CHAPTER SIX Eye of the Hawk

On December 28, 1971, at 9:07 P.M. Uri called me while I was in the Sharon Hotel dining room having dinner with Ila Ziebell, who had just come to Israel. He seemed in such a state of alarm on the phone that I became deeply worried. He would not say what was wrong but begged me to come to his apartment immediately. I asked him if I could bring Ila along, and he said that would actually be helpful. We stopped dinner mid-course and took a cab to Uri’s apartment.
When we walked in, he was alone, dressed in a bathrobe. He looked at us with red eyes. “I can’t tell you what happened, but I cried. Do grown men ever cry?” he pleaded.
“Yes, Uri, I have cried when someone I loved died,” I said.
He asked us to sit down. He fiddled with his hands aimlessly, wanting to talk, yet somehow constrained. Finally, it came out in bits. He had been secretly in love with a woman for the past five years. Her situation was such that they could only meet secretly at rare intervals. An hour and a half earlier she had told Uri that she could never see him again. It was torture for Uri to unburden himself of this secret. He said that he had actually placed a revolver to his head to end his life, but something made him put down the weapon and call me instead.
I was profoundly shocked at his deep depression and at the thought that he might die violently, as had Arigo.
“Uri, please show me the gun” I demanded. Uri walked into his bedroom and handed me a revolver in a brown leather case. I looked at the revolver; it was a .38-caliber Rossi loaded with six bullets.
“Uri, this gun in your hands really disturbs me. Please, may I take it?” I asked.
Uri insisted he was all right now. I offered to spend the night at his place; he refused. I invited him to spend the night at my hotel; he refused. But through all this discussion, he refused to part with the gun, insisting that he was all right. Finally, he agreed to go to the house of a friend he trusted, Sarah Bursak. At midnight we walked with Uri some four blocks to Sarah’s house and left him in her charge.
I called Uri the next morning and casually inquired how he was. He said, “Fine. Why do you ask in such a serious way?”
“Well, I was concerned about what you said last night,” I replied.
“What do you mean? What did I say?” he asked.
“Don’t you remember?” I asked in disbelief.
“No, only that you and Ila were here and we walked over to Sarah’s house,” he said.
I realized that Uri was not depressed and that I could talk very frankly to him. I then repeated very briefly what he had said about his secret love and the gun. He was stunned by my words.
“Do you mean I said all that? Well, I don’t remember saying any of it. It is true about the girl, but it couldn’t be true about the gun. I haven’t had that gun for two months; it is at Shipi’s house. Please go over and ask him.”
Now it was my turn to be stunned. “Okay, Uri, let’s drop it,” I said. “I’ll come over to see you tonight after dinner.”
“Good, I’ll be waiting for you,” he said.
I then talked to Ila about what Uri had said the previous night and what he had said this morning. We both agreed on every detail of what had occurred the night before. We were both especially sure that Uri had handed me a gun. I then drove over to Shipi’s home and asked him if he had Uri’s Rossi revolver. He said, “Yes, I’ve had it here for the past two months.”
I checked to see if Uri had borrowed it recently. The answer was no. Shipi then showed me the revolver; it was the same one I had handled the previous night.
Ila and I went to see Uri at 8 P.M. He was running a fever of 38.2° C. and had the flu. In spite of the illness, he was in a good mood. None of us talked about “the night of the gun.” We chatted about many things for the next two hours. Then Uri asked Ila for a coin, and she gave him a five-agaroth coin. He placed this in a wooden-match box and asked Ila to place her hands over it. Ila felt a tingle in her hands; the box was opened. The coin had vanished.
It was 10:30 P.M. The phone rang, and Uri picked it up. He said to me very excitedly, “It’s her, she’s calling from the Sinai!”
I said, “Who? Who is calling?”
He said, “Yaffa. Talk to her!” and thrust the phone into my hand.
Not knowing to whom I was talking, I said, “My name is Andrija; who are you?”
A woman’s voice said in broken English, “Pleased to meet you. I am Yaffa. I do not speak English, only Hebrew.”
Just then Sarah Bursak walked into the room, and Uri said to her, “It’s Yaffa on the phone from the Sinai. Talk to her!”
So I handed Sarah the phone. She talked with great excitement and enthusiasm in Hebrew to the woman for about two minutes and then handed the phone to Uri, who talked on for several more minutes in Hebrew.
No one discussed the phone call when it ended; it all seemed so natural. Ila and I left shortly thereafter. We drove to the Sharon Hotel discussing this phone call, speculating that Yaffa must be the secret love.
The next morning Uri made a casual phone call to me to say that he was feeling better. Equally casually, I asked him about the phone call from the Sinai last night and who was Yaffa.
He stated flatly, “There was no phone call last night!”
I insisted that there was a phone call and repeated to him in detail what Ila and I had both witnessed. Uri sounded very distressed with me. “Andrija, there was no phone call. You must be getting sick! Please call Sarah; she’ll tell you the same thing.”
I called Sarah and repeated my story about the phone call. She, too, denied it, saying, “Dr. Puharich, I like you very much, but I think you are very strange. This is not a good joke.”
I called Uri back to report on Sarah’s denial and Ila’s affirmation of my story. He stated flatly, “Andrija, you dreamed the whole thing, and Ila is just going along with you. Forget the whole story!”
However, Uri called me back in an hour and said, “I don’t believe there was a phone call, but how did you find out that my secret love’s name is Yaffa?”
These two days’ events numbed me Sarah and Uri experienced one sequence, and Ila and I experienced another, in the same time frame. I had discovered the truth about Uri’s deepest secret, had had a gun in my hand that felt real, and had had a phone call experience that is real in my mind to this day. But most of all I realized that the four of us had had an experience imprinted on our minds by what could only be the agency of IS. I finally learned that, given the existence of IS, I could never again know which of my experiences were directly imposed upon me by IS and which were not.
I have never been so deeply shaken in my life as when I realized the full implication of this power of IS. I thought back to December 7 when Uri had walked toward a flashing blue light in an open field and had come back with my brass pen cartridge. All this could have been an illusion, similar to the one of the past two days. Although I still have the brass pen cartridge, I know that it could have “appeared” in Uri’s hand, without lending any credence to the possible presence of a spacecraft All I can vouch for is my experience, which I’d already come to realize could have been artificially imprinted by IS.
On New Year’s Day 1972 I wanted to take a break from the heaviness of my education at the hands of IS. I invited Ila to take a ride into the countryside. We had absolutely no idea where we would go when we started. We were to decide our itinerary at any moment by the toss of a coin.
We drove north toward Haifa in the dazzling bright winter sunshine. As we reached the area of the Carmel Hills near Ma’agan Michael, an unbelievably multicolored movement of clouds came in from the sea. I stopped driving, to set up my Hasselblad camera, to take purely artistic pictures of the cloud forms and colors against this incredible sky-blue background. There were mini-tornado funnels in the clouds, patches of dark thunderous clouds; I have never before seen such a display of cloud beauty in the sky.
We drove on north past Haifa into a heavy thunderstorm. In the darkness and driving rain I got lost, but I kept on driving, since it didn’t make any difference where we were going. When the air cleared somewhat, I found myself on the road to Safad, one of my favorite places in all of Israel. After Safad, we went down to the Sea of Galilee and to Tiberias. Finally at 10 P.M. we decided to return to Tel Aviv, via the town of ‘Afula, in the Jezreel Valley.
As we climbed out of the basin of the Sea of Galilee over the mountains, we both saw a red disk in the sky, similar to the one I had seen in the Sinai. When we reached the top of the mountain where the sky was clear and the view unimpeded, it disappeared over Mount Tabor.
As we descended into the valley of Jezreel, we entered heavy low-lying fogbanks. Just as we left ‘Afula, a white hawk cut through the fog and passed just inches in front of my windshield. This was a startling vision to both Ila and myself. As we were discussing this sighting, we encountered another heavy fogbank. The visibility could not have been more than ten meters, and I had to slow down to some thirty kilometers per hour. Then directly ahead of the car there flashed a red cometlike light. It had a trajectory like that of a baseball descending from the air toward the ground. What was even stranger was that it appeared to be one hundred meters ahead of the car, beyond the range of headlight visibility. There was something unworldly about this light as it plunged toward the ground into the road ahead, and then went out. As I approached the area of its fall, there was nothing to be seen. Suddenly I heard a cricket sound! A road intersection appeared going to the right, and without a thought I swung the car north onto this road to listen for the cricket sound. As I listened, and as Ila listened, for she had heard it too, a white hawk suddenly flashed through the headlight glow.
I wrote later that night in my notes that “the above pattern of events – red light, hawk, red light, hawk – is highly subjective and probably has no particular significance.” But I found out later that I was wrong, that very significant events were going on. In the following weeks I was approached by my friends Reuven and Jacov, who tried to hint to me very gently that there was increasing concern by the Israeli Army High Command about my presence in Israel. I was also interviewed at times by intelligence officers and knew that trouble for me was brewing. I also found out by other means that all my mail was being read, my phone was tapped, and that I was under twenty-four-hour-a-day personal surveillance. Later, I also found out that on this New Year’s Day, as I was being followed, the best operatives in the country would suddenly lose me. They would radio for help, and another team in a car would locate my car and then they would lose me. The report that I had totally disappeared at ‘Afula, I found out, started a major investigation about me. Of course, I was unaware of all this at the time it was happening. The Israeli intelligence people were getting the same lessons in mind control by IS that I was getting. The only difference is that I knew the lessons were from an extraterrestrial intelligence.
The major display of lights in the sky started in quite an innocuous way on January 2, 1972. I was standing on the balcony of room 1101 at the Sharon Hotel at 7:30 P.M., enjoying the view of Tel Aviv stretching away toward Jaffa. Then due south, beyond Jaffa, appeared a flashing red star, pulsing at about one pulse per second. It was stationary, The flashes continued for about thirty pulses, then it was gone. I called to Ila to witness it, and she saw the last few bursts of light. The next thing I saw I took to be some kind of meteorological experiment. A huge orange flare burst in the air where the red light had been. As the flare plummeted toward earth, a twisted trail of smoke hung in the air. As the orange flare came to within a thousand feet or so of earth, a second flare burst a certain distance from where the first had burst – and followed the same pattern. This went on until there were seven pillars of smoke in the sky. I assumed that these flares had been released to measure wind patterns. Ila and I discussed this phenomenon as such.
Later that day we went to see Uri perform at a show at the Tzavda in Tel Aviv. I told him about the seven pillars of smoke generated by orange flares. He looked at me as though I were crazy and said, “They don’t send up smoke patterns in Israel to study the wind! But let’s check it out.” He phoned the weather service, the Army, and the Air Force. No one had sent up any flares south of Tel Aviv at 7:30 P.M. So Uri convinced me that it was not a meteorological effect. But what was it? It did not occur to either of us that it could be connected to IS, because of the smoke. But this phenomenon was clarified the next day on a night drive. (See Appendix Four. )
On January 3, while sitting on the balcony of my room at the Sharon, Ila, Iris, and I saw in the clear daylight the same kind of hawks that we had seen two days ago to the west of ‘Afula. I studied the birds carefully as two of them floated past my balcony at eye level. They were definitely of the hawk family, with a two-foot wingspread in soaring flight. The entire underside of the bird was white with darker stippling. The top side of the bird was a uniform dark dove-gray. At times one of the birds would glide in from the sea right up to within a few meters of the balcony; it would flutter there in one spot and stare at me directly in the eyes. It was a unique experience to look into the piercing, “intelligent” eyes of a hawk. It was then that I knew I was not looking into the eyes of an earthly hawk. This was confirmed about 2 P.M. when Uri’s eyes followed a feather, loosened from the hawk, that floated on an updraft toward the top of the Sharon Tower. As his eye followed the feather to the sky, he was startled to see a dark spacecraft parked directly over the hotel. We all looked where he pointed, but we did not see what he saw. But I believed that he saw what he said he saw.
I was of the opinion that the birds were peregrine falcons. But I knew that this species was probably recently extinct in the United States. I did not know if this species were known in Israel. Uri stoutly upheld the view that there were no hawks at all in Israel, only kites. He told us that the hawks were sent by IS to guard and protect me. He felt that this was simply a form taken by IS, just as they took the form of a spacecraft, because it suited their purposes. I dubbed this hawk “Horus” and still use this name each time he appears to me.
Uri was scheduled to go to the Sinai to entertain the troops on January 9 and wanted both Ila and me to go along (since there were female entertainers as part of the troupe, he felt he could get permission for Ila to go). This time he got written clearance for us beforehand. We met at Lod Airport at 6:30 A.M. and arrived at an air base in the Sinai by 9:20 A.M. Upon landing, there was a big scene with a security officer about allowing Ila and me to go to the Suez Canal with Uri and the troupe. However, Uri in his inimitable way shouted down the objections of the security officer, we were allowed to go to the Canal Zone.
Between 10 A.M. and 1 P.M., we rode in the back of a truck with a group of entertainers. For me it was a profound experience to go through the long canyons of the Mitla Pass littered with the wreckage of the Six Day War. When we reached the Suez Canal at 1 P.M., the entertainers split into groups, each going his way. Uri, Ila, and I were escorted by an officer to the top of an observation tower where soldiers peered across the canal by day and by night. There was a dreamlike quality to this scene. The sun shone brightly and sparkled off the blue waters of the canal. The sea gulls swooped and foraged for their food. On this side of the canal the Israeli soldiers walked on top of their fortifications. As we stood on the tower in full view, one of the Egyptian soldiers shouted obscenities at us in Arabic; an Israeli soldier shouted back a choice obscenity in Hebrew. Then the quiet, the sound of gulls, and the warmth of the sun. Was this the boundary across which, a few weeks ago, steel and fire were to hurtle the world into a global holocaust?
We were served a hot lunch by a proud and sweating sergeant major. At 2 P.M. a group of three dozen soldiers came from the depths of the bunkers of the Bar Lev Line to see Uri do a show in a sandbagged open area, safe from line-of-sight fire. Another entertainer, Avi, sang a lusty song with his guitar. The soldiers, with Uzzi machine guns on their backs, cheered wildly. Then Uri came on, calling upon a soldier and asking him to concentrate on his sweetheart’s name. Uri thought for ten seconds and gave the name correctly as Bruriah. More cheers. Uri then had each soldier step up and think of a color, number, letter, name of a car, a capital city, etc. For every one of the soldiers Uri gave the correct telepathic answer. By now the wild cheering had subsided – there was instead a hushed awe. Uri then “repaired” a broken watch by passing his hand over it. Then he asked a soldier to hold a key in his hand. Uri placed his hand over the soldier’s for ten seconds. When the soldier opened his hand, the key was bent at a ninety-degree angle. At the end of the performance, the soldiers followed Uri silently to the truck as we boarded to leave.
We went on to the next bunker, and Uri repeated the same kind of show. At 4 P.M. we headed back into the heart of the Sinai via the Mitla Pass. As the sun went down, the wind, the cold, and the jolting of the truck lowered our spirits to a state of numbed withdrawal. It was dark by 7 P.M. as we rolled into some unknown army base. We were fed dinner by torchlight. The word was whispered around that there was an air alert on; some intelligence reports said that Arab planes would enter the area. There was to have been a show that night, but since no lights were allowed on the base, it was dubious that it would be presented.
We were huddled into a small office until 9 P.M., surrounded by soldiers who mobbed and pressed upon Uri. Ila and I were practically crushed by this herd activity. I was prepared to see them start tearing at Uri’s clothes in sheer admiration.
A young girl soldier offered a gold chain to Uri. He held his hand over it, and it broke in two. Uri was then pressed into doing a telepathy test over the telephone with a general from another base. The test was so successful that the general told Uri that he was going to drive over to see him personally.
It was then that I discovered the function of the base we were on. It was an elaborate decoy base designed to draw enemy bombers toward it, and away from more vital targets a discovery that did not make me any too happy. At 10 P.M. the general and his staff entered the packed office. He made an offer to Uri to do a show at his base at midnight. Uri inquired if that meant a warm bed for the night, and the general replied that it did, for all of us.
So we roared off in two command cars into the night. I was surprised to find that we were on a tortuous winding road going up to a mountain aerie. At the top there was a forest of radar towers and antennae. It was obvious to me that we were in a most unusual electronic-warfare center. There was another hassle about the security status of Ila and me, but we were finally allowed on the base. Uri did a very impressive show. What interested me was that this was the first time I had ever seen him perform for a purely scientific and intellectual group. Everyone that I could see in the audience appeared to be of Ph.D. caliber. Yet they were just as enthusiastic and excited as the nineteen-year-old soldiers on the canal.
The commanding general was obviously very impressed with Uri and held a secret conference with him. Uri did not tell me what advice he gave to the general. We did get quarters that night with electric heaters and plenty of blankets. My bones really ached from all the jolting truck rides of the long day.
At 5:30 A.M. we were aroused and piled into a command car. Now I could see that we were in a high mountain aerie that had a clear view of the Sinai in all directions. As the sun arose, the desert became a pastel wonderland, a sight of immense beauty. I also found that we were traveling east. As we neared the region where Uri and I had seen the red eye of IS in the sky a month ago, there appeared to our left at low altitude a giant spaceship! Now Uri, Ila, and I clearly saw it. It appeared to be not more than two miles away, but desert air is deceptive when it comes to judging distances. The spaceship hugged the top of a ridge to our left and floated with the stability of a dirigible. I noticed that it did not cast a shadow on the hill.
I judged it to be double the length of a Boeing 747. In fact, it had a shape as though two B-747s, without wings, were stuck together tail to tail but with one of the planes upside down. The ship did not glint in the sun; there was no reflective surface on it; there were no windows or portholes. It had a very smooth, dull, metallic gray surface.
Uri, Ila, and I were in the back seat of the command car. The driver and two other military personnel sat in the front. Without giving these three a clue as to what they might see, Uri pointed directly to the ridge of the hill below the spaceship and asked them in Hebrew, “What is that?”
All three stared directly at the spaceship and said in substance, “There is only the hill and the blue sky. What do you see?” Uri would not reveal what he saw, but prodded them to concentrate on the spot in the sky where the spaceship floated. Not one of the three saw the ship. Finally, they asked Uri, “What’s so important about that spot?”
Uri said in a joking way, “I thought maybe there was a UFO there.” They accepted his words as a joke and stopped looking. Uri, Ila, and I just watched in total fascination. We soon realized that the spaceship was moving with us at the same speed as our car. This went on for a half hour, and then as we reached a turn where the road went north, the spaceship continued east, dropping out of sight behind a hill.
I recognize the possibility that there may not have been a spaceship there at all. I am aware that the three men in the command car saw nothing because there was nothing to see; I recognize that the three of us certainly had the image of a spaceship in our minds. But I believe that that image was placed there by some superior intelligence which may or may not have required the prop of an actual spaceship. The picture of that spaceship floating in its metallic splendor over the Sinai Desert is still firmly imprinted in my mind.
We arrived at the air base at which we had landed the day before at 7:30 A.M., January 10. I must confess that each of us felt frozen, dirty, tired, and aching. I was back at the Sharon Hotel by 10 A.M. I immediately took a hot bath, shaved, and made extensive notes on what had happened in the desert.
I spent the day on my balcony in the sun going over data of mutual interest with Ila before she left on the morrow. There was no question in my mind as I observed her that the experiences of the past week had destroyed all of her previous conceptions of parapsychology. She was also personally shaken up; what she had witnessed was more than she could bear. She frankly admitted that she could not keep up this kind of pace in acquiring new, unmanageable information.
I drove Ila to Lod Airport the next morning. When I returned to the hotel, there was a phone message from Uri. I called him up, and he began to thank me profusely for the most wonderful present he had ever received – the belt massager.
Now, there is a background to this story that I must tell first. About a week earlier Uri began to complain to Ila and me about his figure – that he was getting fat. We just laughed at him and his vanity. He is six feet two inches tall and weighed 172 pounds; he was not at all overweight. He exercised at least two hours every day. But he persisted in his belief that he had fat bumps on him that should be melted down. He had the idea that a belt massager would do it. Ila was very good with Uri. She explained to me that her husband had the same narcissism as did Uri and she knew how to handle the problem. She asked Uri to assemble all the specifications for the kind of massager he wanted and then to report to us. This kept him busy for a day. When he found out the kind of massager he wanted and got the price, he came to me crestfallen, saying that the cost was prohibitive. Could I find out what the price would be in the United States? I knew he had outwitted me, but I went along with the game. I called up my friend Solveig Clark in New York and asked her to send me catalogs on these machines and the prices, including air freight and duty. In three days I had this information in hand. I went over the catalogs with Uri. He picked a certain machine manufactured by Metz in the United States of a blue color. When I told what it would cost him, he was staggered by the price. Finally he said, “Forget the whole business. I don’t really need the machine.”
Now he was telling me on the phone, “I just walked into my apartment with Sarah Bursak. There, plugged into the wall, was a blue Metz belt massager, the same model I had picked out of the catalog. Since you were the only one who knew what I wanted, I knew that it came from you. Nobody has ever done anything for me like this in my life.”
“Uri,” I said, “I didn’t give you that present. It must be someone else!”
“I can’t believe it, Andrija. Then maybe your friend in New York didn’t understand you – maybe she ordered it.”
“Is there a crate there? Is there an invoice or a packing slip? How did it get in the apartment anyway? You know that it takes days to get things through customs.”
“My God, you’re right. My mother is away; nobody was in the apartment. How did they get in to deliver it?” he said.
“Why don’t you check it out on your end, and I’ll call New York and see what was done there,” I suggested.
Uri came to see me at 4 P.M. just as I was getting a call through to New York to Solveig. Solveig stated that she had not ordered or shipped a Metz belt massager. She also said that she would like to come soon to visit me in Israel, which I thought was a splendid idea.
Uri and I looked at each other – we finally knew who had “delivered” the belt massager. I said to Uri, “They must really love you to humor you on this level of personal vanity. Besides, someone up there is a real joker – this is cosmic humor! A belt massager for the man who is in perfect physical shape! What will they do next?”
The massager was real, had a serial number, was made in Brooklyn, and worked with bone-jolting efficiency. The carton in which it had come had no markings on it, and there was no invoice. It looked as if it had come from a warehouse.
I returned to my hotel, had an early dinner, and prepared to go to bed early. I recalled with sweeping sadness that one year ago that day I had received the news of Arigo’s death. And on that day I had resolved to change my way of life by seeking the good, the true, the beautiful: I gauged the progression I had made in the year’s interim. It was more transformation than progression, and I felt that it was just beginning.
When I awoke on the morning of January 12, I glanced at the Geneve watch on my wrist. It had stopped at, or been moved to, 9:45:45 (21:45:45) while I was asleep. The electric clock showed that it was 8:56 A.M. The last time this had happened was on December 26, 1971. For a moment I had the panicky thought that something had gone wrong, that the war threat was on again. I walked into the bathroom, turned on the radio, and got ready to bathe. Right after the 9 A.M. station break the regular Voice of America program was blanked out. A husky voice came out of the radio saying, Andrija, be prepared – in a few days . . . It faded off in a garbled way. I knew that it was an overlay voice by IS. But what bothered me was the imperfect quality of the voice transmission. I had become used to perfection in the execution of IS phenomena. I telephoned Uri and recited what had happened, but he had no idea as to what it all meant.
The next day, January 13, seemed ominously quiet. I was driving from Tel Aviv to the Sharon along the Coast Road that goes by Dov Airport when Horus appeared opposite my car, standing still in the air heading into the wind. It was 2:30 P.M. I stopped the car to watch this magnificent hawk. Then, literally from nowhere appeared another hawk, which flew alongside of Horus. They wheeled off slowly to the right, landing about thirty feet from my car, and mated there in the field. I went on to the hotel and spent a very quiet evening there, watching and waiting.
The next day was Friday, January 14. My watch ran normally; there was no hawk to be seen. The skies darkened and the wind whipped up to gale force from the sea. The rain came down in sheets before the wind. Alone in his apartment in Tel Aviv, Uri saw a huge silent spacecraft glide over northern Tel Aviv. Then he saw the lights of the city flicker and go out. All of Israel was plunged into wet darkness. At this moment, 7:30 P.M., I was sitting in my hotel room at Herzliyyah, looking toward Tel Aviv. Suddenly I saw only blackness where there had been myriads of city lights. Now I knew the meaning of all the warning signs of the past three days.
On February 1 Uri and I were standing at 12 noon on the seaward side of the swimming pool of the Hilton Hotel. The pool was crowded with swimmers. As we looked south toward Jaffa over the sea, we saw a gigantic display in the sky. First a bright flare fell from a height of about four thousand feet some ten miles away. As the flare fell, a pillar of white smoke remained in the air to mark the fall trail.
As the first flare hit the horizon, the next flare was released some five hundred meters to the right of the first. It took two minutes and twenty seconds for each flare to fire and descend to the horizon level. In this manner seven flares were released leaving seven pillars of white smoke in the sky which lasted for some thirty minutes. Uri and I looked around us. It was quite clear that nobody else saw what we were seeing. A newspaper and radio check showed that no one had released seven flares that day behind Jaffa.
That evening Uri and I were successful in getting answers to our questions from the tape recorder. On the tape we heard a voice, new to us, which sounded rather cold and authoritative:
You may ask questions now.
AP: “Is Arigo one of your subjects?”
Yes. Do you need proof?
AP: “The best proof for me is to have him tell me about my ears.”
Arigo says that he tried to cure your left side. Why did you stop taking his medicines?
AP: “I became allergic to the streptomycin, and I stopped that part of the treatment.” (See page 30. )
He says to start the same medicines again; it will not hurt you this time. Arigo says that he was not hurt in the car crash, There was no pain. He left his body before the crash. He will bring back something for you.
AP: “Thank you and Arigo. I do not know your name. How shall I address you? We have been calling you the intelligence from the sky, or IS.”
You may use the name Spectra. But actually Spectra is the name of a spacecraft which we use as you use a planet. It has been stationed for the past eight hundred years over the earth. It is as big as one of your cities on earth. But only you can see us.
AP: “Why are you interested in the Israelis?”
The Israeli territory is where we first landed on earth. That is why we are interested in them. Be patient – for years. You will have everything in time.
AP: “Are there other people on earth with whom you work?”
There is no other on earth that we will use for the next fifty years but you and Uri.
The tape vanished after this transmission.
On February 9, 1972, Uri and I made another contact via the tape recorder. It went as follows:
What is bothering you?
AP: “We need some clarification about what our work is about.”
You must be patient, very patient. You are working twenty-four hours a day for us, but you don’t even realize it. You are to help Uri. It is not important where you live; you must be on earth only wherever you are.
AP: “How is my mind being used?”
Your mind is being used twenty-four hours a day in a way that we cannot yet explain to you. You feel it now by being tired and sick. But this will not last for too long.
AP: Did you cause the blackout in Israel on January 14 of this year?”
The power failure in Israel is from us.
AP: “What use do you make of the power failure?”
It is a matter you will not understand yet.
AP: “Where will Uri and I be this year?”
I can only tell you that you will be in the U.S.A. part of the time. Handle Uri gently. He has nothing to worry about.
AP: “Can we go aboard your spaceship in order to start learning more about you?”
It will be a long time before this is possible, perhaps years. We are not ready for you yet. We are learning a lot.
AP: “When will the Knowledge Book come?”(The reference to the Knowledge Book is based on a previous conversation, not here recorded. The Knowledge Book is a document which contains information important to man’s future. (See page 176))
In due time, it may take years. But when it comes, it will be the most historical event that man will ever receive.
AP: “I received a phone call from you on February 5, at 5 P.M. at the Hilton Hotel. You said, ‘Spacemen over West Germany! Spacemen over West Germany.’ That was all. What does this mean?”
We noticed them over West Germany. We wanted you to know about it. I spoke to you on the phone about it – said it two times. We need your help in Germany.
AP: `’What can we do – we are quite helpless.”
You will go to Germany. We will tell you when.
AP: “Are Uri and I in any danger?”
No, nobody knows about you there.
AP: “Why has my Horus hawk gone?”
The hawk was your guard. You are being guarded in an entirely different way.
AP: “Why did Ila come here?”
She was sent to you as part of a test. The test was successfully passed. Farewell.
Now, going back somewhat in time, I want to recount my relationship to the Israeli Army.
On January 24 I had a meeting in Tel Aviv with Jacov. He informed me that there was grave concern in the Army High Command about me. He did not specify the nature of the concern, except to report that as far as the intelligence people were concerned, I had vanished from view on December 7. This surprised me so much that I had to laugh aloud: “But Jacov – I’ve been living in public view first at the Hotel Sharon and then the Hotel Masada. Reuven has visited me! I have talked to you! What can they mean?”
Jacov did not elaborate on this statement but suggested that I contact a certain general. I said I would think about it. It was some three months later that I found out what Jacov’s enigmatic statement meant. It was on December 7 that strange things began to happen to the intelligence operatives watching me, and to their equipment and recordings. And now the problem had reached the level of a crisis in the Israeli domestic intelligence apparatus. But again I was innocent of this storm brewing around my head.
That afternoon I was to see the hawk once again while on the beach at Ashqelon. But nothing unusual happened to me. During the next two weeks the pressures from all sides built up, and I realized that I was a source of great mystery to the Israelis. I was even told that I was suspected of being one of the great master spies of history. But I did not know what the grounds were for this building suspicion.
On February 13 I left Israel, as described at the beginning of this narrative. I previously stated that I started to reconstruct my confiscated Israeli journals in Italy. However, it was not until November 1972 that I began to work seriously on this book.
On March 29, 1972, I received in Italy a phone call from Solveig Clark, who was in New York. She said that she had received a call from an anonymous female voice which said: “The Israeli Army is not interested in detaining Dr. Puharich. Dr. Puharich is deluded by thinking that the Israeli Army considers him a master spy. Please give this message to Dr. Puharich.” The phone call terminated.
Now, Uri had given me no assurance in our phone conversations since I left Israel that I should or could return to Israel. But after the phone call from Solveig, I decided that this was a clear invitation for me to return to Israel.
I went to Rome and spent Easter Sunday with Melanie Toyofuku, who was living there. I set up a plan with her to secure my release, should I be arrested in Israel. The plan was simple: If she did not hear from me by telephone every forty-eight hours by a certain hour, she was to alert officials in Washington, D.C., that I was missing.
I flew into Lod Airport on April 3, 1972. I had had a pleasant trip chatting with a Roman Catholic priest from Boston who was making his first trip to the Holy Land. We got to know each other quite well. After we landed I was standing in line with this priest at Passport Control. The page system announced, “Dr. Puharich, go to the nearest phone for a message.”
The priest said to me, “Why, Dr. Puharich, that call is for you.” I nodded assent and thought quickly. This could be a trick of the Shin Beth to get me to leave the crowd and then arrest me inconspicuously. Or it could be a page from Uri. I said to the priest, “I’ll pick up that call after I get into the terminal.”
As I stood in line to have my passport examined, I felt sure that I would be detected. But I was passed without comment. I picked up my two bags and cleared customs. There were Uri, Shipi, and Hannah waiting for me. We quickly got into Uri’s car and sped away from the airport.
Uri explained that I could not stay at his new apartment; it had been wired up for total surveillance by the Shin Beth. Ever since I had left Israel he had been under continuous interrogation by the intelligence people. He was so rattled that he almost came to believe I was a spy. Finally, though, the Shin Beth concluded that I was not, but was either a scientific genius or a charlatan. They had attributed to me all the effects that IS had done to them. Uri told me about the following event, which had happened while I was in Italy.
One day there came for me in the mail a package with technical data and pricing for Xerox copiers. Uri got panicky thinking that this would be interpreted as evidence that I was a spy, so he tore up the Xerox literature and flushed it down the toilet. The next day at army headquarters, he was asked about the material he destroyed and flushed down the toilet. He denied that he had done this. Then the officer reached under his desk and placed before Uri a plastic bag containing the torn papers from the toilet flush! Uri confessed to his “crime,” and everyone had a good laugh about the incident. As for me, I roared with laughter, imagining the condition of the hapless soldier assigned to this new kind of latrine duty.
I asked Uri about the page call for me when I had landed; he had not paged me. We found out later that the army people had not paged me. We concluded eventually that this page was from IS. Uri’s mother later told me that she had received a phone call from “me” from Rome on Saturday, April 1, at 1 P.M. I supposedly had said, “I am returning to Lod at 5:30 P.M., Saturday, April 1, on TWA Flight 840.” I never made such a phone call.
As I checked into the Hilton Hotel, loud music blared out of my locked suitcase! I opened the suitcase to find the radio playing, but the power switch was turned in the off position. I knew that I was being welcomed back to Israel and to work.
On April 5 at 12:30 P.M. the telephone rang. A human-sounding voice with a bit of an accent said in English: Andrija, listen well! Instructions will be coming on June first. Then silence. I immediately called the hotel operator; no outside phone call had come in for me, and no insider at the hotel had called.
The next night, in front of three witnesses, my house keys from my home in New York suddenly “appeared” on a coffee table. I had last seen these keys months before on November 17, 1971, when I had put them in the custody of my house caretaker. Earlier on the same day my Minox C camera, which had been confiscated by the Shin Beth on February 13, had appeared on Uri’s bed.
One of the most spectacular feats of IS occurred on April 10, 1972, at 10:10 P.M. in my room, 1434 at the Hilton Hotel. Uri was lying on one of the twin beds talking to me; I was sitting in an easy chair listening. My Universal Geneve watch with a new heavy silver chain band was lying on a dresser near Uri. Suddenly he screamed, and there was my Geneve watch firmly clamped around his left wrist. It had occurred instantly. He had felt nothing unusual on his skin except the shock of a foreign object. Twenty-five minutes later the watch vanished from his wrist and was back on the dresser again. In both translocations of the watch the time and movement remained normal.
On the night of April 11 I noticed a red light on the seashore jetty below the hotel. I grew curious and walked to the end of the jetty, but the red light was gone. Back in my hotel room, I saw it again. Uri joined me, and we watched it for two hours. It was like the light we had seen in the Sinai, but now it was on the ground.
The next morning the sea off the Hilton was patrolled by a submarine, thirteen PT boats, and five submarine chasers. Rumor had it that radar had spotted an enemy submarine off the coast near the Hilton. That night Uri was interrogated all night by the Shin Beth as to where I was hiding. His answer was “Don’t you know?” Uri believes that the Shin Beth never knew I was in Israel. But I thought things were getting warm and that I had better leave the country again.
On April 14 at 2 P.M. Uri and I were successful in getting information from IS on the tape recorder:
We have a short script for you – general guidance. Go to United States. Your work will be in Europe. Work starts in Germany with a man chosen. Main base henceforth in Israel. Detailed instructions on June first. Uri will have his powers wherever he is. Do a movie on Uri. Melanie is the one to do it. Work at it; it will come out at right time. You are not to entrust anyone with the secret of our existence – no one. Do not interfere with our educational Israel army program. We will contact you once more before you leave Israel. We showed ourselves to you in the sea by the hotel on April eleventh”
On April 15 at 8:55 P.M. the tape recorder yielded answers to our questions:
AP: “Why did you allow my journals to be taken by the Shin Beth?”
Don’t ask!
AP: “Where should Uri and I be on June first?”
You will get instructions.
AP: “How can Uri and I contact you if we need help when there is danger?”
There will not be danger.
AP: “But if I think there is danger – will the hawk appear?”
You are right.
AP: “Since you do not show yourselves on earth, will we be transported to your environment so that we can meet directly?”
Someday, yes.
“Of the people who have been exposed thus far to your powers, who should we continue to work with?”
Only three. Uri, Shimshon, you. We cannot use our full powers unless you and Uri and Shimshon are together. There is a dematerialized aspect to your atoms that we can use. Farewell.
When I saw Uri off to his car parked in front of the Hilton Hotel, we first looked into the car. On the seat in front of our eyes appeared Uri’s rather large Sony CR 150 radio. We had last seen it in his apartment where he had left it earlier.
The day to leave Israel finally came. As Uri and I drove to the airport, it was like approaching a potential ambush. We wondered what would happen to me and what would happen to Uri. Uri told me emphatically that based on his contacts and interrogations, he felt that the Israeli intelligence people did not know I was in Israel. I was not that optimistic because I still had to run the gauntlet of the ticket counter, baggage check, passport control, body search, and hand baggage check.
On April 16, 1972, at 9:07 A.M. the wheels of TWA Flight 841 left the soil of Israel. At last I experienced a deep feeling of safety. I looked down at the green fields, the sandy shoreline, the towers of Herzliyyah Heights, the Sharon, the Hilton where it had all happened. Now I was on my way to Italy, to Germany, to the United States, to carry the message of Uri to the world. But I also was carrying a secret out of Israel that I was not to reveal. How could I carry the message of Uri and not the message of the intelligence of IS? These thoughts were heavy on my heart as my flight landed for its first stop in Athens. I disembarked and wandered around the terminal building. A TWA female representative walked up to me and asked me for my transit card, boarding pass, ticket, and passport. My heart sank. Had they caught up with me here in Greece? How did this woman know who I was, out of the hundreds of people milling around? I was determined not to be trapped this time.
Politely I asked, “What is the problem?”
She said, “I have a Telex here from Tel Aviv, and it says that they do not have your ticket for this flight. Did you turn it in?”
I distinctly remember that my passenger ticket was detached from my ticket when my baggage was checked, so I said, “Of course, I saw it collected.” She asked to examine my documents. While she did so, I stood by in the passenger terminal keeping my eye open for her colleagues. She handed me my documents and said, “It is apparent that you don’t have the ticket – it was removed – and you have all the necessary boarding cards. We shall check it out and let you know. You may board the flight.”
Once aboard the plane I could hardly wait for Flight 841 to get airborne for Rome. Soon we were aloft, and I figured out what had happened. IS had “vanished” my ticket after I had turned it in so that my name did not appear on the passenger manifesto at the boarding gate. The ticket must have been found eventually, because I never heard from the TWA people again.