Harry Stump

Harry Stump was a Dutch sculptor and channeler who gained the attention of Andrija Puharich and his wealthy benefactors due to his purported psychic abilities, particularly his capacity to enter trance states and produce automatic writings and drawings¹.

Stump was a World War II resistance fighter in his native Holland, honored by the Dutch government for his work against the Nazis. He was captured, beaten, and tortured by the Gestapo during the war¹.

Puharich met Stump at a dinner party hosted by Alice Astor Bouverie. In June 1954, Bouverie contacted Puharich about an incident where Stump, after handling a 3,400-year-old scarab-shaped necklace, entered a trance state and began drawing Egyptian hieroglyphs and speaking in a guttural voice, seemingly channeling an entity from ancient Egypt. During this trance, Stump spoke of "a drug that would stimulate one's psychic faculties" and drew a picture of a mushroom, which Puharich later identified as Amanita muscaria¹. This event was significant as it provided the CIA with a key lead in their year-long, unsuccessful quest to locate the teonanáctl mushroom for MKULTRA Subproject 58¹.

Puharich became obsessed with Stump's channeling abilities and the hallucinogenic mushroom. He brought Stump to the Round Table Foundation and, in August 1955, attempted to drug him with teonanáctl to test its divinatory powers, with Aldous Huxley as a witness. The experiment did not yield the desired results, with Stump appearing drunk and confused¹.

Stump's psychic powers began to wane, and the "Egyptian persona" rarely appeared. He became depressed as his trance powers vanished, and his traditional sculpture and painting work suffered¹.