Confessions of a Star Psychic

Keith "Blue" Harary was a hot young psychic, sought after by treasure hunters, stockbrokers and spies. Then he began to question his own extraordinary abilities.

By Keith Harary, published on November 01, 2004 - last reviewed on August 26, 2009

Most of us have encountered the eerie or inexplicable: a dream that foretold the future so precisely it appeared psychic, a sudden intense connection to a distant friend at the moment he faced death, a chance meeting so improbable it seemed preordained. In my own case, a foreboding swept over me on Valentine's Day of the year 2000 at an Italian restaurant in San Francisco. Sitting across from my wife, I suddenly felt she was going to die. There was nothing apparently wrong with her and she'd been given a clean bill of health at her last checkup only four months before. After I convinced her to go for another exam two days later, however, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, a disease that usually progresses without noticeable symptoms until it turns deadly. She was lucky, her doctors explained. Her tumor was discovered and removed before it could spread.

"How could you have known she had cancer?" her oncologist asked. "Are you some kind of psychic?"

I didn't know she had cancer, of course, only that I felt the sudden, alarming sense of her impending death. In fact, although it might surprise those familiar with my unusual reputation, I don't claim, at least these days, to have any special extrasensory abilities. But the doctor's first question—how had I known?—is one that I just may be able to answer.

How can we access information seemingly beyond the reach of inference or sensory perception? That question has driven the entire field of psychical research, known in contemporary parlance as parapsychology. It has also been pivotal in my personal career—in my younger days as a reputed psychic participating in some of the most publicized parapsychology experiments of the last century, and more recently, as a scientist with expertise in cognitive psychology, personality and altered states. Despite more than a hundred years of research, this question remains controversial and unresolved, although the distinctly nonmystical realms of neurology, physics and mathematics may play a role.

The first person to subject psychic claims to statistical tests was Duke University researcher J.B. Rhine, who pioneered controlled experiments on what he termed extrasensory perception (ESP), later known as psi. Rhine adopted the term parapsychology and asked whether ESP was more than a matter of chance. Rhine's experiments were simple. "Senders" focused on randomly shuffled cards marked with symbols: star, cross, circle, wavy lines or square. "Receivers" guessed at the symbol in the sender's mind. By 1940, after 33 experiments and nearly a million trials, Rhine said he'd found an overall effect. But the evidence was inconsistent, and mainstream scientists were not convinced.

Seeking more compelling results, the next generation of parapsychologists tried to induce psi through altered states like dreams and sensory deprivation. They also recruited those considered capable of delivering consistently better results—in other words, psychics.

Becoming Boy Blue

My induction into the psychic Hall of Fame began with a casual experiment. I was only 17-years-old—I knew little about scientific research, and not much more about myself. I knew only that I had a deep interest in human nature, instilled during childhood as my closest friend slowly died from a rare connective tissue disease that seemed to dissolve him from the inside out.

That focus deepened in the summer of 1970, as I wandered the cliffs of Acadia National Park in Maine with a group of friends. Many of us had nicknames and mine was Blue, for my love of the peaceful sky and water around the park. Late one night, I climbed a cliff and fell, saving myself by grabbing a tree instead of smashing on the rocks about a hundred feet below. Days later, a friend committed suicide by jumping from a different cliff. I felt we had traded lives. Soon after, I met two women who told me about Arizona gold prospector James Kidd, who left a quarter of a million dollars in his handwritten will for scientific research into the existence of the soul.

Returning to my home in New York, I'd spent the day visiting the Museum of Natural History on Manhattan's Upper West Side only six blocks from the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR), where the Kidd Estate Project was headquartered. After wandering the museum, I called the Society from a phone booth and was put right through to a graduate student working on the Kidd Project.

"Have you ever had an out-of-body experience?" she asked. I associated the term with an exercise I'd originally practiced with my dying friend when his pain made other activities unbearable: We lay in the grass, relaxed our bodies and let our imaginations run free. It was the only introduction I needed. I agreed to come right over.

"By the way, what's your name?" she asked before hanging up.

"Blue," I said.

As soon as I arrived I was invited to participate in an experiment that required I relax in one room while trying to describe objects hidden in another room. The notion was that if the mind could "leave" the body to see the objects, perhaps it could also survive bodily death.

"Project your mind into the room upstairs and describe what you see on the table," the grad student instructed.