Forbidden Science Dispatches #5

Keith Harary, SRI, Jonestown, and the Murder of Al and Jeannie Mills

Read Forbidden Science Dispatch #1 here.

As has been a running theme in my life and research, I once again find myself perilously close to Jonestown, Guyana. In a prior guest spot on the incomparable Programmed to Chill, Jimmy and I noted that Jonestown “was originally the site of a Union Carbide bauxite and manganese mine,” a company that curiously reappeared with strange consistency in the Point Pleasant and Indrid Cold weirdness.¹ Even within a previous Forbidden Science Dispatch, the subject of Jonestown (along with Patty Hearst and the SLA) teetered into view—but I did not want to wrestle with the subject too much at the time. Now, rather than two steps away from Jim Jones’ notorious death cult, some further entries in Jacques Vallee’s diaries bring Jonestown even closer to the UFO/paranormal sphere. On February 26^th, 1980, Vallee recalls a Stanford Research Institute associate telling him of inner turmoil in an anti-cult group:

Psychologist (Keith) Blue Harary, a colleague from the SRI psychic project, explained to me that a crisis was rocking the Human Freedom Center, leading to a split in this support group created by the families of converts to sects such as Jim Jones’ People Temple. Some members of this cult-fighting organization want to preserve religious freedom at all cost, while others don’t hesitate to kidnap the victims to de-program them. The Center, where he serves as a counselor, has difficulty collecting dues, even from grateful parents. Harary shares my concern about the new cults, which proliferate.²

In a bizarre twist of fate, that very night, the founders of the Human Freedom Center, Elmer and Deanna Mertle (aka Al and Jeannie Mills,) were murdered execution-style. Vallee writes of their murder after the fact, noting that “all three victims (…) died of a bullet in the forehead,” which seems to him to be “the signature of a professional assassin.”³ The trio was killed at the Center itself and there was no indication of forced entry or a burglary. Jeannie Mills had expressed prior concern about “a Peoples Temple hit squad (…) burst(ing) in and kill(ing)” those at the organization in retaliation for their fight against the cult.⁴ Another thorn in the Peoples Temple supporters’ side might have been the release of Mills’ 1979 book Six Years With God, a memoir documenting her and her family’s time with the notorious Jim Jones. Her testimony was nothing to sneeze at, Jeannie had at one point “directed publication of the Temple's literature” while Al served as “the Temple's chief photographer.”⁵ Writer Michael Meiers, however, notes: “It does not appear that the Millses were murdered for revealing some secret about Jones”—much written in the memoir was known previously—“but their deaths did serve to seriously discourage other would-be writers lest they suffer the same fate as these two noteworthy Temple adversaries.”⁶ A few weeks later, Vallee notices that “the media have dropped the Mills murder—as if it never happened.”⁷ The Human Freedom Center coming up in conversation directly prior to a horrific murder taking place on the premises is fascinating, specifically given that Harary, a counselor for the organization, was one of the “psychic subjects” being investigated by SRI.⁸ Later on, he would coauthor a remote viewing study, funded by the Defense Intelligence Agency, along with fellow SRI employees Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ.⁹ Strangely, Harary—while acknowledging that the bullet type matched those used by “professional assassins”—is cagey about what actually befell the Mills family:

For my own part, I believe that Jeannie and Al were victims of their fatalistic vision of reality and that whoever pulled the trigger completed a course of events that was set into motion years before. In their inability to otherwise put to rest their experiences in the cult, they had never really left the Peoples Temple.¹⁰

Harary’s turns of phrase are, for lack of a better term, evasive. If the Mills were killed by an assassin for the People’s Temple or a government agency, it was certainly not willed into being by their paranoia. Much the opposite, it turns their paranoia into a warranted state of mind, as extreme as it could be. Harary claims, for instance, that Jeannie Mills “was monitoring (his) personal telephone conversations at the Human Freedom Center from a line she had installed at her home up the street.”¹¹ However, I have my own paranoid hackles raised by Harary’s strange journey to the Human Freedom Center: He says that one day, compelled by the urge to know the human mind better, he transplanted himself from a “position in the psychiatry department of a New York medical center” to the Mills’ California facility while throwing all of his belongings in storage.¹² He fortuitously found the Center in need of a Director of Counseling, a position he was happy to take. I am not one to discount the human pursuit of knowledge nor the possibility of coincidence, but Harary being involved with the Human Freedom Center, seemingly on a whim, shortly before his involvement with SRI strikes me as a cause for alarm. Besides, even beyond Harary, the shadowy world of intelligence and top-secret military research never lingers far away—at least at first glance.

Indeed, the murder has been frequently examined as a CIA hit. It was former Peoples Temple attorney Timothy Stoen who had allegedly convinced Jeannie Mills to write a memoir of her experiences in Jonestown.¹³ Stoen had previously been “arrested in Berlin on a charge of espionage after he was caught photographing sensitive military installations near the Berlin Wall” and “accused of being a CIA spy and held for nine days before being deported to the United States.” It was after this point that he began to “lecture(…) against communism and joined forces with Jones.”¹⁴ Stoen insinuated himself into “the Concerned Relatives Group”—a subset of the Mills’ Human Freedom Center focused on those with relatives still in Guyana—soon after being one of Jim Jones’ closest aides and urged action from Congressman Leo Ryan. This initiated the horrific chain of events in Jonestown itself, including the death of his son, John Stoen. Jonestown researcher Michael Meiers believes that Stoen was one of several “agents of Jim Jones who were sent to infiltrate (the Concerned Relatives Group) to monitor and help control its progress.”¹⁵ The publication of Jeannie Mills’ book was also odd. Mills received a $30,000 advance to write the book but did not retain the copyright. Instead, “an unidentified entity” under the company MBR Investments held the rights to the book which soon went out of print.¹⁶ But curiously, and in closer proximity to Jacques Vallee, were other CIA-connected personalities near the Mills couple—unrelated to possible Jonestown spies.

The Human Freedom Center was an organization formed by the Mills couple as “a halfway house for cult defectors,” according to the aforementioned Keith Harary.¹⁷ While the Jonestown cult itself had fewer survivors after November 18^th, 1978, the Center also sought to give support to former cult members of all stripes, including the Unification Church and Hare Krishnas, amongst others. Notably unmentioned in Harary’s recollection of events in Psychology Today is treatment for ex-Scientologists. This is curious, because alongside Harary at the Stanford Research Institute were Scientologists serving as remote viewers and researchers, such as Hal Puthoff, Pat Price, and Ingo Swann.¹⁸ Granted, Scientology was viewed less as a cult in the time period but concern was growing: The Mills murder was also contemporary to Operation Snow White—Scientology’s attempt to infiltrate federal agencies and wipe its slate clean as concern over the organization was growing. An operation, I might add, that remote viewer Pat Price himself aided in.¹⁹ To add to this weirdness, SRI remote viewing researcher Russell Targ is also alleged to be involved with the Mills’ Human Freedom Center as a counselor—although this claim quickly becomes dubious.

In Peter Levenda’s 2006 book, Sinister Forces, Book Two: A Warm Gun, the author makes the assertion that Targ “by his own admission was involved with the Al and Jeannie Mertle group of Jonestown survivors.”²⁰ Furthermore, Targ is mentioned as a one-time Director of Counseling, just as Keith Harary claimed to be, leaving a few weeks prior to the Mertles (Millses) being murdered. However, the cited source of this claim, Russell Targ and Keith Harary’s 1984 book The Mind Race, does not indicate that Targ worked at the Human Freedom Center. Rather, I think the tidbit in Levenda’s book may be a misreading of a section explicitly written by Keith Harary:

In 1979, as Director of Counseling at the Human Freedom Center in Berkeley, California, I (K.H.) spent several months interviewing and counseling former cult members. (…) I worked at the (…) Center for almost a year, studying the Peoples Temple and other groups that made claims related to psychic functioning. After that, I accepted a position with SRI International, in order to return to laboratory psi research.²¹

While it is easy to miss the parenthetical initials indicating that Harary was writing, I nevertheless find it concerning that this claim was allowed to proliferate. Aside from its constant reappearance in a variety of conspiracy blogs, the earliest instance of this claim I can find is in researcher Alex Constantine’s book Virtual Government from 1997 where the author says, again citing The Mind Race, that “Russell Targ joined the Center in March 1979, four months after the Peoples Temple slaughter.”²² Like Levenda, Constantine writes that shortly after he left the Mills’ employ, they were assassinated in their home. I personally doubt that Targ filled this role as it not stated in the cited book The Mind Race and it does not match up with his time at SRI. Furthermore, Targ is not a psychologist, but Keith Harary is. I emailed Targ himself to get clarification but received no response. Nevertheless, examining the sources at play leads to further questions.

Everything attributed to Targ in Sinister Forces and Virtual Government is more clearly attributable to Keith Harary, as it matches his recollections in The Mind Race and the Psychology Today article. Harary claims to have left the Human Freedom Center for SRI shortly before the Mills’ murder after spending a little under a year at their organization as a counselor, as both Levenda and Constantine say that Targ did. However, in the Forbidden Science diary entry on the day of the murder, Vallee implies that Harary is still an active counselor with the group, relaying internal schisms within the organization. Despite coming to a tentative conclusion that Targ was not involved with the group, I am now wondering what Harary’s status with the Center was at the time of the murder. Was Vallee misremembering that Harary had left the Mills’ employ or was he still involved with the group in some capacity? If yes to the latter, why has that detail been reported differently by Harary himself? While thinking that Targ was the SRI-connected individual at the Human Freedom Center, there is nevertheless a striking observation from Alex Constantine: He writes of Jonestown researcher Michael Meiers finding that “an associate of the Millses reported to police that a former psychiatrist with The Human Freedom Center was responsible for the murders but (…) no warrant was issued.”²³ Did Harary know more about who had killed the Mills than stated? He would later inform Vallee over lunch in September 1980 that the Mills’ son Eddie being under suspicion for the murder, but Vallee notes that “he was not arrested, nor has the murder weapon been found,” implying that Harary too may have had qualms about his guilt.²⁴ Eddie Mills was again suspected of the murder in 2005 with police alleging that gunpowder residue was found on his hands at the time of the slaying—but again, no charges were filed.²⁵ If Harary had some kind of knowledge or impression about the real killer, such factors might help elucidate his bizarre claim that the couple and their daughter were “victims of their fatalistic vision of reality”—an assertion that leaves more questions than answers. But, as with everything in the Jonestown nexus, the only foregone conclusion is the sudden appearance of a splitting headache.

Thank you for reading Getting Spooked. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The latter get access to over a dozen archived articles and directly support the continuation of this publication. I also started a referral program that rewards archive access to those who share the newsletter with others, so be sure to tell any friends who might find this work interesting. Email me at gettingspooked@protonmail.com with any questions, comments, recommendations, leads, or paranormal stories. You can find me on Twitter at @TannerFBoyle1, on Bluesky at @tannerfboyle.bsky.social, or on Instagram at @gettingspooked. Special thanks to The Anomalist and UFO Conjectures for linking to this newsletter’s previous article. Until next time, stay spooked.

1. Judge, Jim. “The Black Hole of Guyana.” Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas & Hidden History ed. Jim Keith. Portland: Feral House, 1993. Page 138. (Original source of this claim is Shiva Naipaul’s Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy, 1981, of which I do not have a copy.)

2. Vallee, Jacques. Forbidden Science 3: On the Trail of Hidden Truths – The Journals of Jacques Vallee, 1980-1989. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2012. Page 14. Available here.

3. Ibid.

4. Harary, Keith. “The Truth About Jonestown.” Psychology Today. 1 March 1992. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/199203/the-truth-about-jonestown.

5. Meiers, Michael. Was Jonestown a CIA Experiment?: A Review of the Evidence. Lampeter: Mellen House, 1988. Page 268. https://archive.org/details/was-jonestown-a-cia-medical-experiment.

6. Ibid., page 470.

7. Vallee, Jacques. Forbidden Science 3: On the Trail of Hidden Truths – The Journals of Jacques Vallee, 1980-1989. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2012. Page 15.

8. Vallee, Jacques. Forbidden Science 2: California Hermetica – The Journals of Jacques Vallee, 1970-1979. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2008. Page 486.

9. Puthoff, Harold E., Russell Targ, Beverly S. Humphrey, and Keith Harary. “Targeting Requirements Task.” Stanford Research Institute. Prepared for the Defense Intelligence Agency. May 1982. http://files.afu.se/Downloads/Documents/USA%20-%20CIA/Stargate/STARGATE04_176/Part0001/CIA-RDP96-00788R001300320001-3.pdf.

10. Harary, Keith. “The Truth About Jonestown.” Psychology Today. 1 March 1992. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/199203/the-truth-about-jonestown.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. Meiers, Michael. Was Jonestown a CIA Experiment?: A Review of the Evidence. Lampeter: Mellen House, 1988. Page 268. https://archive.org/details/was-jonestown-a-cia-medical-experiment.

14. Ibid., page 270.

15. Ibid., page 268.

16. Ibid., page 469.

17. Harary, Keith. “The Truth About Jonestown.” Psychology Today. 1 March 1992. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/199203/the-truth-about-jonestown.

18. Mörck, Nemo. “Third Eye Spies: A True Story of CIA Psychic Spying, produced by Russell Targ and Lance Mungia.” Society for Psychical Research. 20 February 2023. https://www.spr.ac.uk/book-review/third-eye-spies-true-story-cia-psychic-spying-produced-russell-targ-and-lance-mungia.

19. Kress, Kenneth A. “Parapsychology in Intelligence: A Personal Review and Conclusions.” Journal of Scientific Exploration 13, no. 1. 1999. https://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/volume-13-number-1-1999. Page 83.

20. Levenda, Peter. Sinister Forces: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft, Book Two: A Warm Gun. Walterville: TrineDay, 2006. Page 188.

21. Targ, Russell and Keith Harary. The Mind Race: Understanding and Using Psychic Abilities. New York: Villard Books, 1984. Page 115-118.

22. Constantine, Alex. Virtual Government: CIA Mind Control Operations in America. Port Townsend: Feral House, 1997. Page 114.

23. Meiers, Michael. Was Jonestown a CIA Experiment?: A Review of the Evidence. Lampeter: Mellen House, 1988. Page 470. https://archive.org/details/was-jonestown-a-cia-medical-experiment.

24. Vallee, Jacques. Forbidden Science 3: On the Trail of Hidden Truths – The Journals of Jacques Vallee, 1980-1989. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2012. Page 47.

25. Lee, Henry K. “Retired officer works old cases -- to no avail / Suspects arrested through Lopes' work haven't gone to trial.” San Francisco Chronicle. 10 December 2005. https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/berkeley-retired-officer-works-old-cases-to-2589566.php.