Professor Haraldsson’s flawed scrutiny of Sathya Sai Baba

PRELIMINARY NOTE The latest edition of ‘Modern Miracles’ by Erlendur Haraldsson is a travesty of investigation and suppression of many testimonies of fraudulent materialisation and countless other deceptions. Haaraldsson’s failings are dealt with in the following web pages:-
Erlendur Haraldsson Breaks his Silence on Sathya Sai Baba’s Final Decade review and critical comments by Brian Steel
Professor Haraldsson’s Final Verdict on Sathya Sai Baba and his Western Critics by Chris Dokter
Miracles Are My Visiting Cards – Haraldsson by Robert Priddy
Only “Squibbles” – Part 1 by Barry Pittard
Erlendur Haraldsson, Ph.D – A Parapsychologist Fails To Admit Badly Flawed Data

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The  book ‘Modern Miracles’  by the parapsychologist and Professor Erlendur Haraldsson (previously published as ‘Miracles are my Visiting Cards), has been cited many times as an endorsement of Sathya Sai Baba as a genuine ‘man of miracles’ due to its weight of testimony about his materializations and diverse explanations on that Haraldsson and Karl Osis could find no proof of his faking. That Haraldsson also included proofs of the falsity of Sai Baba’s claim to have resurrected the US millionaire Walter Cowan from the dead was overlooked entirely by all Sai devotees. Also ignored was the defection and critical testimony of the once declared ‘soul brother’ Krishna Kumar who lived together with Sai Baba for a long period in his early manhood. I met Haraldsson in Bangalore in 1988 and was with him when he first presented his book to Sai Baba at Prashanthi and since then my wife and I have been together with him in the ashram and on several long visits to my home in Norway. As the following mails demonstrate, we began to diverge on a serious issue in our attitudes towards Sai Baba, which eventually caused me to question Haraldsson’s silence on what he knew about – and really thought about – Sathya Sai Baba. Having invested his professional prestige in parapsychology and in being as objective as possible, Haraldsson nonetheless grew evidently more and more loath to go properly into the emerging testimonies about sexual abuse, sleight-of-hand and other fraudulent ‘miracles’ as well as SB’s deep murder involvement. The embarrassment to his reputation for probably not having carried out sufficiently detailed critical investigations, not least due to his being partially charmed by Sai Baba and many of his followers. To be vindicated for a deep interest in researching such a controversial and even ridiculed discipline by finding a person who seemed to ‘materialise’ objects was surely preferable to finding it another highly unlikely and specious claim bringing his parapsychology into further disfavour.

As the exposé grew and testimonies flooded in on sex abuses and all manner of other untoward behaviour by Sai Baba, it became important for me to know why Haraldsson was so reluctant to report in detail the allegations he had heard and told me he believed. I came into a considerable moral dilemma as to whether I should make known what he was refusing to speak out about.  I eventually decided that I must confer with some of my most trusted professional friends on this, including the academic Alexandra Nagel, who had researched Sathya Sai Baba in considerable detail. The e-mails now released for the first time below show the nature of my concerns their views on the matter. At the same time, fanatical defenders of Sai Baba were doing their utmost to destroy my reputation as a truthful person through massive Internet activity and stalking, not least occasionally using Haraldsson as a figurative stick with which to beat me and others! (A recent example was Dr. O. P. Sudrania’s hypocritical comments on SB obituary in The Telegraph, The Guardian and elsewhere). I considered most strongly that the public has a right to know the truth about Sathya Sai Baba’s sexual molestations, which Haraldsson openly admitted must be true – but only to me.  To help researchers understand the full background for my exposure of Haraldsson’s failure to report anything negative about Sai Baba’ person and behaviour, despite his scorn for what he called Sai Baba’s rude, thoroughly ignorant prima donna behaviour, a coarse villager whose words cannot be trust at all I did not take the step of going public with his frank e-mails about SB’s homosexuality to me (click on inset thumbnail) on the matter until 2011, only after several further efforts to get him to understand the damage his book and subsequent supportive efforts to Sai Baba were causing. Until this date (2012) he has not shown the slightest interest in the human damage caused by Sathya Sai Baba, calling those who gave their all to Sai Baba ‘fools’ especially his sexual and fraudulent activities and had refused to write what else he knows and thinks about Sathya Sai Baba (i.e. a coarse and rude villager whose words cannot be trust at all). In May 2002 he paid one of several visits at our home when he made clear that people he had interviewed in India has said that Sai Baba was a homosexual. This included an elderly close servitor of Sai Baba in the 60s and 70s called Major Talwas, who told him directly that Sai Baba used boys for sexual purposes! 

More very revealing e-mails originally sent by Erlendur Haraldsson to me, Robert Priddy,  express his true view on Sathya Sai Baba’s personality and his homosexuality. Read them by clicking here.

I have done my level best to inform him of developments, but he avoided reading most of my documentation and changed the subject time and again in conversation because he was not interested in testimonies or much else that showed the extent of SB’s deception, fraud and criminality. I gave him a DVD of ‘The Secret Swami’ but he told me he could not be bothered to watch more than the opening bit! Now I hear he is planning a revised book on Sai Baba… it is only to be hoped that he pulls himself together as a researcher, orients himself properly and comes forth with his fuller evaluation of the entire Sai Baba phenomenon, not just the alleged miracles. His failure to detect the way SB always misdirected attention with a typical magician’s trick to cover his movements before palming objects (also seen on numerous videos) shows that his claimed study of these techniques to have been sadly lacking or forgotten at the crucial time.  That he could not find anywhere that the trinkets and other objects Sai Baba ‘materialized’ while they are sold all over Andhra Pradesh and were delivered surreptitiously to his interview room by a known individual should be addressed by him, as well as numerous other precautions that could have been taken. (See for example Gogineni‘s, Professor Beyerstein‘s and Premanand‘s criticisms).

A  friend in Denmark (now deceased) who was disillusioned with Sathya Sai Baba after having centered his life fully on service to the Sai Baba organization always wanted to know any important facts from me, so I mailed him to put his mind at rest about the sexual allegations… that even EH believed Sai Baba to be an active homosexual and with young boys and men. There is a scan of that mail on the right, click on thumbnail to read it.

My efforts to get Haraldsson to answer pertinent questions as to what he knew and to publish how he really evaluated the behaviour and personality of Sathya Sai Baba (very different indeed from the impression his book and articles give) are illustrated by strictly private mail exchanges from 200, posted in public for the first time – click here to read them.

 Please also see the fuller exposé of slanderer and fantasist O.P. Sudrania who also cites his contacts with E. Haraldsson