He gave no real explanation, which in and of itself is begging the question.

JACK: Okay, now, what’s interesting… Josephson is very political, because Josephson is in Bejing, he’s in China, and he’s a guest of the Chinese government, Nobel Prize winning physicist.  Now, you have to understand, the Chinese culture sees the paranormal as part of their culture.  They accept it as a reality.  So do the South Americans, it is a cultural thing.  It’s this narrow Western thing (that discourages paranormal inquiry).  So Josephson’s invited as a guest of the Chinese government for the next month or so, and by the way, the Chinese, in terms of real technical and competent physicists are asking the right questions that infringe on paranormal signal non-locality, various things…like cold fusion…and Josephson is into cold fusion.

Not only is Josephson into the paranormal, he’s into cold fusion and he’s also into homeopathy.  So Josephson has all kinds of interests… but even his Nobel Prize doesn’t protect him (from western critics).  So with the power of the geopolitical situation, what’s going on there, it staggers the imagination.  Josephson is fighting mad.  He’s going to find out who pressured Valentini and Towler.  It’s not over.  It’s just beginning.

ALAN: Well, at least from a standpoint of human integrity, it seems a betrayal of the scientific process.

JACK: it’s a total betrayal.

ALAN: Facts whatever they be, you follow them…

JACK: You follow them and you find out … yes.  I mean, this is a betrayal.  It’s a definite betrayal. 

ALAN: Looking for the next synthesis…

JACK: It’s kind of ethnic cleansing on an intellectual level.  You go… in fact the reason they gave… one of the reasons that Valentini and Towler gave… they were afraid that if Sarfatti, Josephson and David Peat were at this meeting that some of the younger students would not be able to get jobs in Academia. 

ALAN: Sounds like how the students of Galileo…

JACK: Well, even if the science turns out to be wrong… as you say, string theory, there’s much more evidence for the paranormal and UFO’s than there is with string theory, and yet string theory dominates the physics departments right now.  This is all so crazy, but on the other hand, everything’s pretty crazy right now.  We have the gulf oil crisis, we have the financial breakdown.  By the way, the derivatives (that played a part in the financial meltdown), who invented financial derivatives – which Warren Buffet called the weapons of mass destruction?  The string theorists on Wall Street.

ALAN: Saw that special on PBS.

JACK: Yea, string theorists.  So, that’s the string theory.  That’s the financial meltdown.  And we may not even… God knows what’s going to happen, we may not survive.  We may be witnessing the breakdown of civilization as we know it.  Very rapidly.  We don’t know yet what’s going to happen with this oil thing.  It could be a lot worse than it looks.  Plus methane being released in the tundra, in the arctic, it may be Apocalypse Now, we don’t know.  But it’s a kind of mass insanity, mass intolerance, a kind of fascist view of things, and it has invaded Science itself. 

ALAN: How does the community of physicists around the world operate?  I mean, is there, and I apologize for not knowing this, is there an organization that they function though?

JACK: Well, no.  There’s the American Physical Society, which does a lot of good work.  Look, there are a lot of good physicists out there,  and I must say that experimental physics and applied physics are flourishing.  There’s a lot of great stuff out there.  But, I’m a theoretical physicist, okay?  There’s a lot of good stuff happening in cosmology, the Big Bang, inflation, dark energy, dark matter, the “missing stuff” of the universe making up 96% of the universe we don’t really know what it is.  I think I know what it is, but that’s another thing.  I think I’ve solved the problem.  I may be wrong, but I made a prediction the Large Hadron Collider Accelerator will not show any dark matter particles because dark matter is not made out of particles whizzing through space.  It’s a phase of the quantum vacuum of space, it’s called virtual particles inside the vacuum.  I made a very definite prediction, I could be proved wrong at any time.  So far all the evidence, so far my theory is good, has not been disproved yet.  It’s better than string theory because there’s no way to disprove string theory.  But the point is in terms of physics… the Tuscany meeting, the Bohm meeting is based really… heavily based on quantum computing and quantum information theory.  It’s about Bohm’s theory, and that is almost like string theory because we have no real quantum computers.  They make a certain assumption there – they assume that information cannot be transmitted faster than the speed of light, and from that assumption, they derive all kinds of things about the security of quantum cryptography, and cryptography is very important for intelligence work and for financial security and all kinds of stuff.  The ironic thing is that Valentini, who’s the guy who wrote the rude letter, his own theory is based on what Brian Josephson and I have said years before!  He even said that, see?  But for Valentini, it is a real betrayal, a real intellectual betrayal on his part.   He’s under so much pressure that he will not rise in the academic establishment if he even emphasizes his own discovery which is a system that I was describing for many years and what Josephson was saying for many years – basically, that you can communicate not only faster than light, but backwards in time, from future to past, like precognition, precognitive viewing.  That this is all possible, and not only possible, but necessary. 

So, the point is that if that kind of idea is considered so dangerous, disturbing the status quo so much that anybody who talks about that idea has to be demonized like I’ve been, like Josephson has been.  And even Valentini, they got to Valentini who’s one of the guys who pinned it down, and now he doesn’t talk about his own theory, like “I didn’t do this”.  That’s why it’s so ironic.  You know what it’s like?  It’s like the Soviet Stalinist purge trials.  Valentini is like one of those guys on trial in the Thirties who admitted that he did…

ALAN: and now he recants.

JACK: He’s recanting.  Oh, my God.  It’s that kind of … it’s so bizarre, it’s very surreal.  It’s also very interesting.

ALAN: And in your experience… this is not how Science was  conducted in your life?

JACK: Well, it’s not the way… no.  Actually, unfortunately it is the way Science has been because scientists are no better no worse than most people.  They’re just like the people on Wall Street.  They don’t have a superior morality, in fact, they have an inferior morality, in my experience.  Academics in general are nasty people.  They stab you in the back.  They’re ultra competitive, just like the lawyers like the movie with Michael Douglas, Wall Street.  It’s the same thing. 

Also, you gotta remember, in Academia, there’s been a shrinking budget, it’s like you have rats in a cage where there’s not enough space to go around.  They’re all competing for the money.  They don’t get paid much in academia anyway, budgets are shrinking, and people are getting desperate, desperate fear of driving a cab.  There’s an academic who last I heard, he was driving a cab in Prague, or that’s the story because he was fired from Harvard because he had a big mouth.  Political, conservative, he had this blog, whatever.  but most of the young physicists today are fear-driven because there are no jobs, the economy’s shrinking, and it’s also troubling Universities.  So there’s a tremendous fear of not getting a job in Physics and that has a lot to do with what’s going on right now.  But it was not the way I was brought up, it was a very idealistic thing: Science was seeking the Truth, and all that matters is where it leads you.

ALAN: Now we’ve come around full circle because what I’m hearing you say right now is that you were guided by a set of principles, a set of beliefs about what Science is, how it should be  practiced…you’ve head to that ideal.  You’ve tapped that ideal.

JACK: And so has Josephson, and so has Peat, so have as lot of these scientists.

ALAN: Yet there are other people and I’m assuming just by their bios on the web they’re younger, Towler is younger, Valentini is younger?

JACK: Yeah, and they’re all his age, they’re all Danny’s age, late 20s, early 30s.  And they’re very bright. Apre mois, Le deluge.

ALAN: Question: why would there be a difference in terms of ideal, matching action with your ethics, which is what integrity is defined as, why would that be so different in your generation if that’s a general rule as opposed to theirs?

JACK: Well, I don’t know.  I come from a really weird generation.  The Sixties, we were real rebels. 

ALAN: But you were an idealistic generation.  I grew up in the Sixties as well.

JACK: I’m as old as you, and you’re at least 20 years younger than me.

ALAN: I was fourteen.

(DANIEL GELLER, off-screen): Yeah, so he got the edge of it.

JACK: Okay, you’re right there.  All right.

ALAN: So, what’s the difference (in how each generation approaches the scientific method)?

JACK: I don’t know.  Maybe you should ask Danny, he’s so young.  I don’t know.

(DANIEL GELLER, off-screen): I know a lot of fine young people who are very… have integrity. 

JACK: No, there’s some.

(JAGDISH MANN, off-screen):   This maybe makes sense.

JACK: Well, I don’t know.  In this case, look.  You know what it is?  The theoretical physics community at the level that says Valentini and Towler operate, it’s like a Mafia.  It’s a gang.  And they are some powerful people, like Godfathers.  We don’t know who they are yet.  I’m suspicious of whom they might be.  Some of those people will be at this meeting.  Apparently, some of the key people at the meeting, the older people said “we will not attend this meeting if Josephson and Sarfatti attend”.  And if you want to get jobs, it’s not a wise thing (to investigate the paranormal).  So they were put under a lot of pressure to do that extreme thing (disinvite Sarfatti and Josephson).  It’s just not proper English to do anything like that at that stage. 

(JAGDISH MANN, off-screen): Some meeting of mafia capos?

JACK: A meeting of mafia capos in Tuscany. So maybe one day the truth will come out. The issue, some of the people who will be at the Tuscany meeting, are they the same people who pressured Waldyr Rodrigues a few years ago in Brazil to demonize me?  You see?  That’d be interesting.  And then, who do they work for?  So hopefully, maybe one day we’ll get to the bottom of this.  I don’t know right now.  It’s a mystery.

ALAN: Ultimately you get down to the old motivations of power, money, secrets…

JACK: Well it has to do with…it’s gotta do with defense.  Ultimately it gets back to the military, it gets back to weapons.  And I must tell you this: the Chinese are going ahead.  The Chinese are… they are going to beat us at this game.

ALAN: Certainly we (U.S. government) know that?

JACK: They’re going to beat us.

ALAN; Our government knows that, understands what China’s doing, how far it has…?

JACK; Well, the thing is they’re not under the same constraints.  Their scientists are going ahead with the kinds of issues that Brian Josephson and me and the others talked about… our ideas are being demonized here, in China, they’re actively working on it..  And so are the Russians, and so are the Iranians.  The Iranians are doing some very interesting things… the Iranians are very smart people. In fact, Ahmadinejad is smarter than Barack Obama.  I’m sorry… but he’s definitely smarter than Bush.  I don’t approve of Ahmadinejad, but… our politicians all… these guys in the Middle East culture, they’ve had thousands of years of culture, okay?  And they’re just playing us like idiots,  even Obama.  I mean, this thing with the nuclear program…we’re out-classed.  We’re out classed strategically – that’s my opinion, and I hope I’m wrong… my fear…

ALAN: Unfortunately, I don’t think you are wrong.

(Jagdish Mann, off-screen): Yes, you’re not wrong.

JACK: So, I mean we’re… by the way, and I’m gonna say this: by demonizing me and Josephson, they are making it easier for the Chinese to get ahead of us.

ALAN: And there you may be closer to what’s happening (regarding the Tuscan Controversy).

JACK: And there we may be closer to what’s happening.

ALAN: Thank you for your time, Jack.

[1] Son of Uri Geller

[2] Carlo Suares

[3] allusion to book by Arthur Koestler

 [i]  Allegedly from Edie Sedgwick to Andy Warhol according to my former North Beach room-mate David Gladstone who wrote an unpublished shorter version of my story.

[ii] Randi and Jon Ronson who wrote “Men Who Stare At Goats” came to the Singularity Summit Aug 14-15 San Francisco. I was given a free ticket to it because my sister in law, Ellen Heber-Katz of the Wistar Institute is a featured speaker on organ regeneration.

[iii] See John S. Bell’s Bertlemann’s socks. 

Permission to reprint this transcript is granted by PRAXIS, provided that attribution and website are included in the reprinting.   August 25, 2010.  PRAXIS Society for Human Integrity.

www.praxisforlife.org

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