The Children's Crusade, Pt. 2
An Interview with Parapsychologist Hugh Macdonald on Belita Adair's Psychic Powers, Navy Psych Research, and the Laboratory of Philip Zimbardo
Find more of Reid’s work in the Table of Discontents.
In August 1975, Belita Adair, her mother Stephanie, and older sister Tatiana stayed for a long weekend at Stanford University. This was no campus tour; rather, Belita was there to be studied herself, an idea that the theatre producer who’d discovered her had for publicity and validation of her psychic and musical gifts. These informal psychic experiments were led by Hugh Macdonald, then a Stanford graduate student getting his MA in psychology. Until now the only source available on what happened during these experiments was Belita’s own blogpost and scattered comments online and in interviews. Although I have been able to corroborate much of Belita’s story, the amount of trauma, frequent altered states, hypnosis, and drugging she was subjected to during her time as one of Puharich’s test subjects throws some of her recollections into uncertainty.
Luckily, earlier this year I was able to get in contact with Hugh and he generously agreed to an interview to discuss Belita’s case. His memories shine some light on this murky chapter in the history of psychology and parapsychology, clarifying what exactly happened during those three days in August while raising even more questions.
Prior to his graduate work Hugh had obtained a BA in electrical engineering. In the mid 1970s, during his MA, he was working as an instrumentation specialist under psychologist Ernest Hilgard’s Hypnosis Laboratory at Stanford, initially studying biofeedback on meditating subjects. Hilgard was a highly influential psychologist who pioneered formal experimental research into hypnotic pain management. Curiously, Hilgard also served on a US National Academy of Science panel that reviewed the Air Force’s 1968 Condon Report on UFOs, which studied the results of Project Blue Book among other sources. More worryingly, he also served on the Scientific Advisory Committee for the infamous False Memory Syndrome Foundation.12
During and after obtaining his MA, Hugh published a series of papers with Hilgard and other researchers at the Hypnosis Lab, with such titles as “The reality of hypnotic analgesia: A comparison of highly hypnotizables with simulators” and “Pain and dissociation in the cold pressor test”, but stopped after 1979 to pursue a career as a computer technician and professional stage magician, which he continues to practice today.34 A number of the hypnotic pain management studies specifically were funded by contracts Hilgard’s laboratory had with the United States Air Force, a connection we’ll explore in future articles. In the sections below any statements in quotations are verbatim quotes from my interview with Hugh, while paraphrased quotes have been condensed for readability.
Speaking with Hugh over the phone, he explained how he came to meet Belita: “I studied [Belita] gratis. Well not gratis, [I did it] for avocados. Nobody at the department would take a look at her, but I agreed to.” Rather than being part of a funded project, the experiments were done at the producer’s request, possibly as part of a pitch to establish he psychic bona fides in preparation for a film career. Belita herself recounted that Sam Peckinpah had wanted to make a film staring her, with Belita playing both “a devil and an angel” when she met him at his offices at MGM studios earlier that year. However, as discussed in Part One, these offers could have been an inducement to rope Belita into psychic research in the first place. On the other hand, Hugh characterized Belita’s mother being “like Judy Garland’s mother”—a high pressure stage mother with equally high expectations, so the push for stardom was certainly a factor regardless. In this respect some of Hugh’s statements to me about the image Belita’s mother and the producer tried to create for her are notable. He mentioned that Belita was in fact around 13 when she visited his lab, not 10 as her mother stated. The theatre producer intimated to him that this was a ruse to make her talents and demeanour seem more impressive, “like a real child star”. He noted her behaviour had a tendency to split: “she would be evanescent, not typical of a kid her age, answering questions in a floaty ‘ohh yes I can do that’ voice [...] then she would snap and be an ornery creature like a normal ten year old.”5
That isn’t exceptional for an early adolescent, least of all one under the high stresses of show business, a domineering stage mother, and being a psychic lab rat. But it does foreshadow the fractured personality Belita demonstrated later in life, careening between psychic pop starlet, pagan-curious self-identified Jew, and finally neo-Nazi high priestess of Satan. Hugh couldn’t recall much about the theatre producer himself, only that “he had avocados from his trees in Ojai and he wanted to get rich off of this psychic he’d found. And he said he was Jewish, and that he knew Hebrew, and [Belita] spoke Hebrew just like he did at his bar mitzvah.”
The strangest part of Belita’s recounting of her experience at Stanford was being taken to a dark room by strangers in lab coats, who didn’t permit Hugh or her mother to observe or intervene as she was “mentally bombarded” with insults while a strange machine pummeled her with high-pitched sounds. When I asked Hugh about this terrifying incident he said he had no knowledge of it, and probably would have known if anything of the sort was going on that weekend. But in explaining the experimental procedures and facilities they used he revealed an ominous detail: “I don’t remember this event [...] I don’t think we ever tried hypnosis on her, or brainwaves, but we did the music and language tests [...] we used [another researcher’s] interview room, it had a nice soundproof room. He was a social psychologist, Zimbardo if you know him, he did the prison study?” This was completely new information to me: most of the experiments on Belita were conducted in interview rooms and other social psychology laboratory facilities run by the infamous Philip Zimbardo.67
Zimbardo is best known for being the lead researcher on what’s popularly known as the Stanford Prison Experiment, a social psychology experiment sponsored by the Office of Naval Research. This particular experiment is what brought Zimbardo infamy for the abuse subjects were subjected to in a prison role-play simulation that lasted six days, as well as the “flawed” experimental design that pushed subjects in the role of guards to become abusive.8 However, considering other extreme forms of behaviour modification the US Navy was experimenting with at this time, Zimbardo may have delivered precisely what his sponsors wanted. The most disturbing example was revealed, unusually, in July 1975 by British newspaper The Sunday Times. Quoting at length from remarks made at a NATO conference in Oslo by Dr. Thomas Narut, a PhD psychologist working for the Navy, the paper reported on a secret “combat readiness” program training assassins to “heighten their dissociative powers with regards to killing”. This was done by bolting recruits’ heads into a clamp and forcing their eyelids open while playing a series of graphic films, then asking them questions about details from each film to guide their focus. These included scenes of a circumcision performed with a blunt knife and a saw mill worker cutting off his finger. Narut claimed the successful trainees were stationed at US embassies around the world to be on-call hitmen. Curiously, he stated the busiest time for the program had been during the end of 1973 at the outset of the fourth Arab-Israeli war. The Navy, of course, denied everything in The Times report and attributed the story to Narut having “personal problems.”91011
In this context, the fact that Zimbardo and his personnel controlled the lab infrastructure Hugh was using raises the plausibility that Belita really was subjected to sonic and emotional torture while confined to some sort of sensory deprivation room. Zimbardo’s Navy funding and the Hilgard laboratory’s support from the Air Force further suggests someone from the military may have been keeping tabs on their work much more closely than simple contract management required, given how intensely scientists were surveilled during the Cold War by multiple domestic counterintelligence agencies.
While Hugh didn’t recall any incident like what Belita describes and thinks it implausible that she could’ve been separated from him and her mother in such a way during the three days she was at Stanford, Zimbardo’s control of the lab should raise alarm bells for a few reasons. First, Zimbardo himself was willing to put his test subjects in dangerous and deeply unethical situations. The Stanford Prison Experiment alone is evidence enough of that. Second, his connections to Navy behaviour modification give him further motive to use parapsychology research (like that Hugh was conducting) as cover for further otherwise illegal or sensitive projects. Third, since Hugh’s work with Belita was informal, not subject to the usual funding strings, Zimbardo and his people may have had opportunity to take advantage of her presence in their lab. Fourth, Hugh specifically told me that the room next to the social psychology interview room in Zimbardo’s lab was a soundproofed chamber complete with the EEG equipment necessary for doing brainwave analysis on subjects. Taken together this establishes means and motive for Zimbardo or his people to have done precisely what Belita claims happened: confined her to a small soundproof room, subjected her to alternating sensory deprivation and overload, and monitored her with a strange machine. It’s important to note how at the time, as a child, Belita would have no knowledge of Zimbardo’s modus operandi or what to expect from a brainwave monitoring setup, so the details she mentions in her blog are strong indication that the events truly happened.
Unfortunately, Hugh does not have his notes or data obtained from any of the experiments Belita participated in that summer. He noted that since the tests didn’t lead to the publication of a research paper it’s unlikely any records still survive, but he did recall giving a short write-up report to the theatre agent who arranged everything. The biggest takeaways Hugh had about Belita were that when it came to psychic tests “she was pretty average at everything”, but she had a striking ability to confidently improvise in response to prompting. When asked if she could channel music in a particular language for instance she would simply reply “yes” and launch directly into a performance. Hugh identified this as a highly unusual capacity, especially for an early adolescent. But this does track with the high suggestibility Belita demonstrated throughout her life and along with her musical gifts is probably part of what made her such a prized test subject for the likes of Andrija Puharich.12
Overall, Hugh’s impression of Belita was certainly of a precocious musical talent, but hardly a genuine up-and-coming psychic. Although Hugh himself does believe psi phenomena are real he showed no indication of believing Belita had any genuine ability in this domain. Rather, she seemed to be getting manoeuvred into a show business career by both her mother and the theatre producer who arranged the experiments. The psychic act then would have been a combination of true belief on her mother’s part—the family certainly had a longstanding interest in the occult, shown by their life in Ojai & dabbling in the Liberal Catholic Church—and the producer’s show business savvy. Adding the spectre of opportunistic military behaviour modification experiments to this mix may explain how Andrija Puharich, a captain in the US Army Medical Corps’ psychological warfare section, knew to contact the Adairs immediately after Belita’s health declined following the events at Stanford.
Tanner here. As always, thank you for reading Getting Spooked and my sincere thanks to Reid for contributing the second installment of this series. This is a reader-supported publication, so if you enjoy this research and commentary on the paranormal and parapolitical, consider subscribing, sharing articles with others, or upgrading to a paid subscription. This is not without its benefits: Paid members gain access to archived articles, special podcast episodes, Cystic Detective Updates, and the ability to ask questions for Q&As. It is the best way to directly support the continuation of this publication and my thanks goes out to anyone who has done so.
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Druffel, Ann. Firestorm: Dr. James E. McDonald’s Fight for UFO Science. Columbus: Wild Flower Press, 2003. Page 341.
Ross, Colin A. The C.I.A. Doctors: Human Rights Violations By American Psychologists. Richardson: Manitou Communications, Inc., 2006. Page 163.
Hilgard, E. R., MacDonald, H., Morgan, A. H., & Johnson, L. S. (1978). “The reality of hypnotic analgesia: A comparison of highly hypnotizables with simulators.” Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 87(2), 239–246. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-843X.87.2.239.
Hilgard ER, Morgan AH, Macdonald H. (1975). “Pain and dissociation in the cold pressor test: a study of hypnotic analgesia with ‘hidden reports’ through automatic key pressing and automatic talking.” Journal of Abnormal Psychology. 84(3):280-9. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0076654.
Interview with author.
Ibid.
Ratnesar, Romesh. “The Menace Within.” Stanford Magazine. July/August 2011. https://stanfordmag.org/contents/the-menace-within.
Liebling, Alison. “The abuse lurking in our institutions.” The British Psychological Society. 9 August 2016. https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/abuse-lurking-our-institutions.
“Dr Narut’s ‘personal problems’.” Sunday Times, 13 July 1975, p. 2. The Sunday Times Historical Archive, link.gale.com/apps/doc/FP1801055447/STHA?u=bcptstothepast&sid=bookmark-STHA&pg=2&xid=ff57b4d4.
“The strange tale of Dr Narut.” Sunday Times, 6 July 1975, pp. 1+. The Sunday Times Historical Archive, link.gale.com/apps/doc/FP1801054514/STHA?u=bcptstothepast&sid=bookmark-STHA&pg=1&xid=253725ee.
“Navy Denies Charge It Trains Assassins.” The New York Times. 7 July 1975. https://archive.is/wmpZi.
Interview with author.
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Incredible work tracking down Hugh, thank you for sharing
Happy to be adding this newsletter to one of several I enjoy with thorough footnotes. Thank you.