I'm certainly no expert on the history of UFO/ESP research, so the name Brad Steiger is new to me - as it probably is to most people. A writer of numerous trashy pop culture books on these topics, he hardly even counts as a researcher per se; his list of published works is pretty strange:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Steiger_bibliographyMy reason for bringing him up is that he wrote the only biography of one Olof Jonsson, a psychic-for-hire who had apparent spook connections. I just encountered Jonsson's name in Sterling Seagrave's book "Gold Warriors" - a highly dubious yet undoubtedly important account of Japanese war-loot recovery in the Philippines. It is stated that he was summoned by Ferdinand Marcos to assist a bizarre consortium of characters from the world of intelligence and the American far-right in searching for sunken Japanese treasure ships.
Jonsson & Marcos:
In any case, my reason for posting this is to share some crazy stuff I learned about Jonsson just from a cursory search:
Olof Jonsson, Engineer, Psychic - May 24, 1998Olof Jonsson may have lived a relatively ordinary life as a Chicago engineer had it not been for some unusual habits.
He could answer questions before they were asked, predict events for friends with unbelievable accuracy and even solve murder mysteries by re-creating the crime scene in his mind.
Mr. Jonsson's psychic abilities eventually made him an internationally known figure, the subject of a book and numerous magazine articles and scientific papers and a constant source of fascination.
Despite such fame, he remained in his job as an engineer with the Chicago architectural firm of Schmidt, Garden and Erikson for nearly two decades. He stayed in Chicago until 1980, when he moved to Las Vegas.
Mr. Jonsson died May 11 in Las Vegas at age 79.
One of Mr. Jonsson most famous extrasensory experiments occurred during NASA's Apollo 14 mission to the moon, when he collaborated with astronaut Edgar D. Mitchell. Mitchell arranged a set of ESP cards with different symbols on them from his space capsule, and Mr. Jonsson tried to picture the sequence of the cards from thousands of miles away. He named the cards in the correct order about half the time, a score far higher than pure chance would allow.
The experiment became a cover story in Life magazine, and Mr. Jonsson used it as proof that ESP works as well in space as it does on Earth.
While telepathic work like Mr. Jonsson's has had many skeptics over the years, some experts in the field said he was clearly an exceptional mind.
"I have never met anybody like this before," said Norman Don, director of research for the Chicago-based Kiros Foundation, which supports research in cognitive neuroscience and alternative healing. "Mr. Jonsson was able to do things that I thought were impossible. I thought he was really a very extraordinary individual."
Don conducted several computerized guessing games with Mr. Jonsson in his laboratory, in which Mr. Jonsson was asked to guess which images would surface next. He was able to outguess the computer 99 times out of 100, Don said.
Don said Mr. Jonsson took his talent seriously but always remained active in his career as an engineer.
"He did demonstrations for people, but he never made his living this way," he said. "He was not into psychic readings or anything like that. He considered it totally beneath him."
Yet Mr. Jonsson did establish an international reputation as a psychic as a young man growing up in his native Sweden. After a small town in Sweden had a series of bizarre murders in which 12 women were brutally slain, police authorities contacted Mr. Jonsson, who had a detailed vision of the crimes and the murderer. After Mr. Jonsson identified the suspect as a young policeman, the officer confessed the crimes in a suicide note.
Mr. Jonsson later told the Tribune that the situation disturbed and depressed him, and he swore to never again get involved in solving violent crimes.
Yet throughout his life, he continued to try helping people when he could, sometimes assisting in searches for missing children and occasionally acting as a healer for the chronically ill. Mr. Jonsson also worked to help create more acceptance of parapsychology in the scientific community, Don said.
"He was born with this talent," Don said. "From about four years of age on, he was aware he had this ability, and he thought it was his mission to bring it out into the open."
Mr. Jonsson is survived by a son, Michael; a sister, Karin Parson; and a grandson. Services were held in Las Vegas.
Norman Don from the Kiros Foundation - that actually should read "Kairos" and I see that Google autocomplete adds "cult" to the name when I start typing it.
That account of the Swedish murder case is quite different from this one:
http://garvarn.blogspot.com/2008/07/olo ... ndler.htmlMost psychics create some sort of interesting background narrative to gloss over their often ordinary and banal descent. In Jönsson's case, the story is passed on by long time friend, Swedish literature professor Olle Holmberg (1968), and American writer Brad Steiger (1971), and it carries the standard elements of mindblowing miracles as everyday fun for the innocent psychic child. Jönsson, born in Malmoe 1918, claimed that he started to experience strange things at the age of seven. At his parental home, he one day discovered, allegedly, that he could make a bottle fall from the table to the floor just by concentrating on it. According to Jönsson, he realized that he could affect lots of objects just by looking at them. He also claimed to have started to dream of events that later occured and that he knew what people were thinking; he could answer questions before they were asked. In school, he didn't need to study because he dreamed up the answers the night before the tests. That no one heard of those miracles when they were performed is astonishing...
One of his school teachers is said to have lulled Jönsson into Rosicrucianism. Later, when he was beginning his psychic career, Jönsson used to start his sessions with a lecture on the fundamentals of this branch of mysticism, but he soon gave that up since his audience had more taste for miracles than for ludicrous "wisdom".
Jönsson studied engineering and after a couple of odd jobs following his exam in 1941, he was employed as a draftsman at the Monark bicycle manufacturing company in Varberg 1946. By then, he had also dabbled a bit in healing together with a sidekick whose stutter Jönsson claimed to have cured. But it was during his time in Varberg that Jönsson's reputation as a miracle man started to spread. He soon became the pet psychic of a number of influential names in Swedish psychic research.
[...]
But the downfall of Jönsson in Sweden was his own doing. In the small village of Tjornarp in the south of Sweden, a murder occupied the police and the national press in November 1951. Mill owner Allan Nilsson was found dead in his bed after a fire had almost burned his house down. During the following investigation, the police soon suspected arson and in the autopsy, the cause of death was found to be severe battery. But the police had no leads and in desperation, one of the many psychics that had announced their interest in the matter was called in - Olof Jönsson.
Jönsson was confident and stated that he at anytime would be able to disclose who committed the crime, even if the murderer had made his way half around the world. With the help of objects belonging to the victim, Jönsson spent a day trying to "sense" the killer. He was assisted by local police officer Tore Hedin - seen here together with Jönsson who is "feeling" a rifle. The picture was published nationwide and confirmed Jönsson's reputation as a miracle man. But Jönsson was unable to come up with the name of the murderer and the crime remained unsolved for almost a year.
On the night of Friday 22 August 1952, local police officer Tore Hedin slew his sleeping parents with an axe in the village of Saxtorp. After having set the house on fire, he proceeded to Hurva village, and a home for old people where his former fiancée was working, and living. He crushed the back of her skull with the axe, in her sleep. The next victim was the manager, who received three blows to the head and died. Hedin dropped the axe, got two cans of gasoline from his car and set the house on fire. Four more people died in the flames.
Hedin wrote a suicide note and had some sausages in his car. Then he took a rowing-boat, went out on lake Bosarp, tied some weights to his body, jumped in the water, and drowned himself. He was found on Saturday. In his note, he admitted to having killed mill owner Allan Nilsson the year before. In the following investigation, it was discovered that Hedin had saved a clip with the picture of him and Jönsson during the arson investigation in 1951. The national headlines that followed cunningly mocked the psychic for apparently being too close to the perpetrator (Nilsson, 2008). Jönsson's reputation was wrecked and only the Swedish parapsychologists still had faith in him. With their help, he left for the United States in 1953(Steiger, 1971).
The statement "one of his school teachers is said to have lulled Jönsson into Rosicrucianism" stands out to me. I think of this, from the AFOSI (of Bennewitz fame)
Hey, our intelligence service's emblem just happens to be a rose cross in front of a checkered shield. Nothing strange there.
More interesting anecdotes, involving Uri Geller, Edgar Mitchell, Andrija Puharich & Olof Jonsson, in this 2012 book "Encounters With UFOs and Extraterrestrial Life"
http://books.google.com/books?id=NOVwjv ... fo&f=falseFacts about Uri Geller's intelligence connections have spread throughout the mainstream media in the past few days, thanks to this guy's documentary:
Never mind the NSA: Uri Geller is the real spy story
