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

Almost every day, we were taken to a stark white room at the renowned Menlo Park, California, think tank, Stanford Research Institute International (SRI). There, acting as veritable psychic spies, we used the free response technique called "remote viewing" to train and focus on targets from foreign government offices to clandestine weapons projects until impressions flowed through our minds.

It was in July 1980, in the middle of the Iran hostage crisis, that I received an urgent morning call asking me to report to SRI. I met with a tall, expressionless man who served me a cup of hot coffee before we retired to the white room and got to work.

"We have a person who needs a description," the monitor said, offering me not a clue. Though I hardly understood the process, the question triggered a cascade of impressions about a person in a debilitated state of health. "He seems to be suffering from nausea," I said. "One side of his body seems damaged or hurt." I wondered whether the person I was describing might be some business person or a head of state.

"Where will he be in the next few days?" the monitor asked, again without inflection. I suddenly felt the sensation of sitting on an airplane that was taking off.

"On an airplane," I said.

The target turned out to be the hostage Richard Queen, held by Iranian militants and now desperately ill with multiple sclerosis that affected his nerves on one side. In part due to my input, I was later informed by contacts at SRI, President Carter dispatched a plane to bring Queen home.

Were my impressions psychic? The hostages had been flooding the news for months.

Reports about Queen's health problems, including the issue of "a lame shoulder," had been in the news as well. I don't know whether such reports infiltrated my unconscious without my realizing it, but it would make sense to consider that possibility before the paranormal alternative.

In fact, if remote viewing worked, the idea that it required special psychic talents, while admittedly seductive, struck me as unlikely. I noticed that some of those nurturing psychic reputations seemed prone to exaggerate their claims and willing to compete for celebrity through any means possible. But people without psychic pedigree could sometimes achieve striking results.

In a session filmed live at the ASPR for British television, for example, a volunteer from the production crew with no claim to psychic ability described a randomly chosen target: a small, quiet park with trees and gazebo, a statue with wings and small shops, including one with a red and white-striped awning. That description matched the unusual location point for point.

Reshuffling the Deck

As time went on, my questions continued to mount. One refrain from friends and colleagues, though a joke, was perceptive, indeed: "If you're so psychic, why aren't you rich?" In 1984, I joined two partners in a company called Delphi Associates, with the mission of investing in silver based on predictions of whether the price of that metal would rise, fall or stay the same. In one sense it was a wild, spontaneous adventure, but in another, it provided a serious chance to see what I could do outside the boundaries of the lab. Could I predict the market? It was impossible to know until I tried. We managed to predict the direction of the silver market nine times in a row before failing twice. That's when we pulled the plug. I later found my name used to promote the technique to the public, something I couldn't support, in part because our intentionally informal experiment had not been scientifically rigorous enough to establish any proof.

I was also troubled when a team of "psychic archaeologists" asked me to help find a mythical wreck, a billion dollar Spanish galleon that had probably never existed at all. The expedition director, who needed to satisfy his investors, homed in on a downed ship of trivial financial value in a section of the ocean known to be littered with wrecks, then word got around that I had helped guide him to it as a "significant" find. In fact, the ship had already been found and excavated months before I arrived. False or exaggerated information damaged the credibility of those who were doing legitimate research and made it harder to discover the elusive truth.

Back Door to "Psychic" Abilities

As Blue Harary, I was anointed a "superpsychic" by parapsychologists and a "psychical Paul Bunyan" by the press. Even though I didn't understand myself, much less the nature of the universe, people hounded me for the secrets of the afterlife, as if I were hooked, by IV drip, to spirits and the dead.

Today, as a researcher, writer and consultant in industries from automotive to high-tech, I've created an original personality test with colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley, designed an award-winning publicity campaign based on psychology principles for Budget Rent-a-Car and headed up corporate human resources. Few of my present-day associates know of my so-called psychic past. And to those who knew me well before, the work I do today might seem mundane. But I still study the mysteries I encountered when young, and still believe there are connections we don't understand.

I'm the first to admit that striking correspondences between individual descriptions and targets in various experiments have sometimes seemed incredible. I've seen subjects describe stuffed animals, architectural details and hidden pictures with such fine detail it appeared impossible to describe them better. It seems difficult to fathom that such correspondences could be the product of coincidence—but many coincidences appear to be impossible, too.