The atmosphere inside the Reno courthouse was electric that fall day in 1947. Jurors sat enraptured for two hours as Beau Kitselman delivered a breathless sermon on yogic practices and mysticism from parts unknown. It was a legal spectacle like nothing seen before or since in the high desert.
Yoga had destroyed his business acumen, he said, and had cost him nearly everything else. Now that he had recovered from a blackout period brought on by improper yogic posture, his Western capitalistic desires were bubbling back up to the surface.
The young man had lost possession of his family’s ranch at Pyramid Lake, a hot spot for aspiring divorcees hoping to establish residency in the great city of Reno, Nevada and win an expedited exit from their failing marriages. Six weeks in the Silver State’s divorce capital was all it took. The ranch offered its guests giant trout fishing, weekly rodeo shows, and swimming parties by moonlight to pass the time.
The lake itself was the kind of ancient that inspires awe, the remnants of a gargantuan body of water formed during the Ice Age. It was punctuated by an eerie pyramidal formation rising more than 400 feet above its waves, an extinct mud volcano spewing boiling jets of liquid from its sides and thick clouds of steam from its summit. The Paiute people had lived there for thousands of years, and the Pyramid Lake tribe was responsible for some of the oldest petroglyphs found on the North American continent. Bad luck seemed to linger around the lake, which was over 900 feet down at its deepest. Those enjoying a dip off its shoreline found themselves quickly out of their depth with sudden, city-block length drop-offs lurking under shallow-seeming waters.
Pyramid Lake had no outlet, but bodies seen floating there from time to time would mysteriously show up at Lake Tahoe more than sixty miles away.
With Beau steering the ship at the ranch, his activities drew the ire of area Natives. According to his own mother, he had “left a trail of immorality, illegitimacy, free love, nudism, and phony religion” at the property.
Kitselman came from a wealthy family, the son of a Midwestern steel magnate whose claim to fame was the invention of the roller skate. As a child, Beau had been flagged for participation in eugenicist Lewis Terman’s Genetic Studies of Genius, with an IQ clocking in at 209 (or 184, depending on which newspaper you liked to read). At the age of nine, he wowed friends and family with hours-long lectures on astronomy. Before high school, he was an expert in Morse code.
“Call me genius or faker, or anything you like, but don’t state my IQ,” Beau quipped to reporters, who described him as a “very likeable young man.”
During the 1930s Beau audited classes at Stanford, where he left without a degree but made a lasting impression on peers through his hosting of extracurricular yoga classes. The university had received a gift from the King of Siam, a recreation of a 4500 year old encyclopedia in the original Sanskrit. The priceless volume was handed off to Kitselman because he was the only one around who could read it. By 1940, he had mastered eighteen dead languages, but admirers remarked on his ability to converse “fluently in simple American with average persons.”
No one testifying on his behalf in Reno had any clue about his whereabouts and activities after 1938. Beau had suffered a lapse in memory from roughly 1940 to 1942, when he realized the ranch had been pried from his fingers.
During his fugue years he haunted Hollywood, befriending rising movie stars and recruiting other former child prodigies to his office on Sunset Boulevard. Persons Incorporated billed itself as a hub for “personality rebuilding.” Beau prided himself on his work “bringing to the surface the latent talents of people with special abilities.” In the year before the organization’s founding, he had developed a “calculus of personal interactions.”
“Human beings and their ills are a problem in mathematics,” Beau mused. “The same kind of a mathematical or engineering problem as is an automobile in need of repair. When something happens to an automobile, you take it to a garage.” Persons Incorporated was his body shop. Court records from Reno indicate he was entangled in some sort of legal trouble there, although the judgment roll was conspicuously absent at trial.
A highly revered psychiatrist testified that he was temporarily insane due to yoga-based amnesia, but in the end the judge did not buy it. “If that ranch is lost to me I am selling out and going to Asia and not coming back,” Kitselman had written to his mother in the lead-up to the court battle. Following his embarrassment in Nevada, he compromised with a move to Hawaii, halfway to the Far East.
Beau quickly settled into his new gig “teaching calculus to Navy men” at Pearl Harbor, and in typical Kitselman fashion dove headfirst into extramural pursuits. He and his seaman students had built a “gravitator” and were abuzz with excitement when the physics-breaking device became operational. They had captured the interest of a commander and an admiral, who sent for a colleague from his days in Burbank who was reputed to be an expert in such matters.
Kitselman began working at the Lockheed-owned defense plant after his emergence from the other end of the amnesiac fog that had been following him. There he met an inventor who had been discharged from the Navy under mysterious circumstances just as the second World War was heating up for the Americans. Townsend Brown and Beau became fast friends at Vega Aircraft, part of a sprawling Southern California complex situated at the edge of an old airport. Amid rising paranoia over attacks from above courtesy of the Japanese military, an entire fake suburb was installed on top of the facilities.
After three weeks tinkering away in isolation in a Naval electronics lab, Brown put on a demonstration for his decorated audience on Oahu. The officers are said to have left unimpressed at the sight of his “gadget resembling a carnival ride.”
Beau and other Townsend Brown advocates refused to let the antigravity dream die, and knocked on doors around the United States singing the praises of this prophet of electrogravitics. The inventor drew the interest of a number of wealthy investors over the decades, including the man behind the Learjet, a saucer-obsessed aerospace mogul with a pilot son who flew missions for the CIA. Another fan of Brown was once a majority stakeholder in United Fruit, sitting in the board room while a coup was orchestrated on behalf of corporate interests in Guatemala. Yet another benefactor came from the Reynolds tobacco family, who in later years rubbed elbows with Dr. Andrija Puharich and his band of gifted psychics as they hoped to establish an off-grid colony in the woods of North Carolina.
Beau Kitselman was Townsend Brown’s greatest champion and, as the threat of nuclear annihilation loomed larger than ever at the start of the 1960s, wrote a book to tell everyone how stupid they were for sleeping on his ideas. To Beau, space travel was the only way to ensure the long-term survival of the human race.
“I am so worried about the international situation. If only someone could find an easy inexpensive way to get into space, then, instead of war, we might have twenty or thirty years of competitive space exploration and colonization,” he wrote in his 1962 publication Hello, Stupid. He added, “in that length of time, we might even learn to get along with each other!”
The title greeting was addressed to scientists in particular, including “stupid” physicists like Edward Teller, Albert Einstein, and Louis Witten, who were apparently as disinterested in and dismissive of Brown’s work as the crowd back at Pearl Harbor.
Witten, an expert in classical gravitation, visited a lab putting Brown’s ideas to the test in the 1950s. At the time, Townsend was being bankrolled by a well-to-do industrialist named Agnew Bahnson, and the two spent tireless hours toiling away at antigravity experiments built on aluminum foil, bamboo, and extremely high voltages.
Witten later recounted his visit to historians, laughing as he remembered the state of their workspace.
“The basic idea of his laboratory was he had a strong electrostatic field, which was about 150,000 volts over a distance of about like that, about a meter. And he had an operator operating this thing,” the physicist recalled. “But I knew enough about experiments to know that this was not a very happy place, because I knew that for strong electrostatic fields, there shouldn’t be any sharp points around. Everything should be curved, and nothing was curved.”
He went on, chuckling about Townsend Brown’s mad scientist appearance as he fiddled with the equipment. “And the operator was working on it, his hair was standing up.” He laughed and continued, “then Bahnson took a long cylindrical pipe, and he smoked a cigarette, and he blew through the pipe into this central place where the electrostatic field was, and lo and behold, the smoke rose. Explain it,” they challenged him.
Just then, as he stood with his back to a nearby table with an especially sharp corner, he felt an electrical spark jolting from his rear. He suggested they move their conversation to the hallway where he answered, “It’s nothing worth explaining. It’s completely understandable. You all explain it. It’s not worth explaining. You had an electric field, you got ionization, you get motion. I said look at the operator, his hair is standing on end!”
Witten left without saying much else.
Bahnson and Brown were not deterred by the unenthusiastic sentiment of scientists that had caused Beau Kitselman such great frustration. The duo approached the problem of conquering gravitational forces from all angles. Bahnson had a penchant for the paranormal and didn’t shy away from engaging with those on the fringe. He assisted Robert Monroe with his early out-of-body experiments and, after his untimely death in a plane crash, is said to have delivered a message on antigravity from the astral realm. In his classic book Journeys Out of the Body, Monroe recalls the communication he received from the recently deceased Bahnson. “There is a way to prove antigravity. All you have to do is to demonstrate it yourself, and you have been trained to do it.”
Back in the lab, Brown and Bahnson had been exploring the physics behind the “Venusian scout ship” witnessed by George Adamski, a popular UFO contactee who claimed to be in communication with peaceful extraterrestrial Space Brothers. The pair experimented with zapping a miniature model of Adamski’s saucer, and the UFO expert is reported to have stopped by their workshop. On May 1, 1958, Bahnson started an entry in his lab notebook, “Tonight 9:58 p.m. I have been meditating [on] the AC or RF exploitation, possibly with the help of the Brothers. I have missed them for several weeks.”
“Don’t play with that, sweetie. It’s not a toy,” Brown’s daughter recalls him telling her, referring to the model. “It’s probably the most expensive paperweight in the world.”
According to Linda Brown, she and her father shared a bizarre dream-like experience in 1955, one she later came to believe was real. A trio of “Adamski-style ships” had landed in their back field and the pilots greeted them as Linda, only nine years old, played outside. The entities looked completely human, including a spaceman she nicknamed the Captain who resembled a redheaded version of Jesus Christ.
Linda asked her dad if the spacemen were a threat, and questioned why they would park the saucers at the Brown home instead of the White House. Townsend assured her that a drive-by visit with the President wasn’t necessary as “they already knew everything about us they needed to know from a great distance,” and that humanity was probably more a danger to them than the extraterrestrials were to earthlings.
While Brown was working to unlock the secrets of the scout ships and beyond, Beau Kitselman was promoting his gospel in the background. “Beau Kitselman was a VERY special man,” Linda later said. “He was my dad’s best friend.”
During his time in Hawaii building gravitators and helping sailors brush up their math skills, Beau was also probing into the deepest reaches of the human mind. He had been interested in the problem of consciousness since the early 1930s, when the results of a coin-flip experiment he’d been conducting convinced him that it “must be able to operate outside of the constraints of time and space.” Later he’d correspond regularly with parapsychologist JB Rhine, who was reportedly exploring extrasensory perception with funding dollars from Army and CIA purses. Rhine questioned whether the antigravity exploits of Kitselman’s dearest friend were just “a wild dream or a stock fraud.”
According to those who knew him best, Beau was a “pioneer of cognitive therapy,” promoting the client-centered approach of Carl Rogers while lobotomies and shock treatments were still the psychiatric soup du jour. He was the Executive Officer of Honolulu’s Dianetics Foundation for a brief time, before branching off to develop his own practice which he coined “E-Therapy.” In 1950, he self-published a handwritten book on this novel therapeutic system, which he had been shaping for the better part of a decade.
In 1951, Kitselman was recruited to run an acid-drenched ESP experiment on behalf of the United States Navy. The military was interested in utilizing LSD for espionage purposes, and was especially curious if the drug could be used to enhance the psychic abilities of its operatives. Beau didn’t think LSD was very good at getting the job done, but continued to test subjects under influence of peyote and “other natural hallucinogens.”
In June of that same year, Dianetics founder L Ron Hubbard leaked information about the use of an experimental “vicious war weapon” by certain factions of the military and intelligence community: pain-drug-hypnosis.
Years before the Church Committee exposed the CIA’s infamous MKULTRA program to the public, Hubbard was sounding the alarm on methods he believed to be “of considerably more use in conquering a society than the atom bomb.” The good news, according to him, was that Dianetic processing could be used to detect the deployment of this new mechanism of cognitive warfare.
Although they had worked together at one time, Beau Kitselman and his adherents were adamant that E-Therapy had nothing to do with Hubbard’s Dianetics. In the late 1950s, the two men had a falling out as they sat chatting in the Kitselmans’ living room after dinner one night. Hubbard was revealing a scheme to brand his therapeutic approach as a religion so that his organization wouldn’t have to pay taxes. At the same time, he would pocket the extra money he’d be making off his patients, who would now be shelling out more for access to different levels of their treatment. Beau was appalled and kicked Hubbard out of his home with haste. “Papa didn’t like him,” his daughter later recalled. This story became a family legend.
The end of their friendship coincided with a growing rift in the Dianetics community, with many disciples expressing disdain for this newly proposed pay-to-play program. As spin-offs and splinter groups proliferated, the increasingly dogmatic Hubbard labelled all non-approved adaptations of his work “Black Dianetics” and preached about the dangers of these heretical practices.
In those days, Beau Kitselman and E-Therapy were hot topics in Scientology-adjacent gossip rags. His methods were met with glowing reviews in outlets like The Abberree. In the June 1956 edition of the magazine, one reader wrote in, “Once this show is on the road, there is no stopping it, so far as I can see. This therapy of which I am speaking is Kitselman’s ‘E’ therapy.”
They ended the letter with a plea to the audience: “Don’t try it, it works.”
In another issue, Beau had placed an announcement in its pages offering to sell L Ron Hubbard’s secrets for the price of $888.88 and ten days of free time (ticket to Reno not included). The package was to include teachings on “ALL that Hubbard knows, and in knowing, he says, the ‘student’ will find himself free to become famous, rich, and a leader of men.”
By the end of 1956, Beau had regained ownership of the ranch at Pyramid Lake, open for residency to those interested in his E-Therapy system. The utopian self-improvement colony was a project under Kitselman’s Institute for Integration, a growing threat to Hubbard’s market share.
The ranch resort offered a number of services to its guests, and the “peyote processing” program became particularly popular with the lodgers. One visitor described the scene in a 1958 trip report: “There was quite a number of free souls floating, and I mean floating, around up there, too.”
While tripping E-Therapy patients projected their consciousness above Pyramid Lake, Beau was reportedly monitoring UFO activity on-site at the request of the United States government.
A former gardener at the Kitselman property recalled an astounding letter he had seen on the job, a correspondence addressed to Beau from science fiction writer Aldous Huxley. In it, the author was attempting to score some mescaline. It was dated before 1953, the year Huxley first ingested the drug under the supervision of psychedelic researcher Humphry Osmond, a man being closely monitored by the CIA. The experience famously inspired Huxley to pen his groundbreaking book The Doors of Perception.
In a 1954 letter to Osmond, Huxley gushed about Beau, his E-Therapy practice, and the amazing work he had been carrying out using hallucinogens. “I also have an amiable, able friend [Beau Kitselman], who has evolved, out of the texts of Early Buddhism (texts which he can study in the original Pali) a form of psycho-therapy which he calls E-Therapy,” the writer explained to Osmond.
“He himself has taken peyote and proposes to launch out into mescalin, under doctor’s supervision,” Huxley continued. “Meanwhile he has made a few experiments with ololiq[u]i, has found that in some cases it seems to increase suggestibility, to give release from long-standing tensions, and to help the taker to obtain insights into his or her true nature. At the same time it seems to make it easier for those who are near the taker to enter into some kind of telepathic rapport with him.”
Beau and Aldous got on like a house on fire. In fact, Beau was a regular guest at the Huxley household until it burned down in the Hollywood Hills fire of 1961, and was there to assist with the clean-up following the disaster.
Huxley, like Beau, was incredibly interested in the effects of psychedelic drugs on psychic abilities. He had visited Dr. Andrija Puharich’s lab in Maine, at a time the good doctor was growing increasingly obsessed with a particular strain of magic mushroom. His journey to harness the powers of the mystical fungus began with a message channeled through one of his subjects, a Dutch sculptor possessed by an ancient Egyptian entity calling itself Ra Ho Tep. While undergoing an intense state of trance, the sculptor would scrawl detailed hieroglyphics across pages placed in front of him despite his lack of interest in the history of Egypt.
Huxley stayed at the Puharich residence for two weeks, writing that the doctor was on track to “open the doors of ESP in a big way,” dosing his volunteers with LSD and mushrooms.
“Provided, it doesn’t first open the doors of an untimely grave,” he added.
In the winter of 1960, surrounded by television workers and newspaper columnists, a reporter was taken on the ride of his life. He had volunteered to ingest magic mushrooms under the supervision of Dr. Puharich, who was aiming to measure the drug’s effect on human psychic ability. Beau Kitselman sat behind a computer, recording the results in silence.
“One blink, and I was lost in a Cloud Nine world of whirling colors and texture Walt Disney and Salvador Dalí probably would give their libidos to duplicate,” the reporter wrote of his trip. “Magenta mountains melted into hibiscus petals, and the petals dissolved into a Niagara Falls of flowing diamonds. I kept waiting for the pink elephants to come along and give my tired old bones a lift, but then I forgot about them in a red-and-gold oriental palace that faded into bright green snowflakes.”
After partaking in the mushrooms, he was subjected to round two of a guessing game, part one having been completed while he was sober. Glancing up from his computer, Beau informed the reporter that his telepathy score had doubled while under the influence.
The garage at the Kitselman home was stacked to the ceiling with IBM cards and printouts, and towers of papers covered in handwritten numbers filled the dedicated computer room. Beau would stay up until 6 am most nights working on his programming at a time “when only weirdos had computers,” his daughter remembered fondly. According to one of his E-Therapy colleagues, part of this interest stemmed from his desire “to prove that intuitive man, if developed, can be more accurate than the modern highly-touted computers.” His friend Aldous Huxley helped seed the movement we today refer to as transhumanism.
In 1961, Beau privately distributed a piece titled How to Use a Digital Computer as a Means of Studying the Nature of Time. Two years later, it was cited in an Air Force Cambridge Research Lab report on testing for ESP with a machine.
Beau programmed the computer used for the studies detailed in Dr. Puharich’s 1962 book Beyond Telepathy, and co-authored a related paper with him and a Stanford philosophy professor. “The use of muscarinic mushroom produces in addition a very mild state of inebriation in the early stages, and in the later stages can produce heavy inebriation and hallucinations, depending on the dosage,” the abstract of Computers, Chance & Cholinergia states. “It is suggested that mild cholinergia, artificially induced, may be a useful tool for the investigation of the intuitive capacity in humans.”
In a 1966 write-up of Beyond Telepathy printed in the saucer zine Round Robin, one reviewer marvelled, “Dr. Puharich has already established the validity of a definite change of consciousness brought about through the rhythmic breathing of the yogin.” He continued on, discussing the staggering implications. “If I understand the good doctor correctly, gravity at work in each cell of our bodies helps to hold consciousness in the body. Time is an essential item in the gravity equation. Change time and you change gravity. Our crude diagram above helps to illustrate this time change in the nerves. When the change is great enough, consciousness escapes the physical tomb.”
As the strange brew of parapsychology, psychedelics, and esoteric computer science percolated in labs and garages across America, Huxley was keeping his network up-to-date on new developments in the field. In a stroke of genius, he recommended combining LSD and hypnosis to his friend Jolly West. These “post-hypnotic suggestions” would be “aimed at orienting the drug-induced experience in some desired direction.”
West, a psychiatrist perhaps best known for killing an elephant after dosing it with a heroic amount of LSD, later wriggled his way into the legal drama unfolding around the 1964 trial of Jack Ruby. Behind the scenes, he linked up with a small team of accomplished mental health specialists working for Ruby’s defense. After privately examining him, West concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald’s killer was “obviously psychotic” and had been suffering from paranoid delusions.
Before Jolly West’s arrival, Ruby had been checked out by the defense crew in a nearby hospital. Among the men subjecting him to a battery of neuropsychological tests was a prominent psychiatrist named Walter Bromberg, an expert in sexual-psychopathy and the violent criminal mind. Decades of hands-on experience had led him to believe that there was “a buried program of murder in all humanity.”
Bromberg was a man with a charming but commanding presence, described as Sinatra-esque by his son. During his examination of Ruby, he was able to squeeze some new information out of him. The doctor revealed that the shooter had spent ten days in Cuba back in 1959, helping secure jeeps for the Castro regime, and he learned that Ruby’s father had once served with the Russian Army. When asked if these ties to communist states had influenced Ruby’s mindset, Bromberg responded that “it might have had an effect on his organic background.” He refused to elaborate.
In the leadup to the trial, Dr. Bromberg maintained that Ruby had instinctively gunned down Oswald in a complete blackout.
Bromberg’s name can be found in an obscure FBI memo buried in the JFK assassination files, where sources had been murmuring about his “questionable background.” Inquiring agents uncovered a complaint made against the doctor by a nurse formerly under his employ, with whispers about his hobby of throwing “sex parties in which he struck women companions with a whip.” Rumors had been passed around regarding a scandal in Sacramento that had caused him to flee town.
The doctor had been the chief psychiatrist at Hart’s Island and the Portsmouth Naval Prison, a facility that gained a reputation during the Cold War as the “Alcatraz of the East.” He was senior psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital in New York, spending more than a decade overseeing the institute’s psychiatric court. He made his departure for Nevada just before Dr. Lauretta Bender began her work treating children for “autistic schizophrenia” at Bellevue. Bender delivered electroshock therapy (and sometimes LSD) to patients as young as three years old.
In the early 1950s, he moved from Reno to California, where he headed the sexual-psychopath program at Mendocino State Hospital. There he was accused of violating hospital policy against privately practicing on patients during duty hours and was let go from his position as clinical director. One of the patients in question was later voluntarily committed to the facility. Bromberg remained in Sacramento for many years.
Throughout the 1960s, Mendocino was reportedly a hotbed for drug experimentation, acting as a feeder for programs under the wider MKULTRA umbrella. Female alcoholics were dosed with ungodly quantities of acid, while other subjects were injected with methamphetamine to induce psychosis. Members of another cohort were reputedly sterilized against their will.
These experiments are said to have taken place in a ward removed from the rest of the hospital, segregated by an electrified barbed wire fence contained behind a heavy iron gate. The construction felt more like a fortress than a hospital, and it billed itself as escape-proof. The installation employed technicians with little-to-no medical education, although at times they assisted with administering electroshock treatments. According to one account, “many technicians happily accepted their role as enforcers, keeping the ‘animals’ in line by treating them as prisoners rather than patients.” Others speculated that the secluded location was “specifically chosen as to keep classified experiments somewhat covert.”
In later years, allegations emerged that Jim Jones had embedded members from the People’s Temple into the hospital’s staff, with their activities funded by the CIA. One former cult member anonymously stated that “in 1967, several experiments with LSD were performed on [Mendocino] patients to test the drug’s effects on human DNA... The People’s Temple drugged patients with LSD for long periods...reporting that LSD did induce chromosomal breakage.” Workers from the Temple reportedly lended outside researchers a helping hand with “methedrine attack therapy” carried out on drug addicts.
Walter Bromberg was ahead of the curve on illicit drug research, studying the effects of marihuana intoxication in the early 1930s, well before MKULTRA was a twinkle in Sidney Gottlieb’s eye. He published on the psychological aspects of the peyote rite all the way back in 1943. He appeared to keep up with new developments in the field despite his busy schedule, writing a paper for the American Journal of Psychiatry on “LSD-induced amnesia” in 1970.
His early work and research took him to other bizarre places. He wrote a book in 1937 detailing the history of mental illness and its treatment, from the shamanistic practices of witch doctors up to the bleeding edge of contemporary psychotherapy. The comprehensive volume explored the outdated psychiatric practices of blood-letting, superstitious rituals, and torture.
In the 1940s, Bromberg testified in a court case in Reno on behalf of Beau Kitselman. In his professional opinion, the young man on the stand had been suffering from temporary insanity brought on by a state of yoga-induced amnesia.
In 1971, the Kitselman family received a stack of FOIA documents over eight inches thick. The pages were mostly redacted.