Following Geller's fame, Puharich assembled a group he called the Space Kids, roughly twenty children, several recruited in Mexico, reported in his 1974 book Uri and the later record as displaying spoon-bending and telepathic abilities, the program running through Lab Nine's final years at the Ossining estate. The documented end: the 1978 arson destroyed the laboratory, the records, and, per Puharich's own account, the experimental logs of the Nine's sessions, after which he fled to Mexico claiming persecution, the children dispersing without follow-up study, no papers, no replication file, no cohort tracking. The Space Kids remain one of the least-documented programs in the parapsychology record, known almost entirely through the patron's own books.
The folk tradition reads the Space Kids two ways: as the Nine's successor program, ambassadors being replaced by a raised generation, or as the darkest corner of the file, children in an intelligence-adjacent laboratory studying induced abilities, the archive's MKUltra and Psychic Driving entries giving the frame, and the fire arriving exactly when the questions did. The documented tempering fact: no Space Kid ever surfaced with abuse allegations or corroborated accounts, the silence being compatible with both readings, a benign program that dissolved, or a file that burned clean.
The claim: the Space Kids file is the archive's limit-case for its own charter: a program documented by exactly one interested source, terminated by fire, its subjects untraced, so that every tier of this entry rests on the patron's word, and the correct archival act is not belief or debunking but the label itself, record destroyed, witnesses uncontacted, provenance single, the most honest sentence in the paranormal file being the inventory of what is missing. Verdict: the archive's verdict is the fire's: whatever the program was, its paper trail ends in 1978, and the tradition that keeps the Nine alive, channelers, Keys of Enoch workshops, Esalen descendants, built the continuation on the one thing the fire could not burn, the story. The children grew up. None wrote a book. The council, per the channelers, moved on. The archive files the program closed, the question open, and the arson unsolved, which is the correct three-line entry for a file made of ash.
If the psychic nursery's records all burned, what was being trained, and who insured the building?