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Decades of séance files burned
The fire came a year and a half after de Mohrenschildt's death in Palm Beach. Puharich didn't talk to the police, but he later wrote that he believed it was the CIA. Then he went into hiding. He had published before the fire, so his account survived even though his notes did not.
He died in 1995 after a fall down a staircase. By the end of the 1970s, everyone in his world had lost their jobs, their reputations, and their funding, and some had lost their minds. Every person in the Council of Nine, and every person who could name them, was gone.
How did Puharich's account survive the fire?
Puharich had published his account before the fire, so the story reached readers through his books rather than through his notes. His book Uri, published by Doubleday in 1974, recounted the Geller sessions and the Nine messages. Earlier books, including The Sacred Mushroom in 1959 and Beyond Telepathy in 1962, covered his drug and extrasensory perception research.
Why are archive fires so devastating?
Paper records often exist as a single copy, so a fire can erase them with no backup to restore. In July 1973 a fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis burned for 22 days. It destroyed an estimated 16 to 18 million military personnel files. About 80 percent of the Army's records for personnel discharged between 1912 and 1960 were lost.
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