In November 1990, I accompanied Filipino spiritual healer/ psychic surgeon Emilio Laporga of Cebu City to London upon the invitation of Ziggy Pracher, a psychic researcher, to demonstrate the controversial Filipino way of psychic surgery at a conference Ziggy organized.

One of those who underwent psychic surgery was Stephen Turoff, an English spiritual healer. We learned that Stephen was also a psychic surgeon who received the gift of healing three years prior to our meeting. Before that, he could only perform magnetic healing, but not surgery. Ziggy showed us the video of Stephen performing psychic surgery on patients with the use of knives, just like the Brazilian healers.

He told us that his spirit control or guide was a deceased German doctor named Joseph Kahn.

On the third and last day of the healing session at Ziggy’s house, where Emilio had treated about 100 patients, we asked Stephen if we could witness him performing psychic surgery.

He said he would try calling on Dr. Kahn but he could not promise anything. There were only a handful of people left in the house, including my wife, Yoly.

Trance

He made himself comfortable by sitting in a chair, removing his necktie and glasses and taking a deep breath. In a few minutes he was in a trance, his eyes staring blankly. We asked who he was and received a cold reply: “My name is Pafi. I am an Egyptian who left your world in 1950. This is the second time I am coming in through this instrument (meaning Stephen).”

Pafi said he was a healer. The next problem was to find a patient, because all patients had already left.

Suddenly, he pointed at me and said I was having a problem with my nose. This was true, because a day before, following our visit to Stonehenge, I came down with a bad cold and clogged nose. Pafi said I had a nodule inside my nose which he would take out.

Then he announced, “I need a knife.” Several people started looking for a knife, but he rejected the first one from the kitchen for being too wide. He needed a knife with a narrow blade. Shortly afterwards, somebody produced a narrow knife with a blade about five inches long. “This will do,”, he mechanically announced.

I really got scared at this point. I wanted to get out of the room and hide somewhere. Then again, I was also curious about experiencing psychic surgery “Brazilian style.” So, I stayed on for the incredible sequence of events that followed.

Stephen (or Pafi) motioned for me to lie on the table. While lying down, I asked my wife to call Emilio, who was then outside the house, smoking.

Soon I felt a great discomfort as the whole blade was inserted into my right nostril. I groaned and moaned as if in pain, but it was not ordinary pain I felt. It was more of discomfort and fear at having a long piece of metal inside my nose!

He told me to breathe through my mouth. I wanted him to take the knife out, but he seemed to be taking his sweet time. I even felt him twist the knife inside my nose.

Horror

My wife stood in horror at what was being done to me. She wanted to stop the healer, but knew she couldn’t. So, she rushed frantically out of the room to get Emilio. But Emilio merely smiled at her and said, “Don’t worry, nothing is going to happen to him. Jimmy knows what he is doing.”

Stephen assured everybody that there was really no pain, and the reason I was groaning was because I had a low threshold for pain and my fear had made my muscle tense. Who wouldn’t be, under the circumstances? The video cameras, meanwhile, recorded the entire ordeal.

After a short while, Stephen removed the knife and out came phlegm and some blood. Then he asked me to blow my nose on a tissue paper. More phlegm came out. Then my breathing cleared up. I got off the table badly shaken, but still managed to thank him for the healing. I told everybody I was all right.

Today, Stephen Turoff is the most popular and controversial psychic healer in the United Kingdom, with several books written about him. Aside from performing psychic surgery, Turoff also teaches Kriya yoga and meditation classes. An earlier book about him mentioned the incident where he inserted a five-inch knife into my nose without causing any harm to me.

Among those who witnessed this extraordinary event, aside from Ziggy, my wife and a former assistant, were Dr. Daniel Benor, an American medical doctor who was doing research and writing books on alternative healing around the world, and Barbara Ann Brennan a medical intuitive and clairvoyant from New York who wrote the classic book “Hands of Healing.”

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