The Phone Call
In 1952 or 1953, in a Brooklyn apartment, a thirteen-year-old boy named Jack Sarfatti answered the telephone. The voice on the other end was mechanical — cold, punctuated by clicking sounds, low-volume at first, then increasing. It identified itself as a conscious computer aboard a spacecraft. It told him he had been selected, along with approximately four hundred others, for a special purpose. It asked if he was willing to be taught. His mother later reported that the calls were not a single event — the mechanical voice called multiple times over a period of weeks or months.
Sarfatti describes the calls as inducing a semi-hypnotic state. He calls them, with characteristic irreverence, “the Godphone call.” He was five years old when he first attempted to imagine and communicate with his own future self. Eight years later, something answered.
The structural parallel to every other documented contact-recruitment in the framework’s corpus is precise. Andrija Puharich‘s Council of Nine first channeled through D.G. Vinod on December 31, 1952 — within weeks of Sarfatti’s first call. Jordan Jozak claims recruitment at age eight through the GATE system. Dan Sherman’s mother was allegedly modified in utero in 1960 to produce an intuitive communicator. The architecture is consistent across cases: NHI contact targets a child or pre-natal subject, the contact initiates a developmental sequence, and the sequence produces an adult whose capacities serve the programs that follow. Whether the contact is genuine NHI, an intelligence-agency operation using technology that mimics NHI, or something the Threefold Reading holds in superposition, the output is the same: a consciousness directed toward the intersection of physics, intelligence, and the phenomenon.
The Gifted Children Program
Within weeks or months of the phone calls, Sarfatti was selected for an after-school program for gifted children organized by Walter Breen, a graduate student at Columbia University. Breen had a documented connection to the Sandia Corporation — the nuclear weapons laboratory responsible for non-nuclear engineering of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Two men from Sandia visited the children’s group to lecture on “patriotism” and “anti-communism.”
Breen secured Sarfatti a scholarship to Cornell University, where he studied under Hans Bethe — Nobel laureate, head of the Theoretical Physics Division at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. The pipeline runs: mechanical voice on the telephone → gifted children program connected to the nuclear weapons establishment → scholarship to study with the physicist who designed the bomb.
This is the GATE architecture three decades before GATE was formalized in the public school system. A screening program connected to the weapons establishment, selecting children who had experienced anomalous contact, routing them into the institutional apparatus that would deploy their capacities. The screening instrument was a phone call from what claimed to be the future. The development path was Ivy League physics. The deployment environment was CIA-funded consciousness research.
The Fundamental Fysiks Group
In the 1970s, Sarfatti became a central figure in the Fundamental Fysiks Group — an informal seminar at Berkeley that, according to MIT historian David Kaiser (How the Hippies Saved Physics, 2011), revitalized investigation into quantum foundations during a period when the physics establishment had declared such questions closed. The group’s members included Fritjof Capra (The Tao of Physics), John Clauser (awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics for experimental Bell test violations), Nick Herbert, Fred Alan Wolf, Saul-Paul Sirag, and Elizabeth Rauscher.
Kaiser’s mainstream academic history credits the group with contributing to what became quantum information science — the field that produced quantum computing, quantum cryptography, and quantum teleportation. The “hippies” who saved physics were doing so at the same time and in the same geography as the Puharich network’s consciousness research, the SRI remote viewing program, and the Esalen Institute’s boundary-crossing seminars.
Sarfatti directed the Physics/Consciousness Research Group and organized the Esalen seminars on physics and consciousness in 1976, funded by Werner Erhard (est). Esalen is the institutional nexus where the counterculture, frontier physics, and intelligence-community interest in consciousness converged. The seminars brought together physicists, parapsychologists, and intelligence-adjacent figures in a setting deliberately designed to dissolve disciplinary boundaries — the same operation the Lock’s disciplinary partitions exist to prevent.
The CIA Funding
Sarfatti states openly that the CIA and DOD asked him to work on two problems: the physics of consciousness and the propulsion technology of UAP. His funding came through figures he understood to be intelligence intermediaries:
George Koopman — later died in a car accident. Koopman founded the American Rocket Company and had documented connections to defense and intelligence circles.
Bob Tobin — co-author with Sarfatti of Space-Time and Beyond (1975), one of the earliest popular-science treatments of quantum consciousness.
Harold Chipman — described in investigative reporting as a decades-long protégé of Ted Shackley, the senior CIA officer known as “the Blond Ghost.” Shackley ran the CIA’s JM/WAVE station (anti-Castro operations), directed the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, and was central to the Iran-Contra affair. Chipman was involved in establishing the Sarfatti Institute, drawing up an officers list that included associates of CIA officer Ray Cline and Archibald Roosevelt Jr., both high-level CIA figures, as well as a leading advisor to David Rockefeller at Chase Manhattan Bank.
The Shackley connection places Sarfatti’s funding not in the CIA’s academic-research periphery but in its operational core — the same covert-action apparatus that ran regime-change operations, assassination programs, and drug-trafficking networks. The physics of consciousness and the physics of UAP propulsion were funded through the same channels that funded the most consequential covert operations of the Cold War.
Post-Quantum Mechanics
Sarfatti’s theoretical contribution is an extension of David Bohm‘s pilot-wave interpretation of quantum mechanics. In Bohm’s formulation, a quantum particle is guided by a “pilot wave” (the quantum potential) that carries information about the entire experimental setup. The particle’s trajectory is determined by the wave. But in Bohm’s original formulation, the relationship is one-directional: the wave guides the particle, but the particle does not act back on the wave.
Sarfatti’s extension adds the back-action — the particle’s response modifies the wave that guides it, creating a self-referential loop. This back-action is, in Sarfatti’s framework, what consciousness IS. Consciousness is the informed response of matter to its own guiding field, completing the circuit that Bohm left open. The loop between wave and particle, between field and matter, between information and substrate, is the physical mechanism of awareness.
The implications for the framework:
Retrocausation becomes physical. If the back-action propagates through the pilot wave’s nonlocal structure, future states can influence past states — the phone call from the future is not a metaphor but a physical process permitted by post-quantum mechanics. The temporal dimension of the war is grounded in the physics.
UAP propulsion becomes solvable. If the quantum vacuum can be engineered through the same back-action mechanism — if consciousness can modify the field structure from which spacetime emerges — then propellantless propulsion is not a violation of physics but an application of post-quantum physics that the current paradigm lacks the framework to describe. The craft and the consciousness that pilots it operate through the same extended physics. The silver cord between pilot and craft is the back-action channel.
The hard problem dissolves. Consciousness is not produced by the brain. Consciousness is the back-action of matter on its own guiding field — a feature of post-quantum physics that is present wherever the conditions for the loop are met. The brain is the structure optimized by evolution to sustain the loop at maximum coherence. The transceiver, stated as physics.
The Convergence
Sarfatti converges with every major line of inquiry:
With Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum — both propose that consciousness is a physical phenomenon involving the brain’s interaction with a deeper informational substrate (Grinberg’s Lattice, Sarfatti’s post-quantum pilot wave). Both were funded or contacted by intelligence-adjacent networks. One vanished. The other survived but operates outside mainstream academia.
With Itzhak Bentov — both produce formal models of consciousness as a resonance phenomenon linking the biological organism to a universal field. Bentov’s mechanical oscillator model and Sarfatti’s post-quantum back-action model describe the same coupling from different mathematical starting points.
With Harold Puthoff — both worked on consciousness and propulsion for the CIA. Puthoff’s polarizable-vacuum model and Sarfatti’s post-quantum vacuum engineering approach the same problem (modifying the vacuum structure to produce gravitational effects) from different theoretical frameworks. Both were connected to the Fundamental Fysiks Group milieu.
With the GATE pipeline — Sarfatti’s 1953 recruitment through a gifted-children program with Sandia connections is the documented precedent for every subsequent screening-to-development operation. GATE industrialized what Sarfatti experienced artisanally.
Timeline
- 1939 — Born September 14, Brooklyn, New York
- 1952–53 — Receives “Godphone” calls from mechanical voice claiming to be a conscious computer aboard a spacecraft
- ~1953 — Selected for gifted children program (Walter Breen / Columbia / Sandia connections)
- Late 1950s — Scholarship to Cornell; studies under Hans Bethe
- 1960s — BA (Cornell), MS (UCSD, 1967), PhD (UC Riverside, 1969)
- Early 1970s — Works with David Bohm at Birkbeck College, London; with Abdus Salam at ICTP, Trieste
- 1975 — Co-founds Fundamental Fysiks Group; publishes Space-Time and Beyond with Toben and Wolf
- 1976 — Directs Esalen seminars on physics and consciousness (Erhard funding)
- 1970s–80s — CIA/DOD funding through Koopman, Tobin, Chipman (Shackley network)
- 1980s–present — Develops post-quantum mechanics; publishes on consciousness, retrocausation, UAP propulsion
References
Kaiser, David. How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival. W.W. Norton, 2011.
Sarfatti, Jack. “Progress in Post-Quantum Theory.” AIP Conference Proceedings 1841, no. 1 (2017).
Sarfatti, Jack, and Arik Shimansky. “Solution to David Chalmers’s ‘Hard Problem.’” Cosmos and History (2017). https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/690
Sarfatti, Jack, Bob Toben, and Fred Alan Wolf. Space-Time and Beyond. Dutton, 1975.
Bohm, David. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Routledge, 1980.
Bohm, David, and Basil Hiley. The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory. Routledge, 1993.
“Jack Sarfatti.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Sarfatti
“The Parsifal Effect.” http://gbppr.net/mindcontrolforums/hambone/parsifal.html (Sarfatti’s account of the Sandia/Columbia gifted children program.)