The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Peter Hurkos.md

created	updated	title	aliases	category	tags	summary	born	died	location
2026-05-15	2026-05-17	Peter Hurkos	Peter Hurkos Pieter van der Hurk	Psychics & Remote Viewers	Person RemoteViewer PSI Parapsychology 1950s 1960s	Peter Hurkos was a Dutch psychic who gained international fame for psychometry - divining information from objects by touch - and was studied by Andrija Puharich at the Round Table Foundation in 1956 before achieving notoriety as a police psychic consultant in the United States.	1911-05-21	1988-06-01	Dordrecht, Netherlands

Peter Hurkos was a Dutch psychic who gained international fame for his purported abilities, particularly psychometry - the claimed ability to divine information from an object through touch. A former house painter, Hurkos claimed his psychic powers manifested after he suffered a traumatic brain injury from a fall in 1941¹.

In the fall of 1956, Hurkos was brought to the Round Table Foundation in Maine by Henry Belk, a department store tycoon and one of Andrija Puharich's investors. Hurkos's arrival boosted morale at the foundation, and he formed a close bond with Harry Stump, another psychic working there¹.

Puharich began regularly dosing Hurkos with hallucinogenic mushrooms, specifically teonanáctl, using himself as a control. Under the influence, Hurkos became fixated on outer space, claiming to see a flying saucer and extraterrestrials on Owl's Head beach. He also reported seeing ghosts and experiencing premonitions, including a poltergeist incident that coincided with the unexpected death of Alice Astor Bouverie, a key financial supporter of the foundation¹.

Hurkos's psychometric talents were observed by Bep Hermans, Puharich's au pair and later wife. Hermans recalled that Hurkos, while blindfolded, could provide detailed information about the owner of an object simply by touching it¹.

After the death of Alice Astor Bouverie, Puharich and Hurkos traveled to Mexico in search of more God's flesh mushrooms. Despite the turmoil, the Round Table Foundation continued its activities, with Hurkos participating in experiments involving Telepathy, Dowsing, palmistry, and Eyeless Sight¹.

In the 1960s, Puharich and Hurkos traveled to the Sixth Naval District Personnel Conference in Charleston, South Carolina, to demonstrate Extrasensory Perception and psychometry to submariners¹.

Footnotes

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1. Jacobsen, Annie. Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. Little, Brown and Company, 2017. ↩︎