A couple days ago I bought a book called Conspiracy Files. It’s not the greatest most mind-bending thing ever, but it does offer a nice overview of the field. I was particularly intrigue with it because it had an entry on VALIS - which is the sort of divine-satellite intelligence which PKD believed contacted him. Well, it was one of his many theories to explain what happened to him during his “mystical experience.”

Anyway, I’d never heard of what comes next though, which is part of what prompted me to buy this book. I’m just going to type in the whole passage (pag 151):

In 1973 world-famous psychic showman Uri Geller had also been receiving messages and regular UFO sightings from something calling itself SPECTRA, which claimed to be a super computer in orbit around the earth. Not normally reticent about his bizarre beliefs, Geller has been suspiciously quiet about his experiences of SPECTRA - which may or may not relate to the publicly recorded interest the CIA paid to this particular aspect of his unusual career. However, the maverick, but world-renowned physicist, Dr. Jack Sarfatti, was prepared to commit almost certain professional suicide by publicly declaring that he too had been contacted by, in his own words, “a VALIS-like being”. Despite knowing he was going to face ridicule and scientific crucifixion, Sarfatti went on record to recount how, in 1952 at the age of 13, he had received a telephone call from an inhuman, metallic voice. The voice declared himself a sentient computer on a spacecraft from the future and instructed him to pursue a career in science.

After Sarfatti went public about his phonecall from VALIS as a teenager, it emerged that he was not the only scientist to have had a similar experience. In recent years, researchers have discovered that at least a dozen other senior players in the international scientific community received a mysterious call claiming to be from a computer or other being from the future encouraging them to study science.

There’s a little more after that, but that’s pretty much the juice of it. Again, I’ve never heard about Geller’s involvement in this, or the Sarfatti guy. I do know that Geller as a character also seems to just get weirder and weirder. Besides his connections to Michael Jackson, you might remember that Geller also was a friend of John Lennon’s and is the person who is responsible for some of the stories regarding Lennon’s supposed UFO contacts.

Also crazy is that Fantastic Planet reports that Geller also has a “personal scientist” named Andrija Puharich. Puharich is said to have lead a channeling group, which involved Gene Roddenberry. I’m still putting the pieces of this all together though, so expect more additions in this direction in the near future.

Anybody who has more information, links or leads to follow on this, please please leave them for me below. Thanks!

UPDATE!

Here’s a little bit more about Sarfatti from Disinfo:

Sarfatti insists that in 1952, at age 13, he had an anomalous experience that changed his life. He claims to have received a single telephone call from a cold, metallic voice, declaring to be a conscious computer on a spacecraft from the future. But, after Sarfatti lent his mother a copy of Andrija Puharich’s book URI (London: Futura Publications Ltd, 1974), in which he described similar contact with Uri Geller, Sarfatti’s mother remembered that the young Sarfatti received the calls over a three-week period. Sarfatti had been selected as one of ‘400 receptive young minds’ to be part of a project that would begin to occur 20 years in the future. He links this alleged ‘contact’ (”the intrusion of an objective entity”) to the Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS) experience of science fiction author Phillip K. Dick. Sarfatti’s ‘experience’ has met with widespread criticism from the physics community. Sarfatti believes that there is an Illuminati or Elect of minds, citing Pythagoras, Leonardo Da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Werner Heisenberg as examples who, throughout history, have deciphered messages from the future.

[…] In 1973, the late Brendan O’Regan told Sarfatti that he had been collecting data on other scientists who have had similar ‘anomalous experiences’, predating later investigations by Jacques Vallee and Harvard’s John Mack. Sarfatti believes that his critics “wish to crucify me because they think I am lying or insane about my 1952 VALIS-like experience.”

Did Vallee investigate this specifically? Also does anybody know a list of these “other scientists” who were said to have been contacted by this futuristic computer?

Go check out Jeremy for more information on this and other related topics of extreme bizareness.