24jun26

It is absolutely blazing out there today. Heat warnings are in effect. Friday looks like it’s going to be the hottest day.

OPERATIONS: 700 words yesterday, looking for at least 1000 today
STATUS: DHL have lost a mystery parcel that was on its way to me last week. They claimed to be “tracing” it yesterday, but had it in three different locations at the same time, so I figure that’s gone for good. And my two Royal Mail parcels have just been marked as “Unable to attempt delivery.” Is everything melting just because it got warm?
READING: PHENOMENA: US GOVERNMENT INVESTIGATIONS INTO ESP AND PSYCHOKINESIS, Annie Jacobsen (UK) (US+)

Puharich asked McCulloch to find him a patient at Bellevue who’d been committed for the first time to the psychiatric ward for hearing voices. McCulloch located a machinist whose psychiatric medical profile was completely normal other than a sudden audio aberration. Before the voices appeared, the machinist had displayed no symptoms of insanity. Whereas many a 1950s doctor would have written the man off as crazy, Puharich and his foundation had another theory to pursue. They believed the man might be hearing voices that were traveling on a radio wave, that the machinist was somehow “tuned in” to a specific radio frequency that other individuals could not hear. “We found out that his job was the key to the diagnosis,” Puharich wrote. In the machine shop where the man worked, the machinist’s daily routine was “grind[ing] metal casings against carborundum wheels” for hours at a time. At the foundation facility, Puharich’s research team gave the man a dental examination, “which showed that his metal fillings were coated with carborundum dust,” or silicon carbide, a semiconductor. The carborundum “behaved like the crystal rectifier in the old crystal radio sets of the 1920s,” wrote Puharich. When the subject was placed inside the Faraday Cage, all electrical and radio signals were eliminated. “We found that his voices ceased,” Puharich confirmed. “His teeth were cleaned and he was cured of the ‘psychiatric’ problem.” The man was never crazy to begin with. “Rather, we found that he was precisely tuned to radio station WOR in New York City.”

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