high strangeness – If there is something

Another lost guru Part 5

Origins

As evasive as George Peters tended to be about his life prior to becoming a guru, much of what he did reveal to journalists, prospective biographer Lionel Rolfe and Church of Naturalism collaborator Susan Shore turns out to be verifiable. Census records confirm George Peters’ real name was George P. Fitzpatrick and that he was the son of Cyril G. and Ada Florence (Farwell) Fitzpatrick. He was born in 1938 or 1939 and spent the first decade plus of his life being raised in New York. Corroborating information revealed to Lionel Rolfe, newspaper reports indicate his father was a New York City detective, but Cyril’s alleged wartime stints in Army Intelligence and White House Secret Service could not be confirmed. In fact, the exploits of Cyril G. Fitzpatrick, New York City robbery detective, appear in newspaper accounts both before and after World War 2, making it clear that whatever intelligence work he may or may not have been involved with during the war ceased when he returned to his robbery division gig after the war ended. Following Cyril’s death in 1953, Peters’ mother married Ward McCarron in 1954, and the couple along with George resided in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

As Peters revealed to Rolfe, it was around this time, when Peters was 16, that “he married a young woman who claimed to be French.” Indeed, newspaper reports from October 1955, describe an episode where George Fitzpatrick, son of Mr. and Mrs. Ward McCarron, eloped with Jo Ann LaNette, 15, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Jacques LaNette, Fort Lauderdale. The pair had planned to go to New York, but only had enough money to buy bus tickets to Baltimore. Eventually, the teenage couple returned home to Fort Lauderdale, and in 1956 George P. Fitzpatrick joined the Navy. An announcement in the Fort Lauderdale News dated March 18, 1956 confirms he graduated from the Great Lakes Naval Training Center north of Chicago. While not an official Navy confirmation of service, it seems unlikely Peters and his parents would falsely fabricate such an announcement, and it backs up Peters’ account and other previously unverified newspaper reports.

With much of Peters’ origin story seeming to conform to reality, the questions become even more relevant: did the Navy and/or CIA perform mind control LSD experiments on the future cult guru George Peters? Could the American military or intelligence community bear some responsibility for creating the LSD promotor and new age occultist?

Whether or not George Peters was one of its subjects, it is absolutely the case that the Navy performed LSD experiments on human subjects. A Department of Defense memo dated September 20, 1977 revealed that the Navy participated in five programs where drugs were administered to human subjects for the purpose of mind control or behavior modification. The programs ran from 1947 to 1973, and probably the most well known was called Project Chatter. Led by Navy Lieutenant Charles W. Savage, Project Chatter research was conducted at the Naval Medical Research Institute, Bethesda, Maryland and ran from 1947 to 1953. Peters claimed his experience occurred in 1957, placing it outside the timeframe of Dr. Savage’s involvement. However, it’s possible the program continued under someone else’s direction, or Peters could have participated in a myriad of other LSD programs underway at the time.

It is widely reported that at one time the CIA purchased a significant portion of the world’s LSD supply and seemingly made it available to just about any researcher or institution willing to study its effects on humans. Famously, author Ken Kesey participated in LSD experiments at the Menlo Park VA hospital around the time he began One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1960. Also, in the 1950s, LSD pioneer Dr. Sydney Cohen conducted experiments at Wadsworth VA Hospital in Los Angeles, California. Where George Peters was introduced to LSD cannot currently be determined, but California would be as likely a place as any.

By 1960, it appears Peters had abandoned his family, which included a wife and three children. In a newspaper feature from the 1980s, the then remarried but former Mrs. George Fitzpatrick describes being broke in San Diego in 1960 with a five-month-old baby she could no longer care for. So she put the child up for adoption, as she would do with Peters’ two other children. As a member of the U.S. Navy, it seems probable that he and his family spent some time living in San Diego. While in California, did he become a subject of the LSD experimentation going on at the time, and did that experience cause him to become disillusioned and wander from his family? Whatever life-altering, consciousness scrambling experience befell him, the trip was only going to get much longer and much stranger.

Sources:

The Los Angeles Times

The Los Angeles Herald Examiner

The San Francisco Examiner

The Chicago Tribune

The Fort Lauderdale News

The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN)

Fat Man on the Left: Four Decades in the Underground by Lionel Rolfe

Mind Styles, Life Styles by Nathaniel Lande

General Counsel of the Department of Defense memo, September 20, 1977

Another lost guru Part 4

MK-Ultra

Adding to the barrage of allegations of drug use and drug trafficking coming from multiple sources aimed at the Church of Naturalism, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner reported the California State Franchise Tax Board was in the midst of a year-long investigation of the church at the time of the slayings. The probe investigated allegations asserting drug customers wrote off their cocaine buys from the church as “donations” and subsequently claimed the transactions as tax deductions. Anonymous sources alleged the cocaine buyers were able to purchase the drugs by check or credit card. Reportedly, the church took both BankAmericard and Visa. “They had one of those stamp-type machines like you see in a service station. And they had all kinds of vouchers,” a source told the Herald Examiner. Church secretary, Susan Shore, who claimed to be the sole surviving member of the Church of Naturalism, denied the allegations, claiming she had no knowledge of the tax board investigation.

People with stories to tell about the Church of Naturalism’s involvement in drug trafficking were seemingly coming out of the woodwork. Missing from the narrative, however, were all the individuals they supposedly counseled, helped kick drug habits and trained for gainful employment. Where were the recovering rock musicians, movie stars and sports celebrities with tales of how George Peters rescued them from the throes of drug addiction? According to the Herald Examiner, their tax deductible donations, made in exchange for private “treatment,” involved “instruction in the use rather than abuse” of various drugs. Indeed, one attendee at Church of Naturalism revelries told the Herald Examiner, “People spilled more coke on their shoes at one of George’s parties than they put up their noses anywhere else.”

While surviving member Susan Shore attempted to put to rest rumors of drug use and narcotics trafficking, she dropped a bombshell of her own in the November 14, 1982 edition of the Herald Examiner. In the article, Shore revealed that at the time of George Peters’ death the two had been working on a film about his involvement in the secret CIA program MK-Ultra. “I was writing the story of his life prior to the founding of the church, when he was supposedly one of the people with whom the CIA was doing a lot of experimentation with drugs….The story involves espionage and experimentation with drugs to see how far you could make something go,” Shore told the Herald Examiner. “We were going to make a film that was going to expose what the government was doing back in the early 1960s.”

According to the Herald Examiner, Peters claimed he was a subject of LSD experiments while a member of the Navy in 1957. He volunteered for these experiments and participated in two additional ones after he was discharged. However, the newspaper conceded it could not verify if he ever served in the Navy.

At least one of the experiments Peters described to his friends involved a program to abduct transients, drug them unconscious and deposit them at a new location. The subject was then reprogrammed by Peters or another operative and given a new identity and life history, the Herald Examiner said.

The Herald Examiner also reported that Peters had spoken of his connection to the MK-Ultra program during a July 1981 symposium at the University of California Santa Cruz where he delivered a talk titled The Social and Cultural Implications of Consciousness Research.

As insane as the Herald Examiner’s account of Peters’ alleged involvement in secret experiments sounds, it pretty closely tracks with an experience he relates to his one-time ghostwriter, Lionel Rolfe, and also resembles the approach he would come to adopt as an LSD guru. In Fat Man on the Left: Four Decades in the Underground, Rolfe mentions that Peters had “an ‘enlightenment experience’ at the hands of the CIA” prior to reinventing himself as a guru. Rolfe recounts a bizarre story Peters told him of an encounter with a mysterious man named David, who claimed to be an alien, but actually worked for the CIA. David intended to use Peters as a subject in the CIA’s MK-Ultra program. After drugging Peters, David relentlessly stalks him, trying to get Peters to give up the most intimate and closely held secrets of his life. During these games of ‘Truth or Consequences,’ “Peters had to tell his life story over and over again, and if things didn’t mesh in a psychological profile, David would hassle him until he got what he wanted.” Eventually, Peters confesses to David about a homosexual experience he had in high school. The admission brought him great peace and caused him to have “a classic enlightenment experience.”

According to Peters’ former wife, Katherine Peters, it was this experience that led him to form the Church of Naturalism. “‘George was so lonely and insecure when I met him that he felt he could only keep people around by buying their friendship,’” Katherine Peters told the Herald Examiner. “All that changed, she said, when he recounted a homosexual affair at the age of 13 during a bizarre game of Truth or Consequences.”

After the admission, Peters was transformed. “I thought I could take over the world,” Peters wrote following the Truth or Consequences game. “I thought I had the power and I knew what was right. Then I thought of Hitler and remembered he thought he was right too…. So I thought of the sentence: ‘I will help anyone at anytime as long as it hurts no other.’ By this method, I could leave the world a better place than I had found it.” This became the gospel of the Church of Naturalism.

Whether or not there was any truth to Peters’ account of being pursued by the shadowy David and forced to endure the Truth or Consequences game as a form of mind control programming, the story resembles in many respects the approach he would come to use in his life as a guru. Additionally, whether or not he plucked transients off the streets at the direction of the CIA and gave them a new identity and purpose, it could be argued that as a guru this is more or less what he did. The newspaper accounts at the time of his death could not confirm whether he had made any of his CIA claims prior to the MK-Ultra revelations in 1977, nor could they confirm whether he served in the Navy as he claimed. However, a closer examination of the transformation of George Fitzpatrick to George Peters reveals that he almost certainly served in the Navy, and that the Navy did indeed conduct drug experiments. Moreover, George Peters’ claims of being the subject of these experiments predates the MK-Ultra revelations by more than a decade.

Sources:

The Los Angeles Times

The Los Angeles Herald Examiner

The San Francisco Examiner

The Chicago Tribune

Fat Man on the Left: Four Decades in the Underground by Lionel Rolfe

Mind Styles, Life Styles by Nathaniel Lande

Another lost guru Part 3

Supernaturalism

Within days, neighbors’ insistence that the Church of Naturalism was involved with drugs was validated by the revelation that four of its members were arrested on narcotics charges in June of 1981. An L.A. County Sheriff’s raid of the church compound yielded two ounces of cocaine, 350 Quaaludes, 66.5 grams of maijuana, nearly a gram of hashish and $3200 in cash. As the Los Angeles Times reported, despite the large quantity of drugs confiscated, “all charges were subsequently dropped because the district attorney’s office said the investigators did not find the drugs on the individuals.”

I’m no narcotics investigator, but this seems like a rather odd reason for not pursuing charges. At the time of the raid, sheriff’s detectives must have held some suspicions regarding the occupants of that location, and surely would have acquired some evidence or information that led to the raid in the first place. The presence of large quantities of drugs discovered at the location would surely have confirmed these suspicions. It seems strange then that no one was subsequently charged. How common is it that, after conducting a drug raid and finding the illicit contraband, no one is charged because the possessors of that contraband didn’t have it directly on their person? This seems highly unusual. However, as we will come to find out, this was a pattern for George Peters and the Church of Naturalism, as he was arrested for drugs and subsequently freed without charges on a number of occasions.

At this point, investigators still maintained that robbery remained the motive for the murders, while conceding that drugs may have been a factor. “It appears to us the primary motive was robbery. But, remember, a person can rob for drugs too,” Hollywood Division homicide Detective Richard Kuster told reporters. “It’s obvious they were involved in drug traffic in one form or the other.”

Strange that a group that billed itself as offering drug counseling services, indeed that was purported to have counseled addicted rock musicians, also may have been involved in drug trafficking. One ex-employee of the church told the Los Angeles Times that he had purchased marijuana from the group and later warned an employment agency not to place applicants with the church. The owner of the agency confirmed the man’s account. “At one point we heard something about that place we didn’t like and canceled the job orders,” the owner said. One of the church’s subsidiaries, Mentor Media, subsequently tried to recruit through the agency but was also denied.

Additional odd facts about the group began to emerge. According to the Los Angeles Times, author Nathaniel Lande wrote in a 1976 book, Mind Styles, Life Styles that the Church of Naturalism offered a three stage divinity training. The first stage, called “group grope,” involved groups of 5-10 members living together, working and contributing 80% of their income to the church for “samaritan services.” The second stage, labeled “rural setting,” required members to remove from society and spend an hour each day in hot tubs receiving massages. According to the book, this stage causes members to “develop deep, honest personal relationships.” The final stage is called the “Death Judgment Experience.” Here the church member isolates in a black box for 40 days. “During the experience, the person loses his self-concept and relives the events of his life,” Landes says. The purpose “is that if you can gain sufficient strength and stamina to be yourself by isolating yourself totally, you can operate in society much more effectively.”

In 1998, Lionel Rolfe wrote extensively about his time working as George Peters’ ghostwriter in the memoir, Fat Man on the Left: Four Decades in the Underground. In the book, Rolfe describes a much stranger and darker version of George Peters and the Church of Naturalism than members and acquaintances revealed at the time of Peters’ death. “Into his and his church’s philosophy, Peters had put a lot of thought – some genuinely humanistic, it seemed to me. But he also had potentially evil ideas. I believe he considered himself an enlightened human being who wanted to help others. The trouble, the evil, the weirdness entered his philosophy with his belief that he had supernatural powers … . George claimed he could glow in the dark. He didn’t do it for me, but he did tell me the story of how Mr. X once walked into the room where he was meditating, and Peters was ‘glowing.’ Later I learned that Peters’ witness, Mr. X, would not directly contradict the story…. About this time I started getting concerned about being Peters’ ghostwriter. The more I became familiar with his thinking, the more I found the notion of being his ghost ill-advised, if not plain dangerous. Peters wanted me to undergo one of his sensory deprivation experiences so I would have greater knowledge of what I was writing about. I declined the opportunity.” Smart move.

At the time of Peter’s death, the Los Angeles Times reported on a Church of Naturalism document that alluded to Peters’ alleged supernatural powers. According to the document, “Peters claimed he could read others’ thoughts and move objects through mind control,” the Times reported. The newspaper made no mention of the guru’s ability to glow in the dark.

Despite George Peters’ apparent abilities to transcend the physical constraints of this world, he was also a man who enjoyed the finest comforts and pleasures the material world could offer. Shocking to no one, the man who considered himself a messiah had expensive tastes and eschewed monogamy. “To watch him sitting on the sectional bed-sofa that filled half of his large bedroom as he viewed the wall-size television set was to see how much he loved his toys, and his comforts. It was a grand bed, one that could accommodate a dozen people at a time, and probably had,” Rolfe wrote.

“George was a hedonist. He liked sex…. At the time of our acquaintance, Peters didn’t appear to be heavily into drugs himself, although he certainly liked to smoke good dope. What he really liked, and was obsessed by, were the good things in life.”

That a self-styled messianic guru surrounded himself with life’s finer material possessions, that he partook of mind-altering substances, that he enjoyed frequent sex and the occasional orgy, that he claimed magical powers and exerted a level of mind control over his followers was not shocking for 1982 and mostly lifted straight out of the How To Be A Successful Guru handbook. (Note: George Peters literally taught a guru class. More on that later.) But George Peters’ fascination with drugs stretched back at least as far as the mid-sixties and possibly earlier. Because while George Peters was seemingly pushing forms of mind control on his followers, a week after his death, one of his followers, Susan Shore, revealed to the Los Angeles Herald Examiner that Peters himself had been the subject of CIA drug experiments dating back to the 1950’s.

Sources:

The Los Angeles Times

The Los Angeles Herald Examiner

The San Francisco Examiner

The Chicago Tribune

Fat Man on the Left: Four Decades in the Underground by Lionel Rolfe

Mind Styles, Life Styles by Nathaniel Lande