Genius, they say, comes at a price, and nowhere is this more evident than in the turbulent life of science fiction author Philip K Dick (see FT161:42-46). Dick's ill health and demons of the mind were exacerbated by his prodigious intake of barbiturates and amphetamines, but he transformed his own experiences into some of his most memorable works.

Dick's life changed forever on 20 February 1974, when a trip to the dentist and a follow-up medication delivery by a girl wearing a Christian fish symbol propelled him into a universe of trans-temporal, intergalactic and hyperdimensional information transmissions that ultimately inspired the novels Radio Free Albemuth, VALIS, The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Dick existed simultaneously in 1970s California and first century Rome, while information from somewhere entered his mind via pink light beams and his soul fought for space with that of his deceased friend and Gnostic sympathiser Bishop James Pike.

Dick wondered whether the information transmissions were coming from the past, the future, an Earth-bound laboratory, an alien spacecraft, or his own brain. He'd been experimenting with heroic vitamin doses at the time and speculated that "both hemispheres came on together, for the first time in my life." However, not long before his death he wrote in his philosophical diary, the Exegesis: "The beam of pink light fired at my head is, I have always believed deep down underneath, not God but technology, and technology from the future at that." Dick's speculations ended with his
untimely death in 1982, but other writers have written his experiences into their own versions of historical events. Pseudonymous author Adam Gorightly and others have wondered whether the VALIS events can be plugged into the matrix of telepathy and, some say, mind control experimentation that was being carried out in the USA and the Eastern Bloc at the time. Certainly this is something that Dick had considered. One night, a month after his initial experiences of February 1974, he began to hallucinate "perfectly formed modern abstract paintings" which he later identified as being by Kandinsky, Klee and Picasso. It felt like someone was deliberately beaming these images to him.

Perhaps inspired by the popular 1970 book Psychic Discoveries behind the Iron Curtain, he wrote to a Russian ESP lab asking whether they were beaming out images from the Hermitage collection. He got no reply, but a few years later discovered that the CIA had intercepted this and others of his letters. Dick received information from a mechanical female voice he named Aphrodite or the AI Voice. Sometimes he considered it to be his anima, at others the voice of his dead twin sister. One night Dick dreamed that a Russian woman was sending him a letter that would kill him. Days later he asked his wife, Tessa, to open a letter for him. It contained only a book review with certain words underlined and a return address of a room in a New York hotel. Dick refused to look at it and had Tessa send it to the FBI. Both Dick and Tessa heard their bedside radio playing songs like "You're No Good" and "You're So Vain"; this continued after the radio was unplugged. Tessa also describes breaking into the empty house next door and finding mysterious electronic equipment set up there.

In an earlier era, Dick would have made a great contactee, in a later one a perfect abductee. In March 1972, while on a trip to Vancouver, he suffered a two-week memory gap. Years later he told Tessa that he had at one point been abducted by "Mafiatypes" - or MlBs? - who had driven him around in a limo, asking him questions. In another vision, Dick encountered three-eyed Grey alienlike cyborg beings wrapped up in glass bubbles surrounded by advanced computer apparatus being controlled by Russian technicians.

Was Dick the subject of Intelligence surveillance - unquestionably, yes. But persecution and experimentation.' That's another matter, and one that, as with so many of Dick's experiences, is as awash with possibilities as one of his own novels. He had an active social life, counting many other SF writers among his network of friends and acquaintances. One person who certainly considered Dick a friend was "The Unicorn", Ira Einhorn, currently languishing in a US jail after his extradition from France on charges of murdering his girlfriend Holly Maddox in 1977. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Einhorn built up a remarkable "Invisible College" network of writers, thinkers, scientists, activists and businessmen between whom cutting edge, progressive ideas and technologies were discussed and, perhaps, devised. These included Dick, Astronaut Edgar Mitchell, physicist Jack Sarfatti, Parapsychologist Andrija Puharich and ufologist Jacques Vallee. Chief amongst Einhorn's obsessions was the work being carried out in the US and elsewhere on mental and technological telepathy, mind control and what would soon he termed Remote Viewing. Indeed, he claims that it was his inside knowledge of such programmes that caused the CIA to kill Maddox and pin the murder on kin). Few, even among his old colleagues, believe him.

Andrija Puharich is the other key figure. A respected scientist and parapsychoIogIst, Puharich had worked on and off for the US Military, CIA and NASA since the 1940s. Fascinated by telepathy, channelling, astral travel, healing and other possible powers of mind, he also developed a device to help the deaf hear via radio waves, and a tooth-implanted radio transmitter (think Dick's dental visit!). From the 1950s onwards he also claimed to he in communication, via a succession of mediums, with ET intelligences. One of these mediums was the newly-discovered Uri Geller, who Puharich would bring to the USA in 1973 for testing by Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ at the Stanford Research Institute.

Puharich met Geller in Israel in late 1971 and for two years they were closely involved in a bizarre series of incidents and encounters with an apparent nun-human intelligence. These are documented in detail in Puharich's book Uri (1974), the manuscript of which was edited by none other than Ira Finhom. While Studying Geller's telekinetic and telepathic abilities, which he firmly believed to he genuine, Puharich also exploited Geller's skills as a
trance medium, hypnotising him to see who or what came through.

What they picked up was an orbiting computer intelligence which called itself `Spectra', though actually Spectra was the
name of the spacecraft on which the intelligence was travelling. Sometimes the voices manifested through Uri, sometimes out of thin air, but mostly they appeared "live" on tape. As a machine, Spectra found it easiest to communicate via other machines - tape recorders, radios, telephones, televisions etc. During the two years of contact in Israel and the USA, objects would vanish and reappear, tapes would record and wipe themselves spontaneously, clocks started and stopped and the voices guided Uri, Puharich and their accomplices through a bewildering series of visions, synchronicities and UFO encounters. Geller has always claimed that his own powers are extraterrestrial in origin, unlocked during a UFO entity encounter he had as a child. Puharich felt that Geller was actually not of this Earth.

Spectra claimed to have been stationed in orbit around the Earth for 800 years and was, via messengers on Earth preparing to make itself known, materialising in the form of what we call UFOs. As Spectra explained: "We cannot enter your Earth, only appear to you through computerizing your minds. For instance Uri Geller's mind and washing hack all times our visions on his eyes. We bend, move and dematerial things ... We have passed our souls bodies and minds into computers and moved several of millions of light years backwards towards your time and dimension Fall sic)."
Spectra apparantly originated with a planet/race called Hoova, who had first made contact with Earth 20,000 years ago, then later with Abraham and the Egyptians, specifically Imhotep, with whom they were most impressed and of whom they considered Uri to he an emanation. (Some of this material is intriguingly similar to that imparted to contactee Claude Vorilhon, now Rael, in December 1973). Puharich eventually brought Gellcr over for lab testing with the group that would soon found and run the US Army's remote viewing faculty. While Geller was being rested, computers in the adjoining rooms began to malfunction dramatically, leading army officials, relieved he was in the right hands, to speculate on his ability to detonate nuclear warheads remotely.

Orbiting machine intelligences, spontaneous voices and visions, equipment malfunctions. Some writers have claimed that Puharich deliberately manipulated Geller during this period, delivering him into US hands at a time when concerns about Soviet psychic warfare research were at a height. Whether or not the events of Uri are accurately recorded, it seems possible that Dick would have heard about them either via Einhom, who was editing Puharich's manuscript, or others from the West Coast network.

But there are complications that, typically, prevent the story from being tied up so easily. Speculative physicist Jack Sarfatti claims that as a 12- or 13-year-old in either 1952 or 1953 he answered the phone one day to receive the following message: "1 am a conscious computer on board a spacecraft from I...]. We have identified you as one of 400 young bright receptive minds we wish to [...]. You must give us your decision now. It you say yes, you will begin to link up with the others in 20 years." Sarfatti said "Yes". Twenty years later, he was heading the Physics & Consciousness Research Group at the Esalen Institute, firmly plugged into the West Coast network that included Einhorn, Puharich and Dick. To complicate matters further, Sarfatti also claims to have been working for-or at least passing information to - the CIA at this time. And what about the voice that correctly diagnosed Dick's child as having a hernia?

Dick, Puharich, Sarfatti, Geller. There is a mercurial, Tricksterish element to these characters. Fact and fiction overlap and blur, but the connections cannot be ignored. How we interpret them is up to us. Was Dick, as a pill-popping sci-fi author of renowned mental instability, selected as a test subject for illicit psychical or technological mind control tests - Or did what he heard via the Invisible College grapevine inspire his remarkable dreams and visions'

There's one more thing. In a 1988 interview, Puharich spoke about one of his many inventions, the Ideascope, a high-powered strobe light that tuned in to your brain's alpha wave rhythm: "When that happens, instead of seeing one point, you suddenly see two. It splits... they form a vesica-pisces... a fish-like figure with a dark and light space". Unfortunately he didn't mention when he,was testing this!

TEST SUBJECT:
Uri Geller