The Children's Crusade, Pt. 1

Belita Adair, the Space Kids, and Andrija Puharich's Faraday Cage

The Children’s Crusade was a semi-legendary social and religious movement in 13th century France. As the story goes, in the summer of 1212 a shepherd boy named Stephen of Cloyes began preaching a new Crusade — one that would conquer the Holy Land for Christendom by converting Muslims peacefully, rather than with the sword. Carrying a letter he claimed was written by Jesus himself, Stephen gathered other fervent youths, many of whom were said to perform miracles and in whose wake followed divine omens, leading the group through France to Paris to meet with King Phillip II, and then on to Cologne, Germany. There the story splinters, and depending on the account the group was either led through the Alps on to Genoa by a tau cross bearing man named Nicholas of Cologne, sold into slavery, or shipwrecked trying to transit the Mediterranean. One thing is certain: the Children’s Crusade was a disaster for the children who participated, leaving them nearly a thousand kilometres from home, destitute, or worse. The historicity of these events is less important than the effect such displays of religious enthusiasm had on political will for launching new military Crusades, as well as how they ignited the Crusader imagination. In 1218, one year after the last Children’s Crusaders ended their quest, Pope Innocent III declared the Fifth Crusade, which ultimately failed to take the Holy Land from the Ayyubid Sultanate.

It wasn’t until the mid 20th century that a new Crusade succeeded in regaining control of the Holy Land. This new Crusade, like those of the Middle Ages, deploys religious fervour to motivate soldiers and discipline societies into supporting atrocities. In addition to Jewish supremacism and Christian Zionism, New Age beliefs play a crucial ideological role in promoting the modern Zionist conquest of the Levant, beginning during the regional wars Israel fought in the late 1960s and early 1970s and continuing into the present. In the Age of Aquarius, when many people in the developed West lost their traditional religious views, especially the youth, Crusader spiritual warfare began to meld angels with aliens, biblical miracles with psychic powers, and prophecy with transmissions from a massive artificially intelligent computer orbiting somewhere out in space.

In the early 1970s, a young Israeli paratrooper and illusionist named Uri Geller shot to international superstardom through television appearances in England and the United States demonstrating his supposedly genuine psychic powers. Geller reached the heights of fame possible domestically within Israel by 1970, at which point he was meeting privately with Brigadier General Aharon Yariv, head of military intelligence, bending spoons for Meir Amit, the former chief of Mossad, and taking defence minister Moshe Dayan on dowsing expeditions for archaeological artefacts from biblical times.¹ In 1971 Geller was recruited by infamous medical doctor, parapsychologist, and US Army psychological warfare expert Andrija Puharich to have his powers studied at universities and national laboratories in the United States, bringing him to global attention. According to Puharich, shortly after Geller’s English TV appearances, children around the world began manifesting their own psychic powers.² Some parents reached out to him for advice, confused and concerned for their children’s well-being. Others Puharich sought out through his own channels.

This is the story of one of those children, her strange journey from musical prodigy in the California New Age scene to psychic lab rat in New York and London, and her conversion to Satanism and Nazi aesthetics later in life.

Belita playing the Adair family piano. From FATE Magazine, May 1978, p. 69.

On 13 December, 1975, an elderly Jiddu Krishnamurti met a young musical prodigy named Belita Adair at his cottage in Ojai, California.³ Krishnamurti, then 80, was in his youth hailed by the Theosophical Society as a child-messiah, the vessel for Lord Maitreya, the World Teacher who would usher in a new era of global spiritual awakening, until he split with the organization in 1929 to pursue his own philosophical and spiritual thought. Belita, then 14, was a rising star in the New Age scene around Ojai. Having composed some 200 piano pieces by the time she was 12, Belita’s musical gifts were supplemented with psychic flair, as she claimed to channel the spirits of composers such as Beethoven and Chopin, transmit lost songs from ancient Persian kingdoms, and sing in dead languages during her performances as a "musical medium”.⁴ Curiously, one language she was purported to channel was a 13th century dialect from southern France, probably a reference to Occitan, a language spoken by the Cathars.⁵ The Cathars were a gnostic Christian sect considered heretical by the Catholic Church. In 1209 Pope Innocent III declared a domestic Crusade to eradicate them from the Languedoc region of southern France, just three years before the Children’s Crusade.

Krishnamurti and Belita lived parallel lives: both were first recruited into nominally psychic experimentation at 14 while they were experiencing health and family traumas, and both were groomed by adult occultists who sought to use them as vehicles for cultural transformation as well as their own enrichment. But while Krishnamurti's biography is famous, and he gained renown for his writings and lectures later in life, Belita's story is obscure despite being one of the most detailed, bizarre, and credible accounts from a test subject of the notorious parapsychology research programs of the 1970s.

Belita's experience with Andrija Puharich in particular sheds light on the "Space Kids" project. From 1975-1977 Puharich recruited 36 gifted young people (mostly in their teens, though some were as young as 8 and others were in their 20s) dubbed the “Space Kids” or the “Geller Kids”, training them to develop their latent "psychic" powers while indoctrinating them in a syncretic fusion of millenarian zionism, Babylonian star-worship, and transhumanism.⁶ The few other existing first-hand accounts of this program are generally glowing, praising Puharich's care for his test subjects and extolling the benefits of psychic development for the Space Kids. However, even these accounts betray their authors' misgivings about Puharich's methods and way of discarding people when they stopped being useful. H.G.M. “Bep” Hermans, Andrija's second wife, writing about their son, said “Andy never told me what it meant to be a ‘space kid’ until recently. If he had told me back then that each kid was hypnotized in order to go back to his ‘parent civilization,’ I would probably have flipped, and kept him home.”⁷ Heidi Jurka, who worked as one of Puharich's assistants in the mid 1970s and became a Space Kid herself, remarked how Andrija cut her off abruptly after the mysterious fire that at his Ossining home laboratory that nearly killed her and two other ‘spacies’.

Many survivors are dismissed because of minor inconsistencies in their testimony and this is doubly true when their story includes elements of high strangeness and the uncanny. Belita clearly believes that she experienced genuinely paranormal phenomena, as did many of the people around her, and skeptical readers may dismiss her story out of hand as a consequence. However, the existence of such phenomena is a matter of interpretation, whereas the reality of the events themselves is a matter of the evidentiary record. It is important to note that I have been able to verify most elements of Belita’s telling of her own life through independent sources, cross-checking details against other accounts of Puharich’s dealings in this period, as well as the photographs she included on her website showing her with Puharich, Ira Einhorn, and other key players in the 1970s psychic milieu. Newspaper articles, magazine profiles, other people’s memoirs and other sources all confirm that the events Belita describes in her blog post “MK ULTRA EXPERIMENTS--Dark Secrets from the Faraday Cage” really happened. As we shall see in her bizarre and dangerous encounter with Ira Einhorn in August 1977, it is possible that Belita misidentified or misremembered meeting specific individuals.

Belita in the Adair home in Beverly Hills, aged five in 1966. She says she was “possessed” while playing the piano in this photograph.

Born in Santa Monica in November 1961, Belita was raised in Beverly Hills, before her family moved to Ojai sometime in the early 1970s. The Adairs were a performing family, as her mother Stephanie and older sister Tatiana were professional ice skaters who extensively toured Europe and the US, so once Belita demonstrated her musical gifts she began performing around Ojai, playing in organ services for the Theosophical Society linked Liberal Catholic Church. Tatiana was drawn to New Age thought and the three Adair women attended classes at the nearby Krotona Institute of Theosophy, especially interested in lectures given by acclaimed occultist and writer Geoffrey Hodson. According to a Krotona Institute internal history, Belita’s claims of channeling her music through “angels” caused a “great deal of upheaval” between the Institute’s Board of Directors and the leadership of Ojai’s Liberal Catholic Church, who believed her to be “possessed by darkness”, ominously foreshadowing the direction her musical and spiritual development would take in later life.⁸ The Adairs were eventually asked to leave the Church, and this appears to be what led to their meeting with Krishnamurti, at which they discussed Belita’s connection to the “angelic world”. Belita went so far as to claim that Hodson warned her family that Church leaders including a Deacon were plotting to kill her by planting a bomb in the organ, set to go off the next time she was scheduled to play.⁹

Tatiana & Belita with Geoffrey Hodson & his wife Sandra in Ojai, April 1972.

Though this accusation may sound fanciful, the possibility that Belita was at least threatened with violence can’t be dismissed out of hand because the Liberal Catholic Church is no ordinary religious institution. The LCC was founded in 1916 by leading Theosophists J. I. Wedgwood and Charles W. Leadbeater, both of whom were accused of abusing children under their care.¹⁰ Although Leadbeater and Wedgwood both used the title of Bishop, their ordinations were consecrated irregularly, outside of the official Roman Catholic line of apostolic succession, making them episcopus vagans — wandering bishops. Wandering bishops are associated with all manner of unseemly activities from organized crime to Satanism, and working as intelligence assets. One notorious wandering bishop who combined all of these was David Ferrie, a CIA pilot who ran missions into Cuba working with anti-Castro terrorist groups, operated a private cancer laboratory out of his New Orleans home, and was rumoured to dabble in black magic, as well has having played a prominent role in the JFK assassination.¹¹

Throughout her life Belita claimed that her powers began to manifest following an encounter with supernatural beings when she was two years old. In childhood she called them “angels”, in adolescence they became “faeries”, and in later life she described seeing a “robed horned figure” looming over her bed as a three year old, after which her musical gifts blossomed.¹²

Belita, Tatiana, Hugh Macdonald, and the theatrical agent at Stanford University, August 1975.

In the summer of 1975 Belita was discovered by an Ojai-based theatre agent who took an interest in her gifts and connected her to unnamed Hollywood producers with offices at MGM Studios. The producers promised to jumpstart her career through talk show bookings and other inducements, on the condition that Belita had her powers tested and validated by university researchers.¹³ According to Belita, the first stop was Thelma Moss’s laboratory at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. However, Dr. Barry Taff, who worked with Moss at that time, told me that their lab was not allowed to work with minors due to federal restrictions regarding children’s consent to medical experimentation.¹⁴ Because Belita only mentions the Moss lab briefly, it is likely that nothing came of whatever outreach the theatre producer made to UCLA. Afterwards, she went to Stanford for an intense battery of experiments led by an unnamed psychology professor. She did however take a photograph at Stanford with someone identified as “professor Hugh Macdonald” on her trip there in 1975.

While there was no professor Macdonald in the Stanford Psychology Department that year, there was a graduate student named Hugh Macdonald working as an instrumentation specialist for famed psychologist Ernst Hilgard at Stanford’s Hypnosis Laboratory at that time who bore a striking resemblance to the man in Belita’s photograph. Macdonald coauthored a number of papers on hypnosis with Hilgard and earned his MA in psychology in 1976, for which his thesis was titled “The effect of amplitude on the hemispheric symmetry of EEG Alpha”. Intriguingly, one 1979 study that Macdonald worked on alongside Hilgard experimented with the hypnotic induction of deafness.¹⁵ Given that Belita’s talents were primarily musical, it is notable that Hilgard’s Hypnosis Laboratory was experimenting with sensory manipulation via hypnotic suggestion. Although he was prolific in the 1970s, there is no record of Macdonald publishing or otherwise continuing his academic research after 1979. He went on to have a career as a computer technician and professional stage magician, an interest that was sparked after one of his professors at Stanford suggested he take up magic.¹⁶ I reached out to Macdonald over the phone and by email for comment and received no response.

Possibly under Macdonald and Hilgard’s direction, Belita claims that the Stanford shrinks tested her language capacity against foreign students and ancient language experts, had her channeled music evaluated by a musicologist, among other parapsychological experiments. On one occasion, however, her mom, sister, and the professor weren’t allowed into the testing room with Belita. She was taken alone by a group of strangers in lab coats, hustled down to a basement, and locked in a dark closet-like compartment. Inside, she was “mentally bombarded” with bright strobe lights while insults, screaming, and a machine-generated “funny piercing noise” blared through an intercom that left her nauseous. She stumbled out of the locked room pale, weak, and fainting, and afterwards “was never the same”. She soon became anorexic and lost weight, dropping from 110lbs to 80lbs in a few months. Around this same time she developed lupus, a condition that would plague her for the rest of her life.¹⁷

This is when Puharich first contacted the Adairs, at a time when both Belita and her mother were experiencing health crises (her mother was undergoing a hysterectomy) and the trauma of being treated like a lab rat. It is unclear how Puharich learned of the Adairs and obtained their contact information but it was probably through his contacts in the parapsychology research community. It may have been through his relationships in the entertainment industry as well, and there’s a distinct possibility that Belita was being funnelled by her own Hollywood contacts from above board university parapsychology research into the seedy private sector led by colourful figures like Puharich. Grilling Belita’s mother for a timeline of all her daughter’s symptoms, Puharich made promise after promise and invited the Adairs to stay with him in Ossining, saying that he’d take the burden of Belita being a sick child off of the family and help develop her psychic gifts. Desperate for a solution, the Adairs travelled to snowy New York from Ojai in February 1977.

Puharich treated them warmly at first, but when the Adairs gave him a $500 cheque from their Aunt Marie to cash for them, which was to pay their living expenses, Puharich simply pocketed it and never gave them the money, noting that it would pay for his expenses. This incident set the tone for the rest of their relationship, during which Puharich would consistently string the Adairs along, exploiting Belita and Tatiana, preying on their mother’s hopes, and like the Ojai theatre producer and Hollywood executives, making promises of his own to help jumpstart her musical career. From the first day they arrived Puharich put Belita through a gruelling routine of hours long channeling sessions, held throughout the day and night in his “airless” Faraday cage setup. Puharich developed his Faraday cage for conducting ostensibly ESP experiments back in 1950s, while he was leading The Round Table Foundation. According to him, the design was meant to insulate the psychic subject from outside stimuli and sources of information, such as radio waves.

Belita described the experience of channeling the spirits of dead composers during her musical performances as joyful and energizing, almost like a flow state she entered while playing music. In stark contrast, Belita said these marathon channeling sessions felt like Puharich was “pumping me for information”. She would lay on the floor with her head on a cushion in Puharich’s lap inside the “airless” Faraday cage. While hypnotizing her, Puharich would rub the centre of her forehead painfully hard with his index finger. After hours of channelling, Belita sometimes stumbled out of the Faraday cage dizzy, nauseous, and delirious, with an oily residue coating her hair that her mother complained about. These symptoms weren’t due to hypnotic dissociation and claustrophobia alone, as decades later Belita realized she was being dosed with a topical drug.¹⁸

This was almost certainly an ointment made from amanita muscaria, the red-capped white-spotted mushroom commonly known as fly agaric. Used for millennia by Old World shamans to enter trance states, Puharich wrote extensively about his experiments using amanita muscaria on psychic subjects in his book The Sacred Mushroom. His conclusion was that the mushroom had no effect on average people, but dramatically amplified the psychic abilities of gifted “intuitives”. The symptoms Belita described match those of acute exposure to amanita muscaria. Under the influence of Puharich’s hypnosis and the deliriant mushroom, Belita would channel scientific formulae, atomic numbers, weapons designs, and entities from a planet realm she only knew as the Sabian World.

Belita and Andrija Puharich at his estate in Ossining, NY, February 1977.

We will explore that world, Belita’s channeling sessions, and her later musical career in the next article. We will travel into the past to recover the lost light of the last pagan star-worshipers, glimpse dark futures of a galactic Reich, and learn to read the Cosmic Clock Code.And we will confront a thorny question: why did Belita, whose family was Catholic, claim to be a Jewish pagan later in life and then embrace Nazi themes in her Black Metal albums like 2017’s Necrotic Entity?¹⁹

“Nothing can stop the Aufseherinnen [female concentration camp guards]… brutal stomping boots, all those that oppose the empire will be crushed, reaching cold out of the ropes of the afterlife even then shall they rise, iron fist overseers, woman dedicated to the SS operation, 88! Lust for blood, the art of genocide…” - Belita Adair, “SS Aufseherinnen”

Lyric sheet to Belita’s Nazi-themed 2017 album Necrotic Entity.

Thank you for reading Getting Spooked and thanks to Reid for bringing us our first guest article. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read, consider becoming a regular subscriber to get posts sent to your inbox. Become a paid subscriber to read dozens of archived posts, listen to members-only podcast episodes, or ask questions to be answered in Q&As. It is the best way to 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. The leaderboard tab is public if you want the bragging rights of your referral numbers.

Thanks to The Daily Grail and The Anomalist for linking to “UFOs, Drones, Glitter, and Radar Chaff”. Email Reid at terse-hanger-0e@icloud.com or find him on Bluesky at @seriations.bsky.social. Contact the publication at gettingspooked@protonmail.com for any questions, comments, recommendations, leads, or paranormal stories. You can find Tanner on Twitter at @TannerFBoyle1, on Bluesky at @tannerfboyle.bsky.social, or on Instagram at @gettingspooked. Until next time, stay spooked.

1. Jacobsen, Annie. Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government’s Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis, Chapter 6. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2017.

2. Puharich, Andrija. “The Meaning of UFOs”, January 1979, p. 5., Stein and Day records; Box 54; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.

3. Zimbalist, Mary. “Issue 38—October 1, 1975 to December 31, 1975.” In the Presence of Krishnamurti: The Memoirs of Mary Zimbalist. 2018. https://inthepresenceofk.org/issues/issue-38/.

4. “Church to present program of music.” Ventura County Star. 2 December 1972. https://www.newspapers.com/article/ventura-county-star/153864646/.

5. Crenshaw, James. “Belita Adair’s Musical Mediumship.” FATE Magazine, May 1978, p. 71.

6. Over email, Andy Puharich clarified that there were actually two phases of the space kids program, each with different cohorts. I have determined that Andrija studied many more than the core 36, and Belita was unaware that there were other children involved at all.

7. Hermans, H.G.M. and Andrija Puharich. Memories of a Maverick. Pi Publications, p. 132.

8. Ross, Joseph. “History.” Krotona Archive. https://krotonaarchive.com/PDF/History.pdf.

9. Adair, Belita. “MK ULTRA EXPERIMENTS--Dark Secrets from the Faraday Cage.” Satanic Church of the Dead. Undated, available via Wayback Machine 28 August 2022. https://web.archive.org/web/20220828155720/http:/www.satanicchurchofthedead.com/belitaadairmkultra.html. (Most details in this article about Belita’s childhood come from this blog post recounting her experience as a psychic test subject. Unless otherwise stated this is also the source of most photographs I’ve included.)

10. Rumours hounded both men and Leadbeater admitted to enough in court to be temporarily forced out of the Theosophical Society in 1906. See “The 1906 Scandal: (iv) Leadbeater’s Admissions”.

11. See Edward T. Haslem’s Dr. Mary’s Monkey, Chapter 5: A Bishop in His Heart (Walterville: TrineDay, 2007).

12. “Satanic Corpse Interview.” Propaganda. December 2022. http://www.propaganda666.com/releases/SATANIC_CORPSE_interview.html.

13. Adair, Belita. “MK ULTRA EXPERIMENTS--Dark Secrets from the Faraday Cage.” Satanic Church of the Dead. Undated, available via Wayback Machine 28 August 2022. https://web.archive.org/web/20220828155720/http:/www.satanicchurchofthedead.com/belitaadairmkultra.html.

14. Email correspondence between author and Barry Taff.

15. Crawford, Helen J., Hugh Macdonald, and Ernest R. Hilgard. “Hypnotic deafness: A psychophysical study of responses to tone intensity as modified by hypnosis.” The American Journal of Psychology Vol. 92, No. 2 (Jun., 1979), pp. 193-214.

16. Goodman, Tim. “Magic in the air: Three hundred magicians convene in Palo Alto.” The Peninsula Times Tribune (Palo Alto, California). 22 June 1987, p 73. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-peninsula-times-tribune-hugh-macdona/159493495/.

17. Adair, Belita. “MK ULTRA EXPERIMENTS--Dark Secrets from the Faraday Cage.” Satanic Church of the Dead. Undated, available via Wayback Machine 28 August 2022. https://web.archive.org/web/20220828155720/http:/www.satanicchurchofthedead.com/belitaadairmkultra.html.

18. Ibid.

19. Crenshaw, James. “Belita Adair’s Musical Mediumship.” FATE Magazine, May 1978, p. 71.