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

In response, I named a few objects: A statuette, antlers, a circle with an "X" in its middle and a rectangular, wire-filled box. These items, it turned out, matched a statuette of a reindeer and an actual reel-to-reel tape recorder on the table in a room upstairs, where I'd never been. In truth, invoking the images hadn't been that difficult. I'd spent the afternoon staring at stuffed animals with antlers (among other objects) at the museum. And the lab equipment surrounding me might remind anyone of a wire-filled box. But the graduate student conducting the test was impressed. "You're a psychic," she pronounced. To a teenager seeking transcendent experience, she was an authority.

Free Flights

I continued to visit the ASPR often during the next couple of years, and found that Kidd researchers were attracted by my easy ability to enter the out-of-body experience, or OBE—the altered state deemed essential for investigating the soul. To me it was a familiar state of mind I had practiced since childhood. I just relaxed my body as deeply as I could and imagined how it would feel to be someplace else. The more I relaxed, and the more intensely I focused, the more I felt as though I were no longer in my body but mentally present in that other place.

It only makes sense that when I moved to Durham, North Carolina, as a Duke University undergrad in 1972, I found a home at the Psychical Research Foundation (PRF), which shared the Kidd legacy with ASPR. My mentor was the bald, bespectacled psychologist Robert Morris, who had recently earned his Ph.D. from Duke. Our experiment, still considered the classic research on the OBE, used heart and brain wave sensors to establish the signature physiology of the OBE, an underlying arousal coupled with deep, overt relaxation. Whatever the OBE was, Morris concluded, it was the same every time.

We also asked whether the OBE was purely subjective, in the mind of the "traveler" alone, or might somehow be noticed by a distant observer. To pin it down experimentally, we set out to see whether living creatures could detect my mental "presence" when I focused on them from afar.

Human subjects reported that they could somehow sense my presence, but eventually it became clear that they were picking up everything from passing cars to creaks in the floorboards. Gerbils had no apparent reaction. A black rat snake banged his head against his box exactly when I focused on him during our first experiment, but appeared docile the next time out. A more consistent and statistically significant response came from my pet kitten, Spirit, who relaxed whenever I focused on him from a distance. That research was published in the peer reviewed ASPR Journal and to this day, Spirit's behavior has never been explained away.

My participation in those startling experiments became fodder for a host of misleading press reports, from a supermarket tabloid to the front page of the Wall Street Journal, where I was falsely quoted as saying I'd contacted discarnate entities. Even as a naive 19-year-old college student, I felt discomfort with my role and realized I was being used. Attending classes, I spoke with professors who had contempt for Rhine and the parapsychology scene around campus. I was relieved when they failed to grasp I was the controversial psychic "Blue," by then living in a closet-size back room in an old clapboard house on the edge of campus that served as the PRF lab.

I lived at the lab because the rent was low—just $35 a month—and, with no help from family, I barely had enough to pay for food. What I lacked in money I made up for with work. There at night alone, I tended the animals—not just my cat Spirit and his brother, Soul, but the hamsters and gerbils, too. I felt like I was part of the menagerie, a psychic mascot always on hand, not just to participate in experiments but also to build bookshelves and help write papers. When the PRF was called to investigate the famed Amityville haunted house, I was encouraged to go along. But after a local friend checked it out for me, I concluded it was a fraud and stayed home. It seemed clear to me that Morris and others benefited when I took the spotlight and drew the fire, allowing them to play the scientist role without being tarred by the "psychic" brush.

These were sacrifices I was willing to make as long as whatever truth we found might survive. But the truth was ambiguous. One researcher I knew was dismissed from Rhine's laboratory after throwing out data he deemed too negative to support his conclusions. Another discarded data he thought too positive. Despite these abuses, most researchers seemed to shoot straight. Even so, when one researcher reported spectacular results, efforts at replication by other researchers often failed. Even the most dramatic results in a parapsychology laboratory, I learned, couldn't be reproduced on demand. Had we tried to replicate the kitten experiment, for instance, it would have been impossible to achieve the same conditions. The kitten became older and more independent. Other pets' owners would, inevitably, have different dynamics with pets of their own. It appeared to me that something real might be going on, but pinning it down in the lab was going to be hard.

Project Stargate

Researchers weren't the only people intrigued by the possibility of psi, of course. The concept was especially attractive to a tight circle of adherents in the intelligence community and on Capitol Hill. Hoping to gain advantage on the world stage, they cobbled together a million dollars a year over the course of 20 years for a classified program eventually revealed as the Stargate project. Given my background, I was asked to consult along with reputed psychic superstars Hella Hammid and Ingo Swann.