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Same equation, a thousand miles apart
A hotel mix-up
When the money ran out, Puharich went to Mexico looking for sacred mushrooms to open his mind. At his hotel, his room was accidentally given to an American couple from Michigan, Dr. Charles Lougheed and his wife. The Lougheeds were contactees, people who spoke for space intelligences, so they kept in touch.
A month after Puharich came home, a letter from Lougheed arrived. It described a young Arizona contactee named George Hunt Williamson, who had no connection to the Roundtable and had never heard of it. Williamson had still received the same transmission from the Nine on the same nights in 1952 and 1953.
The equation
On the last page, the letter laid out the Einstein-Lorentz transformation, the physics equation that describes how time and space distort near the speed of light. The Nine had spoken that same equation through Vinod. After that, Puharich stopped doubting, and he spent the rest of his life following the instructions from that room.
How does the Einstein-Lorentz transformation bend time?
Hendrik Lorentz wrote the equations in 1904 to explain why experiments could not detect motion through the supposed ether, and Einstein derived them from first principles in his 1905 paper on special relativity. They show that a clock moving at high speed ticks slower than a stationary one, and that a moving object shortens along its direction of travel. The size of the effect is set by a factor of 1 divided by the square root of one minus v squared over c squared. At 90 percent of the speed of light, that factor is about 2.3.
Why did contactees flourish in the 1950s?
The modern flying saucer era began in June 1947, when pilot Kenneth Arnold reported nine shiny objects near Mount Rainier. By 1952, George Adamski was claiming he had met a Venusian in the California desert, and his 1953 book Flying Saucers Have Landed sold widely. Many contactee messages warned about nuclear weapons, which matched the anxieties of the early atomic age. Adamski's book was co-written with the British author Desmond Leslie.
Why did Westerners travel to Mexico for mushrooms?
Mazatec healers in Oaxaca had used psilocybin mushrooms in night-long ceremonies for generations. Banker R. Gordon Wasson took part in one in 1955 and described it in a 1957 Life magazine article. The article drew a stream of Western visitors to the village of Huautla de Jimenez. Chemist Albert Hofmann isolated psilocybin from the mushrooms in 1958.
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